This is How to Get Ahead in Life, Make Money & Build Wealth

Getting ahead in life is easier than you think. Every day you're going to be faced with 100 things that you could potentially go do, and your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters. Because out of those 100 things, it's really only actually going to be one or two things that actually matter. When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, "I need to pack this in"? Never. Why not? I don't ever give up. I mean, I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Most people. Quit too early, chase too many things, and spend their best years working on things that never build real wealth. The moral of my life, don't quit at age 65. Maybe your boat hasn't come in yet. Mine hasn't. If you're a quiet quitter, you're a loser. And every year that you stay stuck in that cycle makes it harder to build the freedom and life you actually want. So in the next 3 hours, you'll learn the habits, skills, and money rules that will help you get ahead and build lasting wealth. 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. Let's believe. Outworking the people around you still works, and it's never been easier to do. You need to work super hard. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done— as much done in the course of a year as, as, uh, the other company. If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish. Gallup found that full-time American employees worked 42.9 hours a week in 2024, down from 44.1 in 2019. I begin each morning by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list, and I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success. If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority, right? You have to make sure that it's in your plan, it's in your day. That gap is 62 hours a year, and that's a new skill, a finished project, or the side business that you keep saying that you're gonna start one day. You have to prioritize your time really carefully. The way that I've found to stay focused, be productive, and not get distracted is one, by auditing my time so that I know, one, what I'm supposed to be working on, and then two, That at the end of any task, I'm gonna reflect back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on task. So here's how a true workaholic actually works. Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA, and he works 7 days a week. The reason goes back to 1996 when the company came one chip away from dying. You're getting ready to ship the RIVA 128. Yeah. And you guys have about 6 months of cash left. And you're running out of money. In 1993, 3 engineers sat in a Denny's in San Jose and started a company with $40,000. Jensen Huang was one of them, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem were the other 2. They made graphic chips, and for the first 3 years, they made them badly. At the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. By the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia's architecture. 30 competitors have already shown up, even though we were the first company at the time that we were founded. So the world was a completely different place. By 1996, the company was nearly dead. Huang laid off about half the company. Everyone left had one chip to bet on and not enough money to build it the normal way. Our backs were up against the wall. We were running outta time, we were running outta money, and for a lot of the employees, running outta hope. So here's how building a chip normally goes. You design it, you pay a factory to make a small batch, physical samples come back, you test them, you find the mistakes, you fix the design, and you pay for another batch. The plan that companies normally go through, which is, you know, build the chip, Write the software, fix the bugs, tape out the new chip, so on and so forth. Every round costs months and money. Nvidia could afford one production run and nothing after that. So Huang made a bet that should have killed the company. He spent a big piece of the money he had left on an emulator, tested the entire chip on that machine, and never held a real sample in his hand. We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation. Then he ordered the full production run on a chip that nobody on Earth had even touched. If the emulator was wrong about One detail: there was no second batch and there was no company. You decide to do the entire testing in simulation rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run sight unseen with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the RIVA 128. Yeah, the chip was the RIVA 128, and by the time it shipped, there was enough cash left to cover one more month of salaries. It sold a million units in four months. Nvidia lived. Was everybody telling you you were crazy? No, everybody was clear we had no shot. Not doing it would be crazy because otherwise you might as well go home. You're going to be out of business anyways. Well, it worked. Yeah. And for years afterward, Huang opened his presentations by telling the room that the company was thirty days from going out of business. He still works like a man who believes that. He has around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he holds no scheduled one-on-ones with any of them. Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus, 60 people. Yeah. And they all report to you? They— yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports? 60 direct reports. Yeah. I don't do one-on-ones. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. Here's how he describes his week. I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I work 7 days a week. Now, that's a true workaholic. But he isn't just putting in more hours. He set his whole company up so that those hours count. And right about now you might be thinking, okay, that sounds like the fastest way to burn yourself out. And I hear you. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be how you run your company, but when somebody joins me, I ask them a question: how many hours do you want to be working and how many are you working right now? Then I write a contract to match it. Some of the people on my team work 25 hours a week, some are at 70. Both work fine because the hours aren't what usually breaks people. The wrong work is. Hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you, whether you're at 25 or 70 hours a week. And Jensen Huang isn't spending his week on boring paperwork. He built a company with no managers between him and the information. So he spends his hours deciding, making important choices. You can set up your week the same way. So here's how a real workaholic spends a day. Split your week into building days and meeting days. So my week splits into building days, maker days, and manager And then I have manager days, which are meeting days. So Wednesday and Fridays, those are my maker days. Wednesday is my creator day and Friday is my CEO day. And on both days, I don't have anything booked. Monday and Thursday, those are my manager days. I stack them with calls. Tuesday is a maker day on paper as well. It's my YouTube day, so nothing gets booked on it either. Here's why I'm strict about it. One 60-minute call dropped in the middle of a building day does not cost you 60 minutes. It costs you almost a whole day. You spend the morning knowing that it's coming, so you don't start any deep work. Then you spend the hour on the call doing the thing. And then you spend the afternoon getting your head back. And by the time you're thinking clearly again, it's already 4:00 PM and you've built nothing. A meeting day and a building day are 2 different jobs. On a meeting day, you're reacting, you're answering, you're trying to make decisions quickly with people. On a building day, you go down into one thing and stay there for 4 hours. Try to do both in the same morning and you'll be wiped out by Friday with nothing finished. So pick one day this week and close it. Start with whatever you can book off and then grow it to a whole day. Move every call off it, even the good ones. Then take everything you moved and jam it into one other day. So I use 2 meetings days for meetings because of the size of my team and what I'm working on. But start with one. And on that day you might get through 6, 7 conversations in a row and you'll still have the next whole day free to actually go build something. Even half a day is a good start. Then you grow it. Give every day one job. So inside those days, I give each one a single theme. So Monday is my team day and I spend the whole day mentoring and talking to the people on my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I'm filming this video on a Tuesday. Wednesday is my creator day, my project day. Thursday mornings I do my group trainings and Thursday afternoons I save for friends. and friends of friends and podcasts. Friday is my CEO day. The reason why I have different days for different things is switching. Every time you jump from a sales call to editing a video to a hiring decision to support emails, it takes a while to get your head into the new thing every single time. So you feel busy all day and you finish your week with like 4 and a half things finished. A theme day means you never have to catch up. So on Tuesday, I'm not taking calls, I'm not taking meetings, I'm just locked in on my YouTube. My tools are open, my camera's ready to go, my head is already there, and I'll film a stack of videos one Tuesday. that keeps my channel fed for at least a week. I can only do that because I'm not bouncing between things, and the bouncing is what creates most of the chaos and mental fatigue. So look at last week and count how many different kinds of work you touched on your worst day. If it's more than 3, that's your problem. You're not lazy. The problem is you're just switching too much between different kinds of tasks. Then name your own day. So for me, Monday's people, Tuesday is making YouTube videos. Like whatever fits your business, write it somewhere where you will see it. And when somebody asks for a Tuesday sales call, tell them Thursday works better. They will almost never be offended. That's the part That most people worry about and it hardly ever happens. So they book on the Thursday and they start treating your calendar like it's worth something because you treated it that way to begin with. The people who take your protected days almost always are not doing it on purpose. They take it because it's available. So stop making it available. You made it available. And listen, you're going to have real emergencies. So you can decide right now what the rule is going to be for emergencies. For me, I'm training my team so they know if you are calling me on a Tuesday, if you are interrupting me, you're sending me something, I'm in the middle of making videos, so it better be important. And people respect that boundary and there are almost no emergencies that ever pop up. So the first few weeks, that's going to be a little bit harder. People are used to your old calendar. They might test a new one a handful of times. The more you hold steady, this is my calendar, the more they respect it. Shrink the block and move it off your morning. Every meeting I run is scheduled to end 5 minutes early. So a 25-minute call instead of 30, a 55-minute instead of an hour. That gives me 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, to get some water, to get my head straight before the next thing starts. So you never know when you're going to have to go pee. And it A day with no gaps is also where you can feel frazzled at the end. That's the smaller version. And here's the bigger one. I used to check a whole list of websites every morning and it would take me a while to get through all of them. It felt very productive. It also was the first thing I did every day, which my best hours went to reading other people's work. So I ran an experiment. I condensed it into half an hour at 1 o'clock every day. And in that half hour, I have to get it done. And look at that, I get it done in half an hour instead of 90 minutes in the morning. If you give a task 2 hours, It usually takes 2 hours. So you could start doing this today. You could take the task that is eating your mornings. You can cut the time by 2/3, move it to the afternoon, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done, whether you're finished or not. The first 2 days, it'll feel a little bit rushed. By day 3, you'll notice the work was never actually filling that whole block anyway. Your mornings are your best hours, so don't spend them on small stuff. Kill the work before you speed it up. So I have a formula I use for this, and the order is the whole thing. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. That is the order. It's a particular order. Eliminate comes first and almost nobody starts there. You'll buy software to speed up a task that you should have just deleted. Now you're paying every month to do something that doesn't actually matter, or you'll hand it to a person, which is worse because now somebody's week is filled with work that was never worth doing in the first place. So eliminate first, then automate what's left. A tool can automate whether it's a software, whether it's AI, etc. This isn't only a business framework; it's a framework for anything in life. Anytime you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, that feeling is a signal that you need to go eliminate a few things from your life—not to work faster, to have and do less. All progress begins, I think, with telling the truth, and the truth is usually that a third of your calendar is there because it was just there last month. So here is the assignment: open last week's calendar and find the recurring thing that you'd be. A little embarrassed to defend, right? The report, the check-in, the updates that people are not replying to. Skip it on purpose. Say nothing. If a week goes by and nobody notices, skip it again. Do that for a month and it's gone for good. One number, 3 drivers, and nothing else. So I have a brain that wants to chase everything, right? Left alone, I'll start 6 projects on a Sunday. So I keep one Google Sheet and I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's one number. It's not a feeling, it's not a theme, it's a number. And under it there are exactly 3 drivers, and each one is also a number, something I can count at the end of the week to see my progress. That's the whole document. 3 is the limit and it matters. 2, when you're not really running a business, you're running a project. 4 or more and you just have no priorities at all. You just have a list of to-dos that almost never get done. So to put it in a rhythm that makes it work, every time I'm checking in with my team, that number gets updated before the check-in. So you can see in a glance whether it's moving. But the number itself and the 3 drivers underneath it, they don't get swapped out because some shiny ideas showed up on a Tuesday afternoon. The numbers hold for months. So if a driver turns out to be wrong, you change it deliberately, not because you're just in a mood to change things. That saved me more time than any app I've ever bought. The new project isn't the problem. The problem is the old one sitting half finished for 6 weeks while you play with this new idea. So write your number down tonight, write your 3 drivers underneath it, then look at tomorrow and find the block that doesn't move your number or any of your 3 drivers. There's always one. That's the block that goes away. Do 3 a day while they do 1 a week. So here's where your extra hours now should go. When I was young and part of an agency, I was the least skilled person on the team. That's not me being humble. I was measurably the worst. So I did homework. Everyone else was putting out a video a week. I made 3 a day, every day, including weekends. 1 in the morning, 1 at lunch, 1 at dinner. And my agent was looking at them, giving me feedback. So So if we count what that does in a single week, I got 21 reps and a piece of feedback on each video I made. The person next to me got only 1 rep. Over a month, that's 84 corrections against their 4. I didn't catch up to them because I was smarter. I wasn't. I, I was not naturally more gifted. I caught up because I'd been wrong 84 more times than they had, and every one of those got fixed. So that's what the extra hours are for. More attempts at the thing that you're trying to get better at. And after every attempt, somebody tells you what you did wrong. So find your rep. If it's a salesperson and you're taking calls, if you're making videos, then it's videos. If you write, then it's pages. Count how many you did last week, then do that many in a day and let the quality drop a little while you do it. You'll be embarrassed by attempt number 7 and you'll get better by attempt number 15. And find out how it went as fast as you can. If nobody tells you what you got wrong, then you're not getting better. You're just practicing the wrong things. You're just staying busy. Start your day before the work starts. So every workaholic I admire protects the first stretch of the day and spends it with intention on purpose. So back to Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. He gives his time to his email stack. I give mine to a walk, so I call it the Believe Walk. It's it's one word hashtag, and it's three steps. Step one: Wake up and get outside fast. Put a stopwatch on. I'm out the door within fifteen minutes. That part matters more than the walking because the alternative is picking up your phone, and the second you do that, you're starting to hand your life, your day to whoever happens to be overwhelming you with email or Instagram. Step two is the walk, right? Fresh air. Move for twenty to thirty minutes. Some mornings I'll throw a rucksack on extra weight, but that's that's an extra point. You don't have to do that. You just have to get outside. And then step three: Listen to somebody who. Who's already done what you're trying to do. So I'll put on Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz. You're borrowing their belief until yours show up. So this is not about trying to have some productivity hack. It's about who you are when you sit down. I think being leads to doing. So do your believe walk, get outside, walk, put something in your ears. It helps you believe in yourself more. And if you're tight on time, 10 to 15 minutes is enough. That's the baseline. And it's more than enough to change your life. You have 15 minutes. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Huang has about 60 people reporting straight to him. Like I said, no scheduled one-on-ones, nobody filtering what reaches him. When he gives feedback, he does it in front of the group so everyone hears the same reasoning at the same time, and he never has to say it 60 times. And every morning, he reads a stack of short emails from people all over the company, each one listing the 5 things that matter most to them Right now. He gets through about 100 of them. So look at what that design does. A normal CEO waits 2 weeks and sits through 4 meetings to hear the same thing. He reads it first thing in the morning in 5 lines. So he spends his day deciding and not just chasing people all day for updates. You can build that at any size. If you have a team, you can cancel your next status meeting and ask for 5 lines instead. If you work alone, you're still losing time just hunting for information. It's spread across all of your different apps. Every extra app you have to open is another place to go looking and lose time. One inbox, one task list, one document where the plan lives. If you have to check 4 apps to find out what you're supposed to do today, you'll spend your best hour just finding it out and get nothing done. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, but it's in her wings. So build the system so the information reaches you and then trust yourself to decide. You have more room than you think. So nobody gets more hours in a day Than you do, right? The people who beat you work the hours everyone else gave up and they spend them on fewer things. So close one day, name your days, cut a block by 2/3, delete the reports nobody reads. Pick your number. If you can do that, then you must. Where you are next year comes down to what you do with this week. The most dangerous idea living in your head right now is that it's too late for you. It's too late. I'm too old. What do you wanna say to that person? I'm not— it's never too late. Obviously, you know that. I know that. You cannot allow yourself to say that I'm too old ever again. I don't care if you're 98 and you know that you have 15 seconds left to live. Don't buy into the myth that you're too old because that is going to slow you down. The founders behind the most successful startups in America aren't 25 years old. They're 45 on average, according to a study from MIT and the U.S. Census Bureau that tracked 2.7 million company founders. The moral of the Don't quit at age 65. Maybe your boat hasn't come in yet. Mine hasn't. There are absolutely a ton of entrepreneurs that started their companies in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s when it was difficult to do such a thing. Sidney Frank, who created Grey Goose, didn't invent his big thing until his 70s. So this was never really about business or about your age. It's about whether you quit on yourself in the exact chapter where your whole life was about to turn around. The most powerful decision we make Most of us don't make it consciously. Is what are we going to focus on? Don't have a pretty mind. Repetition every day. Stay hard. Let me tell you about a man named Harlan Sanders. At 65 years old, he was broke. A new highway had rerouted the traffic away from the little roadside restaurant that he'd spent years building, and just like that, the thing that he poured his life into was gone. Nothing come along should made this interstate system. That went 7 miles back of me, left me sitting high and dry. He was living on a Social Security check of $105 a month. So picture that for a second, right? 65 years old, a failed business behind him, $105 to his name. He was carrying around all of this doubt. He had every reason in the world to sink into a chair and decide that that was it, his shot is gone. But what he had instead was a chicken recipe and a decision to make. I was 66 years old. I couldn't afford to quit. He climbed into his old He'd pull up to a restaurant, walk to the back, and offered to cook his chicken right there for the owner and the staff. If they liked it, they could use his recipe and his name, and he'd take a few cents of royalty on every piece of chicken they sold. I only got a nickel on every chicken they sold. They got 3 dinners out of it, but I got 1 nickel for the whole deal. But you'd be surprised how fast those nickels add up. Door after door, kitchen after kitchen, he got no more times than any person should ever have to hear, I'm out of chicken. He slept in his car and he kept going at 66, at 67, at 68. Then one day a single restaurant said yes, then another said yes, then hundreds. When you started with this franchise, how long before the real break came and it began to take off across the country? It began to do pretty good after about 2 years. By the time he was 73, Colonel Harland Sanders had franchised more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and he sold that company for $2 million. Which is worth more than $20 million in today's money. After 7 and a half years of this franchise business, I sold out for $2 million. Not a lot of money. I see in the paper yesterday, the same company that I sold for $2 million sold for $240 million yesterday. He became the white-suited face of one of the most recognizable brands on the entire planet, KFC. And remember, he started all of this at 65. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but that was a different time. Sanders got lucky. It's harder now. I've already burned too many years. And that thinking and that objection is the one thing that's standing between you and everything that I'm about to give you here in this video. You feel behind because you're measuring the years that you've lived against some imaginary schedule that somebody else handed to you, right? That schedule is not real. The pressure that you have to have your life figured out by a certain age is just a myth, and it creates unnecessary weight on your shoulders. That has nothing to do with what you're actually capable of building. The years you think that you wasted weren't wasted at all. They were reps. They were you stacking up the exact experience that, that research we talked about says makes a 50-year-old nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a 30-year-old. So we're not too late. You are loaded with experience, and what you choose to do in the next few minutes decides whether all of that experience becomes your actual next breakthrough or you let it stay your excuse. Your timeline belongs to you and nobody else. So the first thing you have to understand about people who win late is they just stopped racing against somebody else's clock. So there's no deadline for finding your purses. Zero. Life isn't a straight line where you're just supposed to arrive at some fixed point by some certain birthday of yours, right? It's this winding path full of tons of detours and setbacks. And the detours are exactly where you need to pick up everything that eventually makes you dangerous. So Henry Ford's first car was a failure. It completely fell apart. And then the second one did too. He didn't found Ford Motor Company until he was 39 years old, and the Model T that changed the world didn't arrive until he was 44. 2 failures behind him and his real work hadn't even started yet. If he had accepted that, that was it, his shot was gone. You'd have never known the name Henry Ford. And he's not some rare exception. Takeichiro Mori was an economics professor who didn't start building his real estate business until he was 55 years old. By the time he was in his 80s, he was the richest man in the entire world. Ray Kroc was 52 years old He was a milk machine salesman. He was sick and tired of driving from town to town selling milkshake machines when he walked into a little burger stand and turned McDonald's into this global empire. These are not lucky freaks of nature. These are men who refuse to believe that their birthday, their age was gonna decide how far they can go. And so it's a shift that happens in your psychology, and it's the whole reason why 45 keeps showing up in the data. Carl Jung talked about how a 16-year-old's mind is aimed at conquering the world out there, the money, the status, the proving to everyone that you matter. But somewhere around 45, you wake up to a deeper truth. The only thing you actually needed to conquer this whole time wasn't the world, it's yourself. And that's actually the most powerful upgrade that a human being I think can go through. The man who spent 45 years learning how his own mind works, learning where he panics, learning where he's willing to sacrifice, what he refuses to do, where his values at, that person is holding a weapon that a 25-year-old can't even picture yet. So you have that weapon right now. You've been sharpening it for years without even noticing. So the goal is to stop asking, hey, am I too old for this? And start asking, what have these years actually taught me that I can finally put to work? Every hard job that you hated taught you something. Every relationship that ended, it taught you something. Every business that didn't make it taught you something that you can't put in a textbook. The bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch. It's in her wings. So your circumstances, they're the branch. They'll shake, they'll break, they'll get rerouted by some new highway like Colonel Sanders that you never saw coming. Your wings are everything that you've learned about yourself over all of these years. Trust those. That's a psychology that wins late, and you already own it. Turn your insecurity into a mission. So here's something that almost nobody says out loud about high achievers, and it's especially true for the ones who break through later in life. A lot of them are running on a dangerous cocktail of massive insecurity mixed with massive ambition, right? You feel deep down like you're not enough, so you work harder and reach higher and chase more. All to cover up that hollow feeling of not being good enough. And when you're older, that insecurity gets bigger because now there's a second voice on top of it that's also saying, hey, and you, you should have done this already. You should be further ahead than where you are right now. So this is really important. That insecurity doesn't mean that you are a broken human. It is just energy sitting in your chest waiting for you at some point to feel something worthy. The way you point that is at service. So when you get nervous, when the doubt floods in, when you feel like an imposter for trying something at your age, shift the focus To the person that you're here to try to help. Service. The second you stop asking, do I look stupid for doing this? And start asking, who is not getting help because I'm sitting on the projects protecting my pride? The fear starts to go away. It has to, because you physically cannot be self-conscious and of service at the same moment. Your brain has only room for one of those. So choose service and watch the nerves quiet down. And this is the part that I believe with everything in me. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with the most in your life, whatever cost you all of those years that you kept grieving, that is the exact thing that you're meant to help other people through. The struggle wasn't your punishment. The struggle was your preparation. The messy divorce, the bankruptcy, the addiction that you beat, the years of feeling invisible, all of it handed you a map that people who haven't walked that road, they simply don't have. And now you have it. Colonel Sanders spent decades cooking in a roadside kitchen before that recipe was worth anything. The pain came first. The purpose grew out of it. And if you have the ability to help somebody through the thing that you survived, Then you have the responsibility to do so. If you can, then you must. That's how you take the insecurity that might have been eaten at you for years and turn it into a mission that finally pulls you forward every morning to do something. Hit the same spot until the wall breaks. Okay, so now let's talk about why late bloomers actually break through, because it often comes down to a very specific and repeatable way of working that you can start copying today. So just imagine this giant brick wall in front of you and a, and a sledgehammer in your hand. If you swing that hammer at 15 different spots in the wall, you're gonna exhaust yourself and the wall is still just gonna be standing there. But if you hit the exact same spot for 15 or 20 times in a row, that wall cracks and starts to come crashing down. Same amount of effort, just completely different results. Difference is focus and repetition landing on one single point. That's what the years of struggle are really for when you put them to use. People never break through because every few months they get discouraged and they swing at a brand new spot. New business idea, new business plan, new spot Over and over and over, they spread their swings across the entire wall and then wonder why nothing ever cracks. The person who wins late is usually just the one who kept pounding on the same spot after everyone else kind of wandered off to swing somewhere else. Focus is a competitive advantage because it's rare. If your idea is genuinely ahead of its time, you might have to hit the same spot forty times instead of twenty. So what? You built the arm for it. You've got the patience that twenty-five-year-old version of you never had. There's this picture that I'd love for you to. You know, burn it here into your mind, especially when it all feels pointless. Think of a combination lock with 6 numbers on it. You have 5 of the 6 numbers already dialed in correctly and the lock still won't open. From the outside, even from the inside, it looks completely stuck. It feels like nothing you're doing is working, but you are one single click on that final wheel away from the whole thing springing wide open. This is exactly where a huge number of people are standing at the exact moment that they quit. They're 5 clicks in, one click away. Sanders was one restaurant away from KFC for years, and it looked like total failure the entire time, right up until the second that it didn't. So on a day it feels hopeless, don't read that feeling as a stop sign. It's a it's an idea that you need to keep going, to keep turning the wheel until you get that last click. Get rich slow, then get rich fast. One of the most freeing things that you can accept is how the timeline of real success actually works. So there's a saying that I love that you get rich really slow, and then you get rich really fast. The slow part is what scares. Scares people away because for a long time it looks like nothing is actually happening. But that slow part is where you're pouring the foundation of your empire. You're making your product genuinely great. You're taking care of the people you serve so well that they can't stop telling their friends about you. You're building your launchpad so solid that when it's finally time to scale, you go up like a rocket ship instead of something that explodes in the sky. Building anything real that lasts is usually a five to seven year haul before it looks like an overnight success to everybody else watching from the outside. And that length of time is the exact reason people burn out and walk away around year 2 or 3. They just don't see the money show up fast enough. They get discouraged and they decide, hey, this isn't working. And so they quit right before the fast part was about to begin. But if you know going in that it's a multi-year climb, you stop panicking and freaking out when month 6 doesn't make you rich. You expected month 6 to be quiet. You're playing a longer, calmer game than most people who are trying to sprint past you and be gone by next spring. So this is a way to look at the slow years without going broke or also losing your mind and confidence, split your focus 80/20. Put 80% of your energy on the work that brings in real revenue right now, the stuff that keeps the lights on and pays the bills so you're not operating just from pure desperation. And then put the other 20% on the bigger creative vision, the long-term thing that you're truly building towards. That 20% is your future. The 80% is what buys you enough time to actually reach it. So many people go all in on the dream with zero income and they flame out inside of a year. And plenty of others play it so safe on the income side that they never once touch the actual dream. The 80/20 split lets you do both at the same time, and it's how you stay standing in the game long enough for slow to finally turn into fast. Borrow the belief until you build your own. Okay, so the hardest part about winning late— some days you will not believe in yourself. There will be this giant doubt that'll be louder than your faith, and everything I've said will feel like it was written for somebody else, somebody younger, Somebody stronger, somebody who didn't make all the mistakes that you made. I've been there more times than I can count. So here's what you do on those days. You borrow belief. When you do not have the belief in yourself, you lean on someone else's belief in you until you can rebuild your own. You borrow it from the stories of people who walk through the same fires before you. You read about Colonel Sanders or watch this video again in that car, and you let his stubbornness pour into your morning. You study how Steve Jobs got kicked out of the very company that he founded, wandered for years, and came back to build it into the most valuable company in the world. You surround yourself with a community that believes in the mission on the exact mornings where you can't find the belief anywhere in yourself. That is strategy. It's not just some weakness. Every strong person that you admire has borrowed belief from someone at their lowest point. This whole game is simply refusing to quit during the stretch of time when you're still building up your belief in yourself to do the thing that you don't think you're capable of doing yet. But you don't rebuild belief by sitting around just trying to think positive thoughts. You rebuild it through action. So confidence is not something that you just Think your way into. It's something that you earn one scary small action at a time. You take the step, you survive it, and your brain updates its files here on who you are and what you're capable of doing. Being leads to doing. You decide to be the kind of person who shows up. You act like that person today even before you feel ready, and the actions slowly make it real. Makes it the truth. So don't sit and get ready to feel ready. Ready is not real. Nobody who ever did anything great felt ready the moment before they started. You know when the best time to start. Is now. How about right now? The best years are the ones you haven't lived yet. Here's what I would love for you to walk away with. You are not behind. You're right on time. You're carrying an arsenal of experience your younger self could only have dreamed about. Sanders started at 65. Kroc started at 52. The best founders in the country are 45+. Your timeline becomes your own. So keep hitting the same spot. Keep serving people through your pain and keep turning that final wheel even when it looks stuck, because you are so much closer than it feels right now. The chapter you're most proud of hasn't even been written yet. The man you're becoming is standing just on the other side of the discomfort that you are feeling right now. So trust in your wings, not the branch. The impossible is exactly what you were here on this earth to do. You are one boring habit away from being ahead of almost everyone that you know. You can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that your wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. Gallup found that only 20% of employees worldwide were actually engaged in their work in 2025, the lowest level they've measured since 2020. Concerning trend we're seeing across the US and some parts of the global workforce where employees' overall satisfaction with their employer has dropped to record lows. It's through repetition that you program your subjective mind, and it's your subjective mind that controls your Right now you're probably in the 80% that isn't engaged, and which side you end up on changes what you earn this year and what your kids watch you do with the rest of your life. All problems or dreams are figureoutable. The secret of this whole thing is stay engaged. Learn from people who've already been there. In June 1966, a guy with a fresh Harvard MBA took a job counting securities by hand in the bank vault. The room was called the cage. The pay was $9,000 a year. year. His name was Michael Bloomberg. Both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better, just who I happened to meet that day. Counting securities by hand, that was the job. A Harvard MBA in a basement moving paper around at the bottom of the building for 15 straight years while the people around him went home. He went from the cage to general Then in 1981, Salomon Brothers merged and Michael Bloomberg got let go. 15 years and they handed him $10 million severance and showed him the door at 39 years old. Well, I got fired after 15 years. I'll let him say that. People always are afraid to say that. I don't know. I, I can just tell you it should happen to every one of you. Uh, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I did have my share of the value of the company, which we were I was selling at the time, and that was the nest egg that I used to start my company. He started his own company almost immediately. It was called Innovative Market Systems. You know it today as Bloomberg LP, and the terminal it makes sits on the desk of nearly every serious trader on Earth. So here's the lesson in that. The job that made him was the one in the vault, the one he'd left off of his resume. I was at Salomon Brothers I worked for Goldman Sachs for 15, 16 years. It was a phenomenal experience. I looked forward to going in every day. I've always looked forward to going in every day, even the day there I knew I was gonna get fired. Everything he'd learned, how the money actually moves, he learned in the room nobody wanted, doing the task nobody respected, showing up while everyone else was already home. They could take away his title, they could take away his desk. They couldn't take back 15 years of showing up every day. Now you might be thinking, okay, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 15 years. I've got a job, I've got kids, I'm running on 5 hours sleep. That's just not available to me. And you're right, that version isn't available to you, and I'm not going to tell you to go, you know, wreck your health just to try to catch up. But let's look at the actual mechanism again, because the hours are the least important part of the story. What you can't copy isn't the hours, it's that he pointed 15 straight years at the same thing without stopping. And duration is something that you can have starting today, no matter how tired you are, because duration doesn't require a giant chunk of time. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. of free time. It just requires that you don't quit in month 4. That's the whole game. You are surrounded by talented people who start and stop constantly, start and stop, start and stop. New idea in January, dead by March. Different new idea in June. If you keep going in one direction for 3 years while that happens around you, you will pass almost every one of them without having a single dramatic day. And a bird sitting on the branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So it's time to trust yourself more. And let me give you exactly what When you're the worst in the room, win on volume. When you're the least skilled person in the building, you have exactly one weapon and it's volume. It's not about clever positioning, just volume. That was me at an agency years ago, bottom of the list skill-wise. Everybody else was out there making one video a week, so I made 3 a day— morning, lunch, dinner. Then I applied every note I got to the very next one instead of saying, I'll do another one next week. Yeah, that's a good point. If you do the math on that, 1 video a week is 52 a year. 3 a day is over 1,000. So in 12 months, I had more reps than somebody with 15 years of 1-a-week experience. I got better for one reason. I got 20 more chances to be wrong and I took every single one of them. So that's the move you make when you're green, right? Talent, taste, connections, they take years to build and you haven't had those years yet. Reps, you can start collecting right now and nobody can stop you from doing it. But this is the part that makes reps feel like work. Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice found that elite performers can only hold truly focused practice for about an hour at a time and top out around 4 to 5 hours a day. So if you're new, you'll get 15 to 20 minutes of full concentration before your brain is just done. So stop trying to find a 4-hour block that doesn't exist in your life. Find 20 focused minutes and make it a real rep with a real output that a real person could see and critique. 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week is 100 hours a year of deliberate work on one skill. That is not Nothing. Find the one book and stop reading the other 99. So I used to read a lot of books a year, and I'll be honest with you that it got to me. 99 out of every 100 of those books did nothing for my business. They felt productive. I finished one, I feel smart. I'd highlight some passages, I'd tell people what I was reading, and my business would be exactly the same as it was the week before. I was reading because it was easier than picking up the phone and selling. So here's what's actually moved my life. Every so often I'd hit one book book that landed directly on the bottleneck that I was stuck on at the moment. And when that happened, I stopped hunting for the next book and just did what that one book said to do. So if we flip that around, don't ask, what should I read this year? Ask, what is the single thing blocking me right now? Try to write that down in one sentence. Then go find the one book, the one YouTube channel, the video, or the person that solved exactly that. Then go through the one thing 3 times and execute it before you allow yourself to go open anything else that's new. And skip the courses that you signed up for. So you can feel busy instead of actually just starting. Formal training is usually a year or 2 behind what's actually working, and it feels like you're making progress because somebody hands you a certificate at the end. But the people who get ahead, they teach themselves. They go find the answers on YouTube, in a book, in a forum from somebody who did it last month, and they run it that same night. Being leads to doing. Decide you are the kind of person who figures things out, and then the figuring out starts happening on its own. Give the new thing 20% of your week and nothing more. Now let me solve the problem that you actually have, which is that you actually already have a life. So there are 2 ways that people handle this, and both of them usually fail. The first is do nothing new, right? You keep exactly everything as it is. You tell yourself you'll start when things calm down, and guess what? Things never calm down. So 4 years go by and you're still in the same chair. The second is 0 to 100. You get fired up on a Tuesday, quit the job, burn the savings, give yourself 90 days to make things work, and 90 days is nowhere near enough runway for anything real. So you end up back in a job with less money and just more fear than when you started. Here's a version that works. 80/20 until you 20/80. So right now, 80% of your working time goes to whatever pays your bills today. Protect that. It's what's buying you your future runway. The other 20% goes to the new thing. So if you work 50 hours a week, great, that's 10 hours a week. If you've got a job and 2 kids and 6 hours is all you got, then use all 6. 6 hours a week is enough to build something real. Put those 6 hours in the calendar as an actual block with time. Time you haven't booked goes to then whoever asks for it first. And then you run that split until the new thing starts producing actual money, not just attention, not just compliments, money from a stranger more than once. Then you move the ratio, right? The new thing gets 40%, then 60%. And eventually it's carrying 80% of your time because it's carrying your bills. So you never have to take a giant leap. You had a slow, boring handover and you never once had to put your family at risk. So one more thing about time, and this one is free. The last 3 weeks of December, everybody in your industry takes the foot off the gas, inboxes go quiet, senior people are suddenly answering their own emails. That's the cheapest access to important people you'll get all year. While everyone else is coasting, you send a thoughtful note, you record the video, you get the meeting that would have taken 6 weeks in March. Now, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak. Quitting with no plan makes me feel weak. Waiting forever makes me feel weak. 20% a week protected every week makes me feel strong. And it adds up to whether you feel it or not. Eliminate, automate, delegate in that exact order. So here's where the hours you say you don't have are hiding. Take everything that you did last week and run it through 3 filters in this order. Eliminate first. So look at every recurring task and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question. Do I actually need to do this at all? Not how do I do this faster, but does this even need to exist? Because a big chunk of what fills your week is there because you did it once and then never questioned it again. The report that nobody reads, the meeting that could have been 3 sentences, the 40 minutes a day you spend reorganizing things Instead of shipping things, right? Kill it and see if anybody notices. Usually nobody does. Automate second and only second. So software, AI can take an enormous amount of repetitive work off your plate right now and it costs almost nothing, but never automate a process you haven't proven by hand first because all you'll do is make a broken process run faster and have more breaks in more places. Delegate third. This is where you'll resist because you'll tell yourself you can't afford it to hire somebody, but you can start at 5 to 10 hours a week of help. That's it. Somebody to handle your scheduling, The editing, the inbox, invoicing. What you're really buying back is your best thinking hours so they land on the one thing that only you can do. Most of what's crushing you right now, you assigned to yourself, and so now you get to unassign it. Being the best doesn't matter if you're a secret. So you can be generally the most skilled person in your field and still lose to someone worse than you who happens to be more well-known. That's not fair, but it isn't going to change. Better known beats best every time, and complaining about it doesn't move you forward at all. So the work is to become known on purpose. Educate your market at scale. Take the questions that you answer one at a time on the phone for free all week and answer them publicly instead. One video, one post, one talk that reaches 500 people is 500 conversations that you didn't have to schedule. And show that you care more than the person next to you. When someone watches you explain something for real, for free, in depth, holding nothing back, they conclude 2 things without you having to say either one. This person knows what they're This person isn't trying to squeeze me. That's the whole sale made before you even meet. The paper airplane on my logo means entrepreneurship because a paper airplane, which breaks the sound barrier in videos, is impossible. And doing the impossible is the entire job description, right? Nobody's going to go and hand you a jet. You get paper and you throw it every single day and it goes further than anyone expected because you kept throwing it. Score the day, not the year. Now, the 2 habits that hold all this together. The first one takes 15 minutes a day. Wake up and get outside within 15 minutes. Go for a 15-minute walk. Don't look at your phone. Listen to something that fills you with belief instead of something that just fills you with other people's panic. And that's it. That's the whole thing. And it's the single most important daily habit that I have because whatever goes into your head first is what you think about for the rest of the day. Then you can build a scorecard. So write down the 5 things that would make today a win. Publish something, talk to a buyer, 20 focused minutes on a skill, the walk, 10 pages of the book. Give yourself a point for each. At the end of the day, you get a score And that score is the only performance review that matters. So keep it on paper, not in an app. An app turns into a project you maintain instead of a habit that you actually go off and keep. And why does this work? Philippa Lalla's research at University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. And depending on the behavior, it can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. So when day 12 feels like it's not sticking, that's not a sign that you're failing. That's just day 12. So many people quit at week 3 while the process was working exactly as designed. Benjamin Franklin did a version of this every single day of his adult life with 2 key questions. So in the morning he asked, what shall I do this day? And at night he said, what good have I done today? That's 300 years old and it's still better than every productivity app on your phone. So don't wait to feel ready before you start scoring. Ready isn't real and it never arrives when you want it. Do more than you were asked on purpose. And last one, it's your cheapest competitive advantage on this entire list. Do more than what you were asked for, not vaguely, but specifically. So before meeting with someone who matters, spend 30 minutes actually studying them. Watch their talk, read what they wrote when they launched their company, find something that they actually built that isn't in their bio, and bring that up instead of their most famous project. Nobody does this. Nobody. And when you show up having genuinely done a little bit of homework, the person you're meeting with is going to be like, oh, this guy's actually done his homework. Person across from you feels something they almost never feel in business, which is that somebody paid attention to them. Then in the conversation, talk 30% of the time and let them talk 70%. Ask better questions than they were braced for. Repeat their exact words back to them when you respond, because that's how a person knows for certain that you were listening instead of just waiting for your turn to interrupt them and talk. That's it. That's the whole technique, and it This works on clients, on partners, on bosses, on anybody. Almost nobody listens. If you do, they'll remember you. You're closer than you think. You don't need a dramatic year. You need 20 focused minutes, 1 book, 5 points on a scorecard, and the willingness to be doing it in month 4 when it stops being exciting. That's a good start. Now go make it 10 times bigger than you were planning to. 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, I think it's 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 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 But everyone has a perspective, and that's in fact all vision means, that you see the world in a way that is either different or otherwise, okay, than, than somebody else. And you see opportunities that I think are— that you believe are particularly important to go in and address. 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 hadn't 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 failing. The answer was no, but he knew he'd regret not trying at all. I, um, went to my boss and said to him, you know, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing and I'm gonna 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 into 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 pantyhose. 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 it. 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 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 bets. 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 1 year if the business completely failed. His downside was just a few months of leasing costs, but his upside was a multibillion-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 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 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 gotta force your brain out of the present moment. You must use the regret minimization framework from James Clear. 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 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 a million dollars, your system is making 50 sales calls every morning before 10 a.m. 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 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 Walled 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 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 can 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 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, buy a nice house, or escape your job. 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 businesses. 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 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 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 exam. You take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forego a couple of years of steady income at 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 and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. 2019, 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 the 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 5 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 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 Crying out for that exact solution. But finding the 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 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 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 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 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, 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 was a roadmap map 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 being 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 Maker 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 multi-million 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 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 for the day. 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 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. The habits that kill your success are silent, and that's exactly why they win. When I was at the peak of my career, I felt like I'm unbeatable. And I feel like I could do anything, but kind of walking on We all experience that in our own lives in certain way, and it's a great feeling. But then the ego takes you places where it's hard to come back from. You're always going to encounter somebody better, stronger, faster, more pious, more worthy, more whatever. So if you live in a world of comparison, it will rob you of your joy. Researchers found that about 43% of everything you do every single day isn't a decision at all. It's an automatic habit running in the background of your brain. If you haven't deliberately chosen the types of friendships that you want, that's a problem. You have to put yourself in a state of perpetual discomfort in order to manifest your greatness. You've got to reach outside of your comfort zone. So nearly half of your life is on autopilot right now, and if the wrong habits are flying your plane, they'll take your dreams straight into the ground without you ever hearing the engine stall. 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 man named James Dyson. James Dyson. James Dyson. James Dyson. He had a simple, stubborn idea for a vacuum cleaner that wouldn't lose suction, and he decided to build it. What he didn't know was the idea would take over the next 15 years of his life. He built a prototype and it failed, so he built another one And that one failed too. He kept going, prototype after prototype after prototype. By his 2,627th prototype, he and his wife were counting every penny they had just to keep the lights on. By 3,727th prototype, his wife was giving art lessons on the side to bring in extra money because they were so deep in debt. Just think about that— over 3,700 failures and he still wasn't done. It's a wonderful process. Everyone in his life had every reason to tell him to quit, that a few thousand failures is the universe screaming at you to stop. But the voice that whispers, you're a fool, give up, never got the final say with him. He kept treating every dead prototype as just one more thing that he now knew that he didn't know before, one more dead end that he could cross off the list. Every single prototype you do that fails— I mean, failure is much more exciting than success. Because why did it fail? You know what, wait a minute, why did it fail? Why doesn't it work? You know, what do I have to do to make it work? And finally, on prototype number 5,127, after 15 years, it worked. You famously had 5,127 iterations on your vacuum cleaner before the final product. Approximately. Approximately. Is that still your approach, as many as Yes, I mean, that's what you have to do is trial and error. That vacuum, the DC01, went on to become the best-selling vacuum in the entire country, and James Dyson became a billionaire many times over. The thing that almost killed his success was not the engineering. It was the silent voice after failure number 3,000, the one whispering that any reasonable man would have stopped by now. He heard that voice for 15 years. He just refused to let it drive the car. Okay, so the objection people say, okay, that's great for Dyson, Evan, but he was some kind of genius. He had 15 years to burn. I'm not him. I don't have that kind of time or that kind of brain. And here's the thing, you don't need to be a genius and you don't need to wait 15 years. What you need is to stop letting these hidden habits make your decisions for you. That's what makes them so dangerous. A silent killer never kicks down the front door and just announces itself. It doesn't feel like failure. It feels normal, even respectable. Right up until you look back years later and realize that it stole a decade of your life. You don't lose to these habits in one dramatic big moment. You lose to them one ordinary Tuesday at a time, hidden in the 43% of your life that's already on autopilot. But the moment you can name them, you take away their power because you can't fight what you can't see. And today you're gonna see all 7 of them clearly. So let's pull them into the light one by one. Silent killer number 1, your comfort zone. The first killer is the one that feels the safest, and that's exactly what makes it so deadly. Comfort. Staying comfortable rarely looks like a mistake. It looks like you're being smart, you're being stable, you're not rocking the boat. But a comfortable life lived on repeat is just you slowly declining and telling yourself that it's safety. You chose the clear, easy path towards a small goal instead of the unclear, uncomfortable path towards a great goal. And you do it 1,000 tiny times a day until one day you wake up and years have slipped past with nothing to show for it. Greatness isn't found in comfort zones. It never has been. Every meaningful thing that you want is standing on the other side of something that scares you. So here's a tool that I use on myself all the time. When a decision makes me nervous, when it makes my stomach tighten, I've trained myself to move towards it precisely because it scares me. So if it's scary, that's a signal that it matters. And I've tried to develop a healthy disrespect for safety because safety is where your big dreams go to die of old age. And I refuse to make decisions that make me feel weak. That's the filter. Does this choice make me feel small and comfortable, or does it make me feel like the person I'm trying to become? So I try to pick the second one every time. You have to get honest about what comfort is actually costing you. It's not costing you a dramatic disaster. It's costing you the extraordinary version of your life. One comfortable choice at a time. So the camera that you're not going to turn on, the pitch that you're not going to make, the message that you won't send out, the ask you keep putting off, all of it protected in the name of just staying comfortable. So start today. Go find your uncomfortable spots on purpose and walk right into them. Do the scary thing while your hands are still shaking, because comfort is the quietest killer of all, because it kills you with your own permission. Silent killer number 2, the people around you. The second killer works on you so slowly that you'll swear that it isn't happening. And it's the people that you spend your time with. your time with. Standards are contagious. If the people closest to you think small, play it safe, and treat coasting as the goal, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to hold your own high standards. You will slowly drift down to the level of the room that you stand in every day, and you won't even feel yourself sinking into it, the same way you don't feel the temperature drop 1 degree at a time. There's a person on almost every weak team that leaders hold on to out of just pure comfort, long after they should have Call it the Susan problem. There's someone barely treading water, not really moving the mission forward, but you keep them close because letting go feels hard and confrontation feels worse. Here's the damage that it does. Your high performers, they walk in, they see exactly who you're willing to tolerate, and they lower their standards to match. Or what do they do? They walk away and leave completely. Who you accept around you sets the ceiling for everyone, including you. The circle doesn't rise to your hopes, it sinks to what you allow. So audience, your circle the way that you would audit your money. Who lifts you towards who you're trying to become and who anchors you to who you're trying to leave behind? You don't need a ton of people. You need a few people who genuinely believe that the impossible is possible for you. You become the average of the voices you let get closest to you. So choose them like your life and your future depend on it. Silent killer number 3, chasing too many things. The third killer disguises itself as ambition. Ambition, which is why smart, driven people fall for it the hardest. It's chasing too many things at once. You have a dozen ideas and each one feels so exciting, so you chase all of them a little and none of them end up taking off. Taking on too much is the number one killer of your creativity and your momentum. Your brain simply cannot process a flood of goals at once without your execution suffocating underneath it. You feel busy, you feel productive, but But you're just bouncing between tasks and finishing none of them. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. So here's an exact framework that you can use to cut it through. First, define your WIN, your wildly important number. That's one single measurable number that you are driving towards. It could be a revenue target, a subscriber goal, a number on a scale, one number. Then pick exactly 3 drivers, the 3 actions that actually move the number. Just 3. Every other shiny object idea that pops into your head gets ignored on purpose. You're only allowed to review or change those drivers once a month. The rest of your time is spent doing them, not rethinking them. That focus feels almost painful at first because saying no to a good idea is really hard for entrepreneurs, but focus is a competitive advantage precisely because so few people can hold it. There's one more move that changes everything here, and it's pretty ruthless. Let go of 80% of the little tasks that you're doing right now. And that might sound extreme to you, but getting rid of that 80% is The only way to free up the, your space, your runway, so you can go all in on the small number of things that you are uniquely built to do better than anyone else on earth. If you try to be great at everything, you'll be great at what? At nothing. So pick your spot, protect it with your time, and let the rest fall away. Chasing everything is a silent killer because it feels like drive and the whole time it's just keeping you busy enough to never actually win. Silent killer number 4, your ego. The 4th killer, uh, wears a mask that looks like strength, and it's your ego. This is not the loud, kind of arrogant kind. It's the quiet kind, the part of you that is so busy protecting this perfect image that it refuses to grow. Ego becomes a shield that high achievers hold up to hide their vulnerabilities. And while it's protecting you from looking foolish, it's also slowly destroying your ability to actually get better because getting better requires being coached. It requires It requires, uh, trying things that you're bad at. It requires raising your hand and saying, hey, I suck at this. I don't know, show me. And the ego would rather die than say those words. The shift to make is from protecting your image to embracing being a beginner. You have to become willing to look like the person who needs help because that person is the one who actually improves. The most successful people that I know are shockingly quick to say, I was wrong, and shockingly fast to apply new feedback. That's not because they're weak. It's because their identity isn't glued to being right. They've untied their self-worth from looking perfect, and that freedom lets them learn at speeds that the ego protectors can't match. So the test: when someone gives you feedback, what's your very first reaction? Do you rush to defend yourself? Do you explain why they're wrong? Do you try to protect your image, or do you get quiet and actually consider, huh? Maybe, maybe they're right. The people who win treat feedback like it's gold, even when it hurts, especially when it hurts. Refusing to take feedback and apply it is not some personal weird quirk. It is the silent killer that keeps you frozen at the exact skill level that you're at today forever. So we got to drop the shield. You got to let yourself be a student again. Your ego wants you to look great today. Your growth needs you willing to look like a beginner so you can be great Later. Pick later. Silent killer number 5, comparison. The 5th killer is one that nearly everyone struggles with in the age of the Instagram highlight reel, and that's comparison. You scroll, you look at someone who's further ahead than you, and something inside your chest just sinks. You start measuring your behind the scenes against somebody else's greatest hits, and it makes this quiet, constant unhappiness that drains the energy that you need to actually build your business. They say comparison is a thief. It steals the joy out of real progress and replaces it with this low vibe of not enough that follows you everywhere you go. So the first fix is to demystify your heroes, the famous people that you measure yourself against, the ones who look untouchable. They're not nearly as far ahead of you as they appear, and a lot of them are wrestling with the same insecurities that you are. They put on their pants the same way that you do. They have bad days, they have self-doubt, they have fear just like you. When you stop treating them like gods and start seeing them as just people who simply started earlier and kept going, Everything starts to change. You realize that you're not measuring yourself against magic, you're measuring against time and repetitions. And both of those are things that you can start stacking today. The second fix is to change who you're actually racing against. So we stop lining up against strangers on the internet and start racing against the only fair opponent that you have, the version of you from a year ago. So look honestly at where you started and count the ground that you've covered in the past year, the skills that you didn't have then, the fear that used to run your life that hopefully barely touches you now. When you measure how far you've come instead of how far you have left, you start to refill your belief instead of draining it out of you. Your only real competition was always yesterday's version of you. So beat that person and let everyone else run their own race. Silent killer number 6, neglecting your energy. The 6th killer is the one that people brag about, which is how you know that it's got them. It's running yourself into the ground and Calling it hustle. Neglecting your health and your energy doesn't feel like a mistake in the moment. It feels like dedication. But your physical state sets the ceiling on your mental state. When you're exhausted, you're sleep deprived, uh, you're eating trash, your decision-making automatically, what happens? It gets worse. Your patience, it gets shorter, and every excuse in your head gets louder. You can have the best strategy in the world and still lose because you are too depleted to actually go out and execute it. So protect your energy like it's gold because it's the one resource that everything else runs on. So start with how you end your day because that controls the next one. Your mind is not this filing cabinet. If you go to bed with 100 open loops spinning in your head, your brain will keep you up trying to hold them all down. So write them down. Get every task and worry outta your head onto paper before you sleep so your mind is finally allowed to rest instead of being awake all night. And it's hard. It's, I still struggle with it. That one habit alone though can change the quality And if the racing thoughts still won't quiet down, you can use a simple breathing pattern to slow your whole nervous system. It looks like this. Breathe in for 5 seconds, hold for 6, and then breathe out slowly for 7. Then do it again. The long exhale tells your body that it's safe to power down. It works better, at least for me, than lying there fighting your own mind with mantras, because you're not arguing with your thoughts, you're changing your actual physiology. Silent killer number 7, waiting to feel ready. The 7th killer is the most patient one of all, and it's waiting. Waiting to feel ready, waiting for permission, waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, the perfect version of you to finally show up before you begin. That moment is never coming. Playing small feels safe because you're paralyzed by the pressure to be perfect the second you start. So you keep polishing and planning and preparing, and years slip by while you get ready to Perfectionism is not this high standard. It's just fear. You're just afraid. So here's the rule that beats the paralysis and it stops perfectionism cold. When you start anything new, refuse to judge yourself until you've done 100 reps, 100 videos, 100 sales calls, 100 posts, 100 whatever it is. Your first ones are going to be rough. You're going to suck at the start. And that's the whole point. You're not supposed to be good at rep number 3. You're supposed to be building the momentum. Momentum and the skill that only comes by creating volume. So burying your head and committing to 100, you make it impossible for the perfectionism to stop you at number four because you've already decided in advance that the early ones don't count as final products; they count as practice. And that shift can take the pressure off in the beginning, and the beginning is exactly where perfectionism does its killing. So we're going to stop waiting for someone to hand you permission. Nobody is. No one's coming to tap you on the shoulder and say, you, it's your turn now. If you see the thing that needs doing, then do it. Don't ask, don't wait to feel ready because ready is not real. And the most capable people that you admire all felt unready the moment before they started anyway. You know when the best time to start is? Now. How about right now? Being leads to doing. You decide to be the person who begins before they feel ready. You act like that person today and the action starts to make It true. The one who wins isn't the one who felt ready; it's the one who moved and started while they were still afraid. You already have everything you need. So there they are—the seven silent killers that we pulled out from the shadows: comfort, your circle, chasing too much, ego, comparison, neglecting your energy, and waiting to feel ready. None of them will ever show up and announce themselves. They win by staying quiet, by feeling. feeling normal by hiding inside your habits that you never think to question. But you can't be beaten in silence by something that you're staring at right now. And now you're staring right at all of them. So here's what I want you to do before moving on with your day. Don't try to pick and fix all 7 at once. Pick the one that's been running your life for the longest, the one that made you a little uncomfortable when I said it out loud, and go take that single one away this week. Just one. That's a great start. And one real win changes more than you think, because the moment that beat it, the rest also get weaker too. Dyson didn't quit at prototype 3,000, and you don't have to quit right here either. If you can see them, you can beat them. And now you can see, hopefully, every single one. The impossible is exactly what you're here to do. You're not broke because of the economy or bad luck. You're broke because you keep stepping into the same 10 money traps. While other entrepreneurs are quietly getting rich by avoiding these mistakes, you might be repeating them without even And if you don't fix this, a year from now you'll still be stressed about money, hustling hard with nothing to show for it, wondering why you're not winning. Just look at the proof. Ever hear about lottery winners going bankrupt? Roughly 70% of big lottery winners end up broke within a few years. Jack Whittaker won a $315 million Powerball jackpot and lost it all in a few years. He even said the money destroyed his life. Why? Because money isn't everything. isn't the answer if you haven't fixed the habits that keep people poor. If you got $1 million today but carried on with the same bad behaviors, that money would vanish. I had to learn this myself the hard way. When I was 19, I had my first company. I was making $300 a month. Imagine working more than full-time and not being even able to afford rent. That was me. I felt worthless. I hit my breaking point at a family event, and I told my business partner I quit. I broke down crying, snotting. Snot-nosed, uncontrollable tears because I felt like I just didn't have what it takes. But the very next morning, I woke up and something snapped. I realized I hadn't earned the right to quit because I hadn't tried everything. I thought, has someone figured this out before? And turns out Bill Gates had built a software company from nothing. So I decided to model how he did it. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started learning from someone who'd already won. And you know what? Within a short time, I closed $13,500 deal and jumping from $300 a month to a $13.5K check. In my head, I felt like a millionaire. But more importantly, I had proof that if I changed my approach, I could change my results. I went from almost giving up to finally getting momentum. Now, maybe you're thinking, Evan, it's not me. It's just, it's a tough market, or I already know this stuff. Wrong. That thinking is a trap by itself. I've coached thousands of entrepreneurs and the ones who People who stay broke always point fingers at the economy, their competition, anything but themselves. The winners, they take responsibility. They look in the mirror and they fix what's holding them back. So drop the excuses, at least for this video, and really listen. Even if you think you've heard it all, I guarantee there's at least one trap on this list you're caught in right now. And if you could eliminate it, it could mean the difference between scraping by and actually building real wealth. So So let's do this. Here are 10 money traps that will keep you poor and how to break out of each one. Trap number 1, scarcity mindset. This is the fear of spending money or taking risks, the impulse to hoard every dollar. You tell yourself you can't afford to invest in growth, so you do nothing. And ironically, that guarantees you'll always be short on money. Here is your truth. Money is a tool, not a trophy to tuck under your mattress. If you're too afraid to use it, you'll never have more of it. Think about it. If a farmer refuses to plant seeds because he's afraid of losing them, he'll never get a harvest. It's the same with your money. Sitting on it due to fear is a sure way to stay broke. Successful entrepreneurs have an abundance mindset. They invest in themselves and their business confidently. Even when I was struggling, I forced myself to invest in help. I hired someone for just an hour a day to take over tasks that he was better than me at, so I could focus on higher value work. Did it cost money I felt I didn't have? Yes. But freeing up that hour led to more growth and more money. The scarcity-minded you would never have done that. That you stays stuck. So here's your action step. Next time you're scared to spend on something that could grow your business— a course, a tool, an employee— remember, avoiding calculated risks is the riskiest move of all. If you want this year to be different, you have to loosen the grip. Invest in your growth or remain forever a servant to pennies. Trap number 2, believing money is not important. I don't care about money. I do it for passion. It sounds noble, right? It's also a recipe for staying poor. I'm all about mission. My channel exists to spread belief. But if you don't make money, you can't keep going. Some entrepreneurs wear burnout and poverty like a badge of honor, as if making money would taint their purity. That's nonsense. Money is oxygen for your business. If you ignore it, your dream dies. I had this blind spot myself at a mastermind. My peers told me, Evan, we want to pay you more, but you haven't given us a way. It hit me that I was so focused on service. I hadn't built monetization into my mission. And I used to say, I'll do it for free if I have to. And I meant it, but that mindset was holding me back from scaling my impact. I learned that money can't be your number one motivation. Motivation, but it must be in your top 5. If your mission really matters, you owe it to yourself to fund it properly. Think of money as the fuel or your gasoline that you have on your fire. More fuel, bigger fire. Does running on fumes make you a martyr? No, it makes you a struggling amateur who might have to quit their dream and go back to a day job. So your action step is start respecting money. Charge what you're worth. Create offers and products that bring revenue, not because you're greedy, but because revenue equals longevity, equals impact. Money in your pocket means you get to keep serving, keep improving, keep living your purpose. Breathe life into your business by embracing profit not as the goal, but as the means to amplify your goal. Trap number 3, the get-rich-quick illusion. This one is deadly because it seduces you with flashy promises. Crypto schemes, meme stocks, guaranteed 6 figures in 30 days courses. If you're chasing those, you're running on this hamster wheel, right? The reality is almost nobody wins that game. Studies show that over 97% of day traders lose money over time. Did you hear that again? You think you're the exception? The odds say that you're not. Trying to get rich quick is like trying to sprint in a marathon. You burn out or collapse financially. Wealth built fast rarely lasts. Look at the dot-com bust. Look at the crypto crashes. Fortunes made in months disappear disappeared overnight for those who didn't have solid fundamentals. And psychologically, the more you chase instant rewards, the more you wire your brain for short-term thinking. Remember the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment? Kids who resisted eating one marshmallow immediately to get 2 later ended up with better grades, better jobs, and way more success decades later. Why? Because delayed gratification is a superpower. It means you can sacrifice now for a greater payoff later. If you lack that, you'll always snatch at pennies and miss out on So your action step, commit to the long game. If you catch yourself saying, why am I not rich yet? I need a shortcut. Slap yourself, right? Figuratively decide to get rich for sure, but not to get rich quick. Build real value, develop skills, put in the reps. It might take longer, but when you get there, you'll stay rich. Every overnight success you admire took years of unseen work. Keep that in mind every time you're tempted by the next hot opportunity. Trap number 4, stagnating your learning. The moment you think you've arrived or I know enough, you're done. The world is changing faster than ever. This year will belong to the innovators, the learners, the adapters, the tinkerers. If you're not obsessed with learning, you will be left behind. Maybe you've got a degree or some experience and you think that's enough. I'll tell you what I discovered. My business degree was practically useless when it came to real entrepreneurship. In my senior year at university, University of Toronto, I finally got a class on entrepreneurship, on small business, and the professor had never even run a business himself. While my classmates played it safe with case studies about fake coffee shops, I was out there running a real company at the time and struggling, and none of my professors could help me. I learned more from YouTube shows than an entire semester of lectures. That's how out of touch formal education was with entrepreneurship. And guess what? Today, the best teachers are on YouTube or podcasts or forums. People actually in the game sharing their up-to-the-minute insights. If you're not tapping into that, you're choosing ignorance. Meanwhile, technology is exploding— AI, social platforms, shifting market trends. You can't rely on what worked in 2016 or 2023. You need to be upskilling constantly. Read books, take courses, follow industry leaders, watch YouTube videos, experiment with new tools. The top CEOs read dozens of books a year, always hunting for one idea that gives them an edge. So your action step: schedule daily learning. Yes, daily, even 30 minutes of reading or watching a YouTube video or tutorial. Adopt the beginner's mindset. Assume that there's always something that you don't know, because there is. This year, ignorance will cost you more than ever. But if you keep learning, you won't just make more money, you'll future-proof your success. Trap number 5: lifestyle inflation. Inflation and looking rich. This trap is sneaky because society will clap for you while you fall into it. You make a bit of money and you immediately upgrade your lifestyle— bigger apartment, nicer car, expensive gadgets— to look successful. After all, you deserve it, right? Here's the problem: when your income goes up, if your spending matches it, you're not growing wealth. You're just on a nicer treadmill now. I've seen entrepreneurs make $100,000 in revenue and spend $110K trying to appear like ballers. The math doesn't work. Even multimillionaires go broke from this. 78% of NFL players are either bankrupt or under serious financial stress within 2 years of retirement. These are people who earned millions per year. And 60% of NBA players are broke within 5 years of leaving the league. How is that possible? Lifestyle inflation. They felt like they had to flex Lamborghinis and jewelry, spend like kings Help every second cousin and old friend who asked, and they blew their money. Wealth is silent; poverty is loud. If you're spending money to prove to others that you have money, that's a fool's game. Real millionaires are investing into assets, not liabilities, to stunt on Instagram. They're not buying depreciating toys on credit; they're reinvesting in their business and stocks and real estate—things that make money while they sleep. Meanwhile, the pretenders stay one hiccup away from. Complete disaster. So your action step, cap your lifestyle. Pick a modest baseline and stick to it as your income grows. Instead of a fancy car, get a fancy investment portfolio. Let your results do the talking, not, uh, your Gucci belt. This year, economic ups and downs will hit the flashy spenders hardest. Be smart now so you're not selling your luxury junk later to pay your rent. Remember, you're building empires, not trying to look like a king for a day. Trap number 6, doing everything yourself. The one-person army, the solopreneur who refuses to delegate, that mentality will keep you broke and exhausted. You might think you're saving money by not hiring, not outsourcing, not partnering, but you're actually stealing from your own future. Why? Because you're capping your growth to the hours that you personally can work. There are only so many hours in a day, and if you insist on being the hero who If he does it all, you will burn out before you ever build real wealth. I'll share a quick story. I met a YouTuber with 6 million subscribers, had a huge audience, and he had just hired his first virtual assistant because until then he'd been doing everything himself, the editing, the thumbnails, the emails, all of it. This guy was a rockstar on the outside, but behind the scenes he was drowning in busywork. It blew my mind and it reinforced one of my core beliefs. You have to build a team if you want to go from just hustling to actual enterprise. And I get it. as you, right? And paying others feels like a luxury when money's tight. But not hiring help when you're overloaded is a trap. Think about it. If you spend 10 hours a week doing $10 an hour tasks, that's $100 of value. If you paid someone $10 an hour to do it, that's $100 out of your pocket. But those 10 hours could be used to generate $1,000 of value or $10,000 doing higher-level strategy, sales, product development. So action step, identify the one task that consumes your time and someone else could do at half your rate or better, outsource it this month, even for a trial run. Start small if you have to. Hire a freelancer for 5 hours a week. Your future self will thank you as you find yourself with more time to make real money. Remember, businesses are built by teams, not lone heroes. You're not just an entrepreneur. Become a leader of people, even if it's one part-timer to start. Trap number 7: never asking for help or advice. Pride, fear of looking Stupid. I have to figure it out on my own. These attitudes will silently rob you of your success. Listen, every great entrepreneur that you admire had mentors, coaches, advisors guiding them. Steve Jobs had Bill Campbell. Zuckerberg had Steve Jobs. Gates had Buffett in his corner. Meanwhile, you're over there Googling or ChatGPTing for hours, just flailing in silence because you're too proud or too shy to ask someone who's been there for help. And I struggled with this too. I'm an introvert. I don't like bothering people. For years, asking for help was my biggest fear. Biggest weakness, probably still is. I thought I had to do everything myself, back to chapter number 6. But once I started seeking guidance, everything started to change. I joined the mastermind group, I reached out to entrepreneurs I looked up to, and very often people are willing to help. 84% of CEOs say that having mentors prevented them from making costly mistakes, and 69% of them made more profitable decisions thanks to mentor guidance. That's data. Even the top of the top lean on mentors to fast-track their learning. If the highest Performers can benefit from advice. Why on earth would you try to wing it alone? It's pure ego or ignorance. Both will keep you broke. So action step, swallow your pride and actively seek out mentorship. This could mean reaching out to someone in your field that, that you respect with a specific question, joining a local entrepreneur mastermind or meetup group, or even just posting your challenge in a community of your peers. Not asking is a guaranteed no. The worst that can happen is someone says they're too busy. So what? Move on to the next. When I was stuck early on, I could have saved so much time if I had just asked someone who'd already built a business for advice instead of assuming the bank would help me or suffering in isolation. Don't let your pride or your fear keep you ignorant. This year, make it a rule. If you don't know, ask. Save yourself years of trial and error. Your net worth will often depend on your network. So start building one that can guide and Trap number 8, waiting for the savior or a sign. This one's a bit counterintuitive. It's when you wait for an outsider to rescue you, a bank loan, an investor, the perfect moment, instead of creating momentum yourself. It's the mindset of, if only I had X, then I would succeed. And I see entrepreneurs fall into this trap all the time. They think a big investor is going to suddenly appear or write them a check, or a bank will just toss them tons of money. of money because they had the courage to start a business. I made this mistake myself at 19. I walked into a bank, my head was held high, and I said, hi, I'm starting a business. How can you help me? Expecting them to be as excited as I was. And the banker basically laughed me out of the door. They told me no loan without 3 years of history or huge collateral. I left feeling crushed, like, oh my God, I'm gonna fail. This is ridiculous. For a minute, I thought maybe that was it. Maybe I wasn't meant to be an entrepreneur if even the bank didn't believe in me. But here's what I realized: nobody's coming to save you. That rejection was actually a gift because it forced me to get creative. Many people would have quit right there. In fact, a lot of new entrepreneurs do quit after their first big rejection or failure. They take it as a sign that it wasn't meant to be. That's the trap. The truth is setbacks are normal. Rejection is normal. Waiting around for perfect conditions or someone else's money is Loser's game. If I had waited for an investor or kept begging banks, I'd still be waiting. Instead, I bootstrapped. I cut expenses. I hustled for sales. We made alliances. Remember the idea of modeling Bill Gates's partnership strategy? Eventually, I didn't need the bank's money. My business funded itself. So your action step, whatever you're waiting for, stop waiting. Start doing. If you think you need funding, challenge yourself to launch a smaller version of your idea with whatever resources that you have Have right now. Prove that it works. Get some traction. If you're waiting for the economy to improve, find a way to serve people in this economy right now. If you're waiting for permission or validation from some expert, give yourself permission. This video is your permission. The only savior you need is the person in the mirror. No more waiting for someday or someone. Successful people start before they're ready, and they trust that they'll find out what they need along the way, not upfront. Trap number nine: not managing your money. Look, it doesn't matter how much you make if you can't manage what you have. Plenty of entrepreneurs have high income and still end up broke because they don't know where their money is going. Ignoring your finances is a huge trap. Maybe you find it boring—spreadsheets, budgets, taxes—so you avoid it, or you assume your cash flow is fine because sales are coming in. That's a big mistake. According to U.S. Bank study, 82% of businesses fail due to poor cash flow management. That means almost 8 out of 10 businesses don't die from lack of ideas or even lack of customers. They die because the owners weren't on top of the money moving in and out. They run out of cash and boom, game over. You must know your numbers, your monthly expenses, your revenue, your profit margins, your, your burn rate. If you're burning savings, All of it. When I started making a bit of money, I hated accounting. So you know what I did? I didn't ignore it. I delegated it. One of the first things I let go of was doing my own books because I knew if I tried to handle it while hating it, I'd probably screw it up. I used Microsoft Money software to automate what I could. And as soon as I could, I hired a part-time bookkeeper. I kept an eye on everything, but I left someone who loves numbers handle The details. So that key point is I respected the numbers. You need to respect your numbers too. If you're not a finance person, fine. But the excuse, I'm not good at math, doesn't fly when your business goes under. So action step today: make a simple financial dashboard for yourself. Track your monthly income, the expenses, your net profit. At the very least, you can use a spreadsheet, an app—I don't care. Just have visibility on it. Set a weekly date with your yourself. Money Mondays, for example, to review and update your finances. Find one expense to cut or optimize and one area to potentially invest more in. And please separate your personal and your business finances, right? Pay yourself a salary or draw so you're not constantly mixing your funds and losing track of what's what. When you know your numbers, you can control them. They don't control you. Master this and you won't wake up one day surprised that you're out Instead, you'll wake up building true wealth systematically. And trap number 10, quitting too soon. The only guaranteed way to fail is to give up, right? Cliché, maybe, but it's cliché for a reason. It's true. And most people still don't get it. Quitting early is the ultimate wealth killer. Every entrepreneur faces pain and doubt and darkness on the road to success. Those who push through eventually see light. Those who quit stay in the dark forever. And I nearly fell into this trap myself. As I told you, I almost quit my business in the first year when nothing was working. If I had stayed quit, you probably wouldn't know my name. I'd be working some job that I hate right now, and none of the impact I've had would exist. I was this close to that reality. And it scares me how many people's success stories end early because they walked away right before the breakthrough. It's digging for gold. Most people stop 3 feet from gold because it's taking longer than they thought, I say keep digging. Often the breakthrough comes just when you're at your lowest and ready to quit. If you give it one more big push— after I decided to stick with my business and model Bill Gates, our first win, that $13,500 deal, it came in not long after. That wasn't a coincidence. It was my persistence being rewarded. And it taught me that a failure is just an event. It's not the end unless you make it the end by quitting. I try now to use my almost quit story to coach others that quit Quantity leads to quality. You have to put in the reps to churn through the failures to get to the success. If you bail after a handful of tries, you never develop mastery. You never hit the tipping point where it starts to rain money. So your action step is make a commitment this year that you won't quit on anything important out of frustration or fear. If you're going to quit something, quit making excuses, but don't quit on your dream. Whenever you feel like giving up, remember why you started and picture yourself. One year from now, if you keep going versus if you stop, and use the pain of potential regret as fuel. Because if you persist through ten failures, you might find success on number eleven. But if you quit after three, you've guaranteed failure. So keep going. Adjust your strategy. Learn from the setbacks. Reread chapter number seven about asking for help. But keep going. Persistence is undefeated in the long run. Winners are just ex-losers who refuse to quit. And most importantly, don't just watch this video. Passively. Do the work to call yourself out and improve. Most people won't even admit they have flaws to fix. You are. That already sets you apart from the masses who will just let another year go by and live in the reruns of the same mistakes. Now it's on you to take action. Knowing these traps is step one. Doing something about them is step two. You've got this opportunity right now to set new habits, a new standard for how you handle money and success. So take it. You don't need multiple streams of income to get rich. 3 wonderful businesses, more than you need in this life to do very well, and 3 of those will be better than 100 average businesses. Splitting your focus across 5 different side hustles guarantees that you fail at all of them. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. The key resource you have to deal with is your time and how you spend time. So, you know, I'm always trying to make sure that, that, uh, I'm only doing doing the things that are important. Well, focusing is, is saying yes. No, focusing is about saying no. If you refuse to go all in on your one true genius, you'll stay stuck in the exact same painful place 10 months from now. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are 2 of the richest men in history. One night they were at a dinner party together. Someone asked them both to write down the single most important factor for their massive success On a piece of paper, they did not look at what the other person was writing. But when they turned their papers over, they had both written the exact same word: focus. So Bill and I, right after we met, had a group of about 20 write down on a sheet of paper one word that they thought accounted for their success. And Bill and I, who may only met twice, didn't know what the other one was writing down. We both wrote down the same word, which was focus. They did not build their wealth by doing ten things at once. They picked one thing and poured every ounce of their energy into it. Now, you're probably thinking that focusing on just one thing is way too risky. You want a backup plan, but your backup plan is actually a trap. When you give yourself a plan B, you almost guarantee that plan A will fail because you don't lack time or resources. You lack the courage to bet on yourself completely. When you finally commit, everything changes. So here are 10 money rules that will force you to focus and Charge higher prices to fewer people. You think you need thousands of customers paying a tiny amount to get rich. That's completely wrong. Most entrepreneurs are terrified of charging higher prices. You lower your hourly rates because you think it will attract a massive crowd. Instead, you attract people who don't value your time. It is much easier to find 10 customers who will pay you $1,000 than to find 1,000 customers who will pay you $10. If you want to build a half a million dollar business, you need clients who are worth $50,000 a year to you. You don't want to do all of these small jobs for $10 an hour. I think that's a great point. All the grueling work for clients paying you pennies. You need to upgrade your offers immediately. Harvard Business Review shows that premium pricing actually increases perceived value. Customers respect your service more when they pay significantly more. So if you sell a software product, don't just charge $20 a month and hope they figure it out. Charge $2,000 a month and personally help the clients win massive victories. You get vastly better results, your clients get vastly better results, you build a highly profitable business that doesn't run you This specific pricing strategy leads directly into how you fund your daily operations. Fund your business with clients, not investors. People think that raising capital from venture capitalists is the ultimate goal. Raising capital is a trap. If you get an investor to give you $50,000, they will take half your business. You might make $50,000 just by landing 2 high-ticket clients. When you raise money, you buy a boss. You lose your freedom and your control. control. The Wall Street Journal reported that 3 out of 4 venture-backed startups fail completely. Your clients should fund your growth. When you deliver massive value, they will pay you gladly. You use that exact money to build your website and hire your team. You keep all your equity. You stay the owner of your dream. You don't have to report to a board of directors who only care about fast returns. You get to build the business on your own terms. Keeping your equity Quality matters, but you also have to protect your daily time. Stop overdelivering on low-ticket offers. You are spending way too much time on deals that pay you almost nothing. Now, you might overdeliver and spend 40 hours on a 5-figure deal. You undercut yourself and charge $10,000 instead of $40,000. That burns you out and destroys your profit margins. You bend over backwards for people who demand everything and pay nothing. The Pareto principle proves that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. You need to stop doing The work that doesn't scale. Serve your premium clients deeply. Let the low-paying clients go. They complain the most and they pay the least. Free up your schedule so you can focus on high-level strategy. Your time is your most valuable asset. When you stop wasting hours on low-value tasks, you open up space for massive income leaps. And once you control your time, you must control your tracking. Track your money like you track. Track your health. You can't improve what you don't measure accurately. Most people treat their finances like it's some mystery. You avoid looking at your bank account because you're afraid of what you will see. You have to stop hiding from your own numbers. If your physical goal is to drop your weight to 185 pounds and live completely pain-free, you track your sleep and your resting heart rate and your weight. You might wear your Oura Ring like I do to monitor your daily readiness score. You treat your physical health like a serious data point. Data project. You need to demand real numbers. You need to do the same thing with your total net worth. You look at your bank accounts daily. You track your daily spending. The American Psychological Association calls this the measurement effect. Simply tracking a specific behavior automatically changes that behavior for the better. When you track every single dollar, you instantly stop wasting your money on things that don't matter. You gain absolute clarity and total control over your future. Tracking gives you the hard. Data, you need to build a real system that scales. Build a machine, not just a job. Now, most entrepreneurs just buy themselves a terrible job, right? If you stop working, your income stops entirely. That is not a business. That is a cage. You need to build a machine around your work. So look at your daily systems. You have to ask yourself if your business can generate $20,000 a month if you don't show up to work. Harvard Business Review Research highlights that process-driven companies scale much faster and survive longer than founder-dependent companies. So document your daily steps, hire people to do the tedious tasks that you hate doing, step out of the daily grind so you can focus on the bigger vision. Your job is to replace yourself as fast as possible. Building a machine gives you the ultimate freedom to focus on real relationships and growth. Start a business development show to get referrals. Cold calling is completely dead. With wealthy clients. One of the things we teach inside of our Movement Makers program is to start a simple video show. Interview the top 50 people in your specific industry, invite them on your show, and tell your story. Nobody asks them for an interview, and when they say yes, that 30-minute conversation turns into a deep relationship. You don't have to be a professional broadcaster, you just have to be curious. LinkedIn data shows that 85% of all jobs and major deals are filled via networking. So don't ask for a sale, ask for for the interview. Bring them massive value first. The referrals flow naturally because you build real trust over time. But building that trust requires you to listen more than you speak. Stop giving free advice until they ask. You want to help absolutely everyone. You see a problem and you immediately try to fix it. Giving advice before someone asks creates instant friction. They don't want what they didn't ask for. You push them away when you try to solve a problem they haven't admitted that they have. You need to ask them probing questions instead. Keep asking questions until they finally ask you what you would do in their situation. Psychology Today notes that unsolicited advice is almost always perceived as harsh criticism. So wait patiently for the clear invitation. When they ask you for your help, they are fully ready to pay for your premium solution. You can only guide the people who are truly ready to be guided. This level of patience though requires you to narrow your focus completely. Focus on the first 5 clients, not the next 5,000. You're stressing about how to scale to millions of users. You don't even have your perfect 5 clients yet. Stop worrying about massive growth at the very beginning. If you have a high-level program like we have, Movement Makers, figure out how to make it incredibly fun and life-changing for just 5 people. You have to nail the foundation before you build the Kevin Kelly wrote the famous essay 1,000 True Fans. It proves you don't need millions of followers to build massive wealth. If you change 5 lives completely, those people will bring you the next 50 clients. Focus small so you can eventually grow huge. Treat your early clients like royalty. But this tight focus requires the right internal motivation. Keep money in your top 5, but never number 1. If money is your only goal, you will quit when the journey gets hard. Money is a powerful tool. It is the fuel for your car. You absolutely need it, but it can't be your destination. Your main mission has to be bigger than your bank account. You have to have a cause that you would work on even if you were not getting paid. The National Institutes of Health published studies showing that intrinsic motivation sustains long-term effort much better than external rewards like cash. Put money as your number 2 or 3 on your priority list. Let your true purpose be number 1. You will actually make far more money this way because you won't burn out. And your deeper purpose usually ties directly back to the people you love. Put your family's future before your ego. You are making terrible financial decisions based on how you look to strangers on the internet. You need to stop caring about digital likes and start caring about your real legacy. Look closely at your family. Look closely at your husband or wife. They do not care about your daily view count. They care about the secure life you are building for them. You need to focus on what actually moves the needle for your household first. Pew Research Center states that family support is the primary driver of long-term life satisfaction and financial stability. So swallow your pride, do the boring work, send the emails, build the true wealth that changes your family tree forever. Your next move. So you have the exact rules laid out in front of you right now. The only thing missing is your absolute commitment to take action. So stop waiting for the perfect moment And start building your real wealth today. Law number one: Money follows value. Money isn't random; it's the reward for solving problems. Wealth is built not on what just excites you, but on what you create that serves others. The more value you deliver, the more dollars will chase you. It's that simple. Think of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Sarah Blakely. They got rich by fixing pain points for millions. You want money? Stop chasing. Start chasing cash and start chasing problems to solve. When you help enough people get what they want, you'll get what you want. That's a law of the universe. Law number 2, adopt a wealth mindset, not a lottery mindset. Getting rich starts in your head. If deep down you believe money is evil or not for people like me, you'll unconsciously push it away. Newsflash, luck won't save you. 70% of lotto winners blow it, and a third end up bankrupt because they didn't change their mindset. Self-made millionaires Millionaires, on the other hand, think differently. They believe they deserve success and can learn whatever skills wealth requires. So the excuses like, I'm not smart enough, I came from nothing, and replace that with, why not me? Train yourself to see money as a positive force, a tool you can master. Your mind is your biggest asset or liability. Choose to make it an asset. Law number 3, purpose over profit, but money in your top 5. Money itself is Money isn't the end goal. Freedom, impact, and purpose are. I always say making money is great. It has to be in your top 5. It just can't be number 1. If you chase only dollars, you'll burn out or compromise your values. Instead, chase a mission and use money as motivation. Think of companies like Patagonia or Tesla— mission-driven, but they still prioritize revenue to fund that mission. Here's the balance: care more about your impact than your income, but respect money Enough to plan for. Money in your top 5 means you price your product right, you monetize your skills, you track your revenue because you know profit powers your purpose. When your why is strong, the money follows. And when the money comes, you push it back into your why. That's how world-changing businesses and lives are built. Law number 4, pay yourself first. The first bill you pay each month should be to yourself before rent, before groceries. Invest in your future. Siphon a chunk of Every paycheck into savings or investments immediately. This habit needs to become a non-negotiable. Why? Because wealth doesn't come from what you make; it comes from what you keep and grow. It's the classic millionaire habit. Nearly half of self-made millionaires save 20% or more of their income from day one. That requires discipline and delayed gratification, skipping some short-term treats so future you can win. Psychology proves this. The famed marshmallow. The marshmallow test showed that kids who delayed gratification ended up more successful in life. The same goes for money. So automate your savings. Treat it like a tax that you owe yourself. If you can't pay yourself, you'll always be paying someone else. Law number 5, live below your means. I know this sounds basic, but it's amazing how many people ignore it. Don't spend all you earn and definitely don't spend more than you earn. Hello, credit cards. The rich stay rich by living like they're broke. Stay broke by acting rich. Studies of millionaires show they're frugal. 64% live in modest homes, 55% buy used cars, nearly all of them vacation cheaply, and 84% refuse to gamble with their money. They aren't clipping coupons for fun; they just know that every dollar wasted is a dollar that can't work for them. So yes, reward yourself occasionally, but don't inflate your lifestyle with your income. Grow into your wealth; don't blow it. As your earnings climb, keep your expenses. In check. This creates a gap, the golden gap, that you can invest to generate real wealth. Law number 6: avoid bad debt, leverage the good debt. There are 2 kinds of people— those who pay interest and those who earn interest. To get rich, you want to be the second kind. Credit card balances, payday loans, buying a Ferrari on finance— that's bad debt. It will chain you down. The average credit card interest will eat your future alive. So here's your rule: never borrow to buy depreciating crap. Use debt only when it's a tool to acquire an asset that pays you back. In simple terms, an asset puts money in your pocket. A liability takes money out of your pocket. Your home, for example, can be a liability if it's draining cash. Meanwhile, a rental property or a business loan can be good debt if managed well because they generate income. The rich strategically use other people's money to multiply their wealth, but they respect the risks and have a plan to pay it off. Be very real with yourself. If the thing you want to buy won't earn or save you money, don't go into debt for it. Law number 7: Let compound interest work. Start investing now. Time is your greatest ally or your worst enemy in building wealth. Every day you delay investing is cash left on the table. Why? Compound interest, the snowball effect of money earning on top of itself. Albert Einstein supposedly called compound interest the 8th wonder of the world. He who He who understands it earns it. He who doesn't pays it. So here's a quick example. If you invest $1,000 at 10%, you'll earn $100 a year. Not bad. But if you reinvest that $100 next year, you earn 10% on $1,100, not just $1,000. That's $110. And now you have $1,210. Keep rolling that over, and in 10 years, that $1,000 turns into nearly $2,600 without adding a penny, all from reinvesting and compounding. Start earning, and it's like planting an orchard instead of a tree. Single tree. Don't wait for enough money to invest. Even $50 a month invested now beats $500 a month started 10 years later. Small seeds become giant oaks, but you must plant them now. Law number 8, create multiple streams of income. One stream of income is one point of failure. If that stream dries up— job loss, one client leaves, industry shifts— your financial life sinks. The wealthy know this, so they build boats with multiple engines. It's often said the average millionaire has 7 streams of income. And while your number may vary, the idea is diversification. It could be a side hustle, investments, rental incomes, royalties, a second business, you name it. In one study, 65% of millionaires had at least 3 income streams, and nearly a third had 5 or more. So start with one strong income. This is where most people get it wrong when they're thinking have multiple streams of income. You don't have 7 all from the beginning, because then you will be— you will diversify your energy out of any real wealth. So you start with one strong income, master it, and then add another. Each new stream is a layer of security and a force multiplier for your wealth. Importantly, build active income. So business, career, and passive incomes, which is investments and assets, do them together. Don't rely on a single paycheck or a single customer. Spread your bets and create income while you sleep. Law number 9, make money while you sleep. That's passive income. If you earn only money when you're personally working, you'll never escape the grind. You need income That doesn't require your constant presence. Warren Buffett said it best, if you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die. And that's not hyperbole. That's, that's reality. Passive income can come from investments like stocks, index funds that pay dividends, rental properties, or from systems that you create, a business that runs without you, or online products, or royalties from a product. It usually takes hard work upfront to set up these passive So don't think it's free money, but once they're running, they free up your time. Even having a little extra cash trickle in every month gives you breathing room. So imagine waking up to find you earned $100 overnight. Now imagine $1,000 or $10,000. The goal is to decouple your time from your money. Start building something today that pays you tomorrow, next week, next year. That's real financial freedom. Law number 10, never stop learning. The moment you think you know it all, your bank account will prove you wrong. The wealthy are students of wealth, constantly reading, attending seminars, picking up new skills. 88% of rich people devote at least 30 minutes a day to learning through reading. They read biographies, business books, industry news—not gossip, not junk. They treat their mind as a million-dollar asset that compounds just. Just like money, if you want to get rich, adopt a growth mindset. Invest in courses, find mentors, seek feedback. My core philosophy is believe. Believe that you can learn and improve. And I try to live this. In the early days, I studied Bill Gates and other successful people to model their strategies, and that learning led directly to my big breakthrough. So ask yourself daily, what can I learn today that will make me more valuable tomorrow? Every new skill or insight is money in the bank, just a bank you can't see yet. Stay curious and humble. The more you learn, the more you earn. Law number 11: Your network is your net worth. You can't do it alone, and you shouldn't try. The people you surround yourself with will make or break your success. Jim Rohn famously said, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. So take a look around. If your 5 closest friends are broke, negative, and complacent, guess where you're You're headed— successful people consciously build success circles. They hang out with other winners. One study found the rich intentionally seek optimistic, goal-oriented peers. Why? Because environment matters. Conversations with high achievers will spark ideas, opportunities, and higher standards in you. On the other side, toxic pessimistic people will drag you down to their level. This doesn't mean cut off loved ones. It means spend time strategically. Find mentors who've achieved what you want. Join entrepreneur groups, mastermind calls, online communities of goal-getters. Upgrade your network and you'll upgrade your net worth. It's practically automatic. Remember, birds of a feather flock to the bank together. Law number 12, don't do it alone. Ask for help and mentorship. So pride and secrecy keep people poor. I learned this the hard way. In my startup days, I was making $300 a month and was too embarrassed to tell anyone. How much I was struggling? I thought I had to fake success or go solo, and it nearly broke me. The truth is successful people ask for help all the time. They hire coaches. They seek mentors. They gather teams of advisors. Ego can be expensive. If you're too proud to admit what you don't know, you will cap your growth. In fact, 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems, often because the founder didn't seek financial advice or delegate when they should. So don't let that be you. Find someone who has been where you want to go and learn from them. And if you're in a crisis, reach out instead of suffering in silence. Don't do it alone because you'll probably fail. You'll quit along the way because it's too devastatingly lonely. The right help at the right time can save your business and your sanity. Success is a team sport, so play it that way. Law number 13, reinvest your profits. So when money does start coming in, it's tempting to celebrate. I made it. Let's spend. But the wealthy think differently. They plow money back into growth. Warren Buffett insists on this. When you first make money, you may be tempted to spend it. Don't. Instead, reinvest the profits. Whether it's profits from your business or returns from stocks, feed it back into your wealth machine. This is how small ventures become empires. I did this with my first company. When we landed our first deal, I didn't go buy a car. I poured it into scaling the business, which later allowed me to sell truly cash in. Reinvesting is how Buffett turned a pinball machine side hustle into a stock portfolio. Each round of profits bought more assets, which produced even more profit. It's a cycle: earn, invest, earn more. On the flip side, if you spend all you make, you kill the compound growth and go back to zero. So celebrate your wins, yes, but then put that money back to work. Delay the gratification a little longer and watch your wealth snowball. Law number 14: Take calculated Calculated risks and embrace failure. No risk, no reward. It's a cliché, but it's true. Getting rich will require you to step out of your comfort zone. So start that business, invest in that property, pitch that big client, even when there's no guarantee of success. In fact, you will screw up along the way, and that is okay. 63% of millionaires admit they took risks and failed at least once in business. But here's the difference. They didn't see failure as the end. It was just the beginning. Just data. They learned and kept moving. As the saying goes, winners are not afraid of losing, but losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success. And that was one of the hardest lessons for me. I was afraid to look stupid, to ask dumb questions, to lose money on a strategy that might not work. But every failure— eating beans for lunch for years, failed product launches, interviews that tanked— that taught me something that eventually led to a huge win. So don't Don't be reckless. Do your homework and take calculated risks. But when you feel fear, don't let it stop you. Often that fear is a sign that you're on the right track. Bet on yourself, and if you fall, get back up smarter. Law number 15, be patient. Wealth takes time. We live in a world of instant gratification, but building real wealth is a long game. Too many people try one thing for 6 months, don't become millionaires, and then quit or jump onto the next fad. Don't fall for the get-rich-quick trap. The truth is, most millionaires get rich slowly. In one study, 80% of millionaires were over 50. It took them decades of consistent effort to hit 7 figures. Saver investors took an average of 32 years to reach millionaire status. Even fast-track entrepreneurs took 12 years on average. The media loves to highlight the 22-year-old crypto billionaires, but that's the exception, not the rule. Embrace the process. Commit to the long haul. This doesn't mean it has to take 30 years for you. The timeline can accelerate with smart smart decisions, but it won't happen overnight. Set longer-term goals and keep grinding. Remember, compound interest needs time to work its magic. That's law number 7. Each year you persist, your knowledge, your network, and your assets compound too. Patience isn't just a virtue in wealth building, it's a strategic advantage. Law number 16, leverage. Multiply yourself through others. Here's a harsh truth. You will never get truly wealthy trading only your own time and effort. There are only 24 hours in a day and only one of you. The rich scale up by leveraging other people's time, their talent, their resources. That means hiring, delegating, automating, building a team and systems that make money even when you're not personally doing the work. So I learned this in running my YouTube channel. For years, I was in front of the camera, I was behind the camera, I was doing everything myself, and I was hesitant to spend money on help. I grew up without a ton of money, and maybe I was too cheap at first, but once I hired my first part-time editor, boom, I went from one video a week to one a day, which then brought in more money. Leverage. Similarly, in business, the moment I started bringing in partners and employees who are smarter than me in their areas, our growth started to explode. According to research, over 80% of millionaires rely on a team of smart people— attorneys, accountants, advisors— to help achieve their vision. So ask yourself, what tasks or expertise can you leverage from others to scale up? It could be as simple as hiring a virtual assistant for $10 an hour to free you up to make $100 $100 an hour, or partnering with someone who has skills or contacts that you lack. Yes, it can cost money to hire good people, but not hiring when you need to is far costlier. Build your dream team. Law number 17: Take action. Speed beats perfection. The money goes to those who do, not those who wait. One thing I see holding entrepreneurs back is analysis paralysis. They plan and polish and procrastinate, and opportunities pass them by. The wealthy have a bias for action. They do the best research they can, then pull the trigger. Jeff Bezos calls it the bias for action and credits much of Amazon's success to it. Warren Buffett calls unnecessary waiting thumb sucking and pushes himself to make decisions swiftly when he has enough facts. The point is, you can't steer a parked car. You have to start moving. Want to invest in stocks? Open the account and put in a small amount today. Learn as you go. Have a business idea? Launch a simple version of it right now, even if it's not perfect. You will refine through real-world feedback. Money loves speed— not reckless, stupid speed, but the momentum that comes from decisive action. Action precedes clarity. So the law is: do it before you feel 100% ready. An average plan executed today beats a perfect plan never executed. Start, stumble, learn, adjust. But start. Law number 18, know your numbers, track your money. You wouldn't drive a car blindfolded, right? So don't drive your finances that way too. Ignorance is extremely expensive. Wealthy people are keenly aware of their numbers. They know their income, their expenses, their profit margins, their tax liabilities, the investment returns, at least the key figures at all times. You need to become the CFO of your own life. You make a budget, update it regularly, and review where your money is going. You can use apps spreadsheets, chalk on a board, whatever works for you, but track it. If you're an entrepreneur, this is even more critical because poor cash flow management kills 82% of small businesses. When I started, I used Microsoft Money software to track my business finances, and my early accounting was a total disaster until I learned how to prioritize it. And once I did, I found ways to save on taxes and get unexpected refunds that boosted my cash flow. That's the reward for paying attention. The law here is what gets measured gets When you track, you naturally start optimizing. You spot wasteful spending, you find opportunities to save or invest, and you avoid nasty surprises. So open those bank statements, know your credit score, set a weekly date with your money. Yes, I'm serious. Your bank account should never be a mystery. Law number 19, give and you shall receive. This might sound more spiritual, but it's hard-nosed success strategy too. Generosity breeds prosperity. Prosperity. The wealthiest people I know are givers. They donate to charities. They mentor others. They create opportunities for the people that are around them. Why? Because what you put out into the world comes back to you multiplied. Zig Ziglar said it best: You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want. And it's true. When you operate from a mindset of service and generosity, you build an army of allies. People open doors for you. Clients refer to you. Your reputation starts to shine. Even on a practical level, generosity expands your network and skills. So volunteer in an organization and meet influential people. Mentor someone, and you often learn from the teaching. Also, giving keeps you humble and hungry. It reminds you that wealth has a purpose to improve lives, including your own. And here's a little secret: giving money away can actually make you feel wealthier. It breaks the fear that money is scarce. Of course, be smart. Don't give beyond your means, but make generosity a line item in your life. It could be money or time or knowledge. Nearly 3 of 4 millionaires in a study volunteered at least 5 hours a month, and many actively mentored others. Coincidence? I don't think so. The more you give, the more you grow. It's a law. And law number 20: stay humble and stay hungry. Money is a moving target. The game doesn't end when you hit some magic number. To not only get rich but to stay rich, you must keep your ego in check and your drive alive. Success can be a sedative. The moment you think I've made it, you start to slip. Remember Bill Gates's warning: success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. So don't fall for that trap. The greats, the the Buffetts, the Oprahs—they never stop learning. They never stop pushing. They act like beginners even when they are masters. For me, the belief game never ends. Despite all the subscribers and the business, I still wake up as a student. I still want to get better. Better every day. So celebrate your wins, yes, but stay curious and grounded. Keep setting the next goal, setting the next challenge, and importantly, stay grateful. Humility also means recognizing the role that others have played and some luck in your success. It keeps you from doing something dumb and losing it all out of arrogance. The hungry, humble entrepreneur will run circles around the complacent one who's resting on his laurels. Money has a way of disappearing from those who take For granted, so no matter how well you're doing, adhere to these laws. Keep growing, keep giving, and keep believing. A quick final thought: You've just learned twenty laws, but knowledge alone won't change your life. Action will. Pick one law today and start living it. Maybe it's setting up that savings account. Maybe it's calling that mentor. Maybe it's finally launching that product. Remember, every big success is just an accumulation of small, consistent wins. You showing up for this, absorbing. These strategies, that already sets you apart from the masses who are still looking for easy answers. And so I want to acknowledge you for, for being here right now and investing in yourself. Now get out there and do the work. Apply these laws and build the wealth and life that you deserve. In 1985, Robert Kiyosaki and his wife hit rock bottom. They were homeless, living out of a beat-up brown Toyota with exhausted credit cards and just a few dollars to their name. Each night, those car seats were their bed, and every morning they faced the gnawing fear of an uncertain future. Their situation was so desperate that a friend eventually offered them a basement room, and they lived in that tiny basement for 9 months just to get back on their feet. Imagine the pressure— mid-30s, penniless, feeling like a complete failure. Kiyosaki's dream of becoming rich was on the line, and the easy choice would have been to give up. But here's what happened Next. By 1989, just 4 years later, Robert and Kim Kiyosaki were self-made millionaires thanks to smart investments in a booming real estate market. And by 1994, at ages 47 and 37, they never had to work another day in their lives. He went from living in a car to achieving financial freedom in under a decade. Maybe you're thinking, sure, but Robert got lucky. He had a once-in-a-lifetime real estate boom. He wrote a bestselling book. He's not me. Stop. Luck didn't make him rich. His mindset and his choices did. He wasn't born into wealth or connections. 80% of millionaires are first generation and earned their wealth on their own. The difference is that he refused to accept being broke as a life sentence. Kiyosaki likes to say, broke is temporary, poor is eternal. He treated his broke state as a temporary challenge, not his identity. He focused on changing his situation, not Complaining about it, and he followed principles that anyone can follow regardless of their background, including you. The only thing that separates you from the Robert Kiyosakis of the world is a story that you're telling yourself, and we're about to change that story right now. Here's how Robert Kiyosaki built wealth from absolutely nothing, and how you can too. Let's break it down. Develop a wealthy mindset. Decide you won't stay broke. Every self-made success starts with a decision. Long before the money came, Kiyosaki made a decision that he would be rich. As a young man, he absorbed 2 very different mindsets from his rich dad and his poor dad. One taught him to chase opportunity, the other to cling to security. He chose the rich mindset. He learned that how you think about money matters more than how much you have right now. This is where you need to start. Decide that being broke is a temporary state, not Who you are. Kiyosaki believed fiercely that he would become wealthy even when he was sleeping in that car. That belief shaped his decisions instead of his fear. He ignored the naysayers, including that little voice of doubt, and kept his eyes on a wealthy future. As he famously said, poor dad lived in fear and never escaped the rat race, while rich dad taught him that the poor and middle class work for money, but the rich have money work for them. That mindset shift from earning to creating wealth starts with you deciding to adopt it. Remember, 80% of millionaires started with nothing. The ones who made it simply believed that they could. Kiyosaki himself warns that the one thing that holds all of us back is some degree of self-doubt. So ask yourself, are you going to let that self-doubt win, or will you choose right now to believe that you deserve to be wealthy and start thinking like a rich person? Commit to the wealthy mindset. That's the Decision costs zero dollars, but it's the foundation for every dollar you'll ever earn. Invest in financial education and mentors. Knowledge is the new money. When you have no money, knowledge is your greatest asset. Robert Kiyosaki didn't stumble into wealth blindly. He sought out mentors and education early. As a kid, he had his best friend's father—that's his rich dad—teach him lessons about money that school never did. He learned how the wealthy think about taxes, assets, and investing while other kids were just thinking about. their next allowance. That gave him a huge head start. But here's the key: you don't need a personal rich dad to start your financial education. We live in a time when the world's knowledge is available at your fingertips— books, videos like this, courses. Use them. Kiyosaki often says, money without financial intelligence is money soon gone. In other words, if you somehow get rich quick but lack financial savvy, you will lose it. He knew that earning Earning money was pointless if he didn't know how to keep and grow it. So he devoured financial education. He learned accounting basics, studied real estate, and soaked up advice from self-made millionaires. If you're starting from zero, commit to learning every single day. It costs you nothing. Read Rich Dad Poor Dad to start shifting your perspectives on money. Read other personal finance classics. You can study entrepreneurs who built themselves up. We feature them a lot on this channel. I often share how mentorship changed my life. Without a mentor, a model, I failed. With them, I succeeded. In fact, I spent 5 years struggling in my YouTube business until I found a mentor who had built companies before, and that's when everything exploded. Model success. If you can't sit down with a multimillionaire in person, do it through books and videos. Make self-education your daily ritual. A well-known study found that 80% of millionaires read at least 50 books a year, many of them about business or self-improvement. They never stop learning because every new piece of wisdom is a tool that can make you money. So start thinking of knowledge as your currency. Kiyosaki built his fortune on ideas and strategies that he learned over decades. What you know will determine how far you go. And if you're truly committed, find a real mentor or community. Surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do. And remember, the best investments when you're broke is not stocks or crypto, it's in your own mind. So fill it with knowledge that can make you rich. Start small and seize opportunities. Use creativity, not cash. Don't have the money? Then you need to get creative and resourceful. When Robert Kiyosaki had little, he didn't sit around waiting for a miracle check. He started where he was. His very first business idea came from noticing a simple problem at the beach. He saw that surfers had no good place to keep their wallets while they were surfing. So at age 30, he started a company to make nylon Velcro surf for wallets. The product took off. It even got featured in Playboy and Newsweek and made him a millionaire on paper by age 30. The business eventually failed and we'll get to that later. But the lesson is priceless. He acted on an opportunity he saw with basically no money down. He didn't overthink it or wait until he had a trust fund. He identified a need and moved quickly. How many opportunities are you missing because you think I have no money, So I can't. The truth is, when you're starting from nothing, your hustle and your creativity are your capital. So maybe you can't buy a rental property yet, but you can find someone who needs help selling their product and take a commission. Maybe you can't launch a factory, but you can start an online side hustle with just your phone. The opportunities are there, but you have to train yourself to see them and grab them. Kiyosaki teaches that the faster you can make a decision, the more likely you'll seize Opportunities before someone else does. Successful entrepreneurs aren't necessarily the smartest or the richest starting out. They're the ones who take action while others sit on the sidelines. Even science agrees that being proactive matters. Research shows that people who actively pursue goals and opportunities tend to create more luck for themselves through their network and efforts. So challenge yourself to start right now with what you have. Ask, what value can I create today with my current resources and skills? Kiyosaki began with a simple product idea. Maybe your start is offering a service or freelancing or selling your items from your closet to get some initial cash, something to get in the game. And use OPM, other people's money and other people's resources when possible. When Kiyosaki later moved into real estate investing, he often used loans and investor money to acquire new properties. He proved the concept. It doesn't take money to make money. It takes courage to move and a keen eye for value. So stop saying, I can't afford it, and start asking, how can I afford it? That simple change in question opens your brain to solutions. The world is full of opportunities disguised as problems. So start small, start smart, and start right now. Money follows momentum. You create that momentum by seizing opportunities, not by waiting for the perfect conditions. Persevere through failures. Turn setbacks into motivation. Robert Kiyosaki's journey was filled with failures. Remember those surfer wallets that made him a young millionaire at 30? That company went bankrupt shortly after because he hadn't secured his patents. He had to watch his early success crumble. Did he quit? No. He started a new business licensing rock band t-shirts, and that company went bankrupt too. He tried his hand at investments and ended up nearly a million dollars in debt in the. 1980s. By the time he was sleeping in that car, he had failed multiple times in business. Most people would have thrown in the towel right there, but Kiyosaki didn't. He later said that being broke and desperate taught him more than any fancy education could. He was learning from every failure, and this perseverance is a trait of virtually every self-made millionaire. In fact, studies show that grit, which is the ability to persevere towards long-term goals, is a better predictor of success than IQ or talent. Psychologist Angela Duckworth found that those who stick it out through setbacks outrank the quitters, even if they aren't as gifted on paper. And Kiyosaki embodies this grit. He once said, each push is life saying, wake up, there's something I want you to learn. Every time life knocked him down, he asked, what's the lesson? Instead of, why me? That's the mindset you need when you face failure, and you will face failure. Look at any successful entrepreneur's track record and you'll usually find bankruptcies, broken deals, false starts. It's said the average millionaire goes bankrupt 3.5 times in their life. Think about that. The difference between those millionaires and everyone else is that they didn't stop on failure number one. They treated failure as a data point, not a dead end for them. Kiyosaki is a prime example. He failed fast. He learned fast. When his businesses collapsed, he analyzed what went wrong— lack of patents, wrong partnerships, et cetera— and he adjusted. He didn't let those failures define him or steal his belief. And eventually his persistence paid off pretty spectacularly. He likes to say, the size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire, the size of your dream, and how you handle disappointment along the way. So ask yourself, how are you handling disappointment? Do you retreat or do you use it as motivation? When your project flops or your idea gets rejected, you have 2 choices. You give up or you do what Kiyosaki did and come back smarter. Learn the lesson and try again. Try again. This is how you build the resilience muscle. And here's the beautiful thing: every failure that you go through makes you a little less afraid for the next round. You realize that failure won't kill you, but quitting will kill your dream. Kiyosaki failed forward. Each mistake brought him closer to the strategy that worked. You must do the same. Embrace the setbacks as part of the process. Remember, people who avoid failure also avoid success. Make money work for you. Build assets and passive income. The ultimate key to how Kiyosaki built lasting wealth is this: he stopped trading time for money and started making money work for him. When you're broke, you initially trade time for money to survive. You get a job, you grind. Kiyosaki did that as a young man in the Marines and later in sales, but he realized that a job alone would never make him rich, which was his goal. It would just pay the bills. So he shifted focus to building assets, things that generate income even when he isn't personally working. In the late 1980s, with very little capital, Robert and Kim began investing in real estate. They started small with 1 or 2 properties during a time when the market was down, and over the next few years, as the real estate market boomed, those properties appreciated and threw off rental income. By 1989, the Kiyosakis were officially millionaires from their real estate investments. How did they do it? They reinvested every spare dollar into buying more assets, more apartment units, more Instead of splurging on luxuries, they lived cheaply. Remember, they even lived in a friend's basement for nine months just to save money, so they could pour money into their investments. This is what Kiyosaki means by pay yourself first. Invest in assets before you pay everyone else. Here's a simple definition that he gives: An asset puts money in my pocket; a liability takes money out of my pocket. So he doubled down on acquiring assets and cut out his. Liabilities. He didn't buy a fancy car or big house until those assets could pay for them on autopilot. By 1994, their passive income from assets was exceeding their living expenses, which meant financial freedom. Kiyosaki never had to work again if he didn't want to, because his money was now doing the work for him. You need to aim for the same thing. It won't happen overnight, but you can start today, no matter how small. Start building your asset column. Now maybe that means saving up a few thousand and buying a vending machine that generates $200 a month, or investing in dividend stocks, or creating a digital product that you can sell online. The idea is to create sources of income that aren't tied to your hours worked. Kiyosaki expanded beyond real estate too. He created the Rich Dad brand, wrote books, and even a board game called Cashflow, all of which became assets generating royalties and income streams. He even turned his books into high-ticket seminar businesses to further multiply his The takeaway for you isn't to run out and start a seminar company. It's to think about how you can monetize your knowledge and your skills in more scalable ways. So could you start a YouTube channel or an online course in your expertise? Could you partner in a business where you own equity? Always ask, is there something that can make money for me even when I'm sleeping? And if it's yes, that's an asset to build. If not, find a way to turn it into one. And remember Kiyosaki's fundamental lesson from Rich Dad Poor Dad. Rich Dad Poor Dad. The rich buy assets, the poor buy liabilities. Every time you get a dollar, you face a choice: invest it into something that will bring more dollars in, or spend it on something that won't. Kiyosaki built wealth from nothing by consistently choosing to invest in his future rather than inflate his lifestyle prematurely right now. Do the same. Even if you're starting with $10, allocate part of it to your future wealth. Put it in a stock Index fund. Use it to launch a small side hustle, anything that grows, and over time these small seeds become a forest. This is how you escape the paycheck-to-paycheck trap. The goal is passive income exceeding your expenses. When you hit that, work then becomes optional. Kiyosaki hit it and never looked back. It's not magic; it's a formula. Spend less than you earn and invest the difference consistently into assets. If you can master that discipline, even when you have very very little, you'll gradually snowball your wealth. Money will start flowing to you from your investments, not just your labor. That's when you truly go from nothing to something big. As Kiyosaki puts it, once a dollar goes into your asset column, it becomes your employee. The best thing about money is that it works 24 hours a day and can work for generations. Start putting your money to work for you, no matter how small the amount. And one day you'll wake up to a fortune that you created. Your turn from nothing to something. You've just followed the journey of a man who started with nothing and created a life of wealth. And now it's about you. The difference between just watching this video and living the life of your dreams comes down to one word: action. You showed up today, you learned, and that already sets you apart from your friends. Now keep that momentum going. Apply these lessons with conviction. Remember that every legendary success story, including yours, starts with a single step forward in faith. So I want to acknowledge you for being here and doing the work that proves that you are the type of person who won't let excuses define your future. Keep going. Keep believing. Investing is not a talent reserved for the rich. It's a skill you have to learn or you'll stay broke. Every self-made investor started with zero knowledge. And had to figure it out through learning and effort. If you keep waiting for someone else to show you how to invest, you'll be stuck watching opportunities pass you by while others multiply their money. At 19 years old, Warren Buffett got rejected by his dream school. He had applied to Harvard Business School, and they told him he wasn't good enough. Buffett was crushed. He thought this rejection might derail his ambitions before they even began. But instead of giving up, he found another He discovered that his hero, Benjamin Graham, was teaching at Columbia University. Buffett applied to Columbia last minute, got accepted, and eagerly soaked up everything Graham had to offer. In one cold Saturday, Buffett took a train to Washington, D.C., and literally pounded on the door of a little insurance company called GEICO just to learn more. A janitor let him in, and Buffett ended up getting a 4-hour crash course from Graham. a GEICO executive. No one has ever received a better half-day course, Buffett said. That one bold move led to Buffett's first big investment profit. He made about a 50% gain on GEICO stock within a year. The point is, Buffett felt a burning urgency to learn everything about investing. He didn't wait for a teacher to come to him. He hunted down knowledge. The pressure he felt to prove himself, to seize the opportunity to learn, is the same pressure that you're feeling right now. When I was 19, I partnered in my first company. It was a biotech software. I worked 12 hours a day and earned almost no money. I was making about $300 a month and eating the same cheap bean salad for lunch every day. Month after month, nothing worked. After 9 months without a single win, my confidence had collapsed. One day, picked up the phone, I called my business partner and said the words I never thought I'd say: I quit. The moment I hung up, I broke down sobbing. I never felt I felt like such a failure. I'd always seen myself as a fighter, not a quitter. Yet there I was, quitting. I barely slept that night. I was heartbroken and thinking I'd just thrown away my dream. But by morning, a new feeling hit me— regret. I imagined looking back years later, knowing that I gave up, and the pain felt even worse than my pain of failing. So I swallowed my pride, went back to my partner, and asked if I could undo my mistake. It'd be great to take me back. But I knew I couldn't just return to doing the same things. I needed a new strategy. Instead of trying to figure all up by myself, I studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft through partnerships. I stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and modeled someone who had already succeeded. Within 3 weeks, we landed a $13,500 deal. After months of almost zero income, $13,500 felt like a million dollars, and that one deal saved our business. We kept using that strategy, grew the business to success, and eventually sold the company. I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: when you feel like quitting, that's That's the moment you must push yourself to learn to try something new. Under that pressure of failure, I finally opened up to learning from others and it changed everything. Now maybe you're still thinking, well, that sounds great for Buffett or for you, Evan, but I have no idea where to start. I'm not a financial genius. I seriously need someone to help me or I'll mess this up. In fact, one of you, Vishal Bhardia, a subscriber, asked me point blank, can anyone help me learn investing? And I get it. When you're new, it feels like you're stumbling in the dark and you desperately want a guide. You might think you need a finance degree or a mentor holding your hand, or you're worried that you'll lose money because you don't know what you're doing. But thinking that is exactly what is holding you back. If you keep believing that you're helpless without an expert, you're giving away your power. The truth is you have more resources at your fingertips today than Warren Buffett did at 19, than I did when I got started. The only permission you need to start learning is your own. Others can help through videos, interviews, books, but nobody can do your pushups for you. For every excuse you have— I'm not good with numbers, I don't have a mentor, I might fail— there's someone out there with the same obstacle who went out and learned investing anyway. If a broke teenager in Omaha could knock on doors to learn finance, if a struggling entrepreneur could model a billionaire strategy to save his business, why not you? The moment you stop waiting for help and start helping yourself, You'll realize you're not as lost as you think. So let's break this down. Here's how you can take charge and learn investing no matter where you're starting from. Shift your mindset. Anyone can learn investing. The first thing you must do is believe that you can learn this. If you think investing is only for math geniuses or Wall Street wizards, think again. One of the most powerful investing stories is about a man named Ronald Read, a janitor from Vermont who quietly amassed an $8 million fortune by the time he died in 2014. He had no fancy degree, no high-paying job. He simply saved and invested consistently over his lifetime. His friends were stunned. But the message is anyone can be a great investor. In his book The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel uses Reid's story to drive home that successful investing isn't about social status or IQ. It's about mindset and behavior. Modern psychology backs this up. The research on growth mindset shows that if you believe skills can be developed, you perform better and go further. And investing is no exception. It's a set of skills you can improve with study and practice, not some innate talent you either have or you don't. Billionaire investor Charlie Munger put it like this: I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up. So becoming a learning machine is far more important than having a high IQ or making one lucky trade. Adopt the identity of a student of investing. Commit to being the person who reads, who asks questions, who tries things. Did you know that in a 5-year study of rich people's habits, 88% of self-made millionaires reported that they read for at least 30 minutes every day to educate themselves? They weren't born knowing how money works. They devoured knowledge daily until it started to click. Warren Buffett, one of the richest investors on the planet, famously said that he reads 500 pages a day because that's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest. And he added that anyone can do it, but most people won't. So you can prove him wrong. Start viewing yourself as a lifelong learner of finance. You don't have to read 500 pages today, but do read something. Replace the thought, I can't learn investing, with, I'm learning investing every day. Every expert was once a beginner who decided to learn. And so embrace that Model the masters. Learn from the great investors. The fastest way to learn investing is to stand on the shoulders of giants. You don't have to invent a strategy from scratch. You can model the masters. I built my YouTube channel on this idea. Success leaves clues. In my own life, modeling Bill Gates's partnership strategy saved my business. In the investing world, the giants have left roadmaps in the forms of books and letters and interviews. Seek them out. You can start with the classics. Warren Buffett became Warren Buffett by studying others. He read Ben Graham's book, The Intelligent Investor, at age 20, and it changed his life. In fact, Buffett calls The Intelligent Investor by far the best book on investing ever written. So why not read the book the greatest investor used himself? There's a treasure trove of wisdom available to you from investors who've been through it all. Here are a few must-read resources that can kickstart your education. So we talked about The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. That's a definitive book on value investing. And Warren Buffett credits this book for shaping his investing philosophy, again, calling it the best book about investing ever written. It will teach you how to think about stocks for the long run and not fall for short-term market swings. Next is One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch. It's a read that shows how average people can beat the pros by investing in what they know. So Lynch was one of the most successful Mutual fund managers ever, and he writes in pretty plain English for beginners. The book proves that your everyday knowledge—the stores that you shop at, the trends you see—can translate into great investments. It's empowering and practical for first-time investors. And third is *The Psychology of Money* by Morgan Housel. It's a modern classic on the behavioral side of investing. So Housel's insight is that mastering investing isn't just about what you know; it's about how you think and act. So he shares. Shares 19 short stories that show how our mindset and habits impact our financial success. So this book teaches you how to manage your fear, your greed, and impatience, the emotions that most often hurt investors more than a lack of knowledge. So absorb the wisdom from these masters. Read Buffett's annual shareholders' letters. They are free and they're online. You can learn how he analyzes businesses. Watch interviews with investors like Ray Dalio or Cathie Wood or Chamath Palihapitiya. We've done 10s on all of these people to see how they approach decision-making. When you study the greats, you're essentially getting mentored by them across time and space. It can collapse your learning curve dramatically. But remember, learning alone isn't enough. You'll need to actually put it into practice, which brings us to the next point. Start small, learn by doing. You can read 100 books on investing, but nothing will teach you faster than actually doing it. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. At some point, you have to hop on and start to pedal. Start small and get your feet wet. Open a brokerage account, or even a simulated trading account if you're nervous, and make your first tiny investment. It could be as little as $50 or $100 in an index fund or a company that you believe in. The amount isn't going to make you rich. That's not the point. The point is to turn theory into experience. Studies on learning show that active practice beats passive study by a mile. Educational research Research illustrates that people retain up to 75% of what they learn when they practice by doing, compared to maybe 10% retention from reading about it. In other words, you could read about investing for a year and still feel unsure. But if you actually invest, even with play money, you start internalizing the lessons. You'll feel the emotional ups and downs of the market, learn how to place orders, and see how you react when the stock you bought drops 10%, which it will at some point. Those experiences are invaluable. They give you feedback that no book or video can fully simulate. So keep your initial stakes small so your early mistakes are cheap. Think of any minor losses as tuition fees in the school of investing, right? Every mistake is showing you what not to do the next time. And nearly every great investor went through a phase of errors and learning. The key is they learned and they didn't quit. And as you gain confidence, you can gradually invest more. Most successful investors begin with basic low-risk portfolios and learn by doing, growing bolder as their knowledge increases. You might start with a simple index fund or a few stocks, and over time, as you study and observe, you'll get better at identifying what makes a good investment for you. And here's a practical approach: keep an investing journal. Each time you buy or sell something, jot down why you did it. For example, I bought Company X because I think their new product will increase profits next next year, or I sold Y because I panicked when it fell 5% in a day. Review these notes periodically. Patterns will emerge and teach you about your own psychology. Maybe you'll see that you sell too quickly out of fear, or that your best decisions were when you stuck to companies that you understand. This internal reflection turns experience into wisdom. And don't be afraid to ask questions and engage with communities. Join an investing forum or find peers who are also learning. Teaching somebody else what you just learned is another powerful way to solidify the knowledge. And remember, there's a learning pyramid. Teaching others has the highest retention. You could share a bit of what you learned from a book or discuss a small investing experiment. It will make you more confident that, hey, I do know a lot of things now. The bottom line is this: action creates clarity. So the, the fog of I don't know what I'm doing begins to lift as soon as you start placing that first trade or start that first investing project. Suddenly PE ratios, index funds, dividends, they're not just concepts, the real things that you're interacting with. Every step you take gives you a little more competence and a little more confidence. So start now with whatever small step you can. Buy one share of that company you admire or set up an automatic transfer of $20 a week into an investment account. Get in the game and learn as you go. Stay consistent for the long term. Remember that investing is a long-term game. The goal isn't to get rich by next Tuesday. It's to build wealth and knowledge steadily year after year. So as you start learning and investing, think of it like a marathon. It's not a sprint. Consistency and patience are your superpowers here. Now, there will be times when you feel discouraged or confused. Maybe the market dips and your portfolio loses some value, or you hit a complex concept that frustrates you. Expect that. It happens to every investor, no matter how experienced. The ones who succeed aren't the ones who never have any doubts. They're the ones who persist through them. Volatility in your emotions and in the market is part of this process. As one investment guide puts it, the market will prove you wrong at times. You will make mistakes. But learning to be a successful investor is a gradual process, and sticking with it for the long run is crucial. So when things go wrong, don't beat yourself up. Analyze it, learn the lesson, and keep moving forward. Remember, every setback is an opportunity to learn. So make a habit of continuous learning and investing. So for example, commit to reading one investing article or a few pages of a book or one video no matter what. Commit to putting a little money aside every month to invest no matter what the market is doing. This discipline builds momentum, and over time your knowledge compounds just like your money does. Think of how compound interest works. A little growth each day can lead to massive growth over over years, knowledge compounds too. Every new thing you learn builds on the last and expands your ability to make good decisions. So 5 years from now, if you stay consistent, you'll look back and be amazed at how far you've come, both in your portfolio and in your understanding. It also helps to keep your why in mind. Why do you want to learn investing in the first place? Is it to secure your family's future? You want to achieve financial freedom? You want to not feel clueless when money decisions come up, whatever it is, write it down. Think about it. In tough moments, revisit your why. It can help give you more patience. When you know you're in this for the long haul, the day-to-day bumps don't shake you as much. You start thinking like an investor who asks, what will this be worth in 5 or 10 years instead of panicking over today's news? And one more reminder, celebrate your progress, not perfection. Did you finish reading your first investment book? Awesome. Did you make your first profitable trade, even if it was only a $20 gain? Amazing, right? These are milestones. By acknowledging them, you reinforce the identity that you are an investor now, a learner. You're a doer. You're someone who actively is building their future, and that identity shift—that becomes everything. You're no longer the person wondering, "Can anyone help me learn investing?" You're the person who is helping yourself learn it every single day. You made it this far in the video, which tells me that you're serious about your financial future. Every investing master was once a beginner who simply refused. Choose to give up, and now you're on the same path. So keep feeding your mind, keep taking action no matter how small, and be proud that you're doing what most people only talk about. By showing up and learning today, you've already set yourself apart from most people. And congratulations! You're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. To learn how to start a profitable business without money, experience, or connections, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Resources are never the problem. It's a lack of resourcefulness that's why you fail. But I believe the greatest talent that you can draw a line through