This is Everything You Need to Succeed in Life In One Video
Evan Carmichael outlines a seven-point morning routine used by billionaires: wake early, exercise, meditate, read, plan your day, skip your phone, practice gratitude. He then walks through building a six-figure business by landing one $2,000-per-month client, over-delivering, and scaling through partnerships.
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Your life changes the moment you stop looking for shortcuts. You self-help by people who have done it, and you learn what they did, and you realize there's no shortcuts. There is no shortcut. There's no hack. There's no tip. There's just the work. Every meaningful success is built one decision, one habit, and one courageous action at a time. Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, You can't practice any other virtue consistently. Always better to make a decision and be wrong than be afraid to make a decision. So not making a decision is, is like a guaranteed wrong answer. Change doesn't happen overnight, but when you understand the science of habits, what you realize is that change, little change, it compounds daily. Keep searching for the easy answer and you'll wake up years from now wondering where all your time went. So in the next 3 hours, you'll learn the mindset, habits, and principles that have helped entrepreneurs, billionaires, and world-class performers build extraordinary lives and how you can start using them yourself today. 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. 6 months is enough time to change your entire life and you're wasting it waiting to feel ready. Take action. So many people talk about doing something or say, what if? They don't actually get up and do it.
When are you going to do it? When are you going to do it?
You've got to create a sense of urgency.
I'm going to do it right now.
Researchers at University College London found it takes an average of just 66 days to make a new habit automatic, which means the behaviors that reshape everything about you can lock in before this year is even over. On average, they found that about 66 days is Every single qualification for success is acquired through habit.
People form habits and habits form futures.
The person you decide to become in the next 6 months is the person you get to be for the rest of your life. Focus has always been a strong part of my personality.
If I get interested in something, I get really interested. The most successful people are very focused.
Let me tell you about a broke actor sleeping in a bus station in 1975. His name was Evan Carmichael. was Sylvester Stallone. He was so far behind on money that he couldn't afford to feed his dog, a big bullmastiff named Butkus. So he stood outside a liquor store and sold his best friend to a stranger for $50, then walked away crying. That's how low it got for him.
So I went to California and I moved in the valley, and things weren't going very, very well there.
As a matter of fact, I had to go out and try to sell my dog because it was either A few weeks later, he watched a nobody boxer named Chuck Wepner go 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali, and something lit up inside him.
One night I went to see Muhammad Ali fight. One brief moment, this supposed stumblebum turned out to be magnificent in the fact that he lasted and Knocked the champion down. I said, now that, that is probably what I need as a catalyst for an idea. A man who's going to stand up to life and take one shot and maybe go the distance.
Here was a man nobody believed in standing toe-to-toe with the greatest in the world and refusing to fall. Stallone went home and wrote the entire script for Rocky in about 3 days.
So I started to write, and it was one of those writing frenzies, and 3 days later And came up with the script of Rocky.
When he tried to sell it, the studios loved it.
Originally, when I brought the script to them, they were fairly enthusiastic about it. The one thing they were not enthusiastic about was me playing the part.
They offered him $360,000 for the script, which to a man who just sold his dog for $50 was life-changing money. And he said no. He said no because they wanted a real star to play Rocky, and Stallone knew in his bones this was his role and his one shot.
The temptation started to come forward. First it was $25,000, then $100,000. I never heard of $100,000 because I had like $106 in the bank. And like I said, I had to sell my dog and things were not looking very, very good. I heard it went up to $360,000. So I thought, you know what, if I— I know in the back of my mind, if I sell this script and it does very, very well, I'm gonna jump off a building if I'm not in it. There's no doubt about it. I'm gonna leap in front of a train. I'm gonna be very, very upset. So this is one of those things where you just roll the dice.
He turned down $360,000 with almost nothing in his bank account. He held out until they finally agreed to let him star, and he took around $35,000 and the lead. Rocky was made for about $1 million and went on to earn over $200 million and win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And the first thing Sylvester did with his money was buy Butkus back, paying $3,000 to get his dog. And he put that dog in the movie. Stallone didn't need 10 years to change his life. He didn't need perfect conditions or rich family. He needed a decision. He refused to walk back and a simple plan he refused to quit on. That's exactly what the next 6 months are going to be for you. Now I know what you might be thinking. You're thinking, 6 months, Evan, I've tried to change before. I've started diets and routines and side businesses and None of it stuck past the third week. Why would this time be any different? And listen, that's a fair thing to feel. But here's the real reason it kept falling apart. And it's not because you're lazy or that you're a broken human. You were leaning on motivation, and motivation is a feeling, and feelings come and go just like the weather. You were also trying to change 10 things at once, which is why the whole tower collapsed the first hard week. That 66-day number from University College London is the key that unlocks all of it. You don't need superhuman discipline. You need one small behavior repeated in the same way, in the same spot, long enough for your brain to wire it in and stop asking permission. Do that and the changes stops being something that you force every morning and it becomes something that you simply are. It's who you are. So for the next few minutes, let me hand you the exact 6-month roadmap month by month so you always know precisely what to do and when. Month 1, decide who you're becoming before you change a single habit. So most roadmaps start with a to-do list, right? Yours starts with an identity. And this is the step people skip that wrecks everything that comes after. There is a truth I come back to over and over again. Being leads to doing. If you want to run every morning, you don't start by just white-knuckling yourself and forcing yourself out of bed. You start by deciding you want to run every morning.
That's right.
You're an athlete. An athlete doesn't debate whether to train. An athlete just trains because that's who they are. Stallone believed he was Rocky before a single person on this earth agreed with him, and that belief is what led him to turn down $360,000 when he was dead broke. So your very first job isn't a task, it's a decision. Get specific about the person who already has the life that you want. What do they do on a random Tuesday when nobody's watching? How do they talk to themselves when they mess up? What do they say no to without flinching? So get a notebook. Try a real physical one. Write it all down, carry it with you. Don't treat your mind just like this filing cabinet because the moment you write, I am the kind of person who keeps my word to myself, you've already started becoming that person. Then every morning before the world grabs your attention, read that identity back to yourself out loud. It'll feel strange at first, and that's fine because you're not describing today's reality. You are casting a vote for tomorrow's reality for yourself. But in month 1, you're not measuring results yet. You're installing the identity that every result over the next 6 months is going to grow out of. And if that feels too Simple to matter. Good, because the simple stuff done daily is exactly what separates the people who change from the people who spend their whole lives just talking about it. Pick your one number and only 3 ways to move it. Here's where a huge number of people drown. They set 15 goals, get crushed by the weight of all of it, and quit on all 15 at once. So you're gonna do the opposite. Pick one number. I call it your wildly important number, your WIN. It's a simple, measurable thing. If it moved, would prove your life is genuinely changing. So Dollars saved, pounds lost, clients signed, videos posted, days in a row you kept your word. One number you can actually count. Then pick exactly 3 drivers, 3 actions that move that number. Not 10, just 3. And one of those 3 always has to be learning or experimenting because you don't know everything yet and you have to keep testing new ways forward. So say your number is 5 new clients in 6 months. Your 3 drivers might be reach out to 5 people a day, publish 1 helpful post a day, and test 1 new approach a week. Or say your number is, uh, you're gonna lose 20 pounds Your 3 drivers might be hit 8,000 steps a day, keep protein high at every meal, and test 1 new healthy recipe a week. Same shape every time, 1 number you can count and 3 actions that move it. Here's why 3 is so powerful. When you wake up foggy and you're unsure what to do, you don't have to think. You can't hide behind just being busy. You already decided. You just run your 3 drivers and the day is a win. Clarity is what murders overwhelm, and 3 is a number that keeps you clear when your emotions try to make everything complicated. Write your one number and your 3 drivers on the first page of that notebook. Make it big so it's the very first thing you see every day. Months 1 and 2, build your 66-day habit stack so momentum runs on autopilot. Okay, now you build the engine, and this is where the University College London research really earns its place on your wall. You've got about 66 days on average before a behavior turns automatic. So months 1 and 2, it's your runway. Don't try to bolt on 20 new habits all at once. Pick the small handful that quietly upgrade everything else and stack them so one triggers the next. So here's an example stack that you can use. So the night before, you put your phone outside your bedroom. So the first thing you touch in the morning isn't a screen full of other people's noise and agenda for your time. When you wake up, get sunlight on your face within 15 minutes and take a 15-minute walk. I call it my believe walk. It sounds too basic to bother with, but that simple move sets your energy and your focus for the entire day, and it costs you nothing. It costs you 15 minutes. When you get back, open your notebook and write down your 3 drivers. Keep the new habits stupidly small at first, so small that you can't say no, because a 5-minute walk you actually do beats a 60-minute workout that you skip. Then at night, run a 60-second audit. Did I run my 3 drivers? And where did I get in my own way? This isn't about shaming yourself. It's just about Creating some data for the next day. And every single day, whether you feel like it or not, press your inner I believe in myself button. Self-belief isn't something that you're born with. It's a muscle that you build by choosing it on the days where it feels ridiculous. Stack all of this and then the magic happens. By the time month 2 ends, you won't be forcing any of it. You'll feel off on the days that you skip it. That's the moment the habit owns you now instead of you dragging it around every morning. Eliminate, automate, delegate, and clear the runway. Here's a fact that almost Here's the news nobody wants to hear. The reason you feel like you don't have time to change your life is that you're pouring your hours into things that don't actually matter. So audit your days and run any recurring task through 3 filters. Eliminate. What can you simply just stop doing where nobody would even notice if it's gone? For years, I wrote detailed notes after every mastermind call because I assumed people needed them. One day I just, I forgot, I stopped. Nobody said a word, nobody was reading them, and I got those hours back. Find your version of that. Number 2, automate. What can a tool do for you so that your hands never have to touch it again? Set it up once, let it run for years. And number 3, delegate. What can you hand to someone else, even if it just starts as 1 hour a day of help? This connects to one of the most freeing ideas that I know. 10 times is easier than 2 times. To really double your results, you grind harder at everything you already do, but to grow 10 times, you're forced to drop the 80% that's average and pour everything into the 20% where you're genuinely great. Clearing the runway isn't lazy. It's how you open up room for the version of you that's ready to be the airplane and take off. Be honest about where your hours are really going. How much of your day gets eaten by things that don't even move the number one inch? Cut them guilt-free. A plane covered in clutter never leaves off the ground, and neither does a life crammed with busywork that just makes you feel productive while you stay exactly where you are. Months 3 and 4, do 100 reps before you let yourself judge anything. This is the exact stretch where you'll want to quit. So we need to walk in knowing what's going to happen. Around month 3, the newness wears off, right? The habits are in, but the big results, they haven't showed up yet. And that little voice starts to whisper, see, this one isn't working either. That voice is the single most expensive thing that you own. And here's how you beat it. You're not allowed to judge your progress until you've put in the reps. So let me give you a number that changed my life. When I started on YouTube, I made about 350 videos before I stopped being completely embarrassed by them. Not 3, not 30, 350. If I graded myself at video 10, you would've never heard my name. So give yourself a hard rule for months 3 and 4. No evaluating, no quitting, no big dramatic decisions about whether this is really for you. You just hit your reps, you post the content, you make the calls, you do the workouts, you save the money. Volume across these 2 months is what builds the skill And the skill is what makes the results explode later. Look at Sara Blakely. She started Spanx with $5,000 she saved selling fax machines door to door, and she spent 2 full years getting doors slammed in her face before it became a billion-dollar company. 2 years of unglamorous reps before the world ever called her a genius and a billionaire. You're only asking yourself for a few months. You're standing in the exact part of the map where people give up 10 feet just before the treasure. You've seen those, those graphics turn around and then they go home. Do not be one of those people. And when you slip, and you will, Remember one rule that saves everything. Never miss twice. A single bad day is fine. 2 in a row is how quitting sneaks its way back in. So if you missed a walk, take a short one at lunch. You blow one meal, the next meal you're back on plan. You don't need to be perfect. You need to refuse to let one bad day become 2. Months 5 and 6, borrow belief, then outgrow the goal you started with. You cannot do this alone and you were never meant to. There's an image that I love. It's a bird sitting on a branch, isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch, it was in her wings. So right now, your own wings, they may not be strong yet, and that's normal because you can borrow belief from other people until yours is strong enough to get you flying on your own. So get around people already living in the thing that you're chasing. Find an accountability partner that checks in with you whether you did your 3 drivers. Join a community where your goal is normal instead of super weird. Get a mentor, even from a distance, even if just Playing their videos while you work. You become the average of the voices that you surround yourself with. So choose that circle like your life depends on it. And by the time you reach month 5, something has shifted. The habits run on their own. The reps have stacked into skill. The number starts to move. So do something that scares you a little bit on purpose. Look at the goal you set in month 1, make it just a little bit bigger. If you can hit 5 clients, that was a good start. Now how about we go for 20? If you saved your first $1,000, now build a system that saves $10,000. Winners don't cling to the goals that they set when they were smaller more scared, they outgrow them. So think of the paper airplane, the logo on paper, the idea that a folded sheet of paper could break the sound barrier. That's the sound effect of my plane going across the screen. That's doing the impossible. And the impossible, exactly what you're here to do. Your purpose comes from your pain, from the exact struggle you're climbing out of right now. And 6 months from now, you'll be standing somewhere you'd call impossible today. Your 6-month start? Right now.
All right.
You have everything you need. The identity, the one number, the daily habits, the reps, and the people around you. The only thing left is to begin. And you know when the best time to start is? It's right now. How about right now? 6 months from today, you'll either be telling the story of how you finally changed your life or telling yourself another story about why you didn't. And I'm betting on the first one, because if you have the ability to do this, and you do, Then you must. Most people think becoming a billionaire is just luck, but the truth is they just think differently than most people. First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It's just, it's really just saying, you know, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles. The things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level. When I'm 80, Now 90, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. Being an entrepreneur is about taking risks, but it's about taking very calculated risks and being, you know, protecting the downsides. Forbes reports 70% of the world's billionaires built it all themselves, starting from absolutely nothing. The list is mostly a list of self-made billionaires. 70% of the Forbes 400 made their fortune.
Here I come.
I had a 1977 Fiat X1/9 that literally had a hole in the floorboard. I got a job working at night as a bartender at a place called Alon's, and then I got a job selling software at a company called Your Business Software. Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming. He transformed a dorm room project into the internet's biggest global village. The site now has the Over 900 million users. If you don't change how you look at problems right now, you're going to spend the rest of your life building someone else's dream instead of your own. But everyone has a perspective, and that's in fact all vision means— that you see the world, uh, in a way that is either, uh, different or, uh, otherwise, okay, than, than somebody else. And you see opportunities that I think are— that you believe are particularly important to Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. When Jeff Bezos was working a safe, high-paying Wall Street job, he had an idea to sell books on the internet. His boss told him it was a good idea for someone who didn't already have a great job. He had to change how he looked at the problem, so he used what he calls the regret minimization framework. He pictured himself at 80 years old and asked if he'd regret trying and The answer was no, but he knew he'd regret not trying at all. I went to my boss and said to him, you know, I'm going to go do this crazy thing and I'm going to start this, this company selling books online. He said, you know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job. And the framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, what I called, which only a nerd would call, a regret minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. That shift in thinking built a $3 trillion empire. Look at Elon Musk when he started SpaceX. He wanted to buy rockets to send to Mars. But they cost up to $65 million each. That price would have stopped anyone else, but he refused to think like an average person. He used first principles thinking. He broke a rocket down to its basic parts and asked what the raw materials actually cost. It turns out the materials were super cheap, so he decided to build the rockets himself. That shift in thinking changed the world. Sara Blakely sold fax machines door-to-door for 7 years. She had $5,000 in savings and an idea for footless penny hose. Every factory told her no. But growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table what she failed at this week. If she didn't have a failure, he'd be disappointed. She learned to look at failure as just a step in the process, not the end of the road. And because she thought differently about rejection, she kept pushing until she built Spanx and became a self-made billionaire. Now, right now you're probably thinking, I don't have billions of dollars or a genius brain of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to do any of this. You think they had some massive advantage that you don't have, but every single one of them started with zero, just like you. The only difference is they trained their brains to see opportunities where average people see dead ends. You can learn this exact same skill right now. I'm going to show you exactly how to rewire your brain to think like a billionaire. Break down your biggest problems. When you face a massive challenge, you probably look around to see how other people solve this. You copy their methods, you hope for the best. That's called reasoning by analogy, and it keeps people completely stuck in average results. Billionaires don't think this way at all. They use a powerful mental model called first principles. The ancient philosopher Aristotle defined a first principle as the basic foundation from which a thing is known. It means you strip away all the assumptions, all the old traditions, and all the outside noise until You find the absolute facts. When you look at the raw facts of a problem, you see solutions that everyone else misses. So let's say you want to start a business, but you think it costs $50,000 to launch. Average thinking says, well, you've got to go get a bank loan or save up for 10 years. First principles thinking asks, what do I actually need to get my first customer? You just need a phone and an internet connection. Those cost almost nothing. When you stop accepting the rules that other people hand to you, you can unlock your ability to start creating wealth. So we need to start breaking down the obstacles into the smallest possible truth. You'll realize that most of your limits, they're just completely made up. Billionaires don't accept the world exactly as is. They break it down and rebuild it to serve their own vision. Once you start doing this, you'll never look at a roadblock the same way again. But breaking down problems is only the first step, because once you see the opportunity, you've got to know how to place the right Take bets where you can't lose. Most people are terrified of taking risks because they think risk means losing everything. And you probably think that billionaires are just wild gamblers who got super lucky. And that is not true. Wealthy people actually hate risk. They actively avoid risk. Instead, they look for asymmetric risk. Asymmetric risk means the potential upside of the decision is massive, but the potential downside is incredibly small. When Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic Airlines, he didn't risk his entire music empire to buy planes. He made a smart deal with Boeing that let him return the plane after one year if the business completely failed. His downside was just a few months of leasing costs, but his upside was a multi-billion dollar airline. So you need to start looking at your own life through this exact same lens. Stop risking everything on ideas that have a tiny payoff. Stop staying in a safe job where your downside is wasting 40 years of your life when your upside is a 2% raise, and start. You're looking for bets where you can lose a little bit of time or a little bit of money, but you could potentially change your entire financial future. If you make 10 asymmetric bets and 9 of them fail, that one win will completely wipe out all of your losses and make you incredibly wealthy. You've got to train yourself to spot these opportunities. If you don't take these smart bets, you'll spend your entire life working for someone who actually does. Taking the smart bet requires serious courage, which leads directly to how you handle your biggest fears. Look at your life from the end. Your brain is wired to keep you comfortable right now. When you face a tough choice, your mind instantly thinks about the immediate stress, the fear of looking stupid, the potential for short-term pain. This is exactly why you put off your dreams. To think like a billionaire though, you've got to force your brain out of the present moment, you must use the regret minimization framework from Jeff Bezos. So you project yourself forward to age 80. You picture yourself sitting in a rocking chair looking back on your entire life, and you ask yourself, will I regret not taking this chance? The daily fears you have right now usually completely vanish when you look at them from the end of your life back to today. When you're 80, you won't care if you lost a little money at age 30. You won't care if your friends thought your idea was crazy. You'll only care about the chances you didn't take. You'll be haunted by the dreams that you let die inside you. When you view your decisions from the perspective of your 80-year-old self, the right choice becomes incredibly obvious. You stop playing small. You stop worrying about rejection. You realize that the pain of regret is infinitely worse than the pain of failure. Build systems instead of chasing goals. So you've been taught your entire life to set big goals, but if goals were the secret to extreme wealth, everyone who set a goal would be a millionaire. The truth is winners and losers often have the exact same goals. Every athlete wants to win the championship. Every entrepreneur wants to build a big company that has a huge impact. The goal isn't what makes you successful. Billionaires focus entirely on systems. A goal is a singular outcome you want to achieve in the future. A system is the daily process that you follow right now. If you focus only on the goal, you'll feel miserable until you finally achieve it. And once you hit it, you lose all your motivation. When you focus on building a world-class system, you win every single day that you show up and run that system. If your goal is to make $1 million, your system is making 50 sales calls every morning before 10:00 AM. You can't control if a client buys from you, but you can control your system of making the calls. Wealthy people fall in love with the daily actions. They optimize their habits. They obsess over the small, boring details of their daily routine because they know that extraordinary outcomes are just the result of ordinary habits repeated over decades. So stop obsessing over what the finish line goal is going to look like and put all your energy into your daily work. If your systems are excellent, the money will naturally follow. And to build a great system, you've got to stop blindly following the herd. Stop copying what everyone else does. One of the biggest mistakes you make is looking at highly successful people and trying to copy exactly what they did. Now, I love modeling success, but this is also a massive mental flaw called survivorship bias. During World War II, the military wanted to add armor to their bomber planes. They looked at the planes coming back from battle and saw that they were covered in bullet holes on the wings And the tail. The military wanted to put armor on those damaged spots, but a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald realized they were looking at the wrong thing. The planes that took hits to the engine never made it back at all. The military needed to armor the engines, not the wings. In business, you only see the people who survived. You see the college dropout who built a massive tech company. You don't see the 10,000 other college dropouts who went completely bankrupt. Doing the exact same thing. You can't just copy the visible actions of a billionaire. You've got to understand the unseen principles behind their actions. So don't just look at their current morning routine. Look at how they made the decisions when they were broke. Understand their risk tolerance. Understand how they manage their failure. When you overcome the survivorship bias, you stop falling for all of the empty success formulas. You start thinking critically about what actually drives success for your business. And that critical thinking is exactly the skill you need to master the hardest skill in business. Cut your losses faster than anyone else. When you put time, money, energy in a project, you desperately want it to succeed, right? When it starts failing, your brain tricks you into holding on. You think, if I just work harder, I can turn this thing around. This is sunk cost fallacy, and billionaires violently reject it. Billionaire quant trader Igor Turchinsky says that cutting losses is the hardest and most crucial skill in business. Wealthy people know that the resources you spent yesterday are gone forever. You cannot get them back. The only thing that matters is the future potential of the project. If a strategy isn't working, billionaires cut it immediately. They don't care how much money they spent already. They don't care if it hurts their pride. They ruthlessly kill bad ideas so they free up their capital and their energy for the massive opportunities ahead. So you've got to train yourself to detach your emotions from your business decisions. Look at your current projects, look at your current investments, look at your current team, look at your current habits, and ask yourself, if I wasn't already invested in this, would I start this today? And if the answer is no, then you cut immediately. And this level of extreme discipline is incredibly painful in the moment, but holding on to a losing hand Guarantees that you stay broke for the rest of your life. And once you clear the losing ideas, you have to have the right motivation to push your winning ideas forward. Make your work about more than you. If your only motivation is to have a nice car or buy a nice house or escape your job you hate, you're never going to make it. Building a massive business requires an insane amount of effort and stress and rejection. And when things get incredibly dark and you want to quit, a selfish desire for money. Will not keep the energy there to allow you to keep going. You must be driven by a mission to serve other people. You're built to serve. I think that, I think your biggest purpose in life comes from your deepest pain. The things that you struggle with the most are the exact things that you are uniquely qualified to help other people overcome. Billionaires build massive wealth because they solve massive problems for a lot of people. They don't wake up thinking about how to just extract dollars from the economy. They wake up obsessing over how to deliver insane amounts of value. When you can shift your focus from what you can get to what you can give, then your entire business transforms. People can feel your intention. Customers don't buy from people who are just trying to make a quick buck. They buy from people who genuinely want to improve their lives. So when you dedicate your life to serving others, it unlocks more motivation. You push through the obstacles that would break an average person, Because you know that other people are depending on you to win. Step into your greatness. You've got everything you need right now inside of you. So stop waiting for someone else to give you permission to be amazing. Your dreams aren't crazy. They're just waiting for you to show up and do the work. Security in a corporate job doesn't exist anymore. The safe job is about to be unsafe. So far this year, companies have cut more than 800,000 jobs. That's the highest number we have seen since the pandemic.
A major West Michigan company plans to cut hundreds of jobs tonight.
Grand Rapids-based AccraSure is telling us that artificial intelligence is replacing actual employees. Over 80% of students feel they learn nothing about entrepreneurship in school, even though most want to start their own business. The only non-gamble in life is going on offense, and you've been taught that going on offense is the gamble because the school system was literally created to create factory workers. Our school systems teach us nothing about money.
Nothing.
It's pathetic. So at 25, I recommitted to my education, but this time I started studying not things that were in books, but people that had actually created wealth. Sticking to a The traditional career path limits your impact, keeps you miserable, and stops you from sharing your unique genius with the world. My sense is that even for the, the kids that get into the, um, the elite colleges at this point, it's like you've passed some Mandarin examination in China, but you're just so exhausted you're never going to do anything more with the rest of your life. You're burned out at 18. You take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forego a couple of years Steady income in another job and whatever else. That's a great risk to take. And if you don't take that risk, I think you have a very high chance that you end up regretting that. Where are you going to spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. When I was 19, I had the hardest choice to make. I was in university and I had a job offer for a safe 6-figure investment banking job. It was a job everybody wanted, but I also had a chance to own 30% Of a biotech software making only $300 a month. And I picked a startup. I chose to struggle, eat beans for lunch, because the thought of sitting in a cubicle doing work I hated scared me more than being broke. I knew I had to take control of my own income. Think about Colonel Sanders. At 65 years old, he had a tiny $105 Social Security check. He didn't go looking for a greeter job at a local store. He took his chicken recipe, hit the road, and slept in his car. He He faced 1,009 rejections before finally someone said yes to his franchise idea. He proved that you can create massive wealth at any age just by owning your own ideas instead of working for someone else. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't pay their rent in San Francisco. They didn't rush out to get safe, normal jobs. Instead, they put 3 air mattresses on their floor and charged people to sleep there during a local design conference. That simple idea turned into Airbnb. They created a $100 million company because they look for a creative way to solve a problem instead of looking for a safe corporate salary. And right now you might be thinking that you need thousands of dollars in the bank to start making your own money. You think you need rich parents or some giant loan to succeed, and that's not true. Colonel Sanders was broke at 65. Airbnb started with 3 cheap air mattresses. You don't need money to make money. You just need a problem to solve and the courage to take the first step. I'm going to show you exactly how to start generating your own income from scratch right now. Solve your own biggest problem. To make money without a job, you've got to realize where value actually comes from. You get paid for bringing value to other people. The absolute easiest way to bring value is to look directly at your own life. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggle with the most is exactly what you want to help other people overcome. So think about your past. If you had a hard time getting fit and you figured out a system that works, that system is your new business. If you struggled with anxiety and found a way to manage it, that method, that's your business. You don't need a fancy business degree to make this happen. You just need to be one step ahead of the person that you're trying to help. Over 62% of billionaires are totally self-made, meaning they've created their wealth by solving real problems, not by inheriting cash. People pay you to solve their problems because they desperately want to skip the pain that you have already went through. You're selling speed and convenience. If you can help someone skip 5 years of painful trial and error, they pay you for that shortcut. So don't think you need to invent the next big tech platform to be successful. Look at the local business in your town. They need help with their marketing, their accounting, their daily operations. They've got massive problems right now. You can step in and help fix those problems. When you focus entirely on serving others and solving their actual pain points, you stop acting like an employee. Begging for a simple paycheck and you start acting like a true entrepreneur commanding a premium price. You stop handing out weak resumes and start handing out powerful solutions for problems. This simple shift in your mindset changes everything. You go from hoping that a boss picks you to knowing that the market desperately needs you. So you've got to stop looking for a company to hire you and start looking for a person to help. The money will always follow the value you provide. So if you fix a $100 problem, you make a little bit of money. If you fix a $1,000 problem, you make a lot more money. It's simple. Your job right now is to identify the most expensive problem you know how to solve and then go find the exact people who are crying out for that exact solution. But finding a problem is only the first step because your surroundings might be secretly destroying your chances of success. Change your environment to change your mind. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now. So if your friends all have traditional jobs, they'll constantly tell you to get a safe job. They aren't trying to hurt you. They just don't understand your big vision. Research shows that you're up to 61% more likely to adopt the exact habits and mindsets of the people closest to you. So if you want to make your own money, you must change your daily environment. You've got to completely shut out the negativity, limit your access to people who doubt you, and fill that empty space with extreme positivity and the specific messages you actually want to hear. So if you can't find supportive friends in your own town yet, go find them online. Read powerful books, listen to great podcasts, watch amazing YouTube videos from the exact people who are already doing what you want to do. I started my YouTube channel because I wanted to surround myself with some of the greatest minds in history. I wanted Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett in my ear every single morning. I wanted their intense ambition to rub off on me. You've got to be incredibly intentional with your daily morning routine. Don't wake up and immediately scroll through toxic social media or the depressing news. Start your day with content that makes you believe in yourself. When you consume greatness daily, it starts to feel completely normal. Soon the idea of settling for a boring cubicle will feel totally insane to you. You'll begin to think bigger, act faster, expect so much more of yourself. You can literally rewire your entire brain for massive success just by changing what you look at and who you listen to every single day. So treat it like a garden, right? Your mind is a garden. If you plant negative seeds, you'll grow a massive negative life. If you plant seeds of belief, you'll grow a massive, awesome empire. You've got to ruthlessly protect your focus. So stop giving your attention to things that make you feel small and start obsessing over the ideas that make you feel powerful. The moment you change your inputs, the outputs will transform forever. But once you fix your surroundings, you need a system to actually get you moving, which brings us to the simple 2% trick. Use the 2% rule to build massive momentum. The biggest thing you're missing right now is just momentum. You're sitting on a truly great idea, but you haven't taken any real action. You're constantly overthinking it. You want everything to be 100% perfect before you finally launch. You want the perfect logo, the perfect website, the perfect business plan, Stop doing that. Perfectionism is just you being afraid. Studies reveal that perfectionism actually decreases your productivity and increases severe mental burnout. You don't need a perfect plan. You just need to execute the first 2%. If your goal is to write a book, bestselling book, the first 2% is writing just one single page. If your goal is to start a massive YouTube channel, awesome. The first 2% is pulling out your phone and recording your first really messy video. Don't worry about step 100, just focus completely on step number 1. Take the absolute smallest, easiest action right now. Once you take that first step, your brain, it gets a— it's a quick win, and that quick win builds confidence, and that confidence creates momentum. So when I wrote my book about momentum, I didn't plan it out for long months. I just started typing furiously. The physical action itself creates the energy you need to keep going. So waiting around for the perfect moment, what does it do? It guarantees that you'll wait forever. Action cures fear every single time. When you're moving forward, you simply don't have the time to sit there and doubt yourself. So don't let your greatest ideas die just silently here in your head. Put them out into the real world. Start messy, start small, but you've absolutely got to start. When? Today. It doesn't matter if your first attempt looks crazy, ridiculous. The only thing that matters is that you aren't just standing still anymore. You're finally in the game. Every massive company started as some tiny, flawed little experiment. You are no different. So push through the hesitation, click publish, make the call, and watch how quickly your life begins to change. Now that you're moving though, you've got to prepare yourself for the hardest phase of all. And this is where almost everyone quits. Expect to be terrible at first. So now you've got to accept a really harsh reality. Your first attempt at anything new is going to be absolutely terrible. Your first product will have tons of flaws. Your first video will be incredibly embarrassing. Your first major sales call will feel completely awkward. And that is completely normal. Everyone starts out at the bottom. You just don't see the messy hidden starts. Data shows that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to truly master any complex skill. You just can't skip the struggle. When I first started on YouTube, I was completely terrified. I was shy, quiet, introverted. I did not like being on camera. It took me 350 videos before I wasn't completely embarrassed to watch myself back, and 700 public videos before I actually felt inspired by one piece of content that I made. And I made absolutely hundreds of terrible videos. You can go back and watch them, but I kept going anyway. Most people just quit because they tried 5 times and they expected to be world class immediately. They let the ego stop you from making actual progress. So the fact that you're willing to try and be terrible becomes an actual secret advantage. So embrace the highly awkward phase. Look at your early failures as data, and that's gonna be part of your story as you climb. Every single time you fail, you learn exactly what not to do the next time. It'll be an inspiration to others. If you can handle looking foolish for a little while, you'll eventually become completely unstoppable. The only real failure in life's quitting before you get good. So you've got to give yourself permission to be a total beginner. Stop comparing your chapter 1 to somebody else's chapter 20, right? Your journey is your journey, and that is okay. So put in the boring reps, do the unglamorous work. The mastery that you want is waiting on the other side of 1,000 terrible attempts. And once you survive that awkward phase, you can speed up your results by borrowing the exact blueprints of people who've already won. Model the massive success of others. You don't need to figure out all of this on your own. That's one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to make a massive fortune. The smartest entrepreneurs study the exact people who've already won and simply model their success. So if you want to build a $100,000 consulting business, find someone who already did exactly that. Study their public website, look at their specific pricing, see exactly how they talk to their premium clients, then thoughtfully apply those same proven principles to your own unique style. According to the Small Business Administration, businesses that receive direct mentoring and strictly model-proven strategies are 2 times more likely to survive their first 5 difficult years. When my first business was struggling, I felt completely lost. I had no real idea how to turn things around. Then I decided to intensely study a highly successful software company, Microsoft, because I had a software company. I looked at how they operated. I looked at how they got their first clients, not how they make an extra million now. I didn't steal or copy them, but I learned directly from Bill Gates's powerful framework. That single focused decision saved my entire company. Success always leaves clues. There is a roadmap out there for you to do whatever you want and achieve whatever you want. You just have to be humble and curious enough to actively go and follow it. So read the biographies of great leaders, watch the long-form interviews of the performers that you look up to and respect, find the hidden patterns in their daily behaviors, and then creatively adapt them to your situation. Why would you spend 10 years making deeply painful mistakes when you can learn from someone else's expensive experience in just 10 days or 10 hours? So be an aggressive student of greatness and your path to financial independence will be so much faster. You don't lack the ability. You just lack the right model. So find your ideal model, study them relentlessly, build your own blueprint for your special flavor. And then when you've got the right model, you need the right people. And there's a specific way to get the most powerful CEOs to take your call. Build real relationships instead of fake followers. So most people think that making money online means you definitely need millions of random followers, right? You think that you need to go incredibly viral to succeed. And that's a massive and actually dangerous distraction. You don't need a million casual subscribers to make a million dollars. You just need deep, highly meaningful relationships. Don't worry about the vanity metrics. They will constantly waste your time. Instead, focus on direct business development through high-value connections. One of my favorite strategies, what we teach inside our Movement Makers program, is a business development show. It's a dedicated interview show. Don't constantly cold call potential clients. Warmly invite them onto your show to share their story. People love talking about themselves. When you feature them prominently, they feel valued and you built a relationship. Statistics clearly show that 84% of B2B sales start exactly with a warm referral or strong existing relationship. When you interview someone, you spend real focused time with them. You build authentic trust with them. That genuine trust turns into lucrative partnerships, massive referrals, highly paying clients, It literally doesn't matter if your new channel only has 200 total subscribers. We're going after people who have high demand but low media demand. You're coming in as media right now, and you can get top industry leaders who've built multimillion-dollar networks. So don't worry about the random clicks and start aggressively chasing real conversations. Add massive value to the exact people that you desperately want to work with. Feature their deep expertise. Ask them incredibly great questions. Do your research before you have them on. Give them a beautiful platform to share their story. When you actively become a super connector and a supporter, the big money naturally follows you everywhere you go. Your network is truly your actual net worth, so start building it deliberately and strategically today. Stop worrying about the algorithm and start obsessing over the actual human beings you want to serve. And building that network takes extreme focus, which means you've got to completely change how you manage your 24 hours. Make every single day truly count. Your limited time is your absolute most precious asset. If you want to permanently escape the endless job cycle and build your own incredible life, you've got to maximize your specific daily actions. So you wake up every morning with a clear intention. Make today truly count. Before you hit your head, your tired head on the pillow tonight, do one specific thing that moves you significantly closer to your dream. Make one beautiful piece of art. Send one highly important email. Record one incredibly helpful video. Create something today that you desperately want your future grandkids to see. Research strongly indicates that completing just one highly meaningful task a day significantly boosts your overall life satisfaction and guarantees long-term success. To make real time for that meaningful work, you've got to ruthlessly manage your busy schedule. You must eliminate Automate or delegate absolutely everything else. If a specific task doesn't directly serve your core mission, stop doing it. If a basic computer program or AI can do it, awesome, automate it immediately. If someone else can do something significantly cheaper, hire them right away. Don't waste your unique genius on boring busywork. Focus only on the high-level tasks that actually move the big needle forward. When you finally take control of your daily time, you instantly take total control of your personal income. You stop hopelessly trading hours for a flat, boring salary and start aggressively trading massive value for huge financial returns. You already have absolutely everything it takes to build a beautiful life of total freedom. You just have to firmly decide that you're ready to step up and claim it. And this brings us to the absolute most important truth of all, and it's something that I hope that you remember every single morning when you wake up. Your belief is your ultimate superpower. You are entirely capable of building a massive life on your own terms. So trust your vision, take the messy action, and never let fear make your decisions for you. You do not need a million-dollar tech idea to build massive wealth and finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already makes real money. Ironically, the businesses that don't crash are the ones Built on track. They solve real problems, they get paid, and they last. Something that most people overlook: the less exciting the business, the less competition there is, and the more reliable the— Right, so it's, it's a foolproof business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession-proof, it is not seasonal, and it's something with recurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not ready to be an owner until Invent the next big app, you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea. The boring version already works. You're not just running the boring businesses, you are building a modern empire. Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, but he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture store, and a We'd look at them if somebody came in and offered us the entire business, and then we try to think, what is this place going to look like in 5 or 10 years, and how sure are we of it? He realized early on that buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and go straight to collecting the profits.
And we got—
and somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years, or maybe for 50 years, and we've seen how— what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at .350 or whatever it may be, and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them, and we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to, to go to even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars. Now, right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell and you can buy their profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The $10 trillion generational wealth transfer. A massive 90% of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually wants. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90% chance of failing. Now, if that's what you want to do, awesome, go for it. But you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business, you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now, it's a massive shift happening in the global economy. About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated $10 trillion in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money every single week. And when these owners retire, their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now. More than 58% of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want to take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of 5 businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an SEO OWS business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new software company like I'm doing with Brandlytics, man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics is awesome. It might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns. But you can buy boring businesses instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least 5 years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad economies and recessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the local competition just by answering the phone on time and having a clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy to understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away, unless again you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the route, implement some basic inventory software to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales just by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down 3 unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOWS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. Now you're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cash flow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy taxi business, they will actually act as a bank for you. So they will hand over the keys to the business and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank for this part. You avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller. So you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income, and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, if the seller will not finance the whole thing, you can use government-backed bank loans. The SBA 7 loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you save from your day job. When Nina and I walked into this business, around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You could take over a million-dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from its own revenue. You just sit at the top and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You'll be surprised by how many say yes. The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession-proof companies that print money good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes. Even when the economy crashes, people still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean the floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're renting out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off the box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss. But when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and $1 million in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can hire a few contractors to handle the repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of business. Also explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield high returns. Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that the employees will quit or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts a business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through the this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero, and if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company, and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving, and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movement Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room, and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed, and then get out of their way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business, you get instant infrastructure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team, and existing cash flow. Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your was to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoebox. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software, and suddenly the business is 20% more profitable. You set up a simple digital marketing campaign that the old owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So your action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find 3 areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift. You are fully capable of running an empire, so stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins, and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do, and the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. You will waste years of your life if you try to learn these lessons the hard way. I spent years learning these business lessons so you don't have to. And if you ignore this advice, you risk wasting years of effort, money, and sanity that you'll never get back. Take my early journey as an example. When I launched my first startup at 19, I was scraping by on $300 a month and felt like a total failure about the quit. In desperation, I studied how the founder of Microsoft built this company from scratch and copied his partnership strategy. Shortly after, I landed my first $13,500 deal. That one insight saved me years of struggle. Now, maybe you're thinking, I need to make my own mistakes, or my situation is different. And sure, experience is a great teacher, but it doesn't have to be your experience every time. Wise entrepreneurs learn from others' mistakes to avoid common traps. In fact, businesses that get mentoring early on achieve higher growth, and 70% of mentored small businesses survive past 5 years. That's double the survival rate of those without mentors. The evidence is clear: skip the avoidable mistakes and learn from those who've been there. Now let's dive into 10 hard-won business lessons. Each lesson is practical, proven, and can save you years of pain. Number 1: Believe in yourself and your vision. If you don't believe in your mission, no one else will. Confidence isn't just feel-good fluff. It's a tool for entrepreneurs. One study found that entrepreneurs with high self-confidence were 10% more likely to secure funding and 22% more likely to survive the tough early years. Why? Because self-belief gives you the courage to make bold decisions and persist through the setbacks. When doubt creeps in, remember why You started and the value that you do bring. So your action tip: write down your core belief or why and place it where you can see it daily. This keeps you fueled when challenges come up. Trust that you can figure things out. That mindset will carry you when others would quit. Number 2, start now. Execution beats perfection. Stop waiting for the perfect plan or perfect time. Good enough now is better than perfect Never. I learned this early the hard way. Early in my career, I spent so long chasing the flawless business plan that I missed a $40 million deal and a competitor swooped in while I was polishing my idea. I was trying to be perfect and it cost me dearly. The lesson: take action and adjust as you go. A great idea means nothing without execution. As one seasoned entrepreneur put it, don't worry about perfection, get started now and learn Do something, anything, and move forward today. Launch that test product. Call that potential client. Post the content on YouTube. You'll learn more from one week of real action than from one year of thinking about it. Remember, you can't steer a parked car, so start driving even if the route isn't fully clear yet. Number 3, embrace failure and keep going. Failure is not the end. It's feedback. Every entrepreneur faces setbacks, big and small. The difference between those who succeed and those who give up is resilience. Don't beat yourself up when something fails. Ask, what can I learn from this? In fact, failure is normal. One report found that 1 in 4 entrepreneurs fails at least once before succeeding, and it takes on average 3 years for a new business to become financially sustainable. Think about that. Even successful founders often went through multiple failed attempts. So wear your failures as badges of learning. If a product launch flops or a client says no, use it to improve your next approach. Every no gets you closer to that yes. As long as you don't quit, you're still in the game. So keep adapting and moving forward. The only true failure is giving up. Number 4, consistency is key and small wins add up. Success is built day by day. The secret isn't grand gestures, it's the small, consistent actions that are repeated over time. Posting one video won't explode your business— probably. Making one sale won't make you a millionaire— probably. But doing something every single day will create momentum. Consistency beats intensity. Think of it like compounding. If you improve just 1% each day, in one year you'll be 37 times better by the end of the year. Tiny improvements don't seem like much in the moment, but they stack up in a massive way. Overnight success is a myth. It's the product of regular, boring, uncelebrated work. So whether it's reaching out to one new client daily or refining your product bit by bit, commit to showing up every day. Those small wins will snowball. Be patient with the process and keep the routine even when progress seems slow. And over time, you'll be amazed at how far those daily 1% gains take you. Number 5: Serve first, not just sell. Mission over money. Chasing money for its own sake is a trap. The real path to a lasting business is focusing on service and mission, solving real problems and delivering value. Ironically, that's also how you end up making more money. Purpose-driven companies actually grow 3 times faster on average than their competitors. When you prioritize your mission and customers, profit follows as a byproduct. Too many entrepreneurs get blinded by dollar signs and the vanity metrics, forgetting to build skills and substance. As one entrepreneur warned, don't just work for money and a fancy lifestyle. Build your skills and assets first. Ask yourself, how does my business improve my customer's life? And double down on that. Not only will you create loyal customers, you'll have the passion to keep going. Doing work you care about is fuel. Research entrepreneurs driven by intrinsic motivation, like a passion for their purpose, are less likely to burn out. So figure out the mission behind your business, your why, and make serving that mission your North Star. The impact and income will come naturally when you do great work that helps people. Number 6, build a support network. Don't do it alone. Entrepreneurship can be lonely, but it should not be a solo journey. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. So surround yourself with winners. Seek out mentors, advisors, peers who have done what you aspire to do. The fastest way to shortcut your learning curve is to tap into someone else's experience. Studies back this up. 70% of small businesses that receive mentoring survived past 5 years. That's double the rate of businesses without mentors. A mentor's advice or friend's feedback can save you from costly mistakes you'd never see coming on your own. Also, build relationships in your industry before you need them. Your network is leverage for partnerships, for opportunities, and for moral support. If you don't have supportive entrepreneurs around you, start by joining a business group or community, and it can be online or offline, to find your tribe. Remember, even the Ranger had Tonto. Don't let pride or shyness stop you from asking for help. Winning in business is a team sport. Number 7: Work smart, not just hard. Avoid burnout. Yes, hard work is required, but grinding mindlessly 24/7 is a recipe for burnout, not success. I learned that hustle without strategy can become toxic. One entrepreneur confessed, I wasted years grinding 80-hour weeks doing everything myself and being a toxic workaholic. Working yourself into the ground isn't a badge of honor, it's a sign you need to change approach. Burnout is very real. In one survey, 42% of small business owners said they felt burned out in just the past month. If you burn out, your business goes down with you. So work smart, prioritize high-impact tasks, delegate or outsource what you're not great at, and set boundaries for rest and Use systems and technology to leverage your time. Schedule breaks and time off. Actually put them on your calendar so you can recharge. Remember, a clear mind and healthy body are entrepreneurial tools just as much as a laptop or a phone. Hustle smart and you'll achieve more in 5 focused hours than in 15 frantic ones. It's not about doing everything. It's about doing what matters most and staying sustainable for the long haul. Number eight: Never stop learning. Invest in yourself. The most valuable asset in your business is you, the entrepreneur. So invest in your own growth relentlessly. Industries change, new skills are needed, and there's always something you don't know. Commit to being a lifelong learner. Read books, listen to podcasts, take courses, seek feedback, watch more YouTube videos. The world's top CEOs reportedly. Read about 4 to 5 books per month because they know knowledge is a competitive advantage. In fact, people who read and learn regularly tend to earn far more, up to 5 times more, than those who don't. That is not a coincidence. Every new piece of knowledge or insight you gain can be applied to make your business better, whether it's a marketing strategy, a leadership skill, or productivity hack. Don't say I'm too busy to learn. Make the time. Even 20 minutes a day reading or an hour a week for a webinar can spark huge improvements. Also, learn from your customers and your employees. Ask questions and really listen. The moment you think I know it all is the moment your growth stops. So stay curious and humble. The more you grow, the more your business will grow too. Number 9: Stay flexible and be ready to pivot. Be stubborn about your goals, but flexible flexible about your methods. The business plan you start with is rarely the one that leads to success. Market conditions change, customers' needs evolve, and you must adapt. In fact, 75% of venture-backed startups end up pivoting, which is changing the direction of their business model, at least once during their journey. Some of the most successful companies began doing something entirely different than what they ended up doing. Did you know one the world's biggest video platforms started as a dating site? The point is, don't marry your tactics, marry the mission. If something isn't working, take the feedback and iterate. Maybe your product needs a tweak, or your target market is off, or strategy isn't clicking. That's okay. Pivoting isn't failure, it's often the road to success. The entrepreneurs who thrive are the ones who can turn on a dime when needed. Keep an eye on the data and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself, What's working, what's not, and what can we do differently? The faster you course correct, the faster you'll find what does work. So stay flexible and you'll navigate any storm. And number 10, be patient and persistent. Success takes time. When I first started as an entrepreneur, I thought I'll be successful in a year or two. Reality check, building a business takes time. Persistence is your friend. Too many people quit right before the inflection point. Remember, overnight success is a myth. Most success stories are years in the making. On average, it takes about 3 years for a new business to become financially viable, and over a third of entrepreneurs consider quitting during those early years when results are slow. This is where patience and faith in the process matter. Don't compare your chapter 1 to someone else's chapter 20. Every great business was once an awkward, struggling startup. If you're doing the right things, which is providing value, improving consistently, learning and adapting, trust that the growth will come in time. Keep showing up even when you see little reward. It's like a tree growing roots before you see it sprout. The work is happening just underground. Success might take longer than you want, but it will also be bigger than you thought as long as you persist. As the saying goes, it takes years of work to become an overnight overnight success. So celebrate progress no matter how small and keep going. Your breakthrough is on the way if you stay in the game. You've got this. These 10 lessons are your shortcut to avoiding the mistakes that trap so many entrepreneurs. Each principle here was paid for with years of experience, painful failures, and hard-earned wins. So apply them and you'll accelerate your journey. Remember, knowledge alone isn't power. Applied knowledge is. So put these lessons to work in your business starting today. You are sabotaging your own business without even realizing it. Do you feel like you're working hard but not getting results? It's time to find out if you're making one of the 5 huge mistakes that self-taught entrepreneurs often make. Stick around because fixing even just one of these could change your business forever. Mistake number 1, trying to do it all yourself and not asking for help. You might be thinking, self-taught? That means you have to figure out everything on your own, and this is a huge mistake. No one can do everything alone. When you try to be the lone wolf, you miss out on other people's experience and insight. It's hard to see the forest among the trees, as they say. A mentor advisor can often spot the solution to a problem that has you stumped. Even the greatest entrepreneurs have coaches, mentors, support networks. Here's some proof: a survey from the UPS Store found 70% of small businesses that receive mentoring survive more than 5 years, which is double the survival rate of businesses with no mentors. In the same survey, 88% of business owners with a mentor said that having one was invaluable. Another study found that 1/3 of successful entrepreneurs had a mentor or support group versus only 14% of entrepreneurs who failed. So the evidence and all the data, it's clear going it alone is actually hurting you. So what should you do instead? Ask for help. Find someone who's been where you are and learn from them. This could be a mentor, a business coach, or even a peer group of fellow entrepreneurs. You'll make decisions with more confidence and avoid pitfalls others have already learned from. Remember, being self-taught doesn't mean refusing guidance. It means you take charge of your own learning. The smartest entrepreneurs are always learning from others. As the saying goes, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. So drop the ego, reach out, and build your dream with others. You'll get get further faster with a little help. Mistake number 2, winging it without a clear plan. Running a business without a plan is like going on a road trip without a map. You might be busy driving, but you have no idea if you're headed in the right direction. Many self-taught entrepreneurs make the mistake of just winging it. They dive into work each day, just reacting to whatever happens without a clear strategy or goals. Figure it out as you go can only take you so far. The result is you waste time and money, you chase shiny objects, or you stall out because you don't know what your next step should be. Here is why a plan matters. Entrepreneurs who plan are far more likely to succeed. Research shows that writing a business plan significantly increases your chances of success. One review found that entrepreneurs with a formal plan were twice as likely to successfully grow their business and secure funding. Another study found that entrepreneurs with business plans are 260% more likely to actually launch their company and 30% more likely to grow it. But despite these benefits, only about a third of business owners ever actually finish a business plan. So don't let that be you. Even writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. That's a simple step that pays off in a big way. It doesn't have to be a giant plan. Having a plan doesn't mean you can't adapt or be lean. It means you set clear goals and a basic roadmap for how to reach them. You can always update the plan as you learn, but start with something. Define your target customer, figure out your product or service, your pricing, and how you're going to actually market your thing and deliver value. Set milestones for the next 6 months and year. This gives you a sense of direction each day. You'll know what success looks like and how to measure it. Without a plan, anything can distract you. With a plan, you can wake up each morning knowing the top 1 or 2 things you need to focus on today. You become proactive Instead of reactive, so take some time to map out your business. It doesn't have to be a 50-page document. Don't stress out. Don't overanalyze. Even a one-page plan or bullet point list of goals is better than nothing. You'll be amazed at how much clarity you get by writing things down. So stop winging it and start planning it. Your future self will thank you when your business stays on track and starts hitting its targets. Mistake number three: lacking discipline and consistency in your habits. Freedom is. One reason you became an entrepreneur, right? No boss, no time clock. But here's the trap: without discipline, that freedom can destroy your business. Self-taught entrepreneurs often treat their business like a hobby instead of a job. They work on it when they feel motivated and slack off when they don't. Or they get caught in procrastination and busywork instead of the hard tasks that actually matter. Inconsistent effort leads to inconsistent results. The reality is successful entrepreneurship takes It takes a lot of hard work and consistent habits. It's not a 4-hour workweek fantasy. In fact, most business owners work longer hours than employees. One study found 33% of small business owners work over 50 hours per week, and 25% work more than 60 hours. Many even put in the time on weekends and vacations. Why? Because when you're building something of your own, you get out what you put in. If you only put in half-hearted effort, don't be surprised when you get half-hearted results. But it's not just about the raw hours, it's about habits and consistency. Research from Duke University found that over 40% of our daily actions are governed by habit, not conscious decision. That means nearly half of what you do each day is just on autopilot. If you develop good habits like dedicating 2 hours every morning to high-priority work or making those sales calls daily, it will carry you through even when your motivation is low. On the flip side, if you fall into bad habits— sleeping in, scrolling social media, reacting to emails all day— your business will suffer. You won't even realize how much time is slipping away because habits run silently in the background. So to avoid this mistake, treat your business like a serious commitment. Set a schedule for yourself. You don't need a 60-hour grind if that's not realistic for you, but do decide on consistent work times and stick to them. For example, you might commit to working on your business from 8 AM to 1 PM every weekday before any other activities. Create a routine. Maybe you review your goals each morning, you tackle the hardest task first, right? Eat that frog. You dedicate certain days to specific needs. Mondays are for marketing, Tuesday is for your product development, etc. Also eliminate the distractions when you're working. Turn off your notifications. Let your friends and family know that those hours are secret. Being your own boss means you must boss yourself around. No one else will do it. Consistency beats intensity. It's better to move the ball forward every single day with solid habits than to work in erratic bursts of inspiration. Those small daily actions will compound over time, and that consistency builds trust with your customers and momentum in your growth. So set up habits that make you productive by default. Make success your daily routine. When discipline becomes a habit, your business will start to run like a well-oiled machine, and you will start to reap the rewards. Mistake number four: ignoring your market and customers, building something no one wants. This mistake is a silent killer. Pouring your heart into a product or service without checking if anyone actually needs it. Self-taught entrepreneurs can fall in love with their idea and assume if I build it. People will come, right? They spend months or years developing a business in a bubble— no market research, no customer feedback— only to launch to the sound of crickets. It's devastating and it's common. Building something nobody wants is one of the top reasons that new businesses fail. So don't just take my word for it. Research by CB Insights found that no market need is the number one reason startups fail. In fact, one report showed that 8 of the top 12 reasons startups fail are related to poor product-market fit— basically making something that nobody wants. Think about that. The majority of failures happen not because the founders weren't smart or they didn't work hard, but because they didn't solve a real problem for customers. Another analysis found that 34% of startup failures were due to a poor product-market fit, and 22% 2% failed from not having the right marketing plan. If no one wants your product, even the best marketing won't save you. The market is the ultimate judge. If you ignore it, you're running on hope, you're not running on reality. So to avoid this mistake, put your customer at the center from day one. Don't be afraid to get out there and talk to people who might have the problem you're trying to solve. It could be as simple as having conversations with your target audience or doing quick surveys. Ask them about their biggest problems and needs in the area that you want to help them serve. Listen more than you talk. Don't lead the witness by pitching your idea too soon. Just learn what they truly care about. And as you gather these insights, be ready to pivot or to tweak your idea to better solve the real pain points that you discover. This is not meant to be a blow to your ego. It's how you craft something people actually want to buy. Also, try to test your idea early and cheaply. If you have a product concept, creating a rough prototype or even a sketch and get feedback on it. If it's a service, try a small pilot program or consult with a few potential clients. The goal is to validate that your solution resonates with people. Are people saying, I need this, or when can I have it, or are they lukewarm? Early feedback is gold. It's far better to learn and adjust in the beginning than to spend all your money on a full launch that then flops. Remember, feedback isn't criticism, it's direction. It guides you to shape your business into something that will work. At the end of the day, your business exists to serve customers, to solve a problem, to bring value. When you align what you offer with what people genuinely need and value, you create that win-win relationship. Customers get something they love and you get a growing, profitable business. So fall in love with the customer, not just your product. Do your homework on your market. Stay curious, ask questions, and never assume that you know it all. The more that you listen and adapt, the less likely you are to build something useless. Solve a real problem and you'll never have to worry about finding customers. They will come to you. Mistake number 5: being afraid of failure and giving up too soon. Entrepreneurship is tough and not every attempt will succeed, but the biggest mistake self-taught entrepreneurs make here is taking failure or too personally and giving up when things go wrong. You might hit a roadblock, a product launch fails, a client backs out, the revenue isn't coming in as fast as you hope, and you think, I'm just not cut out for this, so you quit. That is the only guaranteed way to fail permanently. The truth is failure is not the end unless you stop trying. Every successful entrepreneur has faced setbacks. The difference is they learn from them and they keep going. I love the mindset that failure is feedback. In fact, every failure teaches you something valuable. It does. It shows what not to do or how to do it better the next time. Failure is only failure if you don't learn from it. If you treat each failure as a lesson, you actually haven't failed at all. You have grown. It's like getting feedback from the market or from life on how to improve. And guess what? Everybody fails on their path to success. This isn't just a nice saying, it's reality. The road to success is paved with trial and error. The The most legendary business leaders, inventors, creators, they all had flops and outright disasters before figuring it out. They succeeded because they didn't quit after those failures. There's a famous quote, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. That's Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, humorously reminding us that every no gets us closer to a yes. Success usually takes longer than we want to believe. So many people just give up in year 1 or 2, just when things might have started to click if they had persisted a bit more. So how do you embrace failure in a healthy way? First, expect it. This doesn't mean you're aiming to fail, but don't be shocked when something doesn't work. It's just part of the process. Adjust your mindset to see failure as a teacher, not as a verdict on your ability and that you suck. When something goes wrong, take a step back and ask, why did this happen? What can I learn from this? How can I adjust and come back better? Maybe your marketing message was off. Maybe you targeted the wrong audience. Maybe you simply need more patience for your strategy to actually play out. Use that insight to pivot and refine your approach, and then you try again. And keep in mind that resilience—it's like a muscle. Every time that you get over some setback, you start to build that muscle. You get a little bit tougher and smarter, and over time you become. Become more and more unstoppable because no failure can break you. You always find a way to adapt. This is crucial for self-taught entrepreneurs because you're learning as you go. Not everything will be perfect on your first try. Give yourself permission to fail and learn in public. It's better to launch imperfectly and then iterate and improve than to hold back because you are afraid. And most importantly, don't quit on your dream just because it's harder than you thought. If you truly believe in what you're doing, then keep pushing. You might be closer to a breakthrough than you think. Remember that every overnight success story has a hidden chapter of years of effort and setback. So keep going even when it's tough. Perseverance is going to be your superpower as an entrepreneur. Use it. The beautiful thing about mistakes is that they don't define you, they educate you. Now we've covered the 5 huge mistakes to avoid. You have the power to course correct. Ask for help when you need it. Plan your path so you're not drifting aimlessly. Build rock-solid habits that drive you forward every day. Obsess over your customers and make sure you're giving them real value. And above all, don't let fear of failure stop you. Every entrepreneur's journey is a work in progress. You're gonna have ups and downs, victories and defeats. That is normal. What matters is that you stay in the game and keep going. Learn from every step and keep moving. Success is not reserved for only the geniuses or the lucky ones. It's for the ones who keep improving and keep going. So you've chosen a challenging path being an entrepreneur, but it's also a rewarding one. You have a vision inside you and the world needs to see it. So take this video as your wake-up call and hopefully your pep talk. It's time to double down on your growth, correct the mistakes if you've been making them, and you'll see the difference in your business and in yourself. You are You already have everything it takes to win. Now go out there and make it happen. And remember, the only way you truly fail is if you stop trying. You are wasting half your life on work that does not matter. It's not because you're lazy or you lack ambition, but because you've been trained to mistake busyness for business and simple activity as actual achievement. You don't stop the cycle right now, you will burn out. You'll resent the business that you built, and you'll never reach the level of impact that you were born to make. Look at Mark Burnett. He's one of the most successful TV producers in history. He created Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank. He's won 4 Emmy Awards, 4 People's Choice Awards. Most people think someone like that must work 20 hours a day, never sleep, and sacrifice everything to win. But Burnett's success didn't come from doing more manual labor than everyone else. It came from ingenuity. He understood that you have to stop trying to be the person doing the hard work in the trenches. And become the person designing the platform. He realized that the labor does not equal value. He leveraged systems, teams, and media to multiply his effort. He didn't just work hard. He built a machine that allowed his ideas to scale globally without him having to turn every single screw himself. Now, I know this trap well. When I was 19, I was part of a biotech software company. I thought the secret to success was suffering. That if I wasn't bleeding for the business, I didn't deserve the win. I was making $300 a month. I was eating bean salad every day because it was the cheapest food that I could buy. I felt like I was trying everything, but nothing was working. I felt useless. I wanted to quit. I told my partner that I quit. I looked at my partner and told him that I couldn't do it anymore. But I woke up one day, the next day after I told him I quit, and realized that I just couldn't quit it yet because I would regret it. So I decided to stop trying to Invent the path myself. I looked at Bill Gates. I asked, "How did he build Microsoft?" I saw that he used partnership deals. So I stopped doing all the busy work I thought I had to do, and I just focused on partnerships. And that one shift saved my business. It took me from struggling to surviving to closing deals with major clients. Now you might be thinking, "Okay, Evan, but I have to grind. I'm just starting out. I don't have a team. I don't have money. I have to do everything myself." And yes, just recognize that's the voice of fear that is keeping you small. You don't need a team to be efficient. You need strategy. You need more time. You need focus. The belief that you have to do everything is exactly why you're here stuck doing everything. So here today are the 10 laws of productivity that will let you cut your work time in half while doubling your results. Law number 1, the law of immediate action. You have to stop getting ready to get ready. So the biggest lie that you tell yourself is that you need more information before you start. You buy the books. You watch the videos, you listen to the podcast, you feel like you are working, you feel productive, you get a little hit of dopamine every time that you learn a new hack or a new strategy, but you're not producing anything. You're stuck in a trap of passive learning. Real productivity is not reading about efficiency, it's doing the work. So there's a rule called the 5-minute rule. It says that the hardest part of any task is just starting. It's the activation energy. In physics, Newton's first law says an object at At rest stays at rest. You are the object. You are heavy. You are stopped. To get moving takes a massive amount of energy. But once you are moving, it's easy to stay moving. So you need to lower the barrier to start. Tell yourself you're only gonna work for 5 minutes. Trick your brain. And once you start, you'll keep going. So when I get an idea, I don't wait. I don't put it in a file to think about for 3 months. I act. When I wanted to write my book Momentum, I didn't plan for it for a year. I got the idea and I started writing immediately. I wrote the book in 5 days. Not because I'm a genius writer, but because I didn't give myself time to doubt. I didn't give myself time to research how do I write a book. I just started. Stop consuming, start creating. If you catch yourself reading another article on how to be productive instead of doing the thing you know you need to do, just stop, close the tab, do the work. Law number 2, the law of the miniature model. So you're trying to build the whole You're trying to build a whole castle before you have laid a single brick. This is the planning trap. You have a big vision, you want to change the world. I love it. You want to build a massive app or a huge company. So you spend weeks or months or years planning every detail. You try to solve problems you do not even have yet. You're wasting your time on what-ifs. What you need to do is start with a miniature model. You need a proof of concept. And so in the software world, we don't build the whole operating system at once. You build a tiny piece, then you test it and you see if it works. If you want to build an app, don't spend 6 months writing a business plan. Spend 1 or 2 hours researching if the app already exists. Spend 1 day building a very simple version of it. You start small. When I started my YouTube channel, I didn't have a strategy to get to 4 million subscribers. I didn't have a team. I didn't have fancy lights. I just wanted to help people. I made videos that were terrible. I was shy. I was sweating. I was introverted. I can't even watch them back. But I started, I made a small video, then I made another one. If you try to plan everything, you'll be paralyzed by the size of your own dream because you're thinking so big. So shrink the scope. What is the smallest possible version of your idea that you can execute today? And do that. It cuts out the noise, it cuts out the, the speculation. It gives you data that you can start applying right now. Law number 3, the law of daily momentum. You cannot win if you stop every few days. Consistency beats intensity every single time. If you work on a project for 10 hours one day, and then you don't touch it for a week, you have lost. Why? Because when you come back a week later, you have to spend hours just remembering where you were. You have to load the project back into your brain. You've lost the context, you've lost the flow. But if you work on a little bit every single day, even just for 30 minutes, you You keep the momentum, you keep the project alive in your subconscious. So it works like compound interest. It seems small at first. You think, what can I do in 30 minutes? You can do a lot if you do it every day for a year. You're keeping the background processor of your brain running. Even when you're sleeping, even when you're eating, your brain is solving problems for that project because you touched it today. This is how Jerry Seinfeld got good at comedy. He wrote that joke every day. He put that giant X on his calendar. His only goal was not to break the chain. When I was building my channel, it took me 5 years to get a few thousand subscribers, right? It was slow, it was painful. Most people would have quit. The only thing I had going for me was that I just didn't stop. I kept uploading, I kept going. I didn't need to go viral, I just needed to not stop. If you want to work 50% less, stop starting over. Keep the engine running. Law number 4, the law of routine architecture. So you're wasting your energy deciding when to work. Willpower is a battery. You wake up with a full charge. Every decision you make drains that battery— what to eat, what to wear, which email to answer, when to start the big project. By the time you actually sit down and do the important work, your battery is empty. You're tired. So you go to YouTube or Instagram instead. You need a routine that automates your behavior. So look at Haruki Murakami. He's a famous author. When he's writing a novel, he wakes up at 4 AM. He works for 5 or 6 hours. In the afternoon, he runs or swims. Then he reads. He goes to sleep at 9 o'clock. He does this every single day. He says the repetition is a form of mesmerism. It puts him in a trance. You need to design a routine that protects your energy. So for me, Tuesday is YouTube day. I don't wake up on Tuesday and ask, what should I do today? I know what I'm doing. I'm filming. It's on my calendar. I don't have to use willpower to decide. I just execute. I start every morning with what I call a believe walk. I wake up, I put on my earbuds, headphones. I listen to Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz. I let them talk to me. They remind me of what is possible. They remind me of who I want to be. I don't leave it to chance. I engineer my environment to force me to be productive and think bigger. If you want to work less, stop wasting energy on decisions that should be automatic. Law number five: The law of simplicity. You are making things. Too complicated because you're smart. Smart people love complexity. You see a problem and you want to build a perfect, intricate system to solve it. You want to account for every edge case. You want to use the fanciest tools. But complexity is the enemy of execution. Complexity breaks. Complexity requires maintenance. Complexity takes time. You need to apply the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid. Also known as Occam's razor, the simplest solution is usually the right If you can solve a problem with a spreadsheet, don't build a custom app. If you can solve a problem with a phone call, don't build a giant funnel. When I started branding myself, I struggled. I had too many ideas. I wanted to help entrepreneurs with marketing and sales and raising capital. It was too much. It was messy. Then I found one word, believe. That's it. One word. It simplified everything. Everything I do, every video, every book, every speech filters through that one word. It makes decisions easy. Is this about belief? Yes, do it. No, don't do it. Stop adding layers, strip them away. What is the core value? Do that and ignore the rest. Law number 6, the law of automation. You are doing work that a machine should be doing. Machines are for working, humans are for thinking. If you're spending your day copying and pasting data or sending the same email over and over or manually checking for errors, you're wasting your human potential. You are a being, not a robot, and you are a very expensive, very slow robot. You have to delegate the boring stuff to technology. So in coding, they use continuous integration, a system where the computer automatically tests the code every time a human writes it. The human doesn't have to stop and check. The machine does it. This frees the human to focus on the creative problem solving. So for you, this might mean scheduling tools. It might mean setting up filters in your email. It might mean using AI to help you draft content. I have a team now, but before I had a team, I used tools. I scheduled my social media posts and I didn't sit there on Twitter all day long. I scheduled it out. Every minute you spend doing repetitive tasks is a minute you are stealing from your future. So automate it. Law number 7, the law of the knowledge multiplier. You think you don't have time to learn. You're wrong. You don't have time not to learn. Productivity is not just about speed. It's about insight. So if you try to solve a problem with brute force, it might take you 100 hours. If you read a book by someone who has already solved that problem or watch a video, you might learn a trick that lets you solve it in 10 hours. That book or video just saved you 90 hours. That is a 10x return on your time. Knowledge is a multiplier. So when I started my business, I didn't know how to sell. I was scared. So I read, I studied, I learned. I didn't try to figure it all out on my own. I Look for what worked for others. Most people stop learning as soon as they get busy. They say, okay, I'm just, I'm too busy working to learn or to read, to watch videos. That's like the woodcutter saying, I'm too busy chopping wood to sharpen my axe, right? You're chopping with a dull blade. You're working harder and harder and getting less and less done. You need to feed your brain. You read books, you watch educational videos, you study your craft, you avoid blind decisions. Don't guess.
No.
Law number 8, the law of deep work. Your phone is destroying your dreams. You cannot do high-level work if you are interrupted every 4 minutes. There's a concept called attention residue. When you switch from writing a report to checking a text message, your brain doesn't switch instantly. Part of your attention stays on the text message. It takes about 20 minutes to get your full focus back. If you check your phone every 10 minutes, you never ever reach peak performance. You are operating at 20% capacity. You need to break the habit of constant connection. You have to protect your time. You have to create walls. So when I'm in my deep work mode, I'm unreachable. I'm not checking comments. I'm not checking email. I'm creating. That is how I'm able to produce so much content. It's not because I type faster, right? It's because I don't stop typing to check a notification. Turn off the notifications. Put the phone in another room. Close the tabs. Give yourself the gift of focus. You'll be shocked at how much you get done in 2 hours of uninterrupted time. It's worth 8 hours of distracted time. Law number 9, the law of purpose and stamina. You're tired because you're bored. Fatigue is not always physical. Often it is emotional, it's spiritual. And when you're doing work that doesn't matter to you, you get tired fast. You drag your feet, you procrastinate, you end up in quadrant 4, right, doing things that are not urgent and not important, like watching TV or playing games, because you're trying to escape. You need a clear purpose to drive you. Stephen Covey talks about this. You need a personal mission statement. You need a North Star. When you know why you're doing the work, you find energy you didn't know you had. My purpose is to help entrepreneurs believe in themselves. That wakes me up. That pushes me through the hard days. But you also need physical stamina. You cannot work 50% less if you are sick or you're exhausted or running on sugar and caffeine all the time. Your brain is an actual physical organ. It needs sleep, it needs food, it needs exercise. If you cheat on sleep, you will pay for it in stupidity, right? You make bad decisions, you will work slower. You have to redo things over and over again. Maintain your machine. Define your purpose. That is the fuel. Law number 10: The law of early planning. You lose the battle before you even step on the field. Most people start their day by checking email. They start their day on defense. They let other people dictate their priorities, right? You spend the whole day putting out fires for other people. You need to plan early. You need to start on offense before you start working. You need to know exactly what you are doing. You need to break the big scary projects down into small manageable phases. If you want to build a mobile app, you don't just sit down and code. You plan which platform, iOS or Android, what are the features. You map it out. It prevents scope creep where the project keeps getting bigger and bigger until it just crushes you. So I use my calendar. If it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist. I plan my days, I plan my weeks. This eliminates the stress of What should I do now? I already decided what I should do. Now I just have to go and do it. This keeps you out of quadrant 1, the crisis mode. If you plan, you don't have crises, you just have tasks. Own your time. Productivity is not about becoming a robot. It is about becoming free. It's about respecting your time enough to stop wasting it on things that do not matter. You have the potential to build something incredible. You have Michael Jordan-level genius at something, but you will never find it if you are buried in busywork all day. So apply these laws, reclaim your time, pour that time into your passion. Your ability to learn faster than everyone else will make or break your success. If you're not deliberately training yourself to learn quicker every day, you're falling behind. Most people coast on outdated study habits and it's costing them opportunities. If you don't fix how you learn, learn, you'll keep forgetting critical lessons, repeating mistakes, and watching hungrier competitors speed past you. There's a famous story. 2 lumberjacks have a contest to chop down trees. One hacks away nonstop, sweating buckets. The other stops every so often to sharpen his axe. By the day's end, the one who sharpened his blade easily outcuts the other. The lesson: sharpen your tools, sharpen your mind, and multiply Your results. Even Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Learning smarter is how you sharpen your axe as an entrepreneur. For me, this lesson hit early. I was a kid hiding under his desk in school because I couldn't understand what was going on. I had an undiagnosed hearing problem. I literally couldn't hear the teacher, but I thought I was a problem. I thought. I was stupid. My grades were terrible next to my straight-A sisters. My parents even sent me to a child psychologist at age 8. Eventually, doctors discovered I had fluid in my ears. They put tubes in, and suddenly I could hear clearly. And in my final year of high school, with the encouragement of an amazing French teacher who finally made me believe in myself, I transformed. I went from Bs and Cs to graduating with straight A pluses. Sometimes it really is. Just one little change, one mentor, one strategy that makes all the difference. I wasn't dumb; I just needed the right fix and someone to show me what was possible. Now you might be thinking, "This sounds great, Evan, but I'm running a business here. I don't have time to play around with fancy learning techniques. I just get things done." Or maybe you're thinking, "I've never been a good learner. I'm too old to change now." Or this. And I hear you, and you're wrong. If you don't have time to learn how to learn, then you're guaranteed to waste 10 times more time down the road fixing avoidable mistakes and struggling to keep up. As an entrepreneur, you can't afford not to sharpen your axe, and you absolutely can become a better, faster learner. Your brain is not fixed. It's a muscle that grows with practice. And that's why I'm here. So we're going to lose the excuses, at least for this video. I'm going to show you exactly how to revolutionize your learning. And by the end of this video, you won't just be learning faster. You'll start seeing yourself as a learning machine. So let's do it. Today, I'm going to break down the 7 science-backed strategies that will help you learn faster and retain more starting now. Strategy number 1, test yourself. Don't just reread. The first strategy is this. Active recall. So test yourself instead of passively rereading or listening. This one change will skyrocket how fast you learn. Here's some science behind it. When researchers compared passive review to active recall, the difference was staggering. Students who quizzed themselves on materials remembered about 57% of it, while those who just reread and highlighted remembered only 29%. That's almost double the retention by testing yourself. Active recall can literally boost your performance by around 20% or more. So that's not some tiny tweak. It's a huge leap. Most people feel busy when they're just reading notes or watching videos, but feeling busy is not learning. Highlighting the page or nodding along to a podcast gives you the illusion of knowledge without the actual substance, right? You've done this. You've read something 3 times and think, yeah, sure, I've got this. Then a day later, you barely recall a thing. It's because recognition Feels like understanding, but it's not. Your brain only truly learns when it has to retrieve information with no hints. So think of your memory like a muscle. Reading is watching someone else lift, but active recall is you lifting the weights. It hurts more, it's harder, and that's exactly why it works. So every time you struggle to remember something, you're strengthening that neural connection. So how do you do it practically? After you consume any learning material, a book, an article, a course, YouTube video, pause and close it. Quiz yourself. What were the key points? How would I explain this to a friend? Write down everything you remember from memory. That struggle you feel trying to recall is real learning happening. You can use techniques like the blurting method. You just jot down all you can remember on a blank page or the Feynman technique. Where you explain the idea as if teaching a total newbie. When I prepare a speech or video, I don't just read my notes silently. I practice out loud and test myself. I'll literally recite key ideas in the shower or quiz myself during a walk. And if I stumble, that's good. It shows me what I haven't learned yet when the stakes are low. You need to embrace the stumbles during practice so you don't stumble when it counts. And remember, input is not the same as output. If you can't output the knowledge by recalling it or teaching it, you haven't really learned it. So start testing yourself and you'll cut your learning time because you'll know exactly what you know and what you still need to work on. No more fooling yourself by saying, yeah, I read that chapter, I'm good. Prove it to yourself. It might be humbling at first, but it will make you learn way faster. Strategy number 2, space out your learning. No more cramming. The second strategy is to space out your learning. So don't cram all at once. Spread it over multiple sessions. or days. This is called spaced repetition, and it's one of the most powerful learning phenomenon ever discovered. Here's why it works. When you first learn something, your brain starts forgetting it almost immediately. In fact, almost 100 years ago, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped out the forgetting curve. It shows that memory of new information drops off steeply in the first 20 minutes and continues falling within hours. That sounds depressing, but here's the key. Every time you review or practice that information again, especially after some time has passed, you interrupt the forgetting and reinforce the memory. Repeated spaced exposure essentially bends that forgetting curve so you retain far more over the long term. So think of it like you're planting seeds. If you dump a gallon of water on a plant and then ignore it, it'll drown and then dry out. But if you water it a little bit every day, it grows strong. Your memory works basically the same way. In one example, a learning expert noted that in just 4 months, practicing 30 minutes a day with spaced repetition, you could learn and retain 3,600 flashcards worth of content with 90 to 95% accuracy. That's an insane amount of knowledge locked in, and it's because of consistent spaced practice. Meanwhile, cramming might give you a short-term rush, But a week later, poof, it's all gone. And we've all crammed for a test and then forgotten everything. Spaced learning might not have that all-nighter adrenaline vibe, but the results last a lifetime. Now, as an entrepreneur, spaced repetition can be your secret weapon. You need to remember what you learn from your books and your courses, your own experiences, even your mistakes, the YouTube videos you watch. So build a simple system to revisit knowledge. This can mean reviewing your notes weekly, using a flashcard app for key concepts, Or deliberately scheduling practice of a skill throughout the month. When I learn something, say a new strategy for social media or a speaking technique, I'll circle back to it regularly. I don't just use it once and then forget it. I'll revisit that lesson next week, next month, and each time I find I understand it deeper and it sticks even more. So let me give you a quick story. A few years ago, my wife Nina and her friends invited me on a snowboarding trip. I had never snowboarded. I was a decent skier as a kid, but snowboarding was totally new to me. The first time down the hill, I was terrible. I was embarrassed. I kept falling. I couldn't carve. My legs were burning from the effort of just not tumbling over. I felt like I was holding everyone back. Now, I could have done what most people do and spend one exhausting day on the slopes, maybe take a lesson, and then give up until the next trip months later. And predictably, I would suck again. Instead, I decided to apply spaced practice. After that humiliating day, I went home, and for the next several weeks, I practiced every morning on a tiny local hill near my house. No big crowds, no pressure, just me and this one other older guy who was there every morning, both of us quietly doing our thing. I fell 30 times a run trying to get the turns right, but each day I fell a little less. I trained my muscle memory day by day. After weeks of daily practice, I went back to the mountain with my wife, and this time I could keep up with them. They were shocked at how much I'd improved. That's the power of spacing your practice and persistence. So whatever you're trying to learn, whether it's mastering sales calls, you're learning coding, you're trying to speak a new language, don't binge once and drop it. Schedule it in chunks. Even 15 to 30 minutes a day of focused learning will crush a 7-hour cram session in effectiveness. Trust the science on this. Your brain will thank you, and you'll actually remember what you learn. Strategy number 3, prioritize sleep. Seriously, sleep on it. This one might surprise the hustle culture crowd, but sleep is non-negotiable for learning. If you want to learn faster and remember more, you must prioritize sleep as part of your strategy. Think of sleep as the time when your brain hits save on what you learned. Pulling all-nighters or burning the candle at both ends doesn't make you a hero. It makes you slower. Neuroscience is super clear on this. When you learn something new, your brain needs sleep to properly encode and retain that information. Dr. Matthew Walker, he's a leading sleep scientist, says sleep after learning is essential to help save and cement that new information into the brain. Without sleep, those new memories are like wet concrete that never gets to set. They remain fragile and easily wiped away. In fact, if you try to learn on no sleep, your ability to absorb new information can drop by up to 40%. Imagine losing almost half your learning potential just because you skimped on sleep. That's huge. You can't brute force your way through that. So no amount of willpower or coffee can overcome a 40% deficit in brainpower. As Dr. Walker bluntly puts it, you can't pull an all-nighter and still learn effectively. And it's not just about memory. Sleep helps you make creative connections and find solutions too. You ever heard the phrase sleep on it? It's real. While you're snoozing, your brain is busy replaying and organizing the day's information, linking new ideas to existing knowledge, and even improving skills that you practiced. Studies show that your performance on tasks like playing a melody on piano can actually improve after sleep without further practice. Skip sleep and you skip that whole process. Now I know as an entrepreneur, it's tempting to cut sleep when you have a million things to do each day. And early in my career, I tried that grind of late nights and early mornings thinking I was getting ahead. What I got was foggy brain and a habit of forgetting important details. Now I guard my sleep like my life depends on it because my business brain definitely does. I aim for 7 to 8 hours sleep. I'll choose sleep over answering a few extra emails at midnight because I know tomorrow my brain will operate at 100% instead of 60%, and I get more done in less time because I'm well rested. So action item: treat sleep as a part of your learning protocol. Schedule your learning or practice sessions around a good night's sleep. So, for example, if you want to retain something, study in the evening and then get to bed on time. You'll remember it far better in the morning. Likewise, if you have a big day of learning ahead, make sure you slept well the night before. This isn't being lazy. It's actually being smart. The science says that memory consolidation— that's the process of solidifying what actually happened— happens during deep sleep. And if you consistently cheat yourself on sleep, you're consistently shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to growing yourself and your business. And one more thing on sleep: lack of sleep doesn't just hurt new learning, it can also erase what you thought you knew. Have you ever felt brain dead in a meeting after too little sleep? It's real. You literally can't access some of the knowledge in your brain when you're exhausted. So do not wear sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. High performers in Any field, sports, business, creative work, they know the value of recovery. Your brain is your number one asset. Give it the rest it needs to perform. Strategy number 4, do one thing at a time. Kill multitasking. So here we want to laser focus on one thing at a time. If you're trying to learn while multitasking, you're checking emails, you're bouncing between tasks, you're letting notifications interrupt you, you are sabotaging your learning. And I know entrepreneurs, we love to think we can juggle 12 things at once, but science is crystal clear on this. Multitasking is a myth and doing it makes you dumber and less effective. So this is a slap in the face statistic. Rapidly switching between tasks, what most people call multitasking, can cost you up to 40% of your productive time. Imagine 40% of your day, poof, gone, wasted because you kept context switching. Even crazier, in tests, this kind of behavior temporarily drop people's IQ by 10 points. That's more than the cognitive knock you take from smoking some marijuana. So if you pride yourself on being a great multitasker, I hate to break it to you, you're really priding yourself on being 40% less effective than you could be. And when it comes to learning, the toll is even worse. One expert in cognitive psychology, Dr. Tomasz Chamorro-Premuzic, noted that one of the biggest pitfalls of multitasking is lower retention of knowledge. Of course it is. Because if your attention is split, nothing fully sinks in. Your brain needs focus to transfer information from short-term memory into long-term memory. Distractions reset that process. So if you've ever read a page of a book while also half listening to a conversation, then realize you had no idea what you just read, that's what we're talking about. You were physically looking at the words, but your brain wasn't encoding any of it because it was toggling between different inputs. I had to learn this the hard way too, and My early days of building my business, I would try to learn new skills or work on important problems while also keeping my email open constantly. My phone was buzzing, 20 browser tabs open. I felt like I was being productive. After all, I was doing a lot, but I was doing everything poorly. I read the same paragraphs over and over because I wasn't fully there. I'd watch a tutorial video while also answering messages and later wonder why I couldn't remember Now I've adopted what I call monotasking. So if I'm learning or working on something critical, everything else is off. Phone is on do not disturb, emails are closed. Team knows not to interrupt me during my learning block unless the building is on fire. I literally schedule deep focus time on my calendar. And you know what? In 1 hour of true focused work or study, I accomplish what used to take me 3 hours of scatterbrained multitasking.
That's amazing.
So here's what you can do. Create a distraction-free zone for your learning, even if it's just 20 minutes of reading or practicing a skill. Make it 20 minutes of pure focus. That's it. Put your phone in another room or use an app to block social media. Close all your unrelated tabs. If you're at home, tell your family or roommates, hey, I'm offline for the next half hour. It might feel weird at first because you're so used to being constantly available to everyone, but guard that focus time fiercely. It is sacred time for your brain in that focused state. You'll enter a flow and actually absorb the material or master the skill much faster. Researchers say that even a brief interruption like a text ping can derail your train of thought enough so that it takes several minutes to get back on track. So imagine what constantly glancing at your phone is doing. Don't do that to yourself. Single-tasking, monotasking, it's a superpower in a world of constant distraction. If you do this, not only will you learn faster, You'll also produce higher quality work and bonus, you'll feel less mentally exhausted because switching tasks drains your energy. When you focus on one thing, you actually end the day less tired with more accomplished. Quality over quantity, focus over frenzy. It's a game changer. Strategy number 5, embrace the suck, adopt a growth mindset. So let's talk mindset quickly. To accelerate your learning, you need to embrace to suck and see yourself as a work in progress. So you adopt a growth mindset, the belief that you can improve through effort, mistakes, and feedback. This isn't meant to be a motivational talk. It's backed by decades of research. Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford proved that mindset about learning literally affects how much you learn. If you think your abilities are fixed, like, I'm just not good at X, you'll avoid challenges, you'll give up easily and basically stay bad. But if you believe you can grow, you will embrace new challenges, you will persist longer and ultimately achieve much, much, much more. It sounds almost obvious, but so many of us secretly carry limiting beliefs about our own potential. Every master was once a disaster, right? The people who learn the fastest are usually the ones who are willing to look stupid for a while. They're okay with being the worst in the room because they know that's the price of admission for growth. I try to live this. In fact, one of my personal mottos is expect to suck at the start. So when I try something new, I assume I'll be terrible in the beginning, and that's okay. It frees me to actually focus on learning instead of protecting my ego. So personal story that I hope drives this home for you. When I started my YouTube channel, I was not a natural on camera, far from it. I was an introvert who didn't even like being on camera. And here I was trying to make videos to help entrepreneurs. My early videos, let's just say they sucked. I could barely watch them without cringing. In the interview I did, I talked about this, that it took me 350 videos until I wasn't completely embarrassed for myself, and 700 videos until I inspired myself. That's not a typo, right? 350 videos before I felt even halfway okay about my skills. And by the time I hit 700, I finally made something I thought, hey, that was actually pretty good. Most people would quit after 5 videos that got no views or 50 videos that felt awkward. Like, I felt like quitting plenty of times. I used to beat myself up in those early days. I wanted to be great out of the gate. I thought I could be a B-minus level YouTuber immediately, but reality was I was F level at the start. And because I expected to be at least B-minus, every video that turned out F made me question myself. At one point I mentally quit thinking I'll never be good on camera, but then I realized, no, this is just part of the process. I decided to expect to suck. I literally told myself, okay, you're terrible right now. So what? That just means you have a big opportunity to improve. Let's keep going. I stopped demanding perfection from myself. And started demanding persistence. So if 40 people watched a video, I told myself maybe one person's life was changed by that video. So it was worth it, and I'll get better next time. This mindset saved my YouTube career and allowed me to eventually reach millions of people. It will save you in whatever you're trying to learn too. When you catch yourself saying, "I'm just not good at this," add one word: yet. I'm not good at this. Yet. Replace I can't do this with I can't do this yet. It sounds like a small tweak, but it changes everything. Suddenly your brain goes from a brick wall to now it's a door. It's open. We can go through it. Neuroscience backs this up. When you believe effort will make you better, you actually engage more deeply and learn more each attempt. So when you think you're just innately bad, you don't even try as hard. Like, why bother? You just suck at it and you learn less. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. So break the cycle, give yourself permission to be a beginner, seek out challenges that make you feel clumsy or dumb. Those are the ones that will actually create the most growth for you. So quick example, I once took a hot yoga class with my wife. I was the worst student in the room. I was falling over. I could barely do the poses while these yoga veterans around me are like graceful swans. I don't know how they're doing what they're doing. And I loved it. I'd rather be the absolute worst in a class of experts than the best in a class of beginners. Why? Because when you're the worst, you have the most to gain. So adopt that mentality. Don't avoid the stuff that you suck at. Seek it out and attack it with curiosity. Every failure, it's just data. It's feedback telling you what to improve on. As long as you learn from it, it's not really failure at all. It's just a stepping stone. So ask yourself, where are you holding yourself back because you're afraid of being bad? Decide to embrace being bad. You will accelerate your learning like never before. And ironically, You'll become good at that thing faster than you thought possible. Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something, so keep going. Strategy number six: Teach what you learn. Turn knowledge into belief. So the sixth strategy here is to teach it as soon as you learn it. This is one of my favorites. If you want to truly understand and remember something, turn around and explain it to someone else. Or if If no one's around, explain it to an imaginary audience, to your pet, to the mirror. I don't care. Just teach it. Why? Because teaching forces you to consolidate and organize your knowledge in a way that passive learning never will. Research has a name for this. It's called the protégé effect. When you expect to teach something, you learn it more effectively. In one study, students who were told they would have to teach the material to others recalled more information, organized it better, and remembered the important points more than the students who were just told to take a test on it. And here's what I love the most. None of them actually ended up teaching. The mere expectation changed how their brain absorbed the information. So think about that. If you approach learning something as if you'll have to teach it, you'll automatically go into a higher gear. You look for key points, you seek understanding instead of just rote memory. You fill in the gaps proactively. You engage in what scientists call deep processing. So by teaching, you're basically tricking your brain into learning more deeply and quickly. On top of that, when you teach, you will quickly find out where you are confused. You've probably experienced this. You think you get something, but when you try to explain it, you go, um, well, actually, I'm not sure how to put this. Teaching shines a spotlight on the fuzzy parts in your understanding. That becomes gold because then you know exactly what you need to review or clarify. It's like having a built-in knowledge scanner that highlights the missing This has been a huge part of my life. People often ask why I share so many videos with advice and lessons from others. Do I do it just to help the audience? And absolutely, I love helping Believe Nation. You guys are awesome. But here's a secret: I'm helping myself too. By teaching ideas from videos I watch or books I read or interviews I do, I'm reinforcing those lessons in my own mind too. When I profile a famous entrepreneur or talk about 10 rules of success from Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, I'm effectively reteaching those principles to myself, and that means I'm absorbing them on a much deeper level than if I just read them or watched them and moved on. Explaining their rules to millions of people means those rules now become a part of me. And that daily input and output built my belief and knowledge base. So every video I make is not only helpful to you, hopefully it cements the lessons in me too. And you can do the same thing without having a YouTube channel. Make a habit of sharing what you learned. Did you read a great book? Teach a core idea to a friend over coffee or record a voice note to yourself summarizing it. You're learning a new technique, explain it to your team at work. Even better is teach it as if you're teaching a complete beginner. Simplify complex ideas into easy language. That's the Feynman technique in action, and it's magic for solidifying knowledge. If you can't break it down simply, you probably don't get it yet. So go back and fill in those gaps and then try teaching it again. And one more quick hack, you can start a journal or blog or YouTube series where you teach your future self. After you learn something, write a quick entry as if you're instructing someone else on it. And I like to do this on a smaller scale. I write notes for my videos or speeches in a way that I'm talking to someone about it, not just bullet points. It makes a difference in recall. So remember the old saying about the learning pyramid that we retain 90% of what we teach and only 10% of what we read? Now, the exact percentages on that pyramid are debated, But the concept holds. Active learning methods— teaching, doing— beat passive ones— reading, listening— by a mile. When you teach, you're not only transferring knowledge, you're transforming it into something that lives in your own words and your experience. And the most beautiful part? When you teach, you also start to embody the identity of a knowledgeable person on that topic for yourself. You're not just someone trying to learn marketing, you're someone who can teach marketing. See how that boosts your confidence and belief, you carry yourself differently, and that motivates you to learn even more. So from now on, every time you learn something useful, ask, who can I share this with? How would I explain it so that they really get it? And it might feel awkward at first, but do it anyway. Share on social media, share it in a group, share it with one friend. Don't hoard knowledge. Use it and spread it. In the act of teaching, you'll find the lessons sticking to you like glue as well. And strategy number 7 Take action. Learn by doing fast. Taking action immediately on what you learn is critical. And so in entrepreneurship especially, learning by doing is the fastest way to go from theory ideas into reality. You've got to move from the abstract to the concrete as soon as possible. This not only reinforces what you learned, but it also exposes you to nuances and lessons that you'd never get just by sitting and studying. So there's an old Chinese proverb: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. And so research backs this up. When scientists look at people learning a new skill, they found that the group who actually practiced the task had way more brain activity in regions related to skill and performance with fewer errors compared to the group that only watched the task being done. So the observers barely activated key parts of the brain and made more mistakes when they finally tried the task themselves. So observation alone was not enough. Physical practice was required for the brain to really encode the skill. To quote the lead researcher, observation cannot replace physical practice in learning a new skill. So you can watch all the tutorial videos in the world or read all the articles and books, but until you get your hands dirty, your retention and understanding will be very limited. And I see this all the time with new entrepreneurs. They'll read 50 books on starting a business, but they haven't actually started anything. They have tons of knowledge that isn't quite real to them because it's not yet applied. The first time they try to implement, they realize, oh, this is harder than it looked on paper, or I didn't fully get that concept until I had to actually use it. So here's how you can start to implement this. Whenever you learn a new concept or skill, ask yourself, how can I use this today. Even if something that theoretically you won't need until later, find a way to practice it or experiment with it right now in a small way. If you're learning a new marketing strategy, pick one of your products and spend an hour applying that strategy in a mini campaign. Or you're studying a programming concept, awesome, write a tiny program that uses it. If you're watching this video about learning strategies, as soon as this video ends, pick one strategy and do something with it. So for example, take the worksheet that I talked about, right, and actually write down an action There, that's 2 strategies in one, action and teaching by writing. The longer you wait to apply knowledge, the more it fades and becomes theoretical again. Motion creates emotion and it creates long-term memory. So when I read a great business book or I get advice from a mentor, I immediately look for opportunities to apply it in my business or life that week. If I learn a better way to communicate with my team, I'll try it in our next meeting. If I pick up a tip for productivity, I'll experiment with it the very next It does 2 things. One, it solidifies the lesson in my mind because I've now experienced it and not just read about it. And 2, I get feedback. I see what works, I see what doesn't work, and I learn even more from doing it. So it becomes this virtuous cycle. You learn, you do, you get feedback, and you learn deeper. By taking action, you also create momentum. You overcome the inertia that plagues so many people who know but don't do. Knowledge sitting in your head with no use is actually a burden. It makes you feel guilty or overwhelmed, but knowledge put into practice immediately turns into results and confidence. You start to trust yourself as someone who applies things, not just stores things. And guess what? That identity motivates you to learn even more because you know it's going somewhere. So don't be afraid of doing it wrong. This loops back to embracing the suck. Your first attempt implementing something new will be clunky. That's fine. You will learn way more from a sloppy first try than from endless perfect planning. I like to say version 1 is better than version none. Get a version out there, whatever it is— a first draft, a pilot test, an awkward trial run. You can iterate and improve it, but only if it exists in the real world. Action is where theory becomes tangible and where true mastery is born. So those are 7 strategies. But remember, Knowledge alone is not power until it is applied. We just talked about that. Learning how to learn is the ultimate meta skill. It makes every other skill easier. Imagine the advantage you have in business if you can pick up new technologies, new market insights, new skills twice as fast as your competition. It's massive. As Darwin said, it's not the strongest or the smartest who survive. It's the ones most adaptable to change. Learning is adapting. Bet on yourself and invest the time to sharpen your axe, because when you do, nothing can stop you from cutting through whatever obstacles stand in your way. You might be sabotaging your success every morning without even knowing it. Billionaires have specific morning habits that set them up to win each day, and chances are you're not doing them yet. If you want to achieve billionaire-level status as an entrepreneur, it starts with how you begin your day. So let's dive in to the 7 morning habits that billionaires swear by so you can start adopting them too. Are you ready to upgrade your morning routine? Let's go. Habit number 1 is wake up early consistently. Do you hit the snooze button? Billionaires don't. Nearly half of self-made millionaires in one study woke up at least 3 hours before the workday began. By contrast, only 3% of low-income earners did the same. Waking up early gives you a massive head start. It's quiet, it's distraction-free, and it's time you can use to invest in you before the world wakes up. Take Sir Richard Branson, for example. He rises at 5 AM no matter where he is in the world. Why? It allows him to exercise, spend time with his family, and get in the right mindset before business begins. As Branson says, exercise and family time put me in a great mind frame before getting down to business. I like to wake up early so that I can work through my emails before most of the world logs on. That early start gives him an edge. So here's your action step. Start waking up even just 30 minutes earlier than you do now. Use your time for your growth, as we'll cover in the upcoming habits. Gradually push it to an hour or more. Consistency is key. Waking up at the same time each day trains your body and builds momentum. In my book, Your One Word, I talk about the power of defining a single core value. Use your extra morning time to focus on your core value or mission. This will give you a why that makes getting out of bed easier. Remember, the early bird catches the worm. Billionaires catch the worm and conquer the whole farm by breakfast. Habit number two: exercise and move your body. Your body is your engine. Billionaires treat it that way by making morning exercise non-negotiable. Dr. Richard Branson, worth over four billion dollars, says the secret to his productivity boils down to two. words: work out. He claims regular exercise is a tool that doubles his daily productivity. It boosts his energy and focus for the rest of the day. If a billionaire running 400+ companies can make time to break a sweat each morning, so can you. Science also backs this up. Morning exercise floods your brain with oxygen and releases chemicals that improve your memory and concentration. Even a quick 20 to 30 minute workout will get your blood pumping and your brain firing on all cylinders. Bill Gates starts many days with cardio exercise, often on the treadmill, while learning via video lectures. Oprah Winfrey does regular morning workouts ranging from hiking to strength training to stay in peak state. These leaders know that a healthy body equals a more effective mind. Now don't worry, you don't need to train like an Olympic athlete. Just get moving. Do some stretches, do a quick run, yoga, hit the gym, or even take a brisk walk. Consistency matters more than intensity. As I often emphasize, building momentum is critical. By exercising each morning, you create momentum of positive energy that carries into your work. You will feel more confident, alert, and ready to tackle challenges. Plus, exercise is a natural stress reliever. So here is your action step: pick a form of morning exercise that you enjoy, or at least can tolerate, and schedule it in. Even 15 minutes daily is a great start. Over time, you can ramp that up. Treat that appointment with your body as sacred. Remember, you're not just working out, you're sharpening your biggest business tool— yourself. As the saying goes, take care of your body, it's the only place you have to live, and it will reward you with sharper focus and higher output all day long. Habit number 3, practice mindfulness or meditation. Stressed out about the day before it even begins? Billionaires calm their mind first thing. Many credit meditation or mindfulness practices as their secret weapon for their success. Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who's the founder of Bridgewater Associates, says, whatever success I've had in life has been more due to my meditating than anything else. This man manages billions of dollars, and he gives a huge amount of credit to daily meditation, which was 20 minutes in the morning and again later in the day. It helps him stay calm, think clearly, and make better decisions under pressure. What's so powerful about mindfulness? By taking even 10 minutes for quiet reflection, you train your brain to handle stress and chaos without panicking. Studies show that practices like Transcendental Meditation can significantly reduce anxiety and stress and even improve your mental health and resilience. When you're an entrepreneur, your ability to stay focused and composed is a competitive advantage. Meditation is basically a daily workout for your brain's calm and focused muscles. Successful people use different mindfulness tools. Meditation is one, prayer is another, breathing exercise can work, or journaling. Oprah Winfrey, for example, starts her day with 20 minutes of meditation to center herself. Jack Dorsey, who's the co-founder of Twitter and Square, reportedly does meditation each morning at 5 AM to clear his mind. This isn't just hippie stuff. It's about getting your brain into peak operating condition. When you're calm and centered, you make smart decisions, not emotional reactive ones. So here's your action step: Tomorrow morning, before diving into work, sit in silence for a few minutes. Focus on your breath or try a simple meditation app. If meditation isn't your thing, just try sitting with a notebook and writing down your thoughts or intentions. More on intentions soon. The goal is to quiet the mental chatter and sharpen your focus. In Built to Serve, I talk about finding your purpose. Sometimes you can't hear your purpose because your mind is too noisy. So morning mindfulness will help you listen to that inner voice and approach the day with clarity and confidence. Habit number 4, read and learn every morning. Billionaires are learning machines. They make feeding their mind a morning priority. So instead of scrolling social media or news fluff, they read books, articles, reports, anything that builds knowledge. Warren Buffett spends about 80% of his day reading, and famous famously suggests aspiring entrepreneurs should read 500 pages a day. He says that's how knowledge builds up, like compound interest. Now, 500 pages daily might be extreme for you, but the point is never stop learning. Many of the top entrepreneurs use mornings for self-education. Bill Gates reads roughly 50 books per year, often devoting morning time to reading before work. Mark Cuban reads 3+ hours a day to gain any advantage that he Elon Musk has said that when people asked how he learned to build rockets, he simply answered, I read books. Billionaires treat knowledge as the greatest asset they can accumulate. The average person might be content with browsing headlines. The billionaire devours information that can spark new ideas or improve their decision-making. Now, you don't need hours each morning to read, but do try to read something useful each day. It could be a chapter of a non-fiction book that you're An industry article, a biography of something you admire. Even 30 minutes every morning can set you apart. One study of rich versus poor habits found that 88% of wealthy people read at least 30 minutes a day for self-improvement. It's a habit that clearly correlates with success. Reading does 2 big things: it expands your knowledge and it inspires you by showing what's possible. You can effectively mentor under great people by reading their ideas and experiences every morning. So here is your action step. Pick a book or a learning resource like YouTube that aligns with your goals. Wake up, grab your coffee or tea or whatever you want to drink, and read before you jump into work mode. Make notes of any ideas that jump out and think about how to apply them to your business or your life. And over time, you'll notice that this habit not only increases your knowledge, but also puts you in a more inspired, motivated state to start the day. Feed your mind before you feed the world's demands. In a year, you'll have read dozens of books, and your improved thinking will directly benefit your business. This is how you go to bed a little smarter each day, as Buffett says, by starting each morning as a student of success. Habit number 5: plan your day and prioritize. Billionaires don't wing it when it comes to their day. They take a few minutes each morning or the night before to plan and prioritize what needs to get done instead of reacting to whatever comes up. They proactively decide what their day will look like. This often means identifying the number one most important task for the day and tackling it first. As the old saying goes, if you have to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning. In other words, do your hardest, highest value tasks first while your energy and willpower are at their peak. Research backs up the power of planning. In Thomas Corley's study of rich habits, he found that 81% of wealthy people maintain a daily to-do list versus just 19% of low-income Not only that, 67% of those wealthy people complete 70% or more of their tasks each day. They write down what matters and they execute on it. Writing your plan forces you to clarify what's important. Remember, being busy is not the same as being productive. Billionaires focus on the few critical activities that drive their goals, not the trivial many. Jeff Bezos, for example, schedules his high-IQ meetings meetings at 10 AM while he's still fresh. He refuses to take meetings early in the morning so he can have time to think, plan, and get important work done, and even enjoys a relaxing breakfast with family before diving into Amazon business. Bezos said, I do my high-IQ meetings before lunch. Anything that's going to be really mentally challenging, that's a 10 o'clock meeting. He knows he's at his best in the morning, so he protects that time for critical work and decision-making. By 5 PM, as he says, his brain is tapped out. So he structures his day to make the big moves early. So here's your action step. Take 5 to 10 minutes each morning to map out your day. Write down your top 3 priorities. Do this before you get caught up in emails or fires. If you have a major task that could really move your business forward, schedule time in the morning to attack it. Planning doesn't mean every minute is fixed. It means you have a game plan and clear priorities. This will keep you from drifting and reacting all day. As you complete your important tasks, check them off. It builds momentum and confidence, and over time, this habit will make you incredibly effective. Remember, either you run the day or the day runs you. Billionaires run their day starting with a solid morning plan. Habit number 6, avoid morning distractions. That means no phone first. So here's a habit to not do. Don't grab your phone the moment you wake up. Seriously, the average person, about 80% of people, checks their phone within 10 minutes of waking up. That means most people start their day in reactive mode, scrolling through notifications and emails and social media and the news and other people's agendas. Billionaires break this common habit. They protect their morning focus like gold. So why is avoiding your phone so important? Attention. The first hour of your day sets the tone for the rest. If you immediately plunge into a flood of messages and emails, you're telling your brain to play defense all day. You're chasing, you're reacting, you're stressing. Instead, successful entrepreneurs use mornings for offense— their goals, their mindsets, their plan, as we've already covered. They know Twitter and email can wait until they've taken care of key morning habits— exercise, planning, etc. By doing so, they stay in control. You own your morning instead of letting push notifications and inboxes own you. So think about it. When you wake up, your mind is relatively clear. If you fill it with a social feed or frantic work emails, you've essentially let 100 people in your bedroom shouting demands at you. Top performers often keep the phone on airplane mode or in another room until their morning routine is done. Arianna Huffington, as an example, not a billionaire, but a very successful founder, has spoken about banning devices from her morning routine to reduce stress. Even Oprah is known to avoid checking emails first thing. She'll spend her morning on meditation, exercise, and a good breakfast to ground herself. So here is your action step. Don't check your phone for at least the first 30 to 60 minutes after you wake up. If you currently use your phone as an alarm, consider getting a separate alarm clock or placing your phone across the room so you can't mindlessly reach for it in bed. Use that first hour for the habits we're talking about: exercise, reading, planning, etc. If you absolutely must see if an urgent message came in, scan briefly after you've done one positive activity for yourself. Trust me, the world will not implode if you wait to check Instagram or Slack. By avoiding digital distractions, you give yourself the gift of presence and focus each morning. This will make you far more productive when you do dive into work. It might feel tough at first, since phone checking is an addiction for many. But stick with it, because reclaiming those lost minutes of focus is game-changing. Your brain will thank you, and your business will benefit from a more focused, strategic you each day. And habit number 7, cultivate gratitude and purpose. Billionaires often start their day by feeding their spirit and mindset, not just diving straight into work. This means practicing gratitude, visualization, or setting a clear intention for the day. It might sound a little touchy-feely, but this habit is about training your mind to be positive, resilient, and purpose-driven. When you're grateful and purpose-focused each morning, you carry that strength into everything that you do. Let's go back to Oprah Winfrey, for example. She has openly credited much of her joy and success to keeping a gratitude journal. In fact, Oprah kept a daily gratitude journal for a full decade, writing down 5 things she was grateful for each day. She says this practice changed her life profoundly. Why? Because it shifts your perspective to focus on abundance and opportunity. When you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value. Gratitude literally rewires your brain to look for the good in situations, which is crucial for an entrepreneur facing daily challenges. Harvard researchers found that gratitude is strongly associated with greater happiness and health. It helps people feel more positive emotions, improves their health, and builds stronger relationships. Imagine starting every day feeling thankful and optimistic. Do you think you'd be more motivated and creative? Absolutely. Another powerful mindset habit is connecting with your purpose. Billionaires are often fueled by a big mission, not just money. Steve Jobs had a famous morning question he'd ask himself in the mirror: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do do today? If many days went by with the answer no, he took it as a sign to change something. Now that's a pretty heavy question, but it instantly cuts through trivial worries and forces you to focus on what matters. It gave Jobs a daily dose of perspective and drive. You don't have to use his exact question, but find a morning thought or mantra that connects you to your why, the reason why you do what you do. In Built to Serve, I explained that when you find a purpose centered on serving others, it ignites you every day. So use your mornings to remind yourself of that purpose. Here's your action step: before you launch into your busy schedule, take a few minutes for gratitude or intentional ritual. This could be as simple as thinking of 3 things that you're grateful for as soon as you wake up, or writing them down in your journal. Feel that appreciation. Then take a moment to visualize your goals or say an affirmation that aligns with your mission. For instance, you might say, I'm building a business that makes a difference, or whatever drives you. If spiritual, you might pray or meditate on your purpose. The key is to start your day heart-first, not just head-first. When you do this, you'll notice you approach your tasks with more enthusiasm and resilience. Challenges that come up during the day won't knock you down as easily because you've rooted yourself in gratitude and purpose at dawn. So the 7 morning habits of billionaires: 1, wake up early. 2, exercise. 3, meditate. 4, read. 5, plan your day. 6, avoid distractions. And 7, Practice gratitude and purpose. Now you might be thinking, that's a lot to do every morning. Start with one habit at a time. Build it up. Consistency is more important than perfection. Even adopting a couple of these habits will give you a noticeable boost in your mood, your energy, and your productivity. The more you can stack together, the more powerful your morning routine becomes. Remember, morning routines set the foundation for your entire day. If you win the morning, you're far more likely to to win the day. These habits are common among the ultra-successful for a reason— they work. They prime your body and mind to be at your best. And as an entrepreneur, your business rises or falls based on your mindset, energy, and choices. By noon, a billionaire has often taken care of their health, fed their mind, knocked out a top priority, and centered themselves on what matters. Imagine how further ahead you'd be if you did the same thing starting tomorrow. No more excuses. You do have time for Remember, it can all start by waking up a little bit earlier and not letting your phone hijack your attention. Protect your morning for you and the growth of your dreams. And over time, these small habits compound into massive results. Like I say in my book Momentum, success is built through steady momentum, and that momentum begins anew each morning. So now it's your turn. Which habit will you adopt first? Commit to it. Make it part of your identity. I'm the type of person who blanks every morning. Keep going even if you stumble some days. The goal is progress, not perfection. Soon you'll notice you're more in control, more energized, and closer to your goals than ever before. This is how you join the ranks of the ultra-successful— one morning at a time. So you've got this. Make your morning count and you'll change the trajectory of your whole life. All that's left is to start. Get up, get going, and make your success routine a reality. Steve Jobs had a power his own team called the reality distortion field. He made decisions that made good sense in terms of vision, but he was not an engineer. And in those days, they used to call it in Silicon Valley the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, and it was because Steve didn't feel bounded by the laws of physics. It proves something powerful: the person who believes the hardest wins, even when they're not the smartest one in the room. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. He believed in his vision so completely that Apple became the first company in history worth $3 trillion, and today it's worth more than $4 trillion. There needs to be someone who is sort of the keeper and reiterator of the vision. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision. This matters for you because the force that built Apple is the one thing standing between your idea and the people you need to believe in it. One of the things that made Apple great Was that in the early days, it was built from the heart. Things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. Back in 1983, Steve Jobs was just 28 years old, running a young computer company, and he wanted the best CEO in America to come run it with him. He set his sights on John Sculley, the president of Pepsi. Mexico, one of the most successful executives in the entire country. They went to the most famous executive search person at that time, Jerry Roach, on, uh, in New York, and he turned up my name. And Steve and I met. At that time, I was running Pepsi. Steve and I spent about 5 months getting to know one another, and we would meet almost every weekend. Sculley had everything— a massive salary, corner office, the top job at a giant brand that everyone knew, and he kept telling Jobs no. I said, Steve, thought about it, but I'm not coming to Apple. Why would he walk away from the top job of the corporate world for a risky little computer company run by a kid? Then Steve Jobs looked him dead in the eye and asked one question: Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world? That one sentence changed everything. Sculley walked away from one of the biggest companies in He got about half a meter from me and just stared at me, and there was a long pause, and then he said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?
Or do you want to come with me and change the world?
And it's like it knocks the wind out of you. And I didn't give him a different answer at that moment, but a week later I was working at Apple. Jobs didn't win him with a bigger paycheck or a stack of spreadsheets. He won him with a vision so big that running a soda company suddenly felt small. That's how powerful real belief is. That moment right there is the reality distortion field in action. It looks like magic from the outside, but here's how he really did it. They don't even have to believe in what you are saying. They just have to believe that you believe in what you're saying. That's the whole secret. Jobs believed so hard that other people borrowed his belief until they could grow their own. Years later, he proved it again with the famous Think Different campaign. Jobs personally chased down permission from the families of Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi to put them in an Apple ad. He genuinely believed that if those legends used a computer, they would've used a Mac. That's the level of belief that I'm talking about. He didn't just hope it was true. He knew it in his bones, and that certainty is what pulled the whole world along with him. And it Wasn't loud or pushy. A lot of the times Jobs spoke softly and slowly, and people leaned in to catch every word. The belief was so inside him that he never had to raise his voice to make you feel it. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Steve Jobs, but I'm no Steve Jobs. I don't have his charisma. I don't have some reality distortion field. I'm just me. And this is for you. Steve Jobs was not born with this. He was a kid who got fired from his own company in 1985 because people stopped believing in him. He spent years in the wilderness building other things before Apple begged him to come back. The conviction that you saw later inside Steve Jobs, it was built brick by brick, choice by choice. So it's not a personality that you either have or you don't. It's a skill, and any skill can be learned. So you already have something. It's something you believe in. You already have an idea, a project, a dream, something that lives inside you. The only thing missing is learning how to carry that belief in a way that other people can feel it too. And once you do that, doors start opening that you didn't even know were there. So let's get into how you actually do this, starting with the foundation that everything is going to sit on top of. Believe it before they do. In 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and showed the world a phone with no keyboard, just glass. Every expert said he was wrong. Phones needed real buttons that you could feel. Every smartphone of the day had a little keyboard, and people swore nobody would type on a sheet of glass. Jobs didn't have any proof. He had belief. He bet his whole company on a blank screen because he could already see you swiping and tapping like it was the most natural thing in the world. He believed it before a single customer ever touched one. Here's what most people do. You wait for other people to believe in you first, and then you feel confident. You wait for the customer to say yes, the investor to write the check, the audience to clap and cheer for you, and then you'll finally feel sure of yourself. That's backwards. The belief has to start with you before there's any proof, before anyone else is on board. So when the people in front of you lack self- belief, they borrow yours. That's your real job as a leader, as a founder, as a creator. You have to believe enough for 2 people because the person across from you is scared and they're watching you to see if it's safe to dream. If you flinch, they flinch. If you are rock solid, they relax and start to lean in. So before you ever walk into that meeting or hit record or send that pitch, do the inner work first. Get so clear on why your idea matters that no one can shake you from it. Run the hardest objections at yourself in advance. Answer them on paper. Keep going until there's nothing left. There's no cracks in your presentation. When you become the person who fully believes, the words and the actions start flowing on their own. You stop sounding like you're hoping, and you start sounding like you know what you're talking about. And people feel that difference instantly in their gut, the same way the world felt it watching Steve Jobs hold up a little slab of glass. So before any big conversation, write down in one line what. What you absolutely know to be true about your idea, not what you hope, what you know. Read it out loud until your body believes it. Then walk in carrying that one line. Hold their dream bigger than they hold it. When the team was building the first Macintosh, one of the engineers told Steve Jobs the computer couldn't boot up any faster. It was already as fast as it was ever going to get. Steve Jobs didn't accept that. He sat the engineer down and did the math out loud. Millions of people would turn this machine on every single day. If it booted 10 seconds faster, you multiply that by all those people every day for years, and you're saving dozens of human lifetimes. Then he looked at him and asked, so can you make it boot faster? A few weeks later, that engineer had cut the boot time almost in half, something he'd sworn was impossible. That's what holding a bigger dream does. The people you talk to are usually stuck in the day-to-day, buried in the fear of their bills, and they've shrunk their dreams down to something safe. Jobs never did that for the people around him. He held bigger picture that they could see for themselves. And that's exactly why they did the impossible for him. So when someone shares their goal with you, hold it in your hand and think bigger than they do. If someone tells you they want to make an extra $10,000 this year, look them in the eye and say, that's a good start. Then show them the version of their life that's 10 times bigger than the one they just described. You're not, you're not trying to flatter them. You're trying to remind them of what's actually possible that they have forgotten inside of themselves. People are drawn to the person who sees more in them than they see in themselves. That's leadership. Do that for the people around you and you become magnetic. They'll follow you not because you pressured them, but because you believe in their future more than they currently do. And I think that's one of the kindest things you can do for another human being. You give them permission to want and be more. Make it so simple they can repeat it. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, the company was a complete mess. They were making dozens of different products, and even Steve Jobs couldn't explain what half of them were for. So in a meeting, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a simple 2x2 grid— 4 boxes. One question across the top: are you a regular person or pro? And one question on the side: do you want a desktop or something portable? He said Apple would make one great product for each box— 4 computers, that's it. Then he killed almost everything else. People thought he was crazy throwing away that many products, but that Brutal simplicity is what saved the company. Jobs said something that sounds backwards until you actually sit and reflect on it: simple is harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple. The person who can take a giant idea and say it so a ten-year-old understands it—that's the person who wins the room. So let's look at the Think Different campaign. Jobs didn't give a forty-page report on company values; he boiled the whole soul of the company down to two words. So take your idea, whatever you're trying. Trying to get people to believe in and ask yourself, can I say this in one clean sentence? If you can't, then maybe you don't understand it well enough. Keep cutting it down. Keep carving it out. Remove every word that isn't carrying actual weight. Get rid of the jargon that makes you sound smart, but, but corporatey. Because when your message is that simple, people can carry it for you. They can repeat it to their friends, their team, their family, and your one clean sentence becomes their words too. That's how an idea travels from one person to the whole world, on the back of a message so clear it sticks in someone's head and won't leave. Speak their words, not yours. When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the other companies selling music players were all bragging about gigabytes— 5 gigabytes of storage. Technically impressive and totally meaningless to a normal human being. Steve Jobs didn't say 5 gigabytes. He held up the iPod and said 1,000 songs in your pocket. Same exact device, same storage. One of those is engineer language and the other is human language. And that one little phrase is a big reason the iPod took over the world. That's the lesson. When you want someone to believe in your idea, the fastest way to build trust is to make them feel understood. And you do that by speaking their language, not yours. Listen to how they describe their own problem, then say it back to them in their exact words. If a customer says, I'm tired of of feeling invisible. You don't translate that into a line about brand visibility solutions. You say you felt invisible, then you're done with that. Instantly, that person feels like you get them. And here's another piece. Never tell someone they're wrong, even when they are. The second you say you're wrong, a wall comes up and they stop listening. So agree first and then gently guide and improve. Start with, I totally hear you, and then walk them towards the new way of seeing. It and stop framing your offer as some giant, big, scary leap. Frame it as just the next logical step. People are afraid of big jumps, but they'll happily take one small step that's reasonable. It's a step forward. You lower the fear, you raise the trust, and you make it easy for them to say yes. Belief grows when people feel safe, and people feel safe when they feel heard. So do this enough and people stop arguing with you and start asking you what to do next. And the moment someone truly feels understood by you, they stop defending their old position, and they open up to a new way. Stand up for your idea when it gets tested. In 1985, at just 30 years old, Steve Jobs, he got pushed out of Apple, the company he had built in his parents' garage. The board sided with John Sculley, the same CEO that Jobs had recruited, and stripped Steve of all of his power. He could have crawled away and given up on his ideas. He didn't. He went and he started NeXT. He bought a tiny computer company that became Pixar, and he kept building on the exact vision people had just rejected him for. 12 years later, with Apple sliding towards bankruptcy without him, they came back and begged him to return. And that same vision turned Apple into the giant that it is today. So the principle here is believing in your idea quietly isn't enough. At some point, someone bigger, louder, more successful is gonna push on your idea. And unless you stand up for it, the most dominant people in the room will never respect you. They're testing you. They want to see if you actually believe what you're saying or if you're going to fold the second that there's some pressure. So when someone challenges you, don't cave, don't get defensive. Calmly hold your ground and explain why you see it the way you do. Ask some questions back. Make them defend their doubt the same way they're asking you to defend your belief. And if the fear of failing is what's stopping you from standing your ground, remember the bird. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust Her trust isn't in the branch. Her trust is in her wings. So put your trust in your own ability to figure things out no matter what happens. That's where real conviction comes from, not from knowing nothing will go wrong, but from knowing that you can handle it if it does. When you stand on that, then no challenge can knock you off your idea. Obsess over the parts no one sees. Now, there's one more thing that made people believe Steve Jobs. And it might be the most subtle one. When Steve Jobs was a boy, his father Paul, who built furniture out in their garage, taught him something that stuck with him for life. A real craftsman makes the back of the cabinet just as beautiful as the front, even though it's against the wall and nobody will ever see it, because you know it's there. Jobs took that to heart. When they built the Macintosh, he insisted the inside of the computer, the circuit board hidden behind the case where no customer would ever look had to be beautiful too. The engineers thought he was nuts. Who cares what the inside looks like? Steve Jobs cared. He approved every word of marketing copy and everything that went on the website, down to the last detail. People called it extreme, but that obsession is exactly why the world came to trust Apple. When you care that deeply about the things no one sees, it shows up in the things they do see. People can feel when something was made with love. So whatever you're building, Pour yourself into the corners that nobody's going to check. Make the hidden parts excellent too. Answer the email better than you have to. Fix a small thing that only you are going to notice. That level of care is impossible to fake and people will sense it. Your conviction is not just in your words, it's in how you do the work when no one is watching. Every hidden detail you get right is one more reason a customer tells a friend, one more reason a skeptic will give you a second look, one more brick in the wall of trust that you are building with people. None of it is visible on day one, but over time it stacks into something that people cannot argue with. And if you have the ability to do it right, then you have the responsibility to do it too. If you can, then you must. That's the standard that makes people believe that you are the real thing. Okay, so here's what I want to leave you with, with Steve. Steve Jobs wasn't magic. He was a person who believed in something so deeply that the whole world eventually believed it too. You have that exact same ability inside you right now. Starting today, start by believing before there's any proof. Hold a dream for the people around you. Make your message simple. Speak their language. Stand up for what you see and care about the details. Do that and watch how people start to lean in. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready isn't real. You get to decide today that your idea is worth believing in. If I lost everything tomorrow and had to start a brand new business this year, with no audience and no savings, I wouldn't panic because starting a business has never been simpler or cheaper than it is right now. There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities. We're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now. This is the best time ever in the history of technology. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Americans filed a record 5.67 million business applications in 2025, the most in history, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So while everyone online keeps telling you the dream is dead and the economy is rigged, more people are quietly betting on themselves than at any point ever. The U.S. is marking Small Business Week. And new data finds more Americans are jumping on the small business bandwagon. Data is showing us that last year, a record number of people applied to be small business owners. This isn't just about business. It's about taking back control of your time, your income, your life. And I'm going to walk you through the exact steps I'd follow in order to do it from scratch. Where are you going to spend your time? Your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I am in control of everything that happens. Everything, everything that will happen in my life, I will be the master of. 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. When I was 20 years old, I had a little software company and I was making $300 a month. I was so broke and so ashamed of it that I lied to my own friends and pretended I was living the hustle lifestyle when the truth is I couldn't even afford $20 for a night at the hotel. night out and beer. One night I was sitting there crying, ready to quit, completely convinced that I just wasn't smart enough to pull this off. And then something hit me that changed the whole direction of my life and my company. Somebody had already figured this out. I don't have to be a genius. I don't have to have the skills or information yet, and I can model someone who has already done it. So I went and studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft. He had a software company. I had a software company. Everyone assumes Microsoft blew up because of some genius piece of But it didn't. It blew up because Gates made a deal with IBM, the number one computer maker in the entire world at the time, so that every single computer they shipped came with Microsoft software already loaded on it. But here's the part that almost nobody talks about: Microsoft was already a seven million dollar company before that famous IBM deal ever happened. And when I dug into how Gates got from zero to that first seven million, the answer was the exact same word: partnerships. He did not work everyone, although he worked very hard. He partnered with people who already had what. He needed. So I went back to work the very next morning, copied that one single idea, stopped trying to do everything alone, and closed my first deal for $13,500. Bill Gates kept me in business, and I never once met the man. Right now you're probably thinking it's easy for me to say all this because I have a big audience today. But if you took every single follower away from me tomorrow, I promise you I would not start by trying to go viral on YouTube. Building an audience from scratch, it takes 3, 5 more years, and most people run out of motivation and money and quit long before it ever pays them anything. So forget about followers at the start, forget about the perfect logo, forget about waiting until you feel ready, because ready is not the truth. And so here's exactly what I would do instead, starting from absolute zero, step by step. Get to $96,000 with just 4 clients. So the first thing I do Is ignore almost everything you think a business needs. I would not build a website. I've personally helped launch multimillion-dollar companies that didn't even have a website when they signed their first clients. So website is not the thing standing between you and your money. It's just a comfortable thing to hide behind, feeling like you have to get this thing done. Instead, I'd lock onto one piece of dead simple math and let it run my entire life. I need to get four people paying me two thousand. $2,000 a month. That is the whole goal. Not 400 customers, not some giant viral launch, not a warehouse full of inventory. Just 4 people who get enough value for you that they will pay you $2,000 every single month. 4 clients at $2,000 a month is $96,000 a year, which means you have an almost 6-figure business built on just 4 relationships. And it gives you the survivable cash flow you need to build everything else on top of it. So the only question that matters on day one is simple. What can you do that's worth $2,000 a month to somebody else? And this year, that list is huge. You can set up AI systems and automations for companies that they're drowning in their busywork. You can run ads on their social media. You can consult in a skill that you already have. Pick the one thing that you're best at and can start delivering this week and price it at $2,000 a month or more so the math works fast and you're not grinding to make 100 tiny little sales. You do not need 1,000 customers, you need 4 yeses. And when you stop thinking that you need to build some massive company, and you realize you just need 4 people to say yes, the whole thing stops feeling impossible and starts feeling like something you could go and do this week. Mind the network you already have. Here's where almost everybody freezes. They think they have to go find total strangers and somehow convince them out of thin air to buy from you, right? You don't. To land those first 4 clients, I would start by auditing the resources and the people already sitting in my phone, in my contacts right now. I don't want you throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, answering fake questions in your own head about whether you're qualified or whether you're ready. I want you to go out to the people you already know. If your brother and your sister run chiropractic clinics or your friend owns a med spa, you go straight to them first. You don't reinvent the wheel. You offer to run their ads or handle the service for them, even cheaper, free at the start, so you can learn the industry from the inside and walk away with your very first real testimonials and case studies to share. Those early wins are absolutely everything because proof is the thing that lets you walk into the next conversation and charge full price with total confidence. Being leads to doing here. The moment you decide that you are the person who solves this problem, you stop researching and you start reaching out to the people who are already know you, already like you, and already pick up the phone when you call them. So you're not starting from zero connections right now, even if it feels that way. Your network, not your wallet, is your real startup capital. And the good news is you already have one. You just never asked it for anything. Make your first offer impossible to turn down. So when you reach out to those first few people, the worst thing you can do is show up sounding desperate or trying to sell some big, vague, expensive package. Instead, I would lead with a clear result. And almost no risk for them at all. So pick one specific painful problem that you already know how to fix and offer to fix just that one thing. Tell them you'll do it at a low starter rate or even tie your pay to the result that you get them. So the only way they lose is if you don't deliver. That one move, it melts their fear away because now they aren't gambling on you. They're just saying yes to an outcome that they already want anyway. So don't pitch them a long list of features. And deliverables because features confuse people and a confused person, they don't buy from you. So pitch them the after, paint a clear picture of exactly where their business will be once their problem is finally gone and let them feel it for a second, right? Then the very second you get them a real result, you ask for 2 simple things. You ask for a short testimonial in their own words, and you ask them who else they know that has that exact same problem. That becomes a flywheel for you. That one happy client instantly becomes both Your proof and your next referral source, and you use that momentum to raise your price a little bit and go land the next one. You're not trying to close 1,000 deals or be everywhere at once. You are just trying to make your very first client so ridiculously happy that getting your second, third, and fourth starts to feel almost easy. So get that first yes this week, overdeliver like your life depends on it, and from there you let the proof do the selling for you. Build your Money 50. So once you get that first bit of cash flow coming in, you stop hunting one client at a time and you start scaling through relationships instead of ads. I would build what I call my Money 50 list. This is what we teach inside our Movement Makers program. Here's how it works. You pick 5 different categories of people and then you go 10 people deep in each category. So you end up with a written list of 50 names. These are people who, if they did know you, if they did like you, if they did trust you, could each be worth 6 figures or even 7 figures to your business every single year. And here's the key that most people miss. These usually are not your current customers. They're referral partners. They might be CPAs or lawyers or property managers, agency owners, the people who already have a deep, trusted relationship with the exact audience that you're trying to reach. One single CPA can send you 30 clients without you even spending a dollar on advertising because their clients already do whatever they recommend. So write those 50 names down on one page. You put it where you see it every day, and you treat that list like like it's made of gold because getting in front of those fifty people is the entire game. You don't need a million customers; you need a handful of powerful relationships. The person with the best relationships wins every single time, and relationships are completely free to build if you're simply willing to give first before you ever ask for anything. Start a biz dev show. Now, how do you actually? Get in front of your Money 50 list when these are busy, important, successful people? Here's the mistake most people make. If you email them and ask to grab a coffee and pick their brain, they will ignore you every time because everybody on earth wants their time and attention. So you flip the whole thing around. You start a simple interview show, what I call a biz dev show, and you invite those exact 50 people to come on as your guests on almost nobody ever asked them for an interview before. So they say yes, because everybody loves being treated like the expert. And here's the beautiful part. You don't need a fancy studio, you don't need expensive gear, you don't need a big audience, because going viral is not the point. And the view count doesn't matter at all here, because they're telling their story and they don't get a lot of attention typically. The only metric you care about is the relationship. You spend a full hour, you make them look great, you tell their story, you're genuinely curious about their work. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, you ask one strategic question connected to what you do, just to quietly plant a seed in their mind. And then the moment you stop recording, you make your move. You tell them that you'd love to be their second opinion or their go-to person in case any of their clients have an issue that obviously you know how to deal with. In 1 hour, you just turn a complete stranger into a warm potential partner who wants to help you, and it costs you exactly $0. There's no faster way on this planet to earn someone's trust than to put them in the spotlight and champion them before you ever ask for a single thing back. Trade your time for a piece of the upside. The next move is the one that truly changes everything, and it's the one that I'd be the most aggressive about this year if I'm trying to build my business. When you're first starting out, it's totally fine to charge a flat monthly fee, but the real wealth is never in trading just your hours for dollars. It's in owning a piece piece of what you help actually build. So the second I had proof of what I could actually get for results for people, I would stop just being a hired hand. I would walk into an established business that's already making money and say, hey, give me a percentage of the company and I'll come in and be your growth person and your sales engine. If you really want to scale your upside, you take X percent of a business in exchange for driving their growth instead of just giving them a flat rate every month. Month. I had this exact same thing with a bunch of agencies I started. I taught them everything I knew about YouTube. I took a 25% split, they had the other 75%, and today they've built up and run 7-figure businesses. I didn't need money to make that deal. I needed a skill that got results and the guts to ask for a percentage instead of just a paycheck. Most people, they're too scared to ask, so they stay employees of their own business forever. If you can deliver real results for Then you have the responsibility, I think, to ask for some real upside. If you can, then you must. Let AI be the team you can't afford yet. The last thing I do, and honestly the biggest reason there has never been a better time in human history to start a business than right now, is to lean on AI like it's an entire team working for you for free. When I started out, I couldn't afford a designer, I couldn't afford a writer, an assistant. Or developer. So I did a lot of it myself, badly, painfully, slowly, and it held me back for years. You don't have that excuse anymore. Do you need your offer written, your emails drafted, your brand design, your research done, a simple tool built for a client? AI can do a strong first draft of every single one of these things in minutes. And your only job is to add your judgment and your taste on top of it. That's exactly why setting up AI systems for other businesses is one of the best best $2,000 a month offers you can possibly sell right now. Because every business owner on earth knows they need this. And almost none of them have any idea how to actually do it. So don't use AI to replace your thinking, use it to delete your excuses, right? Every single time you catch yourself saying, I can't afford to do that part, stop and ask whether AI can do that part for you. And this year, the honest answer is almost always going to be yes. The person who wins today is not the one with the biggest budget or the fanciest university degree. It's the one who's actually willing to roll up their sleeves and use the tools that are already there in your pocket. Your first move is the one that matters. So that's the entire plan. And I want you to notice that not one single step required money, a degree, or permission from anybody. It just required you deciding to start and being willing to model the people who have already done it instead of trying to be You don't have to figure it all out today. You just have to take that first step before you feel ready. Your financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with how smart you are. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. The big secret behind disruption is not having any idea how it's supposed to be done. I had no idea how to do what I was doing. There's literally one thing, like one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth. It's the lack of FOMO. Research shows that poorer households that believe they control their own choices build 40 to 60% more wealth than those who blame their situation on outside forces. Watch and read high-performance people, and you will see that they always take responsibility when their life goes to garbage. It's when they quit taking responsibility. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to focus on what we can control. We can't rewrite the past. We can't predict the future, but we can take ownership of our actions today. So we create a culture of progress, of just moving forward at your pace. Mastering this mindset is not just about buying a nicer house. It's about finally getting the freedom to spend your time exactly how you want. When you actually realize Everything's your fault. It gets really good out here because when you think your boss's boss controls your, when you think somebody down the street in a building controls your, then you get real sad because you feel helpless. When you realize you control your, things go. Delaying gratification is an absolute superpower.
You have to put yourself in a state of perpetual discomfort in order to manifest your greatness. You've got to reach.
When I was 19, I had a massive choice to make. I had a 6-figure investment banking job offer on the table. It was the smart choice to take that. It was the safe choice. But instead, I chose to own 30% of a startup company and made $300 a month. My friends thought I was crazy, and logically it didn't make sense. But I knew that true wealth and freedom, they don't come from playing it safe in some cubicle. I had to rewire my brain to take the risk, and it led me to building and selling a biotech software company. The psychology of taking that leap is exactly what gets you from $0 to living on your own terms. Look at Sara Blakely. She was selling fax machines door-to-door and kept getting the door slammed in her face. She had absolutely $0 in business funding and no background in fashion. But growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table, what did you fail at today? He completely rewired her psychology. Instead of fearing failure, she embraced it. She feared not trying. She used $5,000 in savings and that unstoppable mindset to build Spanx into a billion-dollar brand. She didn't have more knowledge than the competition. She just had that bulletproof psychology that you can build too. Then there's Ronald Read. He spent his life fixing cars and sweeping floors at JCPenney. He wasn't a Wall Street genius, but when he died, he left behind an $8 million fortune. On the flip side, Richard Fusconi was a Harvard-educated executives of Merrill Lynch. He had all the smarts and connections in the world, but he went completely bankrupt. Why? Because Reed mastered the psychology of money, patience, and delayed gratification, while Fisconi let his ego destroy his bank account. Wealth is a behavior. You just have to learn the right behavior. Now you might be shaking your head saying, Evan, this is just motivational talk. My problem isn't my mindset. My problem is my hand. Empty bank account and the terrible economy. You can blame the economy or your boss all you want, but that won't put any more money in your pocket. People are getting rich right now in the exact same economy, starting with the exact same $0 that you might have. The only difference is what's happening here inside their heads. So here are the exact mindset strategies you need to stop playing small and start building real lasting wealth from nothing. Take control of your results. Getting rich from $0 starts with a psychological concept called your locus of control. This is the exact belief system that dictates how you view your own power in the world. People with an external locus of control believe that outside forces determine their success. They blame the economy, their boss, the algorithm, their bad luck. They think wealth is something that happens to lucky people. But self-made millionaires have a fiercely internal locus of control. They believe their actions and only their actions dictate their financial reality. So if you want to make millions, you have to adopt this exact same mindset today. You have to take 100% responsibility for your empty bank account right now. It isn't your parents' fault. It isn't the government's fault. It's your responsibility to change it. When you take full ownership, your brain stops looking for excuses and starts looking for solutions. A major study found that people with a strong internal locus of control save significantly more money and accumulate more wealth over time because they actually believe that their actions matter. So I want to hit 40 million subscribers on YouTube. I can't reach that massive number by hoping the algorithm magically favors my videos. I have the power to control the process. I have to make better content. I have to test new ideas. I can take extreme ownership of the results. You need to do the same thing with your finances. If you want to get rich, stop giving your power away to outside circumstances. Decide right now that your future is in your own hands entirely. You are the director of your life. When you face a setback, don't ask why the world is being unfair to you. Ask yourself what you can do differently next time to get a better outcome. It's a psychological shift that changes everything. It turns you from a victim into a creator. It forces you to look at your daily habits and realize that every single choice you make is either building your empire Or taking you down. You have to look in the mirror and accept that nobody's coming to help you, right? Nobody is going to hand you a check for $1 million. You have to go out into the marketplace and you earn it through your own value and your hard work. Start small today. Take ownership of your morning routine. Take ownership of your spending habits. Prove to yourself that you control your destiny. This internal belief is the absolute foundation of all self-made wealth. Until you believe that you are in control, you'll always find a reason to quit when things get hard. Embrace total control and watch how quickly your financial world begins to transform. Master the art of waiting. The next psychological trait that you must develop is delayed gratification. This is your hidden financial superpower. When you start with $0, the urge to spend your first bit of profit is incredibly strong, right? You finally make $1,000 and you want to buy some nice clothes, or you want to upgrade something on your car to show people that you're succeeding. This is exactly how people stay broke forever. People who get rich from zero master the ability to delay their rewards. They choose their future self over their present desires. They take that first $1,000 and invest it right back into their skills or their business. They understand that waiting is part of the price that you pay for massive abundance later. Right now I'm developing a software, it's called Brainlytics, and we'll link it up below. It requires a massive amount of Energy resources up front. I could easily take that money and spend it on immediate comforts, but I'm delaying my gratification because I know building a real asset will create infinitely more value in the long run. You have to approach your wealth the exact same way. If you can't resist the urge to buy things that you don't need right now, you'll never have the capital required to build real wealth. Experts point out that financial success rarely comes from a single dramatic. Decision. It comes from hundreds of small decisions made consistently, like a ship that's guiding you— the rudder, right? It's guiding your ultimate direction, making improvements all the time. Mastering this requires completely changing how you view money. So you stop seeing money as a tool to buy status and start seeing money as a tool to buy freedom. Every day you delay a purchase, you're buying a piece of your future independence. You're giving yourself options. You're a fortress around your life so you never have to take a job that you hate just to pay the bills. It's deeply psychological. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of wanting something and actively choosing to say later. You have to fall in love with the process of building, not just the rewards of spending. When you train your brain to wait, you develop an incredible level of discipline that bleeds into every other area of your business. You'll have the patience to stick with a marketing strategy When it doesn't work on day one, you'll have the patience to build a loyal audience over five years instead of just chasing a viral trend. Now we're not trying to deprive ourselves of any joy; we're just trying to have strategic patience. The people who make millions from zero, they don't have magical willpower; they just have a clear vision of their future so that it's exciting, that it makes ignoring the short-term distractions easier. So build your vision; make it so powerful that skipping that expensive dinner today feels like a step. Step in you building your big financial empire. Break your familiar patterns. Your brain is literally wired to keep you poor. This is because of a psychological concept called status quo bias. Human beings vastly prefer to stay exactly where they are, even if their current situation is terrible. The known struggle is always more comfortable to your brain than the unknown possibility. So you might hate being broke, but you know exactly how to survive being broke. It's familiar. Year. Building wealth from zero requires stepping into the complete unknown, and that terrifies your nervous system. So you have to violently break your familiar patterns if you ever want to reach the next level of success. Wharton Executive Education explains that people resist change because they fear losing what they have more than they value gaining something new. So you have to fight this natural instinct every single day. You have to become comfortable with the deeply uncomfortable. If your daily routine, it feels safe and easy, then you're not growing. You aren't pushing the boundaries of what your potential actually is. I'm currently working on a project to dub my 8,000 videos into 75 languages. Like, it's a massive leap into the unknown. It breaks every pattern of how I usually run my channel. But I know that sticking to my comfortable English-only strategy will eventually cap my growth. And I want to serve the world. I have to shatter the status quo to reach a global audience. So look at your life and identify where you're playing it safe. Are you staying in a dead-end job because it provides a predictable paycheck? Are you avoiding launching your business because you're afraid of looking stupid to somebody? Realize that playing it safe is the most dangerous thing that you can do, right? The world is moving too fast. If you stay still, you will get completely left behind. You have to train yourself to aggressively seek out change. Make it a habit to disrupt your own life before the market completely comes after you. So it means trying new marketing channels. It means pitching bigger deals and bigger clients. It means investing in new skills, even if you feel completely unqualified for it. Rich people don't wait for the perfect safe moment to make a move. They act despite uncertainty. They know that the only way to transform their financial reality is to break the mold of their current existence. So you need to stop defending your limitations, stop protecting your comfortable little box that you built for yourself, break down the walls, expose yourself to the risk of failure, because that's the exact same place where massive financial success lives. Your future millions are hiding right behind the changes you're most afraid to make today. Heal your hidden money wounds. This is a big one. Sometimes the The reason you can't get rich has nothing to do with your business strategy, has everything to do with your deep hidden money wounds. Many aspiring entrepreneurs carry financial trauma from their childhood without even realizing it. If you grew up in a house where money was always a source of stress and arguments or fear, your nervous system learned to view money as a massive threat. You might subconsciously sabotage your own success because getting rich feels feels fundamentally unsafe to your brain. So we have to heal these hidden psychological wounds before you can ever hold on to any kind of real wealth. Therapists explain that financial anxiety is often a nervous system response, not just a budgeting problem. When you view money through the lens of trauma, you either hoard every single penny in absolute terror, or you blow it all immediately because your brain wants to get rid of the stress. Neither of these behaviors will make you a millionaire. So you have to rewire your psychological response to money. You got to move from a mindset of deep scarcity to mindset of abundance with money. Scarcity tells you there's never enough, so you have to fight everyone for a tiny piece of the pie, while abundance will tell you that money is simply a— it's an infinite resource that flows to people who give immense value. So you have to start telling yourself a new story about what you deserve. You aren't destined to struggle because you saw your parents struggle. You don't have to carry their financial anxiety into your own future. So start paying attention to the words that you use when you talk about finances. Do you constantly say that you can't afford things? Do you feel intense guilt when you spend money on yourself? These are symptoms of a broken money mindset. And so it's actively challenging these thoughts. Replace them with the belief that you're highly capable of generating more income. When you finally heal these wounds, making money stops feeling like a battle for survival and becomes more fun. It becomes a creative game. You stop making decisions because you're afraid, and you start making decisions because of opportunity. You'll easily pitch the high-ticket clients because you actually believe your service is worth it. You'll invest in your business because you trust in your ability to generate a return. Healing your psychology becomes a key to unlocking the potential of your finances. Follow your curiosity instead of a plan. This is a massive myth in the business world that you need a flawless 10-year master plan to get rich. Most people stay at zero because they overthink every single detail before they even take the first step. They want guarantees, they want the perfect map. But the truth is, self-made millionaires rarely start with a perfect plan. They just follow what makes them intensely curious. They lean into their interests, they take messy action, they figure out the rest along the way. You have to stop planning and start actually exploring. Experts highlight that greatness can't be rigidly planned. Mind, and the best opportunities come from meandering, curiosity-driven steps. When you follow your genuine curiosity, you naturally work harder and longer than anyone else. You don't need some artificial motivation when you're deeply obsessed with the problem that you're trying to solve. This obsession is what pushes you past the early rough stages of entrepreneurship when you're making absolutely no money. If you just chase a trend because you think it's going to make you quick cash, then what happens you, you burn out and you quit as soon as things get difficult. But if you follow your genuine interests, you create unique expertise that nobody else can easily replicate. You spot connections and opportunities that the purely profit-driven people are going to completely miss. Your weird passions are actually your biggest competitive advantage. So you have to give yourself permission to experiment, to try, to taste. Try new projects that might fail. Launch the weird service you've been dreaming about. You don't need to see the whole staircase, as they say. You just have to take the first step. You just need to follow the immediate spark of excitement. One small curious action naturally leads you to the next. Before you know it, you have a completely unique business model that fits your complete unique strengths. So stop letting the pressure of this perfect plan paralyze you, right? People are are just procrastinating because they're afraid the market changes too fast for a ten-year plan. to be accurate anyway. So speed and curiosity are infinitely more valuable than perfect preparation. Start pursuing those interesting ideas in your head right now. Embrace that it's going to be messy and that you're going to fail. The path from zero to millions is never this straight line. It's this wild, crazy, unpredictable journey that is fueled entirely by your willingness to explore the unknown. Build your margin of safety. When you're trying to escape $0, a single bad decision can completely wipe you This is why mastering the psychology of risk is so important. People who build lasting wealth understand that they are not perfect. They know they're going to make bad investments, they're going to hire the wrong people, they're going to launch products that completely fail. Because they expect to fail, they build a massive margin of safety into their lives. You have to plan for disaster if you want to survive long enough to experience your future incredible success. In the book The Psychology of money, Morgan Housel explains that leaving room for error is the most underappreciated part of wealth building. If your entire financial strategy relies on everything going exactly right, you are guaranteed to fail. You have to assume that projects will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you initially expect, or triple, or 10x. You need to build a buffer. This isn't about being negative. It's not pessimism. It's about extreme psychological resilience. When you have a margin of safety, a business failure just becomes an expensive lesson, right? It's not the end of your entire company. You don't panic when a client drops you or a marketing campaign doesn't do well. You've already built in the cushion to potentially absorb it. This creates emotional calmness and allows you to think clearly and make rational decisions while your competitors are freaking out and making desperate mistakes. So you build a margin of error. How do you do it? By living below your means by keeping some cash reserves and not risking everything on one single unproven idea. So you have to protect your downside. It's not just about making money, it's about making sure that you never get forced to close down your business. Survival is the foundation of compounding wealth. You have to be around long enough for the money to be coming in. When you know that you have room for error, you actually have a lot more freedom to take risks. You can swing for the fences because you know that one strikeout, right, it's not going to destroy your entire business. It switches you from not playing to lose, and now you're actually trying to play to win. So embrace that reality that you're going to mess up, you're going to screw up, it's not going to be perfect. Build the financial and emotional shock absorbers that you need. And that's a psychological shift that gives you a lot more power to outlast the hard times and ride the waves to massive wealth. Consistency. The final psychological key to getting rich from zero is the most boring but also the most powerful. It is relentless, unbreakable consistency. You can't build a multimillion-dollar empire in one just big, giant, dramatic leap. Wealth is built through tiny, unsexy, daily repeated actions over years. Most people fail because they want the overnight success. They put in intense effort for 3 weeks, see no results, and then quit. Self-made millionaires understand that intensity Creativity is useless without consistency. Experts confirm that wealth isn't built through perfection, but through consistency and how you respond when things don't go as planned. So you fall in love with showing up every single day, especially when you don't feel like it. You don't need to be the smartest person in your industry. You just need to be the person who absolutely refuses to go away. You separate your daily actions from the immediate emotional feedback. You can't judge the success of your day by the money that immediately hits your bank account today. You judge your success by whether or not you executed the daily habits that you set for yourself. Did you make the sales calls? Did you create the content and the videos? Did you improve your product? If you did the work, it was a good day. The financial results eventually follow, but they're— it's always a lagging indicator. They fall behind the Effort comes first, then the money. It requires an immense amount of mental toughness. It means pushing through boredom. It means ignoring shiny object syndrome that distracts you from your core mission. I want to do all these things. You have to put your head down and do the repetitive work that actually moves the needle forward. So build a routine that is so simple and powerful that you can execute it even on your worst days. Designed for your worst day is not your best. So look at your life right now. What's the one daily habit that, if repeated for five years, would completely guarantee your financial success? Identify it, protect it, do it every day. Your future millions won't come from a magical lottery ticket, right? You build them brick by brick, habit by habit, every day. So let your consistency become your competitive advantage in a world full of people who quit too soon. Step into your greatness. You have everything it takes to build an incredible life from absolutely nothing. It all starts with a simple choice to change your mindset today. So stop waiting for permission and start proving to yourself that you're truly capable of achieving. I believe in you. To learn everything you need to become mentally strong, focused, and free, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Distractions are stealing your life one decision at a time. Trying to Pursue too many goals at once can definitely be counterproductive. Now, I realize that life is complicated. We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue.
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