The Rich Focus on Buying Back Time. Here's How To Do It.

The wealthiest people I know buy back their own time before they buy anything else. But most people use extra money to buy things instead of buying freedom. Time is the ultimate currency. No matter what resources you have, you can't wind back the clock. There are a lot of things that are a waste of time. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, working adults were asked how they'd spend a $40 windfall, and only 2% thought to spend it on saving themselves time. I have the same number of hours as anybody else. What am I going to spend them on? And getting that right is more important than exactly like being perfectly productive with those hours. Being willing to delegate is such an important thing in life, and being a good, good delegator, finding people who are better than you to do the things you're not good at, and then, then that frees you up to do the things you are good at. The hours you buy back are the difference between seeing your kids on a Tuesday and still doing your own invoices at 60.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

One of the most important things you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. So here's how the rich actually buy back time. Andrew Carnegie built the largest steel operation in America and could not make steel himself. One hire is what made the whole company work. Carnegie needed somebody to run the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, and he found a man named Bill Jones. Now, Jones wasn't an executive. He was a mill man who understood businesses and understood the people standing in front of them. Carnegie valued him so much that he offered Jones a partnership in the company. Ownership, the thing every ambitious person says that they want. And Jones turned it down. He didn't want business worries. He told Carnegie to keep the partnership and pay him a big salary instead. So Carnegie paid him $25,000 a year. That was the same salary the President of the United States was paid, and Carnegie gladly paid. Jones took the cash, Carnegie kept the ownership and got the best operator in the country running his mill every single day, and that left Carnegie free to be in New York and Britain selling steel, raising money, and buying up the companies around him. Only he could do that part. Meanwhile, Jones ran the plant and created inventions that changed how the whole industry moved molten iron. Carnegie said he wanted one line on his gravestone: "Here lies a man who hired people better than himself." He never actually put it there, but he said it as a summary of how he built. Everything he built and became the richest man in the world. Now, you probably don't have Carnegie money. What he paid Jones was presidential money, and I'm guessing you just don't have that lying around. But you can also start small. One of my first companies, we had almost no money coming in, and I was doing some tedious work that I was bad at and I hated. And I told myself maybe what you're telling yourself right now: I can't afford to hire a full-time person to help. I'd love their help. I need their help, but I just don't have the money. So I hired somebody for an hour a day. And because that person was faster and more focused than me, that hour gave me back 2 hours of my day. You think you can't afford help? You can. You just haven't done the math on it. And in this video, I'm breaking down the 6 ways to buy back your time like the rich so you can focus on the work and the people that you love. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily. One video at a time. Number 1, work out what an hour of you is worth. You can't buy back time until you know what your time costs, and almost nobody has ever done the calculation. So take the revenue you want your business to make this year and divide it by 2,000, which is roughly the working hours in a year. If you want to build a $140,000 business, your time is worth $70 an hour. If you're going for $1 million, your time is worth $500 an hour. Use the number that you're aiming at, not the one that you actually hit last year. Act like you're already worth $500 an hour. If you spend your days on $20 jobs, you'll never get there. So personally, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak, and working for $20 instead of $500 an hour is one of them. So write your number down and put it somewhere that you'll see because it changes how a normal Tuesday looks like. At $500 an hour, spending 40 minutes rearranging your calendar costs you $333. Booking your own travel costs you $250. Chasing an unpaid invoice Yeah. By email costs you about $80 in your own time, and you'll have to do it 3 times before they pay. Then take 25% of that number, and that's what you should be willing to pay someone else to do it. So at $70 an hour, you can pay $17.50 an hour for help. At $500 an hour, you can pay $125 an hour, and that's a bargain. That 4-to-1 ratio is why rich people make so much progress. Pay somebody $125 and you get back an hour you value at $500. Do it 20 times a month and you freed 20 hours. It turns into even more money if you spend them selling and building higher value So go through last week's calendar right now and put a dollar figure next to each block. It might make you feel a little sick to see how much you're wasting on low-value activities, but all progress begins with telling the truth. Number 2, kill the work before you hand it off. So most owners skip straight to hiring. They find something that's super annoying and immediately look for a person just to take it over. That's how you end up paying somebody to do work that never needed doing. So write this down. The order is eliminate, then automate, then delegate. In that order every time. Eliminate first. So go down your calendar and your task list and ask one question about each item. What actually happens if this never gets done again? I used to spend hours writing up and sending out the minutes from my mastermind groups. One month I didn't send them. Nobody noticed. Nobody asked. So I stopped doing it forever and I got my time back. A lot of your week is stuff you only still do because you did it last week. Reports that nobody reads, meetings that exist because they existed last quarter, a weekly email to a list that never replies, a dashboard you built in 2023 and just Add a habit. If you're not sure something matters, just stop doing it for 30 days and see whether one single person mentions it. If nobody cares, then eliminate it from your schedule for good. Automate second. So whatever survived the cut, look for software or AI that can handle it before you hand it to a human. A scheduling link kills the back and forth on calendar bookings. A saved template can kill 20 minutes of writing. An automatic invoice reminder kills the most uncomfortable email that you have to send all month. Automation doesn't get sick, it doesn't quit. If you have to do something more than once, look for how it can be automated next time. And then delegate third and only third. By the time you get here, the pile of work is a fraction of what it was when you started, and everything left is genuinely worth paying for. Eliminate, automate, then delegate so you can focus on what you're genuinely called to do. Number 3, start with 1 hour a day. You don't need a full-time hire. Full-time is how this goes wrong, because if you've never managed anyone before, you try to fill their day with busywork. Busy work. You lose a ton of your time managing and training them, and then you resent the cost and just want to go back to doing everything yourself. So start with one person part-time on the tasks that you hate the most and are the worst at. 1 hour a day is enough to prove the whole idea to yourself, and the person you hire should be faster at it than you, which is a part that people keep underestimating. My first hire gave me back 2 hours for every 1 hour that I paid for. So let's say you're an entrepreneur and you want to make YouTube videos to spread your message and promote your business. So you spend 20 minutes recording the video and then 5 editing it, you're spending 5 hours on the skill editing that you probably don't care about getting great at and spending 20 minutes on the skill speaking that could serve you for life. Hiring a part-time editor allows you to make more videos, get better at the skills you actually want to improve, and buy your time back so you can grow your business. And handing the work over takes less effort than you might be imagining. If you have written instructions or SOPs, that's great. But what I love to do is just screen share videos. So the next time you do the task, hit record on your screen, and narrate what you're doing. That's the training. And it costs you 5 extra minutes because you had to do the task anyway. They can rewatch it as many times as they need instead of asking you the same questions twice. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Number 4, test people instead of interviewing them. Interviews tell you who is good At interviews, you need to know who is good at the work you're actually hiring for, and there are two ways to get there fast. First, write the job posting as one big unbroken paragraph, and then bury a specific instruction in the middle of it. So for mine, I'll ask people in the first sentence of their application to tell me how many YouTube subscribers I have, and in the second sentence, share who their favorite entrepreneur of all time is and why. Most people use AI to submit, which makes things even worse because they spend eight seconds applying to your job, and you need to spend five to thirty minutes. Reviewing it. If 200 people apply for the job, you're spending hours to sift through work that took them seconds to create. So the first sentence of how many YouTube subscribers that I have works through AI because the number is constantly moving and AI will default to an older answer. The second sentence of their favorite entrepreneur also weeds out AI applications because AI will default to the same 5 people and give the most generic responses as to why. Anybody who doesn't follow the instructions or is using AI to copy and paste answers goes straight to the reject pile. And that instantly weeds out over 80% of the applications and makes the hiring process suck a lot less. Second, give the survivors a paid trial project capped at 5 hours that should take them 2 hours. Pay them properly for it. Hiring a video editor based on how well they interview makes no sense. They might be the most shy, introverted person of all time. That's fine. You're not hiring them as a salesperson, so don't interview them like one. You hire a video editor based on how well they edit Your video. So in that trial project, you learn their speed, you learn how well they communicate, you learn what did they get stuck on, whether they ask smart questions, whether they hit the deadline, and how much you like actually working with them. I'm not a micromanager, so you also see if they use the full 5 hours to do a 2-hour job, which means they're either exceptionally slow or just taking advantage of you. And it's great to know that upfront instead of years in. My lead video editor, Christina, came through the same paid trial system. I sent her raw footage of a content shoot I did and asked her to cut it in my style. She sent it back, did what I asked, and She also told me my style wasn't very good, so she improved it and she was right. I hired her. She's edited my videos for over a decade now. We even hired her awesome husband Sam to join us too. And right now they're probably editing this video on their boat off the coast of Italy. So first, weed out the people who did not actually bother to read your job post or lazily left it to AI to apply for them. And then second, give people a trial job to actually work with them on a sample project and see how well they do as well as how well you enjoyed working with them. It completely changes the traditional hiring process and brings So many more right-fit people to you. Most entrepreneurs complain that hiring sucks. It doesn't have to if you have a better system. Number 5, buy time in your personal life too. Buying your time back isn't only a business move. The same math works in your personal life as well. In that same study outta the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 28% of people said they spend money buying back time in a typical month, and the ones who did reported meaningfully higher life satisfaction. It just isn't the first thing that comes to mind. And that's the mindset difference that rich people have. They prioritize buying back their time over entertainment, fancy toys, and almost everything else. Now, researchers also gave people $40 twice. One weekend they had to spend it buying time, the next weekend on something physical. People were happier on the weekend they bought the time. Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School has spent years on this, and she found taking the same money and spending it on getting rid of the chores you hate most does more for how you feel about your life than spending it on Things does. The reason you don't do it already is guilt. Offer someone a new shiny gadget or a service that saves them 4 hours, and the new shiny gadget wins nearly every time because the shiny gadget feels like it's a reward, and paying someone to clean your house feels like you're admitting that you couldn't handle it yourself. So price out your own week honestly. If your time is worth $40 an hour, 3 hours of yard work costs you 3 hours you just said were worth $40, right? Paying somebody $60 buys all 3 of them back. Same with driving across town for 90 minutes to save $30 on groceries. That drive spent $60 of your life to save $30. So start with a single chore you hate the most. Get a number on it and pay somebody. Researchers looked at more than 35,000 Americans and found the happiest ones had 2 to 5 free hours a day. Under 2 hours and you're stressed. Over 5 and it starts working against you because you lose the feeling of being useful. So look at your own week. The average person spends 2 hours every single day on household chores. Let's break down exactly what you can outsource for under $40 an hour. First, cleaning. You spend about 6.5 hours a week cleaning your house on average. You can hire an independent cleaner for $25 to $40 an hour. Second, grocery shopping. You spend an hour every time you go to the store. You can get your groceries delivered for a small delivery fee instead. Third, yard work. You spend 2 hours a week on your lawn. You can pay a local service $30 to mow it for you. Fourth, laundry. You spend over an hour a week doing laundry. You can drop off your clothes at a wash and fold service for $1 a pound. Add that up. That is over 10 hours of your life back every single week for less than $40. So for $1,500 per month, you've bought back 40 hours of your time to focus on things that bring in more than $1,500 a month or spend that time with the people that you love. That's how the rich buy back their time everywhere. Number 6, guard what you just bought. You buy back 5 hours a week and a month later they're all gone again, right? New stuff just seems to fill them up. Has that ever happened to you? Those hours you bought back only count if you spend them on the work that only you can do. So for me, That's being on camera and building relationships. Every month I ask myself, what can I uniquely do? And the honest answer is there's always more that I should be handing off to more people on my team. Ask it every month, not once a year, because the answer keeps changing as you grow. So when your business was doing $100 grand, you had to do certain jobs yourself. At half a million, somebody else should be doing it, but you'll keep doing it out of habit unless something makes you stop and look. So decide in advance. Where the hours go, write it down. If the plan is three hours of selling, two hours with your kids, put on a calendar before the small tasks take over because an hour that isn't claimed by something specific gets claimed by your inbox, by your DMs, by social media, by other busy work that mostly doesn't make you money. You can start this week. Andrew Carnegie became the richest person in the world by knowing he wasn't the best person to do. most of the work and being willing to pay for someone who was. You can start smaller than you think. 1 hour a day, 1 task you hate. Don't wait for permission and don't wait to feel ready. You know when the best time to hand the first task off is?

Now.

How about right now? Your business, your mission, and your family deserve the you that spends time on the things that only you can do. And congratulations, you're 1 video closer to who you're meant to be. Now let's learn how to get ahead of 99% of people starting today. You are one boring habit away from being ahead of almost everyone that you know. You can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. Gallup found that only 20% of employees worldwide were actually engaged in their work in 2025, the lowest level they've measured since 2020. Concerning trend we're seeing across the US and some parts of the global workplace. Where employees' overall satisfaction with their employer has dropped to record lows. It's through repetition that you program your subjective mind, and it's your subjective mind that controls your behavior. Right now, you're probably in the 80% that isn't engaged, and which side you end up on changes what you earn this year and what your kids watch you do with the rest of your life. All problems or dreams are figureoutable. The secret of this whole thing is staying engaged. Learn from people who've already been there. In June 1966, a guy with a fresh Harvard MBA took a job counting securities by hand in a bank vault. The room was called the cage. The pay was $9,000 a year. His name was Michael Bloomberg.

Both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better, just who I happened to meet that day.

Counting securities by hand. That was the job. A Harvard MBA in a basement moving paper around at the bottom of the building for 15 straight years while the people around him went home. He went from the cage to general partner. Then in 1981, Salomon Brothers merged and Michael Bloomberg got let go. 15 years and they handed him $10 million severance and showed him the door at 39 years old.

Well, I got fired after 15 years.

I'll let him say that.

Yeah, people always are afraid to say that. I don't know. I can just tell you it should happen to every one of you. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I did have my share of the value of the company which we were selling at the time. And that was the nest egg that I used to start my company.

He started his own company almost immediately. It was called Innovative Market Systems. You know it today as Bloomberg LP, and the terminal it makes sits on the He was responsible for the deaths of nearly every serious trader on Earth. So here's the lesson in that. The job that made him was the one in the vault, the one he'd left off of his resume.

I was at Salomon Brothers for 15, 16 years. It was a phenomenal experience. I looked forward to going in every day. I've always looked forward to going in every day, even the day there I knew I was going to get fired.

Everything he learned, how the money actually moves, he learned in the room nobody wanted, Nobody respected, showing up while everyone else was already home. They could take away his title, they could take away his desk, they couldn't take back 15 years of showing up every day. Now you might be thinking, okay, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 15 years? I've got a job, I've got kids, I'm running on 5 hours sleep, I'm already exhausted. That's just not available to me. And you're right, that version isn't available to you. And I'm not going to tell you to go, you know, wreck your health just to try to catch up. But let's look at the actual whole mechanism again, because the hours are the least important part of the story. What you can't copy isn't the hours, it's that he pointed 15 straight years at the same thing without stopping. And duration is something that you can have starting today, no matter how tired you are, because duration doesn't require a giant chunk of free time. It just requires that you don't quit in month 4. That's the whole game. You are surrounded by talented people who start and stop constantly. Start and stop, start and stop. New idea in January, dead March, different new idea in June. If you keep going in one direction for 3 years while that happens around you, you will pass almost every one of them without having a single dramatic day. And a bird sitting on the branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So it's time to trust yourself more. And let me give you exactly what to do starting today. When you're the worst in the room, win on volume. When you're the least skilled person in the building, you have exactly one weapon. And it's volume. It's not about clever positioning, just volume. That was me at an agency years ago, bottom of the list skill-wise. Everybody else was out there making 1 video a week, so I made 3 a day, morning, lunch, dinner. Then I applied every note I got to the very next one instead of saying, I'll do another one next month. If you do the math on that, 1 video a week is 52 a year. 3 a day is over 1,000. So in 12 months, I had more reps than somebody with 15 years of 1-a-week experience. I got better for one reason. I got 20 more chances to be wrong and I took every single one of them. So that's the move you make when you're green, right? Talent, taste, connections, they take years to build and you haven't had those years yet. Reps, you can start collecting right now and nobody can stop you from doing it. But this is the part that makes reps feel like work. Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice found that elite performers can only hold truly focused practice for about an hour at a time and top out around 4 to 5 hours a day. So if you're new, you'll get 15 to 20 minutes of full concentration before your brain is just done. So stop trying to find a 4-hour block that doesn't exist in your life, find 20 focused minutes and make it a real rep with a real output that a real person could see and critique. 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week is 100 hours a year of deliberate work on one skill. That is not nothing. Find the one book and stop reading the other 99. So I used to read a lot of books a year, and I'll be honest with you that it got to me. 99 out of every 100 of those books did nothing for my business. They felt productive. I finished one, I feel smart. I'd highlight some passages, I'd tell people what I was reading, and my business would be exactly the same as it was The week before, I was reading because it was easier than picking up the phone and selling. So here's what's actually moved my life. Every so often, I'd hit one book that landed directly on the bottleneck that I was stuck on at the moment, and when that happened, I stopped hunting for the next book and just did what that one book said to do. So if we flip that around, don't ask what should I read this year? Ask what is the single thing blocking me right now? Try to write that down in one sentence. Then go find the one book, the one YouTube channel, the video, or the person that solved exactly that. Then go through. The one thing 3 times and execute it before you allow yourself to go open anything else that's new. And skip the courses that you sign up for so you can feel busy instead of actually just starting. Formal training is usually a year or 2 behind what's actually working, and it feels like you're making progress because somebody hands you a certificate at the end. But the people who get ahead, they teach themselves. They go find the answers on YouTube, in a book, in a forum, from somebody who did it last month, and they run it that same night. Being leads to doing. Decide you are the kind of person who figures things out, and then the figuring Give the new thing 20% of your week and nothing more. Now let me solve the problem that you actually have, which is that you actually already have a life. So there are 2 ways that people handle this, and both of them usually fail. The first is do nothing new, right? You keep exactly everything as it is. You tell yourself you'll start when things calm down, and guess what? Things never calm down. So 4 years go by and you're still in the same chair. The second is 0 to 100. You get fired up on a Tuesday, you do everything you can to get it done, and then you're done. Quit the job, burn the savings, give yourself 90 days to make things work. And 90 days is nowhere near enough runway for anything real. So you end up back in a job with less money and just more fear than when you started. Here's a version that works: 80/20 until you're 20/80. So right now, 80% of your working time goes to whatever pays your bills today. Protect that. It's what's buying you your future runway. The other 20% goes to the new thing. So if you work 50 hours a week, right, that's 10 hours a week. If you've got a job and 2 kids and 6 hours is all you got, then use all 6. 6 hours a week is enough to build something real. Put those 6 hours in the calendar as an actual block with time. Time you have in book goes to then whoever asks for it first, and then you run that split until the new thing starts producing actual money—not just attention, not just compliments—money from a stranger more than once. Then you move the ratio, right? The new thing gets 40%, then 60%, and eventually it's carrying 80% of your time because it's carrying your bills. So you never have to take a giant leap. You had a slow, boring handover, and you never once had to put your family at risk. So one more thing about time, and this one is free. The last 3 weeks of December, everybody in your industry takes the foot off the gas, inboxes go quiet, senior people are suddenly answering their own emails. That's the cheapest access to important people you'll get all year. While everyone else is coasting, you send the thoughtful note, you record the video, you get the meeting that would've taken 6 weeks in March. Now, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak. Quitting with no plan makes me feel weak. Waiting forever makes me feel weak. 20% a week protected every week makes me feel strong. And And it adds up to whether you feel it or not. Eliminate, automate, delegate in that exact order. So here's where the hours you say you don't have are hiding. Take everything that you did last week and run it through 3 filters in this order. Eliminate first. So look at every recurring task and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question. Do I actually need to do this at all? Not how do I do this faster, but does this even need to exist? Because a big chunk of what fills your week is there because you did it once and then never questioned it again. The report that nobody reads, the meeting that could have been 3 sentences, the 40 minutes a day you spend reorganizing things instead of shipping things, right? Kill it and see if anybody notices. Usually nobody does. Automate second and only second. So software, AI can take an enormous amount of repetitive work off your plate right now and it costs almost nothing, but never automate a process you haven't proven by hand first because all you'll do is make a broken process run faster And have more breaks in more places. Delegate third. This is where you'll resist because you'll tell yourself you can't afford it to hire somebody, but you can start at 5 to 10 hours a week of help. That's it. Somebody to handle your scheduling, the editing, the inbox, the invoicing. What you're really buying back is your best thinking hours so they land on the one thing that only you can do. Most of what's crushing you right now, you assigned to yourself. And so now you get to unassign it. Being the best doesn't matter if you're a secret. So you can be generally the most skilled person in your field and still lose to someone worse than you who happens to be more well-known. That's not fair, but it isn't going to change. Better known beats best every time, and complaining about it doesn't move you forward at all. So the work is to become known on purpose. Educate your market at scale. Take the questions that you answer one at a time on the phone for free all week and answer them publicly instead. One video, one post, one talk that reaches 500 people is 500 conversations that you didn't have to schedule. And show that you care more than the person next to you. When someone watches you explain something for real, for free, In depth, holding nothing back. They conclude 2 things without you having to say either one. This person knows what they're doing. This person isn't trying to squeeze me. That's the whole sale made before you even meet. The paper airplane on my logo means entrepreneurship because a paper airplane, which breaks the sound barrier in videos, is impossible. And doing the impossible is the entire job description, right? Nobody's going to go and hand you a jet. You get paper and you throw it every single day and it goes further than anyone expected because You kept throwing it. Score the day, not the year. Now, the 2 habits that hold all this together. The first one takes 15 minutes a day. Wake up and get outside within 15 minutes. Go for a 15-minute walk. Don't look at your phone. Listen to something that fills you with belief instead of something that just fills you with other people's panic. And that's it. That's the whole thing. And it's the single most important daily habit that I have, because whatever goes into your head first is what you think about for the rest of the day. Then you can build a scorecard. So write down the 5 things that would make today a win. Publish something, talk to a buyer, 20 focused minutes on a skill, the walk, 10 pages of the book. Give yourself a point for each. At the end of the day, you get a score out of 5, and that score is the only performance review that matters. So keep it on paper, not in an app. An app turns into a project you maintain instead of a habit that you actually go off and keep. And why does this work? Philippa Lalla's research at University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. And depending on the behavior, it can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. So when day 12 feels like it's not sticking, that's not a sign that you're failing. That's just day 12. So many people quit at week 3 while the process was working exactly as designed. Benjamin Franklin did a version of this every single day of his adult life with 2 key questions. So in the morning he asked, what shall I do this day? And at night he said, what good have I done today? That's 300 years old and it's still better than every productivity app on your phone. So don't wait to feel ready before you start scoring. Ready isn't real and it never arrives when you want it to. Do more than you were asked on purpose. And last one, it's your cheapest competitive advantage on this entire list. Do more than what you were asked for, not vaguely, but specifically. So before meeting with someone who matters, spend 30 minutes actually studying them. Watch their talk, read what they wrote when they launched their company, find something that they actually built that isn't in their bio and bring that up instead of of their most famous project. Nobody does this, nobody. And when you show up having genuinely done a little bit of homework, the person across from you feels something they almost never feel in business, which is that somebody paid attention to them. Then in the conversation, talk 30% of the time and let them talk 70%. Ask better questions than they were braced for. Repeat their exact words back to them when you respond, because that's how a person knows for certain that you were listening instead Instead of just waiting for your turn to interrupt them and talk. That's it. That's the whole technique. And it works on clients, on partners, on bosses, on anybody. Almost nobody listens. If you do, they'll remember you. You're closer than you think. You don't need a dramatic year. You need 20 focused minutes, 1 book, 5 points on a scorecard, and the willingness to be doing it in month 4 when it stops being exciting. That's a good start. Now go make it 10 times bigger than you were planning to. Now let's learn what the rich teach their kids about cash flow. Wealthy parents raise their kids to run money like a business owner long before they ever hand them a single dollar. Your children are learning about the world through you, and more through your actions than through your words. You know, from the moment they're born, you're their— you're their natural teacher.

Should I tell my little beautiful girl, 6, 7 years old, should I keep telling her that one day her glass slipper is going to fall off and a prince is going to, uh, rescue her, or a prince is going to slay a dragon and rescue her. I want to teach her how to sell glass slippers or make them for her friends or own the slipper factory. And I want the prince to go, damn, who owns this factory?

A University of Cambridge study found that your money habits are mostly locked in by the age of 7. When that goes down in value, this will naturally— the real estate will naturally go up in value. So that's why I tell you, don't lose my property if something happens to Papa, okay? Do not lose your property. Do not lose it. Take care of the property. I'm not the dad who just brings home presents when my kids want something. It's like, okay, how are you going to earn it? I've tried to make it so that they understand that in order to get something, you have to work for it. So the lessons you teach at your own dinner table this year will still be steering your family's decisions 40 years from now in the hands of people who aren't even born yet. The government is not responsible for educating your children, okay? Neither are the celebrities, the rappers, or the media. It's not their job to teach your kids anything.

Even trying to teach my oldest girls— I have 3 girls— about money, I realized that I didn't teach them the right— I taught them some lessons. You want to— you want a car? Go work. I will match I was teaching her work ethic, which is great.

Back in the 1760s, a young man named Mayer Amschel Rothschild was running a tiny coin and trading business out of a cramped house in the Frankfurt ghetto. He had almost nothing— no connections, no fortune, no family name that opened doors for him. What he had was 5 sons and a single obsession: he was going to teach those boys how money actually moves through the world. World. So he did something that nobody had done before. As each son grew up, he sent them out to a different city. Amschel stayed in Frankfurt, Nathan went to London, James went to Paris, Solomon went to Vienna, Carl went to Naples. 5 sons, 5 cities, 1 system. He didn't hand them money and wish them, you know, good luck. He taught them to run banks, to lend, to move cash across borders faster than anyone alive, and to share every piece of information with each other, so the whole family got smarter together. In 1810, he made it official and signed his 3 oldest sons into a formal partnership. The family crest became 5 arrows held together, one for each brother, because his rule was simple: alone you snap, together you hold. And the Rothschild family stayed wealthy for more than 200 years, 2 centuries, through wars and crashes and revolutions that wiped out almost every other rich family of the time. It It wasn't the gold that lasted, because gold gets spent. It was the education. Mayer Amschel didn't leave his kids a pile of money. He left them the ability to make it, to keep it, and to grow it. And that ability got handed down like a family heirloom. Now, you might be thinking, okay, well, that's a nice story about a banking dynasty, but you don't have a trust fund or family bank sitting in the other room. You're just trying to raise good kids and pay your own bills. But here's the thing, the Rothschilds weren't powerful because they had money and then they taught their kids. They taught their kids, and that's how the money showed up and stayed in the family. The lessons came first. And every single lesson I'm about to give to you right now in this video costs you nothing. You don't need to be rich to teach your kids how the rich think. You need a few dollars, a kitchen table, and the willingness to have conversations your own parents probably were too scared to have. If you can do that, that, then you have a responsibility to do it because your kids are learning about money right now, whether you're teaching them on purpose or not. So let's make sure that they are learning the right things right now with this video. Teach them the one money rule school will never mention. So here's the first thing wealthy families drill into their kids, and it's so simple that a 6-year-old can get it. An asset is anything that puts money into your pocket. A liability is anything that takes money out of your pocket. That's it. That's the whole game. And the reason that matters so much is that the school system and most of the world will teach your kids the exact opposite. You'll hear people call a fancy car an asset. You'll hear people say your house is your biggest asset. But walk your kid through it. Does the car put money in your pocket every month or does it take money out for gas and insurance and repairs? It takes money out. So under this rule, it's a liability. Even the family home, as long as you're the one living in it and paying that mortgage, is pulling cash out of your pocket every single month for the bank. It's actually the bank's asset because you are the one sending them a payment every month. This one idea rewires how a kid sees the entire world. Teach them to spend their life filling up the asset columns first. Things that pay them, a few shares of a solid company, a little side business, a skill people will pay for. Make it real for them. Say your kid saves up $200. One kid spends it on a video game, which is fun for a week and then just sits there. Another kid spends $200 on a used lawn More and starts cutting 3 neighbors' lawns for $25 each. By the end of the summer, the second kid has earned back their $200 many times over, and they still own the mower. Same $200. One choice fed them, the other choice ate itself. When a kid can see the difference with their own eyes, it starts to stick with them for life. And once those assets are big enough to throw off real cash, the fancy stuff can come paid for by the asset instead of their paycheck. Your purpose comes from your pain. That's what I believe. And a lot of grown adults are in financial pain right now for one reason nobody ever taught them the difference between something that feeds them and something that eats them. So give your kid that one rule and you've already put them ahead of most adults walking around today. Pay commissions, not allowances. So a set allowance every week for doing basically nothing teaches a kid that money just shows up. Cash flow teaches the opposite. Money comes when you create value. So turn your home into a tiny There's a great framework called the 3 E's. Expectations are the things you do for free because you're part of the family, like making your bed, clearing your plate. Nobody gets paid for those. Expenses are things a kid now pays for themselves out of their own money, like their own toys and games and weekend outings. And that shift is powerful because now they have a real reason to earn instead of just asking you. And extra pay is the money they earn by doing real jobs above and beyond. So those jobs come in 2 flavors.

Mm-hmm.

flavors. Action gigs are physical work like cleaning the garage, pulling weeds, reorganizing the pantry. Brain gigs are thinking work like planning the family's next trip on a strict budget, learning a new language, hunting down every subscription the family's paying for and canceling the dead ones. See what that does? One kid learns to work with their hands and the other learns to solve problems and save the household real money. Both are earning. Neither is waiting for a out. In our YouTube mastermind group, we have a member called Dr. Shawna. She was a doctor who took this to another level. She was working 100 hours a week at a hospital with 5 young kids, and instead of an allowance, she put her children on commission, ages 5, 7, and 8. She paid them $10 every time she closed a new client, so they had a reason to stay quiet and helpful during her sales calls. She paid them $10 for every book that they read, so those kids grew up fascinated by the business, and today they help run it With her. She didn't just raise kids, she raised them to be business partners. That's a great start. And you can start even smaller than she did. Pay your kids for the lemonade stand, the car wash, the little gig. What you're really teaching is that they are the ones who turn effort into income for the rest of their lives. Build a family bank instead of handing out cash. Okay, so this is a move that kept the Rothschilds rich for 200 years, and you can run a tiny version of it in your own So when your kid needs money for something big, uh, a first car, first business, uh, first apartment deposit, don't just give it to them and don't just send them straight to a credit card company at 20% interest. Become their bank. Loan them the money with a real written simple agreement and charge them a fair interest rate. Here's why this becomes so powerful. When your kid borrows $10,000 from a bank and pays back $2,000 in interest, that $2,000 walks outta your family forever. When they borrow it from you and pay you that $2,000, Mm-hmm. The money stays inside your family, and you can lend it out again. Rich families do this on purpose, so the interest keeps circling back home instead of feeding an outside bank. Run the math out, and it starts to get wild. If a family keeps around $185,000 of interest inside the family instead of paying it to outside banks, and lets that grow at six percent for twenty years, it turns into $600,000. That's money the grandkids can borrow from someday, built entirely out of the interest the family would have handed to strangers. And they attach one more thing. To it, accountability. The Rothschilds had a rule that family members had to show up to the family meetings, and if you didn't show up, you got locked out of the family bank. No conversation, no capital. So you're teaching your kid that money and responsibilities go together always. Being leads to doing. So when a kid starts to see themselves as someone who borrows smart, pays back on time, and keeps their word, they start acting like that person in every part of their life. Turn your kids into a tax-free employee. If you own any kind of business, even a really small side hustle, this one is huge and almost nobody uses it. You're allowed to hire your own kids for real legitimate work, filming your videos, handling social media, stuffing envelopes, cleaning your rental apartment, and you can pay them a real wage that is a tax deduction for your business and up to a certain amount each year, completely tax-free for them. So the same dollar that would've been taxed on its way to you goes to your kid instead tax-free, While teaching them to actually work. Then take it one step further. Have them put some of those earnings into a custodial retirement account. A kid who starts investing even a few hundred dollars at age 10 has something an adult can never buy back— decades of compounding. Time is the one asset you cannot make more of, and your kid has more of it than anyone. Ready isn't real, so don't wait for them to be older or for the amount to be bigger. A 10-year-old earning $15 an hour to help you learning to save and invest a piece of it is getting a real financial education. that a $60,000 college degree won't give them. And there's an awesome hidden lesson inside it that matters even more than the money. Your kid gets to watch you treat them like a real contributor, someone whose work actually has value. That does something to a child. They start to carry themselves like a person who builds, not somebody who's begging for money. The paycheck might be small, but what it does to their self-belief is not. Raise a steward, not a spender. Warren Buffett is worth over $100 billion, and he decided long ago that his kids would get Almost none of it. He famously said that the perfect amount to leave your children is enough that they feel they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. He wasn't trying to be cold there. He just understood something that has a lot of data behind it. A researcher named Thomas Stanley who studied thousands of millionaires found that adult kids who get regular financial handouts from their parents end up with about 57% of the Net worth of kids who don't. I'll say it again: the more that you hand them, the less they build. The gift becomes a thing that actually holds them back. So the wealthy raise their kids as stewards. A steward doesn't think this money is mine to burn. A steward thinks I'm the caretaker of this, and my job is to hand it to the next generation bigger and stronger than I got it. That's a completely different identity, and identity here is everything. There's a phrase for this: average families do estate planning, which just means getting the money ready for the kids. Wealthy families. do heritage planning, which means getting the kids ready for the money. They start young, they go slow, and they build the skill before they ever transfer the wealth to them. So teach your kid that whatever they build isn't only for them, it's a responsibility they carry for the people who come after them. That's how you raise someone who protects and grows what they touch instead of someone who's always sitting around waiting for the next payday or allowance. And you don't have to be a billionaire to raise Stewart. You just have to keep pointing your kids past themselves and towards the people their choices will one day take care of. Talk about money out loud. This is one of the most common quiet mistakes that sinks really good families. Money becomes a secret. The parents whisper about it, argue about it behind closed doors, and never actually explain it because they're afraid or they're embarrassed. And the kid grows up with a knot in their stomach every time the subject of money comes comes up and they're totally unprepared. Wealthy families, they do the opposite. They put money on the table and talk about it in the open on purpose. One of my favorite examples is a writer named J.L. Collins. He wanted his teenage daughter to understand money, but she told him she didn't want to spend her life thinking about it. So he wrote her letters, simple, honest letters about saving, investing, and what he called FU money, which means having enough money saved that you can always say no to anything you don't to do. Those letters became a book that has now helped millions of people. He turned a scary subject into a gift, just one honest conversation letter at a time. You don't need to be an expert to do this. You just need to be honest and you need to let your kids see how you actually think about money, including the mistakes that you've made. Your fumbles are some of the best lessons that they will ever get so they don't make the same mistakes too. So you can start the same kind of thing tonight. My son Hayden, we have a ritual where every year he writes letter to his future self since he was 7 or 8. In my house, there's also a rule. You can't just bring me a problem. You have to bring me a problem and a possible solution. Even when his answer is completely wrong, it forces him to think it through instead of waiting for someone to come and rescue him. And that becomes a real inheritance, not just some number in a bank account, but a kid who can think clearly, talk about money without fear, and solve their own problems. And so if you have the ability to teach that, then you have the responsibility to teach it too. The real inheritance. None of this requires you to be rich. It requires you to be intentional. You don't have to hand your kids a giant fortune. You get to hand them something better, the exact same skills the wealthiest families on earth have passed down for centuries. So start with one lesson this week, just one, because the best time to plant the seeds was when they were 5, and the second best time is right now, right? How about right now? If you want to learn why the rich obsess about cash flow, not Net worth, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You've been chasing the wrong number your whole life. The poorest people on earth always are going after this stuff versus cash flow. When you learn as an investor over multiple decades is