This is What It Really Takes to Get Rich Nobody Tells You This

Getting rich is far more predictable than you've been led to believe.

You got to get your freaking financial literacy right. You got to get your money, financial mindset right. I think earning money is one of the simplest things I ever learned, and it's one of the most misunderstood things.

The problem isn't that wealth is impossible for you. It's that nobody ever taught you the habits and decisions that quietly create it.

Everybody here has the ability absolutely to do anything I do and much beyond. And, and some of you will and some of you won't, but the ones that won't, it will be because, be because, uh, you get in your own way. Every single qualification for success is acquired through habit. People form habits and habits form futures. I went to school and what they pounded in me was the poor person. You got to get a job, you got to get a job, you got to work for money, you got to save money, and you got to invest in the stock market and all this stuff. That's why people are poor.

If you keep following the same money advice as everyone else, you'll likely end up with the same financial struggles as everyone else. So in the next 3 hours, you'll learn the mindset, habits, and money principles that have helped ordinary people build extraordinary wealth and how to start using them today. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. How rich you become has almost nothing to do with how much you earn. The Federal Reserve found that nearly four in ten American adults couldn't cover a surprise four hundred dollar expense with cash, and plenty of the people in that group earn very good money. So the Japanese skill of turning a modest income into real lasting wealth might be just the most important thing nobody ever bothered to teach you. And today I'm going to. Let me take you to Japan to a little boy named Konosuke Matsushita. He was born in 1894 into a comfortable family, but when he was just 4 years old, his father gambled the family's money away on the rice market and they lost everything. They went from comfortable to poor almost overnight. So at 9 years old, before he even finished elementary school, little Konosuke was sent away from his family to work as an apprentice, first at a shop making charcoal braziers, then at a bicycle shop where he swept floors, he ran errands, and slept where he worked. He had maybe 4 years of formal schooling in his entire life. This was a child with nothing— no money, no education, no connections, No safety net at all. But he was watching and learning and saving every small bit of money he could. As a young man, he took a job at an electric company, and in 1918, at 23 years old, with only a tiny bit of savings, he decided to start making electrical sockets out of a little apartment where he lived. His wife and brother-in-law worked alongside him. Money was so tight in those early days that at one point he had to pawn his wife's kimono just to keep the tiny business alive. And here's what actually carried him through. He was patient in a way that almost no one is. He wasn't thinking about getting rich by the weekend. He famously laid out a 250-year plan for his company because he thought in centuries while everyone else panicked about next month. He stayed frugal and disciplined his whole life, even long after the money came in. And that tiny socket workshop grew steadily and slowly into Panasonic, one of the largest companies in the world today. When Konosuke Matsushita passed away in 1989, he left behind a personal fortune of around $3 billion and a whole country that called him the God of Management. A boy with 4 years of school and a pond kimono. But notice what actually built that fortune. It wasn't a big salary, a rich family, or a lucky lottery ticket. It was the discipline he had when he had nothing, patience when everyone else wants it now, and the habit of saving and reinvesting every small bit of those things for decades. Those aren't talents that you're born with. They're habits. And habits can be learned by anyone, including you, starting with your very next payday. Now, the common objection that comes up is, okay, that's a nice story, Evan, but I don't have enough to save for anything, let alone invest. This wealth stuff belongs to people who have big salaries, not someone who's barely covering rent. I hear you. And that's why I want to go back to the Federal Reserve number. Nearly 4 in 10 adults can't cover a $400 surprise. And that group is packed with people pulling in 6 figures who spend every dollar the moment that it lands. So high income did not save them because how much you make and how wealthy you become are 2 completely separate skills. Konosuke Matsushita started as a penniless 9-year-old apprentice. So there's a system to this, an approach the disciplined wealthy have used quietly for generations, and the Japanese have some of the most beautiful practical versions of it in the world. It works on a small salary, and honestly, it works best when you start small because you build the habits before the big money ever comes in. So let me walk you through this art step by step. Pay yourself first before the world takes its cut. The first Japanese principle changes the order that keeps most people broke. Normally money comes in, you pay all your bills, you spend on whatever comes up, and then you try to save whatever little bit is left over. And there's never anything left over. Just, there just never is. And the quiet wealthy do the exact opposite. The moment money comes in, before a single bill is paid, they take a fixed slice off the top and set it aside for the future. So pay yourself first, even if just 10%, even if just 5% at the start, because things are tight. The number matters far less than the habit you develop. You treat that slice as sacred. It's untouchable as your rent is, a bill you owe to the person that you're gonna be in 20 years. And here's the trick that actually makes it work. You automate it so you never even see the money and never have to rely on your willpower. Set your account to move that slice into your savings or investments automatically the day that the money comes in. What you don't see, you don't miss, and what you don't miss, you don't spend. So let's say you earn $3,000 a month, pay yourself 10%, and that's $300 moved automatically. Automatically to your future before you even touch it. You learn to live on the $2,700 and you barely feel it. But that $300 a month invested and left alone turns into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a working life. A person who saves 10% of a small income ends up far wealthier than a person who saves nothing on a large one. So it starts with your next payday, not someday when you earn more, because someday never comes. Kakeibo. Write down every single dollar you spend. So there's a beautiful Japanese practice called kakeibo, which means something like Household finance ledger, and it's over 100 years old. The idea is simple and a little uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. So you write down by hand every single dollar you earn and every single dollar you spend. All of it: the coffee, the streaming service, the takeout, the impulse buy at checkout—not on an app that kind of puts it behind some dashboard, but with a pen, so your brain actually feels each expense. So why does this matter so much? Because money doesn't leak out in big dramatic ways. Typically, it leaks out in tiny amounts that you never notice—a $4.50 premium coffee every workday adds. Up to $1,600 a year. A $15 ride you take twice a week instead of walking is more than $1,500 a year. One forgotten $14.99 subscription is $180 a year doing nothing. Add up a handful of these little leaks and it's often thousands of dollars a year draining out of your life while you swear you have nothing left to save. John D. Rockefeller, who became the richest man of his era, kept a little book he called Ledger A as a young man with almost no money, and he wrote down every penny he earned and spent long before he was rich. Awareness Awareness comes first, always. You cannot fix a leak that you cannot see. So for one month, write down every dollar. At the end of the month, you can sit there with your ledger and ask 4 simple questions. 1, how much came in? 2, how much do I want to save? 3, how much did I actually spend? And 4, how can I do a little better next month? We're not trying to shame ourselves here, just some reflection. And that's where the change happens. Live below your means and stop performing wealth For strangers. So here is a truth that the wealthy understand in their bones: looking rich and being rich are two completely different things, and chasing the first one destroys the second one usually. So much of spending isn't even about you; it's a performance for people whose opinions will not pay your bills, and half of them aren't even paying attention to you or more. The new car, the designer logo, the upgrade you can't quite afford—it's just a costume, and the costume becomes more and more expensive. So the people who actually build real wealth choose to live below their means on purpose, and they feel genuinely. Free doing it because they're not a slave to anyone else's opinion. So look at Chuck Feeney. He co-founded the company behind the duty-free shops in every major airport and became a billionaire. And he wore a $15 watch, flew coach, and lived in a modest rented apartment. He gave away almost his entire fortune around eight billion dollars because being rich was never about looking rich to him. Konosuke Matsushita stayed careful with money his whole life, long after he could have bought anything on earth. So here's the muscle that we need to start to build when your income goes up, and it will. You don't automatically inflate your lifestyle to match it. You keep your costs steady and let the gap between what you earn and what you spend grow wider and wider, because that gap becomes the raw material of all of your wealth. So before any big purchase, ask yourself an honest question: am I buying this for me or for how it makes me look to other people? And if the answer is other people, put it back. A smaller life that you can actually afford beats a bigger one that actually owns you. Invest the difference. Let it grow while you sleep. So here's a piece that so many disciplined savers miss, and it's the one that actually turns your savings into wealth. Saving money alone will not make you rich. If you just pile up cash in a bank account or under your mattress, inflation eats it year after year and you fall behind while you are feeling responsible. The gap that you created by paying yourself first and living below your means, that difference has to be put to work. You now have to invest it. Now, I want to keep this calm because building wealth on a modest salary is not about gambling. It's not about chasing hot stock tips or day trading or Or throwing your rent money at whatever's trending this week. The approach is boring, and boring is exactly why it works. You buy a piece of the whole market through a simple, low-cost index fund, and you keep buying it automatically every month in good times and in scary times. And then you leave it alone and you let it grow for decades. You're not trying to be a genius. You're trying to own a slice of the economy and let the time do the heavy lifting for you. This is where compounding, the most powerful force in money, goes to work For you. Your money earns, and then those earnings earn, and the snowball rolls downhill for 20 and 30 years until the number becomes something that honestly looks impossible from where you're standing today. And please don't let the fear of not being a finance expert stop you, because that fear keeps more people poor than bad investments do. Start with whatever you can, $50 a month, just to become an investor and cross that line from someone who only spends money into someone who also owns things that grow. Once you're on the other side of that line, Everything starts to change. Kaizen, 1% better with money every month. So the Japanese have another amazing gift for you, a concept called kaizen, which means continuous improvements through small steps. It's the idea that you don't transform your entire life in one giant leap. You improve it by 1% at a time steadily until those tiny improvements compound into something that is enormous. So we want to apply this to your money and it takes all the pressure off. You don't have to go from saving nothing to saving 30% overnight, which might feel impossible and makes you, you know, quit on it in a week. You just get a little better every month. So this month you automate 5% of your income. Next month you nudge it to 6%. You cancel one subscription that you forgot about. You negotiate one bill with a 5-minute phone call that saves you money for years. You learn one skill that lets you ask for a raise. None of these feel dramatic on its own, and that's kind of the whole point, because each is small enough that you'll actually do it and stick with it. But stack a year of tiny 1% improvements on top of each other and you'll become almost unrecognizable from a money standpoint. This is also how you raise your income, which matters just as much as saving. So get 1% better at your craft every month, become more valuable, and a more valuable person earns more. Kaizen is patient, and it's the opposite of the crash diets people try with their finances every January and then abandon by February. Small, steady, forever. That's a pace that wins, and that's a good start that you can build on. Mottainai. Treat everything you own as something not to waste. So there's one more really cool Japanese idea that I love called mottainai. It's a deep sense that waste is something to genuinely regret, that everything has value and shouldn't be just carelessly thrown away. So in a world that is constantly telling you to go buy the new thing and toss out the old one, mottainai is more radical and it's a wealth-building superpower. It means you maintain and repair the things you own instead of instantly replacing them. It means you You use something fully before buying its replacement. It means when you're about to spend, you pause for a second and ask yourself, do I truly need this, or am I just bored, or am I just trying to impress somebody else? This mindset naturally protects you from one of the biggest wealth killers of all, lifestyle creep, the sneaky way your spending rises to swallow every raise that you ever make. So you make more and more, and somehow you never get ahead. When you respect what you have, you stop needing an endless drive of new things just to feel okay. And that contentment is worth more than Almost anything that you can actually buy. This stretches beyond your wallet, which is why I love it. What Tai Chi teaches you not to waste your time, your talent, or your one-shot life chasing things that you don't actually care about or matter to you. A person who respects a twenty-dollar bill enough not to waste it usually respects an hour enough not to waste it too. And those two habits together carry you further than any one-time lucky break. So waste nothing, value what you have, and watch how much more of your money stays. Yours. Think in decades. The long game is the whole game. So everything I've shared rests on one final principle that ties the whole Japanese art of quiet wealth together, and it's patience. You have to think in decades. Konosuke Matsushita literally planned 250 years into the future because he understood that anything truly great is built slowly, brick by patient brick. In money, this is the difference between the people who make it and the people who don't. The person who invests a small amount every month and refuses to touch it for 30 ends up wealthy. The person who panics and sells the moment that the market dips or raids the account to buy something shiny resets the clock to zero over and over and never gets anywhere. Compounding needs one thing above all else to work its magic: time you refuse to interrupt. So build yourself a buffer first, an emergency fund of a few months of expenses so a surprise bill or a lost job never forces you to sell your future just to survive the right now. The old farmers stored grain against a bad harvest just for a reason. Then with that buffer different place, you can plant the seeds as you wait calmly through every scary headline in the news. There's an image that I love. Um, it's a bird sitting on a branch, isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch, it was in her wings. So your wings here are your habits, these habits, this system, the discipline that you're building. Once you trust a system, you stop panicking about every up and down that happens. I think your purpose comes from your pain, and if money has been a source of pain and fear in your life, then mastering this art can become part of your mission, the thing that you model, and then you teach your And the people around you, play the long game because it's the whole game. So there's the quiet Japanese art of becoming wealthy, and none of it required a big salary. So pay yourself first, track every dollar, live below your means, invest the difference, get one percent better every month, waste nothing, and think in decades. A boy with four years of school and a pond kimono built an empire on those bones, and you're standing here with far more than he ever had. So you know when the best time to begin is? Right now. How about right now? If you can do this, and you absolutely can, then you must. If you're broke right now, it's not because you're lazy or because you're not smart enough. It's because the game was designed for you to lose, and nobody ever handed you the real playbook. The Federal Reserve's own data shows the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth in the entire country, which means half the people in the richest nation on Earth are fighting over crumbs. But 500 years ago, a ruthless Italian named Machiavelli wrote down the cold, brutal strategies that the powerful were using to win and keep winning. And today I'm handing you 10 of them, because the day you stop playing fair with a system that was never fair to you is the day everything starts to change. Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He grew up dirt poor on a farm in Vermont, so poor that he hitchhiked and walked miles just to get to school. He came home from the war and spent about 25 years pumping gas at a gas station, and then he worked as a janitor at JCPenney sweeping floors for another 17 years. He never made much money in his life. He wore the same old flannel coat held together with safety pins and drove a beat-up secondhand car. So when Ronald Reed died in 2014 at 92 years old, the people in his small town got the shock of their lives. This quiet janitor had left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $4.8 million to his local hospital and $1.2 million to the library? How does a gas station attendant and a janitor die richer than most doctors? He spent less than he earned. He bought shares of boring, solid companies. And then he did the hardest thing of all— he waited for decades. He let his money quietly multiply while everyone around them spent theirs on stuff that fell apart. He wasn't lucky. He wasn't a genius. He was patient. He was disciplined. And that combination beats a giant paycheck Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great for Ronald, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I can barely cover my rent. So how am I supposed to build wealth from nothing left over at the end of the month? Here's what's important to understand. Building wealth on a low income was never about how much you make. It's about strategy. And strategy is the one weapon that doesn't cost you a single dollar. A high income with no strategy goes away. You've watched broke celebrities and bankrupt lottery winners prove that 100 times over. Yeah, I've seen it. But a low income with brutal discipline strategy compounds into actual real freedom. The amount you start with matters far less than the rules that you're playing by. And most people never learn the rules because the people who profit from you being broke don't want you to. So let me give you the 10 moves Machiavelli would hand you if he were sitting here with you today. And fair warning, they're gonna feel uncomfortable because comfort is the exact thing that's been keeping people poor. Number 1, bet on your skill, never on your luck. So Machiavelli split the whole world into 2 forces. There's Fortuna, which is luck, the random chaos that you don't control. And he said it rules maybe half of your life. And then there's Virtue, the— your skill, your foresight, your decisive action. And that's the half that you do control. Broke people spend their whole lives praying to Fortuna. They wait for the lottery ticket, the inheritance, the lucky break. That's going to save them. The strategist does the opposite. You pour everything into virtue and take command of what actually is in your hands. And the very first thing in your hands is information. So start tracking every single dollar that comes in and every single dollar that goes out starting today. Most people who are broke generally have no idea where their money disappears to, and you cannot command an army that you cannot even see. So when you log every transaction for 30 days, You'll find the leaks, the subscriptions you forgot about, the little daily spends that quietly are bleeding you dry. Plugging those leaks is the easiest money that you'll ever make, and it costs you nothing but a little bit of honesty. All progress begins with telling the truth, and that includes telling the truth about your money. And foresight is the part of virtue too. The strategist doesn't just react to the month; he plays the long game. He sees the moves three years out and acts on it today while everyone else. Else is only thinking about Friday night. You don't control whether you got dealt a bad hand, but you absolutely do control how you play it. Number 2, see the game exactly as it is. Machiavelli's most powerful rule was to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were. So here is a cold reality: the financial system is not on your side. It is engineered to keep you spending and borrowing Because your debt is somebody else's income. Buy now, pay later, 0% financing, credit card minimum payments— these things are all designed to look harmless while they quietly drain you for years. So you fight back with what I call rich math. Never ever judge a purchase by its monthly payment. Judge it by its full, total, real cost. The system trains you to ask, well, what's the monthly payment? Because that little number, it hides the damage. The wealthy ask, what does this actually cost me in total? And what could that same money become if I invested it instead. And then you hunt down your high-interest debt and you destroy it like your future depends on it. Every dollar you pay in interest is a soldier that is fighting for the other side. Take those soldiers back. Number 3, build walls of discipline, not willpower. So a brutal truth about human beings that Machiavelli understood 500 years ago is that people are weak under pressure. Your willpower will absolutely collapse the moment when something gets hard. And life always gets hard. That's why he never trusted good intentions. He trusted strong walls. So stop relying on motivation to save money because motivation is the most unreliable thing that you can do on your own. Build the wall instead. The very moment that money hits your account, automate a transfer that pulls a set amount into a separate savings account before you can even think about it. Then make that account painful to reach. No debit card attached to it. Delete the app off your phone. The goal is to make savings being completely automatic and makes spending that money a genuine hassle. You pay yourself first before a single bill, before a night out. When the structure does the work, your weak moments can't sabotage you anymore. Number 4, move in complete silence. Machiavelli knew that the moment that you reveal your strength, you paint a target on your own back. The same thing is true with money. The second that people around you They sense that you've got some. They all want a piece of it. Family starts asking for loans. Friends expect you to grab every check. And worst of all, you feel this pressure to prove it with a new car or flashy wardrobe. So you do the opposite of what your ego wants. You build your wealth in total silence. You let your money be present but completely invisible. Drive the modest car for a few more years. Keep the quiet apartment. Wear the regular clothes. Let your bank account grow while your lifestyle barely changes. The broke person spends to look rich. The strategist looks ordinary on purpose and gets rich for real. Think about Ronald Reed again. The whole town thought he was just a poor old janitor right up until the day he died, and that invisibility—that was a superpower because nobody ever came asking for a handout, and nobody ever pressured him to keep up. Every dollar you don't spend impressing strangers is a dollar that stands guard growing your army. Let them underestimate you. The quiet ones are the ones. Who win. Number 5, seize assets. Don't rent out your hours. The 99% trade their time for money, and that's exactly why 99% of people don't get rich. There are only 24 hours in a day. Everybody has the same 24 hours. So when you sell your hours, your income has a hard ceiling no matter how hard you're working. Machiavelli respected those who seized territory and held it. And in the money game, your territory is assets, the things you own that make That make money whether you show up or not. So shares of solid companies like Ronald Read bought, a small piece of real estate down the road, a digital product you build once and sell 1,000 times. This is where the pay yourself first money goes, not into savings account to rot, but into ownership. So stop thinking like a worker who rents out your hours and start thinking like an owner who buys things that pay you. Every dollar you put into an asset is another soldier you send out to work 24 hours a day. And unlike you, that soldier never sleeps and never quits. Number 6, be ruthless about your generosity. This one might sting, but you might need it. Machiavelli warned that generosity given carelessly will bankrupt the giver and breed entitlement in everyone around them. So when you're building wealth or on a low income, you simply can't be the personal bank account for your entire circle. Giving money out of guilt drains your reserves and also trains people to depend on you instead of building things for themselves. Number 7, be ruthless about your time. So you give with strategy, not with guilt. Give when it actually builds something, when it lifts someone towards standing up on their own, not when you're being pressured into doing it. Protect your capital the way that the general guards a treasury that funds the entire war, because the thing that people don't say is staying broke so that you can rescue everybody else doesn't actually help anybody. Get strong first. A wealthy you can help 100 people for the rest of your life. A broke you can't even help yourself, and it definitely can't help them. So it's put your own oxygen mask on first before trying to save the whole plane. Number 7: Build the machine, then master one thing first. So the wise don't chase money around all day. They build a machine that commands money to come to them. Ronald Read built a quiet machine out of dividend stocks that paid him whether he was awake or asleep. So the goal becomes to build an automated income that doesn't depend on your sweat. But listen to this carefully, because a lot of people get this wrong. So don't try to build 5 machines at once. When you're starting out, the path to wealth is almost never multiple streams of income. It's not— look at people's stories. It's not. It's becoming absolutely killer at one single thing. The people who chase 5 side hustles all at the same time usually do 5 of them really badly and burn out with nothing to show for themselves. So pick one skill, one asset, one stream, and you master it until it actually pays you. Then and only then you can take that money and start building the next machine. Like the expression goes, one blade sharpened to a razor's edge beats 10 dull blades every single time. Number 8, pay for speed. Here's a strategy that feels completely backwards when money is tight, but it's actually how achievers win. Achievers pay for speed. So when you're broke, your instinct is to figure everything out for yourself for free But figuring out alone can cost you years and a mountain of actually expensive mistakes. The single smartest investment a low-income person can ever make on their own is into skills and knowledge, is into yourself, because your ability to earn is the one asset that no stock market crash can wipe you out and no thief can ever steal from you. A $30 book or an online course that teaches you a skill which raises your income for the rest of your life is the highest return you can make on earth. It's not even close. Look at it this way: if you spend three years struggling alone to learn something an expert could have taught you in three months, that lost time isn't free. It's the most expensive thing that you'll ever buy, and you paid for it with time out of your life. So before you try to invest in anything else, invest in your own earning power first. Sharpen the one tool that produces all the others, which is you. Number nine: Speak like someone who selects, not someone who. Machiavelli understood that power is established by how you carry yourself. So show weakness and dependency, and the world will exploit you every time. So watch how you speak about money. Broke people speak like applicants, hoping, asking, begging for a shot. Wealthy people speak like they select, like they're the prize choosing who gets access to them. You have to retrain your own thinking and language. When you sit down to negotiate a salary, a rate, a price, a deal, you communicate from a place of authority and calm value, even if you don't have a ton of money in your bank account. So stop saying, I was hoping for, and start saying, well, my rate is. Stop apologizing for your prices. Learn to say a number and then go completely silent and let it sit there. Because the person who speaks first in negotiation usually loses. People will always pay more to someone who carries themselves like they're worth more. And remember, raising your income is the single fastest accelerant on this entire list. And it very often starts with nothing more than how Number 10, strike now while everyone else is hesitating. Machiavelli said fortune favors the bold and that wealth grows in the exact spot where hesitation dies. The number one reason people stay broke for their whole life isn't a lack of money. It's waiting, waiting for more money to start, waiting for more time to start, waiting for the perfect moment that is never ever coming. So let me be as clear as I can on this. What is the perfect moment? Don't wait for permission. Don't wait to feel ready because ready is fake. You start with whatever you have in your hands right now. Invest $20 this week. Open the account today. Track your first dollar tonight. Here's how it works. You get rich slowly and then you get rich suddenly because the slow part only ever begins the moment you decide to start. The best time they say, right, to plant the seed was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. How about right now? The story they'll tell about you. The fact that you're starting with less isn't the thing that disqualifies you. It's actually the thing that's going to make your story pretty remarkable. Ronald Read proved that a quiet janitor can outbuild a millionaire. And if a man with a safety pin that holds his coat together can do it, so can you. You have the ability. So now you have the responsibility to actually use it. Law number 1: 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 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 Rule 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, on the other hand, think differently. They believe they deserve success and can learn whatever skills wealth requires. So the excuse 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 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 it. Money in your top 5 means you price your product right, you monetize your skills, you track your revenue because you know No 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 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. The 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 six: Avoid bad debt. Leverage the good debt. There are two 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 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 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 single tree. Don't wait for enough money to invest. Even $50 a month invested $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'll 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 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 streams, 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. We'll 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 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 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 have. 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 and 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 risks and embrace failure. No risk, no reward. It's a cliché, but it's 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 data. They learned and kept moving. As the saying goes, winners are not afraid of losing. 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 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 six 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 slow. 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 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 seven. Each of 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 sixteen: 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 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 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. 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 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 or spreadsheets, chalk on a board, whatever works for you, but track 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 managed. 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. 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 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 every day. So celebrate your wins, yes, 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 it 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 20 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. Getting rich in America is far more ordinary than anyone ever told you. Can I get rich if I just have a salary, do you think? Yeah, you can. But if you want to make a couple million dollars, 100%. Can everybody do that? It's only not Accessible to you if you're a lazy piece of shit that wants to do nothing.

I think earning money is one of the simplest things I ever learned, and it's one of the most misunderstood things.

I went through the research on America's self-made millionaires, and 80% of them are the first generation in their family to ever be rich, according to Dr. Thomas Stanley and Dr. William Danko's national study in The Millionaire Next Door. I was raised on a farm with my grandmother, um, for the first 6 years If you'd asked me at the time if we were poor, I probably would've said no, because when you are living it and you don't know anything else, you think that's the way life is.

My car was my home where I'm going to live. Got a blanket, a pillow in there, and all the other stuff went in the trunk or in the other seat. And then to eat, I figured out a way to eat off $2.50 a day.

So this isn't really about money for you. It's about whether you get to decide what your life is going to be like.

The paycheck is one of the most sinister plots ever pulled upon a human being. If you need a paycheck, you've sold your soul.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. There's a woman named Ann Scheiber who spent her whole career as an auditor at the IRS, and she was passed over for promotion again and again, no matter how hard she worked. Never once earning more than about $4,000 a year. When she retired in 1944, she had a small pension and around $5,000 in savings to her name, and that was it. That's the whole pile. She lived quietly and frugally in the same tiny rent-controlled New York apartment for decades, and to anyone passing her on the street, she just looked like a little old lady with almost nothing. When she passed away in 1995 at the age of 101, the world found out she had turned that $5,000 into an estate worth $22 million, and she left every penny of it to fund scholarships for young women. She never won the lottery. She never started a company. She simply bought shares in strong brand name companies that she understood, like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, reinvested every single dividend, and then did the hardest thing of all, which was to leave it alone for 50 years while it compounded. Nobody handed Ann a dollar of it. She built it One careful decision at a time with habits so boring that the people right next to her never even noticed. And when I sat down and looked at 50 self-made millionaires to see what they actually have in common, Anne wasn't the exception. She was the rule. The same patterns showed up again and again in the retired auditor and the billionaire. And that's exactly why this is so good for you. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a nice story, but that woman had 50 years to let it grow and you don't have that kind of runway or that kind of patience. So try to hear me on this because it matters more than almost anything that I'll say today. The research doesn't say that you need a high salary or a head start or a rich uncle. It says you need to do a small set of specific things consistently, starting from wherever you are starting today. The Federal Reserve found that there are now around 16 million millionaire households in the United States, which is roughly 1 in 8 American families, and the vast majority built it themselves. The reason this feels Out of reach for so many people, it's not your income. It's that nobody ever showed you the actual pattern, so you've been guessing. So let me show you the pattern, because once you see what these people repeat over and over, you can't unsee it, and you can start running it this week. Decide it's yours first. So before any of them had a single dollar of proof, they decided they were allowed to be wealthy. This might sound soft, and especially as point number one, but it's the most important one on this whole list. So. So stay with me. Henry Ford said it best. If you believe you can do a great thing or you believe you can't, you're right either way. The self-made millionaires I studied didn't wait to feel rich before they started acting like an owner of their own future. They switched the order that you've been probably living your whole life. They became the kind of person who builds wealth first in their identity, and then the daily actions followed naturally from that identity. So being leads to doing. When you wake up already seeing yourself as someone who is fully responsible for your own financial You stop buying things to look impressive to strangers, and you start buying assets to actually become wealthy. And this is the part that almost nobody talks about. The research on self-made millionaires found that they score sky high on emotional stability, and they're comfortable being different from the crowd. They had to be because acting wealthy and looking wealthy are opposite habits, and they chose to actually be it. So that one shift, that deciding that it's yours before your bank account agrees, is the foundation underneath every other habit. that I'm going to give you today. Your circumstances right now are a good start, and your only job is to decide that you're meant for far more than them. The bird sitting on the branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her own wings. That's the mindset that you're building. So you need to stop needing your situation to be perfect because your confidence lives in what you're capable of, not in what you currently have. Get killer at one thing. So self-made millionaires, they got genuinely great at one thing. Before they ever tried to do everything. There's that popular idea floating around that you need 7 income streams or 25 streams of income to get rich. So people go and they start 7 mediocre projects at once, and then they wonder why none of them ever take off. The self-made millionaires, they did the opposite. They went all in on becoming genuinely excellent at one skill or one business, and they let that one thing become the engine that funded everything else later on. So think about this like an edge of a puzzle you're working You build the borders first, you get one strong frame locked in, and then the middle pieces become easy to fill in. Anne Scheiber mastered exactly one boring strategy, owning great dividend companies and never selling them. And she ran it for 50 years straight. The richest investors alive will tell you the same thing, that they got wealthy by going deep on one approach and refusing to get bored with it. The multiple streams of income that you hear about are real, but they show up at the end of the story, not at the beginning. They come from owning one thing So completely that it overflows into the next. So pick your one thing right now. Get so good at it that you become the obvious choice in your own little corner of the world—the person that people call first. Depth beats spread every time, especially in the early years when your energy is your most limited resource. Spend less than you make. Okay, so this is the habit that built Ains' $22 million empire, and you can copy. It's starting with your very next paycheck. They live below their means while they were building on purpose, and they never apologize for it. Dr. Stanley's research found that the typical self-made millionaire invests close to 20% of their income every single year. His study even found that more than 6 in 10 of them could tell you precisely what their household spends on food, clothing, and shelter each year. That's not something glamorous, and that is the entire point. These are people who could easily afford the flashy car, and chose the reliable used one, who could afford the giant house and chose the sensible one, so that the gap between what they earned and what they spent could go straight to work for them. So you don't have to live like a monk for the rest of your life. You just have to win the early years by keeping that gap as wide as you can and pointing it at assets instead of stuff that impresses people that you don't even like. Every dollar you don't spend on looking rich is a dollar you can spend on actually The discipline you show in the next 24 months is what buys your freedom for the next 40 years. Make your investing automatic. Self-made millionaires, they set their investing on autopilot so their own emotions can never get in the way. So here's a stat that surprised a lot of people when I found it. Dr. Stanley found that fewer than 10% of millionaires are active traders who buy and sell within a single year, and that a full 42% of them make their investments made zero trades at all in the year before they were surveyed. They are not glued to the screen reacting to every scary headline and every hot tip that they get. They set up a simple system where a fixed percentage of every dollar that they earn, often around 10%, gets routed straight into long-term investments before they can even feel it leave. And then they let time and compounding do the heavy lifting for them. This is leverage of the quietest kind. Your money keeps working at 2 in the morning while you sleep every weekend, every holiday, never calling in sick, never asking you for anything. And the discipline to leave it alone is its own kind of superpower, because the urge to panic and sell is what wrecks the results of almost everyone who tries. The ones who win at this aren't the smartest about the market. They're the ones who took themselves out of the decision entirely and let the machine run on autopilot. So set up the automatic transfers this week, even if it's tiny, and then protect it like it's sacred. Guard your time. Time like gold. Self-made millionaires fiercely protect the one thing they can never make more of, which is their time. The self-made people that I studied valued their time almost infinitely over their money, and they run their days through a simple filter that I like to call eliminate, automate, delegate. So first they eliminate the roughly 80% of activities that keeps them busy but broke, the stuff that feels like work but never actually grows anything. And then they automate whatever piece of software or a bit of AI can handle for them on repeat, and then they delegate what's left over to someone else, even if it starts with just one virtual assistant for a few hours a week, what they keep for themselves is the small, precious slice of work that only they can do, the work that actually multiplies the money. And you can start this today with nothing but your own calendar. So look at everything that you did last week and ask which of it a wealthy version of you would have eliminated, automated, or handed to somebody else. Then go reclaim those hours and spend them on the one or two activities that genuinely build your future. Rich people aren't busier than you. They're just ruthless about what they refuse to do because they understand that every hour spent on low-value work is an hour stolen from the work that makes them become free. Build your circle of 50. Self-made millionaires understand that relationships are the highest form of leverage that you will ever have. The richest people don't grind away alone in the corner hoping that someone discovers them. They deliberately build a small circle of the right people who can spend life-changing opportunities their way. So one of the things that I do in our Movement Makers program is I teach making a list of the 50 people in your world who could refer real money or open up real doors for you over the course of a year. And instead of cold pitching them or begging them for scraps, you invite them in, you make them look good, you start a show, you serve them first, you build a genuine relationship, you invite to interview them before you ever ask a thing. The wealth follows the trust, always in that order. And it's not just who you know, it's what you offer them. So the premium things that people actually pay for come down to a few simple words: community, convenience, customization, and real coaching. And the self-made build their relationships and their offers around delivering exactly those things. When you become the person who gives before you ask for anything in return, doors start to swing open that money alone couldn't open. So you cannot do everything yourself. And none of the 50 millionaires that I studied ever tried to. They surround themselves with people who raise the ceiling on what was possible, and then they did the same thing for others. Never stop learning. Self-made millionaires—they never stop feeding their own mind because the self-made treat learning like a job that never ends. So there's a researcher named Tom Corley who spent five years studying the daily habits of 233 self-made millionaires, and one final. Stood out for me above the others. A full 88% of them read at least 30 minutes every single day for self-education. So books on their craft, biographies of people that they looked up to, anything that made them just a little bit sharper. Among the people in the study who were struggling financially, only 2% did the same. That gap is pretty big and it compounds over the years exactly like money does. The self-made pour hours into their own education long after school is over and the tests have stopped. Because I know that the highest returning asset on earth is this, right? The one sitting between your ears. They chose a biography over entertainment and one hard book over ten easy distractions on purpose every day. So build that habit starting today. Read twenty pages a day. Watch a YouTube video that's educational a day. Take a course that you've been putting off. Get close to the people who are ten steps ahead of you and learn how they think. You don't have to be the smartest person in any room. You just have to. Refuse to stop getting better because the version of you that keeps learning is the exact version that eventually gets wealthy. Anchor it to mission. This last one here holds everything together, and it's that for these people, the money was never the actual point. So when you study them up close, self-made millionaires, almost none of them got outta bed every day just chasing dollars. They were chasing a mission, a problem that they were obsessed with solving, a family that they were determined to provide for, a mark that they wanted to leave on the world. The money's just a way of keeping track, and here's why that matters. I think in the most practical way, because a mission is what gives you the staying power to run these boring habits for 10, 20, 30 years, long after your motivation is gone and like people aren't clapping for you. Even the most successful people I studied spent a huge chunk of their days fighting doubts and fighting their fears, and only a small slice of their time feeling unstoppable. The mission is what carries them through the doubt. Your purpose comes from your pain, from the exact thing in your life you never want anyone you love to go When you build your wealth on top of a reason that big, then the frugality stops feeling like sacrifice and it stops feeling like waiting because every dollar is buying you something that you actually care about. So if you have the ability to build this kind of life, then you have the responsibility to do it. If you can, then you must. You're closer than you think. So when I lay all 50 of them side by side, these self-made millionaires, the pattern is, is pretty simple. And that's maybe the best news that you'll hear all week. Decide that it's yours. Master one thing. Spend less than you make. Invest automatically. Guard your time like gold. Build real relationships. Never stop learning. And anchor it all to a mission that's bigger than money. None of that requires a rich family, a genius IQ, a lucky break. It requires you to start and to keep going when it's boring. And the best time to start? How about right now? You're far more capable than your current Bank account is whispering to you right now, and the quiet, ordinary, almost invisible habits that built every one of these fortunes are sitting right in front of you as well, waiting for you to simply pick them up and run. Almost every business that dies gets killed by the person who started it—not the market, not bad luck, and not by the economy.

Unfortunately, and one does have to be focused on the short-term and money coming in when creating a company because otherwise. Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them.

Good engineers, lousy management. Successful businesses have to satisfy a real need, a need that people will actually pay to have fulfilled. Now, you may have an idea, you may love your product, you may love your service, but if that product or service doesn't fix a specific problem, your business will fail. Nearly half of new businesses fail within their first 5 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 22% of business startups fail in the first year, and 50% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. And what's really on the line here at It's not just your business, it's the years of your life that you're about to pour into it and whether they add up to something that lasts or disappear like it never happened.

Take a wild success like Airbnb everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought no one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger.

Of course, people proved that wrong.

But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing. That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. So I went deep on 50 businesses that died, and I kept coming back to Sam Walton. Before he built the biggest company on the planet, Sam was a nobody running a single Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, pulling in about $20,000 a year. He worked harder than anyone in town. He obsessed over low prices and treating customers right, and he turned that little rented store into one of the most profitable shops in the whole region. He did everything right, and then he lost it all. Sam didn't own the building, he only rented it. And when his landlord saw how much money that store was making, the man refused to renew the lease to Sam and handed his entire business to his own son. Just like that, the best store in the area was gone. And Sam Walton had nothing to show for years of work except one pretty brutal lesson. You have to own the land, you have to own the building, you have to own your foundation. Anyone else might have walked away right there. Most people do, but Sam didn't. Your purpose comes to your pain, I think, and Sam's purpose got forged the day he lost that store. With his wife Helen pushing him to start over in a new town, he sold what was left, moved to Bentonville, and in 1962, he opened the first Walmart. He built it on everything that loss taught him. Today, Walmart pulls in $648 billion a year, and about 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. Your setbacks do not have to be permanent. It's only permanent if you stop. Sam turned the pain of losing one store into creating 10,000 more. Okay, so here's what you might be thinking. Your business might be different. You know, your idea is better, you care more, you'll outwork everyone around you. So those 50 dead businesses have nothing to do with you. I get it. But here's what hit me when I studied them. Almost all these founders thought the exact same thing. They weren't lazy people. A lot of them were brilliant. A lot of them were working 80-hour weeks. What killed them was not a lack of effort. It was a blind spot. One weakness that they never saw coming. Exactly like Sam Walton not owning his building. Effort doesn't save you from these blind spots. Seeing it does. So let me walk you through the blind spots that killed all 50 businesses so you can find yours before it's too late. Killer number 1, running out of cash. The first killer is running out of cash, and it took down more of these businesses than anything else. Here's the part that scares most people. You can run a business that looks profitable on paper and still go broke because profit and cash are not the same thing. Profit is a number on a spreadsheet at the end of the month. Cash is what's actually in your account On Tuesday when your payment is due, your expenses show up fast and on time. Your payroll, your rent, your ad spend, your software—they all—they get paid with clockwork. They're showing up. Your customer payments—they show up usually slower: thirty days, sixty days, sometimes ninety days later. That gap in the middle is where businesses often bleed out, and you can be growing the whole time it's happening. It gets worse when a founder hits one good month and treats it like this is the new normal. I've watched people spend tens of thousands of dollars on fancy equipment. After a single strong week and then get wiped out the next month because they had a slow month and because they kept zero reserve. I watched a coaching company hit almost $4 million a year in revenue and still have to shut its doors. Almost $4 million. They ran outta cash because they spent too much on ads, paid the team too much, uh, built a structure that they couldn't sustain and never looked deeply at their accounting. And if you're trying to build the whole thing on $87 or $99 a month product, Listen, because the capital burns out before the idea burns out. Low-ticket models often need massive scale. They need huge customer service and they get hammered by refunds and chargebacks. So here's what you can do. Watch your cash, not just your profit. Keep at least 3 to 6 months of expenses in reserve so one slow month can't end you. Know your numbers cold. I know it's hard for some people every week, not just once a quarter, once a year when it's already too late. And sell something with enough margin to actually fund the business. So I don't like decisions that make me feel weak, and nothing makes you feel weaker than checking your bank account and realizing that the money is already gone. Killer number 2: building something nobody wants. The second killer here is building something that nobody actually wants. This one is pretty sneaky because it feels like progress, right? Your head's down, you're building something, you're quietly creating, and you add another feature and it like that you're being productive because you're busy and you're busy and you're shipping. And then you take it out to the markets and like nothing happens. And I did this with my very first software company. I spent months building a feature that I thought was incredibly cool, right? We took it to market, like nobody wanted it. Nobody. All that time, all that work was gone because we built in a vacuum and never asked a single customer if they actually needed this thing or not. The fix here is so simple that it's almost embarrassing. It hurts. Go find a customer first, then build around what they actually need. So talk to 10 real people in your market before you build anything. And don't ask them if they like the idea. Ask them the problem that keeps them up at night and what they've already tried to pay to solve. Then sell it before you make it. Take a deposit, pre-sell the spot, get a real credit card payment for the promise of the thing. If real people won't pay you for the promise of it, they won't pay you for the finished version either. It's a lot harder. And you just saved yourself a year. Get honest about the problem that you solve, because if you don't solve a real problem, you do not have a real business. Entrepreneurship is about solving problems. You have an expensive hobby. And one more addition here: chasing small, broke customers and hoping they grow rich with you—they won't. Pick customers who can actually afford you right now, who have the budget to pay you what you're worth today, right now, and build for them. Killer number three: the right things in the wrong order. Okay, the third killer here is doing the right things in the wrong order. A lot of these businesses. They didn't die because the founders were doing dumb things. They died because they were doing smart things in the wrong sequence. And I see it all the time. A founder with no steady revenue decides to build a massive global brand or launch a low-ticket online course before they've ever built a simple high-ticket engine that brings in real money every single month. So they spend a year on logos and funnels and fancy websites and content while your bank account slowly drains and not one of those things is actually paying your bills. The order matters more than the effort. So phase 1 is something higher ticket that generates steady cash. One offer, a clear customer, enough money per sale that a handful of clients keeps your lights on. That cash funds the team and the systems you need to survive everything that comes next. Only once that engine is steady do you earn the right to go to phase 2, the lower ticket courses, the products that end up scaling. And then only after that you build phase 3, the big brand, the global audience. Get steady money coming in first and everything you build on top of it gets so much easier because now you're building with money in the bank. Instead of running on your savings and investments. When you try to skip that first step, it's like you're you're building a house and you're trying to create the second floor before you've even built the foundation. And you know how that ends. Killer number four: no systems, no scale. The fourth killer is having no system. A friend of mine, Nick Peterson, likes to say nail it then scale it. And this is also a powerful idea in the book The E Myth Revisited, which is that most small businesses fail and most franchises can succeed. So think about why is that? A franchise runs on documented It's a documented, repeatable recipe that almost anyone can follow. Walking into any location of a big franchise and you get the same result because the magic is written down in a playbook that anyone can run instead of just locked inside one person's head. The average founder does the opposite, right? You keep shooting from the hip, you keep trying to do the entire business inside your own head, and if you never write it down, your killer recipe, then 2 things happen and both of them can be completely fatal. First, you can't scale because you are the bottleneck for everything, right? Ever, ever feel that you're the bottleneck? Every fire, uh, every customer waits on you. And second, anyone you hire operates at a lower level because they're guessing at what you do instead of following a proven process. And then you decide hiring doesn't work when really you just never gave people the recipe to follow. So I think being leads to doing. So start being the kind of owner who builds the systems, even when it's just you. Write down exactly how you get a customer step by step, how you deliver the work step by step, how you keep them happy and get them to refer to you. you step by step. Turn the magic in your head into a checklist your team can run without you standing over them. The day your business can win without you in every single room is the day it stops being this fragile little egg and starts being worth something. Killer number 5, keeping the wrong people. The 5th killer is keeping the wrong people. This is tough. This one is hard because it's personal and it costs you twice. Founders hold on to underperformers, the team members who are barely Treading water, the friends you had from high school, the people that you might've started with, you hold onto them long after you should have let them go because firing usually feels cruel and hiring again feels pretty exhausting. But every single day you hold onto someone who's just okay, you give up the chance to bring in somebody great because A players are in limited supply and you've got a seat filled with someone who's just the wrong person. A B player doesn't just do B-level work, they block the A player who could have had that seat. And the other side of this is maybe even worse. Putting good people in the wrong roles. If you take someone whose gift is starting new creative projects and bury them in monotonous, boring, repetitive grind work, they're going to burn out and fail, and it's not their fault. You put them in the wrong seat and then blame the person. So match the work to the person's natural strengths. Give the starters the new projects and the finishers the systems, and be brutally honest with yourself about what's actually moving the business forward and who's just kind of still being busy. That's a good start, but now I want you to go further than good. We build a team where every single seat is filled by someone who is excellent at that exact job, and watch how much lighter the whole thing gets carried. Killer number 6, the best-kept secret. The 6th killer is just being the best-kept secret in your industry. You can have the highest quality product in your entire market and still lose to a mediocre competitor who just simply cracked the content code, because best known Beats best every time. If nobody knows you exist, your quality literally does not matter because they can't buy what they can't find. And this might be a little uncomfortable. A lot of founders hide behind their branding, their funnels, the logos, the pretty websites, because all that work feels like work while letting them avoid the one thing that actually pays the bills, asking for the sale and collecting the payment. It's so much more comfortable to redesign your homepage for the 80th time. than to look someone in the eye and ask for their credit card. I watched a friend of mine spend $70,000 in a single year on polished thought leadership content and get basically zero results to the point where he almost quit creating content completely. The content alone didn't save him because without a clear ask, it's just expensive time that you're putting out every week. So put yourself out there every single day, tell people exactly what you do and who you help, and then make the ask. The money is on the other side of the ask. And the only way you get good at asking is to ask more often. Killer number seven: built on rented land. So the seventh killer is building your whole business on land that you don't own. So remember Sam Walton losing that store because he only rented the building? The modern version of his mistake—it's everywhere and is it is deadly. You build your entire business on top of one thing that you don't actually own, like one social media algorithm, one marketplace, one big client who makes up eighty percent of your revenue. When I looked at those fifty failures. More than half of them were dangerously concentrated on a single platform or a single customer. And the day that the algorithm changed or the terms changed or that one client walked away or went under, the business that took years to build was gone in a week. It feels completely fine when it's working, right? You're on top of the world, which is exactly why so many smart founders miss it until it's too late. The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, and you don't get a vote, Right? So own your foundation, own your email list, because that's an audience nobody can just delete or take out from under you. Own the direct relationship with your customers, not just the followers on a page that you've rented. Spread your revenue so no single channel platform or client can end you by changing their mind on a Tuesday. Build on ground you actually control the way Sam Walton swore he would do the day he lost that first store. Killer number eight: quitting right before it works. The eighth killer. Oh, this is so tough. It's quitting right before it works. When sales slow down, founders panic and fall straight into a scarcity mindset. They start slashing prices, offering payment plans they can't afford, uh, chasing any customer with a pulse and making desperate decisions that dig the hole deeper instead of actually helping them climb out. And a huge number of them give up the exact moment that success was just around the corner. MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, made 130 videos before he ever cracked 10,000 views. 130 videos. Imagine a version of him who quit on video 129, one away from the breakthrough, convinced that it's just never gonna work. That person never becomes MrBeast. It shows up in small ways too. You send one email, you don't hear back, and you decide, oh, they're not interested, when the truth is the win was 3 follow-ups away with just a busy person who doesn't hate you. They're just busy. Success lives in the consistent repeated effort, the boring follow-ups that everyone else is Too proud or too scared to do. I think if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. So when that voice shows up and it's telling you, "Hey, you should quit," treat it as a signal that you're close and push for just one more time. So just build a little momentum and protect your belief like it's the most valuable asset that you own. So here's what I really want you to hear: Every one of these fifty businesses died from something the founder could control. That's not bad news; that's actually awesome news. It's the best news. That you'll get all day because it means survival is in your hands, not, not the market, not the government, not the president. I love this quote about a bird on a branch isn't scared of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. Go find your blind spot and fix it before it finds you. Your intelligence is the reason you're not successful. Being smart might actually be holding you back. Every day I see brilliant people with sky-high IQs lose to others with half their talent. Why? Because intelligence alone doesn't automatically translate to results. If you keep letting your smarts run the show, you'll watch those average people, the ones who show up consistently and push through, leapfrog right over you. And the worst part? The world misses out on your genius. The woman who should have cured cancer might be stuck in a dead-end job because she didn't believe in herself or take action. Think The fast, cocky hare, the smart one, took a nap thinking he had the race won. The slow but steady tortoise kept going and crossed the finish line first. In real life, too many smart people act like the hare, so confident in their brainpower that they get complacent or overcomplicate everything, while the less assuming tortoises quietly grind out the win. Being the hare might feel good at first, but it doesn't last. That's right. Doesn't win races. I learned that the hard way in my early twenties. I had a shot at a life-changing deal, selling my first company for millions of dollars. I was trying to be the smart kid with a detailed plan, and I overplanned everything. I spent months crafting the perfect business plan instead of actually doing something. And guess what happened? A big company came looking to buy businesses like mine, but we weren't ready to move. It came down to my company. And our biggest competitor, and we lost. And that competitor of ours got bought for $40 million while I was still polishing my plan. $40 million! That stung. I could have sold my business for $40 million, but I missed my shot because I was being too perfect. That failure woke me up. I realized my smart plan was really just fear in disguise— fear of making a mistake, fear of it not being perfect. Perfectionism is really just fear. We call it diligence, but really You're just scared. I decided to become a recovering perfectionist after that. Now, when I get a great idea, I force myself to act on it immediately before my brain can come up with 20 reasons to wait. I learned that a half-assed plan that you actually execute is better than a perfect plan that stays in your head. Now, at this point, you might be thinking, Evan, are you saying I should stop being smart? Am I supposed to dumb it down to succeed? No, I'm not saying abandon your brain or act recklessly. Recklessly. I'm saying you have to change how you use your intelligence. Right now, your smarts are running the show and running you into a wall. You probably pride yourself on being the smartest person in the room, but is that working out for you? If you're so smart, why aren't you where you want to be? The truth is, raw intelligence without execution gets you nowhere. You have to get out of your head and into action. Being smart is a gift, but if you don't pair that gift with courage, with discipline, with hustle, it will absolutely hold back. Don't let your ego or fear of not looking smart keep you from growing. The only thing worse than being seen as not smart is being full of potential and never actually achieving anything. So yes, keep your intelligence, but put it to work for you, not against you. So let's talk about how to fix this. Let's turn your intelligence into an asset instead of a liability. Here we go. Why smart people struggle with success and how to turn Number 1, you overthink everything. Smart people can get stuck in analysis paralysis. Your brain sees 20 angles to every problem. You can imagine every possible outcome, and all that analysis leaves you spinning in circles. Sound familiar? You plan and you plan and you plan and nothing actually happens. Meanwhile, someone with half your brainpower just picks a direction and goes. They get results while you're still in your head. And here's the deal. Thinking about doing something and actually doing it are completely different things. No matter how brilliant your idea is, you must act on it. Studies in cognitive psychology even show that excessive deliberation can lead to worse decisions because you start second-guessing yourself and overcomplicating simple choices. So what's the solution? Decide and go. Give yourself a deadline to make a decision and then Then execute. Trust your intuition and start moving. You can adjust course as you go. Remember, real progress happens in the real world, not in your head. Don't let overthinking murder your momentum. Number 2, you're chasing perfect and it's slowing you down. This was my curse. In school, you might've been the kid who got A's, who set super high standards. In life and business, those high standards can actually cripple you. You rewrite the opening chapter 7 times. Times and never publish the book. You tinker with your product endlessly because it's not good enough yet to launch. Guess what? Perfect is the enemy of progress. Successful people execute and then iterate. Unsuccessful smart people keep polishing a draft that never sees the light of day. Here's how one entrepreneur put it: you can't refine what doesn't exist. You can't improve a product that never launched. Average performers Often beat perfectionists because they're willing to put out good enough and then improve later. My own $40 million mistake was due to perfectionism. I waited and wanted the perfect plan, and I was too late. Learn from my mistake. Launch messy. Embrace mistakes. Done is better than perfect. And remember that urge to be perfect? It's really fear. Perfectionism is fear in a tuxedo. It looks respectable, even admirable, but it's killing your success. So punch fear in the face by putting out your work, flaws and all. Progress beats perfection every time. Number 3, you rely on talent instead of work. This one stings, but I've seen it so often. Things come easy for you, right? School, jobs, picking up new skills. You're used to being the best with minimal effort. Meanwhile, others had to grind to get good. And the result is you never develop the discipline and habits that success actually requires. Maybe you breeze through school without studying, so you never learn how to truly study or struggle. You prided yourself on pulling off last-minute miracles or acing presentations with no prep, and it worked until now. So when you finally hit something hard, something that doesn't come instantly, you stall or quit because you don't have the tools or grit to push through. Psychology research backs this up. People who think intelligence is fixed tend to avoid challenges that might prove them wrong, but those who believe abilities grow with effort are the ones who persist when things get tough. So natural talent might open the door, but discipline, resilience, and grind get you to the finish line. If you've coasted on talent, it's time to be humble and get to work. Being smart is not an excuse to be lazy. Embrace the beginner's mindset. Push yourself to do the uncomfortable drills, the boring repetitions, the late-night study sessions. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard, every single time. Number 4, you get get bored and lose focus. So let's get real, highly intelligent people get bored easily. Your brain craves novelty and big ideas. Once you figure something out, doing the actual work feels tedious. You love planning the project but hate the day-to-day grind of executing it. And I get it, but here's the reality: most success is built in the boring middle. The book that you want to write, 5% is the exciting idea and 95% is sitting down day after day banging out words or editing. And that business you want to build, the concept is thrilling, but actually building it involves 1,000 tedious tasks, paperwork, and emails and routines. Not exactly fun or intellectually stimulating. The smartest people often struggle here. Isn't this work beneath me? No, this work makes you. Consistency is the secret weapon of the average. Those who succeed are willing to do the uninspiring stuff consistently without constantly questioning, is this worth my genius? If boredom is killing your momentum, fix it by reframing the boring stuff as a challenge. Can you show up and execute even when it's not exciting? That's your new game. Also, systemize your life. Build routines and accountability that keep you moving forward even when you're not feeling it. The ability to do boring things consistently is incredibly Master it, and you'll leave the dabbling geniuses in the dust. Number 5, you live in theory, not reality. Smart people often fall in love with theories and big picture ideas. You might design elegant strategies in your head, craft perfect models of how things should work. But then here's how things do work in real life, which is usually much messier. If you're too attached to the ideal scenario, you can become disconnected from actual reality. So for example, You might refuse to launch a product until you understand every aspect perfectly, or you insist on a plan going exactly as imagined, and when it doesn't, you freeze. Meanwhile, less brilliant people are adapting on the fly and they're getting results. So what's the fix? Embrace reality and adjust. Don't let your beautiful theory stop you from getting your hands dirty. Maybe your strategy should be tweaked. That's fine. Maybe your hypothesis was wrong. Learn and you pivot. Actionable data comes from the real world, not the daydreams. So don't wait for conditions to match your mental model. Get out there, try stuff, and adjust to the feedback. Remember, your ability to learn and adapt beats your ability to pontificate. Stay grounded and stay flexible. Number 6, you undervalue emotional intelligence and help from others. Success is not a solo brain game. It's a team sport. If you're brilliant, brilliant but can't work with other people, you're going to hit a ceiling fast. Maybe you've told yourself others just slow me down, or no one can do it as well as I can, right? Classic smart person trap. The truth is someone with average IQ but great people skills will outrun a genius who alienates others. Businesses, careers, life— they all run on relationships. If you struggle to communicate, to collaborate, or to ask for help, that's a major blind And I used to try everything alone and not admit weakness. It nearly broke me. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I was struggling, and that loneliness almost made me quit. I learned that if you don't ask for help, you end up stuck and isolated and far more likely to fail. So don't let the pride or social awkwardness sabotage you. You don't have to be an extrovert or the life of a party. I'm not. Just develop the skills to connect and communicate. Listen more. Be curious about others. Find mentors and accept their advice. If you lack some of the soft skills, learn it. Being smart means you can grow here too. Remember, being right isn't enough. You have to bring others along if you want to do something big. And if you have a big dream, you'll definitely need others. So start valuing emotional intelligence as much as book intelligence. It's not soft. It's the glue that holds your success together. Okay, now let's bring this home. We've identified the traps, uh, overanalysis, Self-analysis, perfectionism, coasting on talent, lacking of follow-through, living in theory, and flying solo. These are natural tendencies of a powerful mind, but if you leave them unchecked, they become big barriers. The great news is you can overcome each one. Self-awareness is step 1. If you've nodded along or, or winced at any of these points, you're already learning where to improve. Step 2 is to work with your tendencies instead of against them. Build systems and habits to counteract your weak spots. For example, if you know that you overthink, set strict deadlines or accountability partners to force action even when you're in your head. If you're a perfectionist, set good enough goals. Deliberately release version 1.0 of a project when it's 80% there just to prove to yourself the world doesn't end if it's not perfect. If you get bored, gamify the process or tie boring tasks to a deeper mission that Practice doing things before you feel fully ready for them. This starts to train you to gather real-world feedback. And if going it alone is not working for you, find a coach, a community, a partner who can push you and keep you accountable. And most of all, shift your identity. Don't see yourself as the smart one. See yourself as the bold one, the action taker, the lifelong learner, the resilient fighter. Yes, you're smart. So use that brain to strategize ways to get out of your comfort zone and into the unknown. Instead of clever excuses to stay in it. My mom used to tell me, if you have the ability, you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. And that hit me hard and stays with me. Your intelligence is a gift, not just for acing tests or impressing people, but for making an impact. If you're capable of more, you owe it to yourself and the world to do more. I know there's genius inside of you. Everybody has what I call Michael Jordan-level talent or genius at something. Don't let it go to waste because of fear, laziness, or ego. Break the patterns. Do the uncomfortable work. The world needs what you have, and you deserve to fulfill the measure of your potential. You could work hard every single day for the next 40 years and still never get rich because working harder was never actually how real wealth gets built.

I went to school, and what they pounded in me was the poor person. You got to get a job. You got to get a job. You got to work You got to work for money. You got to save money and you got to invest in the stock market and all this stuff. That's why people are poor. The idea of having a job and waiting for your 401 to save you, I think you're going to be sadly disappointed. I was taught to use debt to get rich. Most people use debt to get poor.

The median homeowner in America is worth $396,200, while the median renter is worth just $10,400, according to the Census Bureau. According to the Federal Reserve. And that nearly 40-to-1 gap has almost nothing to do with how hard either of them worked.

Saving money is not smart. It used to be smart. It has not been smart for 50 years. People who only work hard have limited leverage. If you're working hard physically and not getting ahead financially, then you're probably someone else's leverage. Let that land. If you have savings sitting in a bank account, someone else is using your money as their leverage. The bank takes your deposits and lends them out at a profit, not to you, to the rich.

Because the real secret the wealthy understand isn't about doing more. It's about leverage, getting your money, your time, and even other people's resources to build wealth for you while you sleep.

One of the most important things The greatest asset you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. The rich don't work for money, so we learn to use debt to create assets, and assets keep putting money in our pocket. I cannot do my job on my own.

I cannot go on the rugby field by myself.

And when I go onto the field of business, I don't go by myself. Bookkeeper, accountants, attorneys, bankers, And whoever else. And that's how we play the game.

In 1985, Robert Kiyosaki was 38 years old and he was homeless. The business he had built licensing t-shirts for rock bands had just collapsed and taken everything down with it. And for a stretch, he and his wife Kim were sleeping in the back of an old brown Toyota with no income and no obvious way out. He had already lived a big life by then. He had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam. He had been a top salesman at Xerox. He had started companies that boomed. And then went bust, but broke and sleeping in a car at 38, he made a decision that changed everything. Instead of running back to a safe job to feel secure again, he went all in on the one idea his mentor had drilled into him years before, that the rich don't work for money, they buy assets that work for them. So Kiyosaki started buying small real estate using the bank's money instead of his own, letting tenants pay his loans while each property put cash in his pocket every month. He bought one, then used what it threw off to help buy the next, and then the next after that. And by 1989, he and Kim were real estate millionaires. By the time he was 47, the income from his assets covered his entire life, and he never needed a job again. He did not work his way there. He didn't just get lucky. He used leverage, other people's money, and other people's time to build a machine that paid him whether he showed up or not. Then he wrote the whole thing down in a little book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. Now I know what you're thinking, and it's the same hesitation that often keeps people stuck where they're at. You're thinking leverage sounds like something for people who already have tons of money and that borrowing and debt are dangerous. So the safe move is to just keep your head down, try to save your way to security. And I know what it feels to feel that way, but remember that all progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth right now. Saving alone has never made a single person wealthy because when you only save, save, your time and your paycheck are the only 2 things doing any work. And both of those run out, one at the end of the month and one at the end of your career. Robert Kiyosaki built his entire life's teaching on this one uncomfortable idea that the rich don't get rich by being the hardest worker in the building. They get rich by owning the systems and the assets that all the hard workers run. So leverage isn't reckless and it isn't only for the already wealthy. It's a Like any other skill, and you can start learning it today right where you're standing with what you already have. So let me show you exactly how to do it step by step. Know your assets from liabilities. So we need to completely rewire how you see an asset and a liability because this single definition changes everything that comes after it. Robert Kiyosaki keeps it brutally simple and maybe almost too simple. An asset is anything that puts money into your pocket. A liability is anything that takes money out of your pocket. That's the whole thing. The reason this matters so much is that you've probably been taught your entire life to call things assets that are actually draining you every single month. The fancy car, the closet full of stuff, even the big house that you live in, all take money out of your pocket through payments and taxes and insurance and endless upkeep, which by Kiyosaki's math makes them liabilities. No matter what the salesperson or the bank calls them, the wealthy become almost obsessed with buying real assets instead. Things like rental properties that pay you every single month, a small business that runs without you having to stand there, shares that pay you dividends, or something that you create one time that earns for years afterwards. So your job starting this week is to look at every dollar that leaves your hands and ask just that one honest question: is this putting money into my pocket or pulling it out? Then build your whole life around owning more and more of the first kind. That's the edge of the puzzle right there. You get that one border locked in correctly and every other piece starts to find its place. Use other people's money. Other people's money is the second form of leverage, and learning to tell good debt from bad debt is where real wealth actually begins for regular people. Almost everything you've ever heard treats all debt as the enemy to be feared, but Kiyosaki splits it into 2 very different Bad debt is money that you borrow to buy stuff that loses value and drains you, like credit cards, a loan on a car that's worth less every year. Good debt is money you borrow to buy an asset that earns you more than the loan costs you to hold. So the math that makes this whole thing click— say you have $100,000 saved up. You could buy one rental property in cash and earn a steady return on it, maybe around 9 or 10% a year, which is fine. Or you could take that very same $100,000 and use it as 5 separate down payments control 5 properties with the bank's money instead of one of your own, and have 5 sets of tenants each paying down a loan for you while you collect the cash flow on all 5 at once. That move can roughly double your return on the same starting money, and it puts 5 times as much property to work building your equity. And it gets better because of something Kiyosaki calls the velocity of money. Once those 5 properties are throwing off cash every month, you don't just sit on that money. You take it and you use it as a down payment on the next asset, and then the cash from that one helps you buy the one after it. So the same original dollars keep moving and keep multiplying instead of falling asleep in a savings account. That's how a small start snowballs into something serious over time. You don't have to start with real estate at all. You just have to stop seeing every kind of debt as the enemy and start asking the only question that actually matters, which is whether the thing you're borrowing for pays you back more than it costs you to hold it. Answer that one question honestly in every purchase, and you'll already be thinking like the wealthy. Use other people's time. Other people's time is the next form of leverage, and this is the one you can start using right now, no matter how little money is in your bank account today. You get the exact same 24 hours in a day as every billionaire who has ever lived. So the only way to ever get more done is to stop being the single person doing all of it. Kiyosaki calls this buying back your time. And one of my favorite ways to do it is what I call eliminate, automate, delegate. First, you eliminate the work that doesn't move the needle at all. The busy work that kind of just fills your day. Then you automate whatever software or AI can handle for you on repeat without complaining, and then you delegate the rest. And that can start with just one person for a few hours a week taking a small task off your plate. The hours that you free up are not just for sitting on the couch. They are for the high-value work that actually builds and buys your assets. The wealthy almost never trade their own hours directly for money for very long. Because they understand deep in their bones that time is the one resource they can never earn back once it's gone. So start small, start today, hand off one single task this week that someone else can do just fine, and pour those remaining hours into building something that pays you forever. Own systems, not a job. So systems are the next form of leverage, and this is the line that separates owning a real business from owning I mean, the hardest job that you'll ever have. A whole lot of people who proudly call themselves entrepreneurs have actually just bought themselves a job with no boss and no time off because the second they stop working, every dollar of income stops coming in with them. A true owner builds a system instead. So a set of steps and tools and people that keep producing whether the owner is in the room or somewhere on their beach. This is exactly what Kiyosaki did with his real He had no interest in spending his days fixing toilets and chasing down rent, so he put property managers and simple systems in place, and the buildings kept paying him every single month whether he showed up there or not. You can build your own version of this with the work that you already do for money right now. So write down exactly how you do the things that earn you money, turn it into a simple repeatable process that anyone could follow, and then slowly hand off those steps. To people, to software, to AI, one at a time until the business can run a day, then a week, then a whole month without you having to get in there and do anything. The beauty of a system is that it keeps the value even when you step away, and it's the thing that you can eventually sell or hand down because it works without you always being attached to it. A job can't be sold. A system can be. Being leads to doing here. The day you start thinking like an owner of a system instead of a worker, stuck inside one, every decision you make begins to change for the better, from what you spend your evenings on to what you choose to learn next. Pick the right side. The wealthy understand which side of the money game they're actually standing on, and the good news is you can choose to switch sides starting today. Kiyosaki drew a famous simple map he called the Cashflow Quadrant. He gave the 4 spots simple letters. E is for employee, S is for self-employed person, B is for the business owner, and I is for the investor. On the left side, you have the E and the S, and both of them trade their time directly for money. So the moment they stop, the income stops coming in with them. On the right side, you have the B who runs systems and the I who puts money to work. And on that side, the income keeps flowing in even while they're asleep, on vacation, or sick in bed. Kiyosaki said the entire game of getting wealthy It's just slowly moving yourself from the left two letters over to the right two, and almost nobody ever realizes there's a right side to move to. Almost everyone is taught to spend their entire life on the time for money side and to call that arrangement security when it's really the opposite. The wealthy deliberately build themselves a bridge over to the other side piece by piece. So you don't have to quit your job tomorrow morning to do this. I don't think you should. You keep your steady income for now, and you use your nights and your weekends to start one small business or buy one small asset that earns a little without your hands on it constantly. Then you grow that. Every single step you take towards the ownership side is a real step towards a life where your money finally stops depending on your alarm clock going off in the morning. Make money while you sleep. So the final piece that ties this whole thing together, and it's the art of making your money make money while you sleep. So Kiyosaki describes his entire strategy using the game of Monopoly, of all things. So you buy a few small greenhouses and you let them sit there and produce, and then once they've grown, you trade them up for one big red hotel. And in real life, that meant that he and his wife started by buying small properties that produce cash flow, living modestly while those built up, and then rolling the gains into bigger and bigger assets over the years. And the principle works far, far beyond real estate. You take the money your assets produce, and instead of blowing it on more shiny liabilities the second that it arrives, You reinvest it into the next asset and then the next one after that so that each asset you own goes out and buys you the following one. That's the loop the wealthy run their entire lives on, and they even use the tax rules to keep far more of it than a regular worker ever could. They run their money through businesses and real estate, which lets them legally write off expenses and use things like depreciation to shield a chunk of their income from taxes. So the very same dollar that gets taxed heavily an employee gets taxed lightly for an owner. Stack that small advantage up year after year and it turns into a pretty enormous head start. Their assets pay for their nice things, so they never once have to trade away their freedom just to fund their lifestyle. I think your purpose comes from your pain, from whatever moment or being broke or stuck or overlooked you swore you'd never feel again. And that purpose is exactly what keeps you reinvesting, hopefully on the days when splurging would feel so much easier. If you have the ability to build this kind of life, then you have the responsibility to do it. If you can, then you must start your leverage this week. So here is the whole thing. Uh, let's do it in one breath. Stop measuring your life by how hard you work and start measuring it by how much you own that works for you. Buy assets, not liabilities. Use good debt, other people's time, and real systems to multiply far beyond anything one person could ever do alone. Move steadily towards the ownership side of the game and reinvest your way up the board, one greenhouse at a time. You don't need all of it on day one. You just need to start running one of these forms of leverage this week and then add the next one when you're ready. The paper airplane here was never supposed to break the sound barrier, and yet it's happening anyway. That's what my logo is all about— the impossible getting done every day. Because doing the impossible is exactly what you were built You don't need to be born rich, and you don't need to wait until every perfect condition is there. You need to start learning about leverage today, and the best time to start is now. How about right now? You do not need a million-dollar tech idea to build massive wealth and finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already makes real money.

Ironically, the businesses that don't crash are the ones built on trust. They solve real problems, they get paid, and they last.

Something that most people overlook: the less exciting the business, the less competition there is, and the more reliable the— Right, so it's, it's a foolproof business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession-proof, it is not seasonal, and it's something with recurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not ready to be an Owner until you invent the next big app, you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea; the boring version already works.

You're not just running the boring businesses; you are building a modern empire.

Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, but he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture. Store and a paint business.

Look at them. If somebody came in and offered us the entire business, and then we try to think, what is this place going to look like in 5 or 10 years, and how sure are we of it?

He realized early on that buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and go straight to collecting the profits.

Somebody comes to us with We've seen how— what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at .350 or whatever it may be, and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them, and we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to go to even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars. I think that's a great analogy.

Now, right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell and you can buy their profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The $10 trillion generational wealth transfer. A massive 90% of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually wants. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90% chance of failing. Now, if that's what you want to do, awesome, go for it. But you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business, you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now is a massive shift happening in the global economy. About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated $10 trillion in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money every single week. And when these owners retire, their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now. More than 58% of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want to take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of 5 businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an SOWS business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new software company like I'm doing with Brandlytics, man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics is awesome. It might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns, but you can buy boring business instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least 5 years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad economies and recessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the lowballers. Local competition just by answering the phone on time and having a clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy to understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away, unless again you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it makes money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the route, implement some basic inventory software, to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales just by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down 3 unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOWS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. Now, you're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cash flow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing, because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy business, they will actually act as a bank for you. So they will hand over the keys to the business and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank for this part. You avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller. So you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income, and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, if the seller will not finance the whole thing, you can use government-backed bank loans. The SBA 7 loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you saved From your day job, when Nina and I walk around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You could take over a million-dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from its own revenue. You just sit at the top and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that. Doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You'll be surprised by how many say yes. The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession-proof companies that print money in good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes. Even when the economy crashes, people still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean the floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're renting out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off the box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss. But when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and $1 million in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can hire a few contractors to handle the repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. Place. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of business. Also explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that the employees will quit or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. The systems are the foundation of your business. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train and introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts the business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero. And if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving, and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movement Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room, and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed and then get out of their way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business, you get instant infrastructure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team, and existing cash flow. You're Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your job is to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoebox. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software and suddenly the business is 20% more profitable. You set up a simple digital marketing campaign that the old owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. Single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building the future. This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So your action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find 3 areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift. You are fully capable of running an empire, so stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins, and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do. And the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. You will never become a billionaire or even a millionaire by following the advice of the middle class. Most people think that extreme wealth comes from luck or inheritance or being in the right place at the right time, but the truth is it comes from having the guts to concentrate your bets when everyone else is diversifying their to protect their ignorance. If you keep spreading your focus, your energy, and your money across a dozen different safe options because you are afraid of losing, you will guarantee that you end up with a life of mediocrity and never reach the massive potential that you were built for. In 2008, Elon Musk was facing the worst year of his life. He had made $180 million from selling PayPal, a fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island, but Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into 2 companies that looked like they were about to die: Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had 3 failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely die. Or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive. But risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away; they would have kept the forty million dollars and lived like a king. Musk chose the hardest path: he split the money. He went all in on both. He literally had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve, 2008, at the very last hour, a financing round came through for Tesla. Days later, NASA awarded. He risked $180 million to get to zero just to have a shot at changing the world. Today, he's the richest man on the planet. So right now you're probably telling yourself, but Evan, I don't have $180 million like Elon Musk. And that's not the point. It's not about the amount of money. It's about the habit of your mind. You're playing small with the $1,000 the same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself, you can't bet on Yourself anyone else. when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyzed 50 billionaires to find out what they actually have in common, and it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they are doing. If you know how to analyze a business, if you know your market, if you know your value, why would you put your money into your 20th best idea Instead of your top idea. When you look at the portfolios of the ultra wealthy, you see extreme concentration. They find one thing they believe in, usually a company they built themselves or an investment they know inside and out, and they push all their chips into the middle of the table. Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon. And the data backs this up. There's a study by Acadian Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top 5 to 10 stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their conviction, not their fear. You are hurting your own growth by trying to do too many things at once. Once you have a side hustle and a main job, and you're thinking about crypto, and you're trying to start a YouTube channel, and you're learning Spanish, you are diversifying your energy because you are afraid that if you pick just one thing, it might fail. But by doing five things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all five of them fail. You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says, "If you can find just three wonderful business." Businesses in your life, you will get very rich. You don't need 50, you need one. You need to become an expert in one area. You need to know more about your specific niche than anyone else in the room. When you have that level of knowledge, you don't need to diversify to protect yourself. Your knowledge is your protection. So stop trying to be okay at everything and give yourself permission to be a genius at one thing. Put your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket very closely. Like Andrew Carnegie used to say. The power of disagreeableness. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to stop caring what other people think. I don't mean you should be a jerk. I mean you must possess a psychological trait known as low agreeableness. Researchers from the Socioeconomic Panel in Germany analyzed the personality traits of millionaires and billionaires. They used the Big Five personality model, they found a consistent pattern. Wealthy people score very high on conscientiousness. They are disciplined and they're organized. They score high in openness. They like new ideas, but they score significantly lower than the average person on agreeableness. This means they are not afraid of conflict. They are not afraid to swim against the tide. They do not need social harmony to feel good about themselves. When you are building something massive, massive. People are going to tell you that you are crazy. They are going to tell you that it cannot be done. They are going to tell you that you are wrong. If you have high agreeableness, you will listen to them. You will try to fit in. You will compromise your vision to make everyone feel comfortable. Billionaires don't do that. They are non-conformists. Look at Steve Jobs. He was famous for his reality distortion field. He would demand things that his engineers said were impossible. He wasn't trying to be their friend. He wasn't trying to be agreeable. He was trying to change the world. He didn't care if people thought that he was difficult. He cared about the vision. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to fight for your idea when no one else sees it. You have to be the one who says yes when the whole world says no. This is why so many billionaires are entrepreneurs. You cannot climb the corporate ladder If you are highly disagreeable. The corporate world rewards people who follow the rules and play nice. The entrepreneurial world rewards people who break the rules and create new realities. So you can ask yourself today, where are you compromising your dream just to avoid an awkward conversation? Where are you saying okay when you want to scream no? Stop trying to please everyone. You are not pizza. You are a leader. Lead. The obsession with speed. Speed is the ultimate weapon. If you look at the daily habits of billionaires, they do not waste time. They understand that time is the only asset that they can never buy back. There is a concept called return on time investment, or ROTI. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage— other people's money, other people's time, systems, and technology to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard, they work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline, he meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important tasks immediately. He doesn't check email first. He doesn't scroll social media. He calls it thinking Meditating, using his brainpower to solve complex problems before the world can distract him. Most people are moving too slow. You have an idea for a business, you spend six months researching a logo. You want to start a podcast, and you spend three weeks looking for the perfect microphone to buy. Right? You're using preparation as an excuse to hide. If you wait until you feel ready, you will be waiting for the rest of your life. Billionaires act on information. Immediately. When Elon Musk faced that crisis in 2008, he didn't take a month off to think about it. He was on the phone, flying around the world, negotiating deals, moving money, literally working 20 hours a day to save his companies. The speed of his decisions saved him. You need to shorten the gap between the idea and the execution. If you have an idea right now, do something about it in the next 10 minutes. Send the email, buy the domain, post a video, call the Stop overthinking. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to make you rich. Safety is slow. Wealth is fast. The billionaire mindset is about shrinking timelines. If you think a goal will take you 10 years, ask yourself, how can I achieve this in 6 months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you stuck to the 10-year plan. So a lot of you are waiting for permission. You're waiting for someone to tell you that you are good enough. You're waiting For the perfect time, there is no perfect time. The perfect time was yesterday. The second best time is right now. The ability to handle crisis. You will never reach the top without facing a moment that threatens to destroy everything that you have built. This is the existential crisis phase. Every single billionaire that I've studied has gone through a moment where it looked like it was all over. We talk about Elon Musk in 2008, but look at Jeff Bezos in a dot-com crash of 2001, Amazon lost 90% of its value. 90%! Imagine looking at your net worth and seeing it drop by 90%. Most CEOs panicked. They folded. They went bankrupt. Bezos didn't panic. He focused on the math. He focused on one single metric: the cash conversion cycle. He realized that if he could get cash from customers before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash-generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis, he used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being antifragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were. It's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you are going to get hit. You are going to lose a big client. Your star employee is going to quit on you. The economy is going to tank. Pandemic is going to shut down the world. If you crumble when things get hard, you are not ready for this level of success yet. Billionaires look at crisis as a puzzle to be solved, not a sign that they need to stop. They maintain an internal locus of control. They believe that no matter how bad the external situation is, they have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you are facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. So embrace the crisis. Crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive problem for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in 2 days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong with with that, but it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you, because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you are chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I studied, they're not sitting around counting money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They are built to serve. So if you want to join their ranks, stop asking, how can I make a billion dollars? And start asking, how can I help a billion people? The money is just a byproduct of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you that is waiting to be unlocked, but you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. 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 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 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 have 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 10 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 to 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 skyrocket your net worth. 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 the grueling work for clients paying you pennies. You need to 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 into the ground. 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. 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 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 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 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 finances. So you're saying I need to track my spending? 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 you don't show up to work. Harvard Business Review 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. You need a better way to network with wealthy clients. One of the things we teach inside of our Movie 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. 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 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 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 skyscraper. 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 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 people Sustains for longer than extrinsic motivation. That's right. 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. Success this year for you comes down to one thing: your habits. Most entrepreneurs say they want the best year, but then do the same things as last year. If you change And nothing, nothing changes. In fact, if you coast through this year, you'll wake up next year with nothing but regrets. Research with dying patients found that many stayed stuck in old patterns and habits out of a false sense of comfort. They pretended they were content where deep down they longed for more. Don't let that be you. Think of the famous story of the elephant and the rope. A massive elephant is held by a tiny rope tied to its leg. It could break free at any time, but it doesn't even try. Why? Because as a baby elephant, that rope was enough to hold it. It tried and failed back then, so now it believes that same rope can still hold it forever. It's not the rope stopping the elephant, it's the belief that the rope is stopping it. I know how that feels. Let me take you back to when I was 22. I was about to graduate university and had a choice: take a 6-figure dream job in banking or join a startup and make $300 a Everyone told me, take the money, but I fast-forwarded in my head. I imagined being 40, looking back, and I knew I'd regret not giving the startup a shot. I literally said to myself, when I'm an old man, I'll regret that I didn't keep going. I'd rather know and fail than not know. So I turned down the job and went for the startup. It was risky, it was scary, and it was one of the best decisions of my life. Not because it was easy, it wasn't, but because it taught me to bet on myself. myself instead of playing safe. Maybe you're thinking, that's great for you, Evan, but I'm not sure I can do it. I've tried changing and failed. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. If that doubt is in your head, I want you to remember that elephant. That doubt is just a tiny rope. It held the old you, but it doesn't have to hold the new you. Just because you failed before doesn't mean you'll fail forever. Failure is training, not your verdict. You can break free You can change your habits starting now. So let's cut that rope and get you moving. All right, no more excuses. Let's get into the 7 habits that will make this year your best year yet. And stick with me because if you apply these, I promise you will feel the change. Habit number 1: Win your morning, win your day. Stop hitting that snooze button. The first thing you do each morning sets the tone for your entire day. If you start by snoozing, What are you really doing? You're telling yourself, my goals can wait. The first thing you do every day is tell yourself it's okay to not hit your goals when you hit snooze. Successful people don't start their day procrastinating. They start with intention. So here's what you're going to do. Carve out a powerful morning ritual. It doesn't have to be long. It just has to be intentional. For me, I start every day by feeding my mind with something positive. I watch an inspiring video A lot from this channel to get my belief pumping. Then I create a quick post on my Instagram stories sharing a message with you guys. Why? Because it fuels me. That sets me up for the day. I want to create something every day that I'd be proud for my grandkids to see. So find what fuels you. Maybe it's reading a chapter of a motivational book, doing a quick workout, journaling your goals, and make it a non-negotiable morning habit. Science backs this up. A solid morning routine can increase your energy, productivity, and positivity, and build momentum. For the day, when you win the morning, you win the day. Tomorrow morning, instead of reacting to the alarm with dread, jump out of bed with purpose. Even if it's 15 minutes earlier than usual, use that time to focus on you. No phone, no emails, just something that builds your mindset or skills. And trust me, starting your day with intention rather than reacting will change everything. You'll feel more in control, more confident. I'm more motivated to crush whatever comes next. Habit number 2, curate your environment for greatness. You can't plant a seed in toxic soil and expect it to grow, right? In the same way, you can't achieve big goals while drowning in negativity and distractions. Your environment, the people you hang out with, the content that you consume, the spaces that you work in, is either lifting you up or pulling you down. There's no neutral state here. So it's time to take control of it. Start with what you consume every day. Day. Social media, TV, news. If you scroll Instagram or Twitter and end up feeling like crap, that's a problem. How many times do you go through your phone and spend an hour on Instagram and feel worse about yourself than when you started? Probably too often. The solution: curate your feed. Now, I do this myself. I only follow people that inspire me. My YouTube, my Instagram is great. I'm not following people who are out there spreading negativity. As soon as something negative appears, I swipe away. I am trying to engineer my online environment for boldness and belief, not negativity and doubt. You can do the same. Unfollow the haters, the cynics, the drama that doesn't involve you. Follow people who are where you want to be, who are sharing their knowledge, who make you feel energized. And this goes beyond social media. Look at your real life circle. Are the people around you supportive or skeptical about your dreams? Jim Rohn said you are the average of the 5 people you who you spend the most time with. And he's right. If your friends are complaining and playing victim all day, guess what? You'll start doing the same. But if you're around the go-getters, mentors, Believe Nation members here who lift you higher, you'll rise to their level. It's proven. Even emotions are contagious in groups. One Harvard study showed that seeing positive posts on Facebook actually made people feel more positive and seeing negative posts most made them negative. We catch mindsets from each other. So audit your environment ruthlessly. Design it for success. Clean your workspace if it's cluttered and stressing you out. Put up a picture or quote that inspires you when you look at it. Maybe you need to spend less time with that always negative cousin and more time in a mastermind group or with fellow entrepreneurs who push you forward. Remember, you are the gatekeeper of what gets into your head, so protect When you surround yourself with positivity, ambition, and solutions, you automatically show up as a better version of you. Habit number 3, flex your discipline muscle daily. Successful entrepreneurs aren't magically more disciplined. They've just trained that muscle, and you can too by doing one hard thing every day. The goal is to prove to yourself that you are in control, not your temptations or your fears. Each day is an opportunity to send yourself a powerful message. that I am stronger than my excuses. Now I have a little weird way of doing this. I literally keep a giant Costco-sized bag of Doritos on my desk. It's right there behind me, right? Sounds a little weird, right? It's there on purpose. Doritos are my kryptonite. I love them. And by all rights, I should throw that bag out just to avoid the temptation, but I do the opposite instead. I have a strategy that's called Damn the Doritos. Just by thinking about it, my mouth is watering as I'm talking. I could eat that whole bag right now. now, but I'm not. Every day that unopened bag taunts me, and every day I choose to look at it with self-control. My mouth is watering. I want to remind myself that I'm stronger than the Doritos. When I resist it, I get a little bit more confidence. The high you get of self-confidence to know that you're stronger than the Doritos is incredible. It's not about the chips, it's about training willpower. You don't need a bag of Doritos, but you do need a daily willpower workout. Maybe it's taking a cold shower, Every morning, so you're toughening your mind. Maybe it's committing to do that one task that you hate, like a sales call or coding or whatever it is for you, for 30 minutes every day without fail. Pick something that you typically shy away from or is a temptation that you usually cave to and challenge it head-on in a small way. My mouth is still watering from the Doritos. Psychologists have found that willpower is like a muscle. Use it regularly and it grows stronger. Even small, regular tests of self-control can boost your willpower over time. So give yourself those tests. Now, why is this so important? Because every time you keep a promise to yourself, every time you do the hard thing when you could easily take the easy way out, you reinforce an identity. I am disciplined. I follow through. And that identity is gold. It motivates every other habit. When you know you can count on you, your confidence shoots through the roof. You walk into meetings, into sales calls, investor pitches, whatever, with a quiet strength because you've proven to yourself in private that you have self-control. So starting today, choose your hard thing and flex that muscle daily. It doesn't have to be something extreme, just consistent. Those tiny acts of discipline day after day will compound into an inner strength. Habit number 4, don't build alone. Get mentors and accountability. Entrepreneurship can be lonely if you let it, but success—it's a team sport. The smartest entrepreneurs actively seek help, feedback, and mentorship. They know that trying to do everything solo is a recipe for burnout and tunnel vision. As the African proverb goes, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Going far is the goal here. I had to learn this one the hard way when I started out. I was stubborn. I thought I had to have all the answers myself. Myself. And when I didn't, I hid it. I was making no money in my first business, eating beans for lunch, struggling to survive, and I was too embarrassed to tell my friends or my family. I would lie and say, oh yeah, everything's good, I'm hustling, I'm living the entrepreneur life, where inside I felt like a failure. I mean, nobody likes to admit how much they suck, right? But that isolation nearly broke me. I almost quit on my dream because I was trying to do it all alone in silence. I eventually opened up and got guidance, and it saved my business. Don't do it alone because you'll probably fail. You'll quit along the way because it's too devastatingly lonely. That's the advice from my younger self to you. So what does this habit look like? It means building your support system. Find a mentor or a coach if you can, someone who's a few steps ahead of you that can show you the ropes. If you can't get a one-on-one mentor, no problem. You can learn from virtual mentors, books, courses, videos right here. Believe Nation, there's a new video for you Join a mastermind or local entrepreneur group where people hold each other accountable. Even just one accountability buddy can 10x your progress. When you know someone will ask you, hey, did you do what you said you were going to do? You show up differently. In fact, entrepreneurs who connect with mentors are proven to perform better. One study found that 70% of small business owners with mentors survive beyond 5 years, double the survival rate of those who go alone. That's huge. Mentors literally double your chances of success. So if you're starting out and feel like, who would mentor me? Here's a tip. Model first. I'll cover that next. And serve where you can. Offer to help out someone that you admire. Add value to them. Intern or volunteer in their world. You'll learn just by being around them. And don't overlook peer mentors. Someone at your level who is just as hungry can still be a great accountability partner. The point here is to get out of your own head and get feedback and support from others. It will keep you sane, motivated, and on the track when the road gets bumpy. Every hero has a guide. You're the hero of your story, but you're not meant to do it all alone. Habit number 5, keep learning, model the best. Never stop being a student. The moment you think I know enough, you've started dying. Harsh but true. The world is evolving. Your industry is evolving. You need to evolve too. The quickest way to compress decades of learning into days is to model people who have already done it. Done what you want to do. Success leaves clues. Whatever goal you're chasing, someone out there has achieved something similar. So study them, copy the right things, and build on it. When I hit the lowest point in my first business, this habit is what saved me. Remember that startup that I chose? It was not all sunshine. I was making $300 a month. I felt like a total failure. I finally told my business partner I quit. I was done. But the next day I woke up and something clicked. I thought, someone has figured this out. Who has built a software company before? And Bill Gates was my guy. He's the first name that came to mind. I dove into young Bill Gates and how he built Microsoft from zero to one. I didn't care that he became a billionaire. I cared about how he started when he was just another kid with a dream. And I discovered something game-changing: partnerships. Gates landed a partnership with IBM that exploded Microsoft. But even before that, he grew through smaller Partnerships. I thought if partnerships got Microsoft from zero to one, maybe that's the key for us. So I copied it. I hustled to secure a partnership deal for our first startup, and boom! We got our first major break—a thirteen and a half thousand dollar deal with a UK distributor. For me, making three hundred dollars a month, thirteen and a half thousand dollars felt like a million bucks. I went from drowning to breathing because I modeled success. And I tell this entrepreneurs all the time. Now find who solved your problem and learn from them. As I put it back then, Bill Gates had built a software company. I'm going to learn how he did it and apply it. That decision gave me hope and a roadmap. So make this a habit. Always be learning. Always be modeling. Read biographies. Watch interviews. Take courses. Watch videos like this. If you have business idols, consume everything you can about how they think and how they operate. Don't just admire Elon Musk or Sarah Blitzenstein. Or whoever, study them, emulate their mindsets and strategies that resonate with you and read, read, read. There's a reason the average CEO reads around 4 to 5 books per month while the average person barely reads 1 book a year. Leaders are learners. Every book or article or video is a mentorship session with the author. It's condensed wisdom for a few bucks or for free. Take advantage of that. The key here is consistency. Commit to a learning routine just like you commit to a workout. It could be 30 minutes of reading every day, or listening to podcasts during your commute, or taking an online class each month. Whatever it is, schedule it. Never be the smartest person in the room. If you are, you find a bigger room. Stay curious, ask questions, seek feedback. The best entrepreneurs are always upgrading their skills and their knowledge. When you adopt this habit, you'll start noticing something pretty cool. You'll make better decisions faster. You'll spot opportunities and red flags that you used to miss. Why? Because you have a library of other people's experiences and insights in your head. That's your ultimate competitive advantage. Keep feeding your mind and there's no limit to how high you can climb. Habit number 6, take action before you're ready. This habit is simple to understand but hard to do. Less thinking, more doing. Planning has its place. Learning has its place. But nothing, and I mean nothing, beats taking action. So many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck in analysis paralysis. They want the perfect plan, the perfect timing, the perfect version of their product or service. Guess what? Perfect doesn't exist, and waiting for it will kill your dreams. You have to start before you're ready. You have to jump and grow wings on the way down. That's how real progress is made. One of my favorite expressions. Is version 1 is better than version 0. Your first attempt might be ugly, messy, even embarrassing, but at least it exists. You can improve something that isn't there. When I started my YouTube channel, I was not a natural on camera. In fact, I was awkward. It took me 350 videos— yes, 350 videos— before I felt slightly comfortable in front of the camera. Can you imagine if I had said, I'll start making videos once I'm good on camera? This wouldn't exist. Believe Nation wouldn't be here. I just had to post and post and post, even when the views were low and my delivery wasn't great. That's how I got better, by doing. After my first year on YouTube, I had 25 subscribers and my videos frankly kind of sucked. 5 years in, I had maybe a few thousand subscribers. Most people would have quit right there. Most people do quit too soon, as we've already talked about. But I kept going, kept improving 1% with each video, and then momentum kicked in. 10 years later, those 25 subscribers turned into millions. Millions. The channel grew beyond what I ever imagined, all because I kept taking action instead of overthinking. So I want you to adopt this mantra: progress over perfection, action over analysis. This doesn't mean go be reckless. It means don't let fear of failure or imperfection paralyze you. Failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success. Each failure is just an iteration. Think of it like software. You're releasing beta versions of yourself And your business, and you're getting feedback, and you're updating it. Every launch, every attempt—it's version one, one point one, one point two, and so on. But you can't get to version two point zero without that rough draft of version one point zero. Maybe you haven't started your podcast because you're worried it won't be as good as some top podcaster. Record it anyway. Maybe you're hesitating to launch your product because it's not as polished as you'd like. Launch it anyway. You can tweak and refine as you go. The market will give you feedback. Your job is to get in the game and adapt. You will learn 10 times more from doing than from thinking about doing. Action creates momentum, and momentum builds confidence and competence. It's a beautiful cycle once you're in it, but you have to break the inertia first. So whatever you've been putting off—that big idea, that next step—start now, today. It won't be perfect, and that's okay. You're going to learn, adjust. Adjust and get better. The greatest realizations, opportunities, and yes, even luck tend to come to those who are in motion. So get moving. Habit number 7: Stay consistent and patient. Play the long game. Finally, if you want this year to truly be your best year, you must embrace the power of consistency. Greatness is achieved through daily practice and patience over time, not one-off spurts of effort. In a world obsessed with overnight You need to be the tortoise, not the hare. Be willing to put in the work consistently and trust that the results will follow, even if you don't see them immediately. I'll share 2 visuals that I love, one from nature and one from my own journey. First, nature, the Chinese bamboo tree, right? For the first 4 years, a Chinese bamboo seed sits underground with no visible growth. You water it, you nurture it, and nothing seems to happen. Year 1, nothing. Year 2, nothing. Year 3, nothing. 4, nothing. Most people would give up, dig up the seed in frustration. But in year 5, boom! This tiny shoot finally breaks through the soil and then grows 80 feet in just 6 weeks. 80 feet! It seems like an overnight explosion, but was it? No. It was years of invisible growth, of roots spreading deep and wide, creating a foundation for that rapid rise up. If at any point you stopped watering, that bamboo would have died in the ground. Consistency and patience made the miracle happen. Your journey is the same. You may be putting in tons of work right now with little to show for it, but if you're laying the foundation, the breakout will come. Success is often building quietly on the ground until one day it shoots up for everyone to see. Now, in my journey, I already told you about my slow start on YouTube— 5 years to crack a few thousand subscribers. It was pretty demoralizing at times. Times. But I kept reminding myself why I started— to help entrepreneurs. And I kept uploading videos every day, even when the growth was slow. Most people quit too soon. All I had going for me was I kept going. I just refused to quit. Eventually, the curve turned upwards. After those first 5 years of grinding, the next 5 years saw exponential growth. We crossed 100,000, then 1 million, now over 4 million subscribers. It looks like a huge jump, but it was really the compound The effect of consistent effort. One video didn't do it, 1,000 videos did. One pushup doesn't get you fit, 100 pushups a day over months does. Consistency isn't sexy, I get it. Doing the same small things every day can feel boring when you crave big results, but I promise you, this is exactly how big results are achieved. James Clear says, habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Every small action, every small daily habit like a penny that's doubling. It might not look like much today, tomorrow, even next week, but give it time and you'll see an astounding transformation. The key is to keep showing up, especially on the days you don't feel like it. Anyone can work hard when they're motivated. Warriors work hard even when they're not. So ask yourself, what's one or two critical things, if done consistently, that will move the needle most for your business or life? It could be making 5 sales calls It could be writing 500 words for your book every morning. It could be posting one piece of content daily to build your brand. Commit to it and stick to it like clockwork. Put on your calendar, track it, make it a non-negotiable. And while you're being consistent, practice patience. Trust the process. Remind yourself of the bamboo tree. Just because you don't see growth yet doesn't mean nothing's happening. So stay patient and keep watering those seeds. Most people will give up in the 3rd inning. You're going to be the one who's still playing strong in the 9th. That's why you'll win. Your future self will thank you a year from now for the habits you start today. These 7 habits are not quick fixes. They are identity shifts for you. They transform you into the kind of person who naturally achieves more, who inspires others, and who lives with purpose and confidence. You've got this. I believe in you, but more importantly, you're starting to believe in you too. You showed up here right now today. You've invested in yourself right here today. That's the difference between someone who dreams and someone who does. So keep showing up, keep doing the work, and no matter how tough it gets, remember why you started. Your best year ever is in reach. It's time to grab it. The absolute worst thing you can do for your future right now is listen to the people who tell you to be realistic. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity. Why would you be realistic?

What's the point of being realistic? Don't listen to the naysayers.

Everything I The thing that they heard out of people's mouth was, that's impossible. Wealth is only created by the crazy ones who ignore the limits and build products that nobody else thinks are possible. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. If you're going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. So I think it's important to start now. It's important to do things that you think are crazy. If you let average people talk you out of your wild ideas today, you will spend the rest of your life full of bitter and painful regret. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

The biggest poison in us is regret. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. Think about Steve Jobs. In 1976, he had $0 and was working out of his parents' garage. His friend Steve Wozniak built a computer circuit board just for fun. Wozniak wanted to give the plans away for free because that was the realistic thing to do. But Jobs was crazy. He told Wozniak they should start a company and sell the boards. They had no money, so Jobs sold his old Volkswagen van just to buy the first parts. Everyone thought they were nuts to take on giant computer companies from a dirty garage. But because Jobs ignored the realistic advice, he built an empire that completely changed the world. Now, you might be thinking that Steve Jobs was a rare genius and you're just an average person with an empty bank account. But Jobs started out returning glass bottles just to buy food. He was not born a billionaire. He just refused to let a lack of cash shrink his vision. You have the exact same potential inside you right now. To unlock that potential, I'm going to walk you through the ultimate $0 playbook inspired by one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history. Top of the rise, not the result. When you look at massive companies today, you see their shiny corporate headquarters, you see their thousands of employees, their massive advertising budgets. You look at what they are doing right now, and you try to copy it. And that is a massive mistake that will keep you broke forever. You have to copy the rise, not the result. So you must look at what your heroes did when they had $0 and zero team. So when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was an absolute disaster. They were 90 days away from total bankruptcy. They had dozens of confusing products. They had different versions of the Macintosh, different printer And a bunch of random software out there. The customer was completely confused. Jobs did not launch 15 new ideas to save the company. He walked into a meeting, drew a simple grid on a whiteboard with 4 squares, and changed everything. He cut 70% of the products and focused on just 4 things. He made 1 desktop and 1 portable computer for consumers, and 1 desktop and 1 portable computer for professionals. You need to do the exact same thing in your own life right now. Right now. If you're starting with $0, you cannot afford to have your attention split into 10 different directions. You cannot try to launch 5 different companies at the same time. You cannot try to master 10 different social media platforms all at once. You have to say no to almost everything so you can say yes to the one thing that actually matters. Multitasking is completely destroying your future. A major study by the American Psychological Psychological Association proves that switching between different tasks causes a 40% drop in your productivity. You need to pick one single problem to solve. Pick one product, pick one platform, go all in on that one thing. Build your momentum step by step. It takes a massive amount of energy to get the train moving, but once you have momentum, you become completely unstoppable. Focus is your greatest weapon when your bank account is empty. Build your empire with free technology. Right now you are living in the greatest time in human history to be an entrepreneur. You do not need a giant bank loan to build your team. You do not need to hire expensive agencies or consultants. You have free access to artificial intelligence that can do the work of 50 people this year. Technology is the ultimate equalizer. Generative artificial intelligence is completely changing the world and is available to you for absolutely nothing. A major report by McKinsey estimates that generative AI will up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy every single year. What does that actually mean for you today? It means you can use free AI tools to write your code, create your marketing plan, design your logos, and build your entire website today. You can build AI agents that handle all of your customer service while you are sleeping. You have to start using these tools immediately. Steve Jobs always believed that a computer was like a bicycle for the human mind. He believed technology should amplify your natural ability. That is exactly what you must do with AI right now. So stop making excuses about not having money to hire people. Use Gemini, use ChatGPT, use OpenCLaw, use NotebookLM, use the free tools that are sitting right in front of you on your laptop. When you leverage technology properly, your $0 budget turns into a billion-dollar advantage. The winners this year will not be the people with the most money. The winners will be the people who use the free tools to execute their crazy ideas faster than anyone else. Design the ultimate customer experience. So you can't just build a product that works, you have to build an experience that people actually love. Steve Jobs was famous for combining technology with the liberal arts. He believed that engineering and math were simply not enough to win. He said it is technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes your heart sing. So think about the early days of Apple. Steve Jobs dropped out of college, but he dropped in on a calligraphy class just because he thought it was beautiful. Years later, he put those beautiful fonts into the first Mac computer. He cared about how things looked and how they made people feel. You have to focus on the design of your business. How does your feel when they interact with your brand. You want your brand to be a powerful emotion. When people watch my content, I want them to feel belief. So think about what you want people to feel. Companies that obsess over design and customer experience completely crush their competition. The Design Management Institute ran a massive study over a 10-year period. They found that design-driven companies outperformed the standard stock market index by 219%. You do not need money to care about your customer. You do not need a massive budget to make your product simple, elegant, and beautiful. Focus entirely on creating an amazing experience that your customers will never forget. The power of quality thought over production value. People get completely stuck because they think they need a massive budget to start making content. You think you need a $5,000 camera and a professional studio to be taken seriously, right? And that's a complete lie. All you need is your phone and a really good idea. The quality of your thought will always matter more than the quality of your production. When I look at the most successful videos that I've ever made, they were not always shot in a fancy studio, and it's not because of the quality of the camera that I had. It was me sharing a message that people needed to hear. In fact, people trust you more when you look like a normal human being instead of just a polished, I don't know, television commercial. A major report by Stackla found that 86% of consumers say authenticity is the most important factor when deciding what brands they like and support. So you have to stop worrying about having the perfect lighting or the perfect microphone. Steve Jobs built the first Apple circuit board in a dirty garage, not a billion-dollar laboratory. He focused entirely on the quality of the product, not the fancy environment around him. So you have to take that exact same approach to your business today. Use the free camera in your pocket to talk directly to your audience. Give them actual value and they will never care about the background of your video. Say no to the good ideas. A lot of people think that getting rich requires having 100 billion ideas. The truth is actually actually the, the exact opposite. If you want to build an empire from nothing, you have to learn how to aggressively say no to almost everything. Steve Jobs famously taught that focus is not about saying yes to the thing you have to focus on. He said focus is about saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. The biggest threat to your success is not a bad idea. The biggest threat is the good ideas that distract you from your great idea. Good is always the enemy of great. When you have $0, you cannot afford to waste your energy chasing shiny new objects. You have to pick one lane and dominate it completely. A major global study by Startup Genome analyzed thousands of companies and found that losing focus and trying to scale too many things at once is the primary reason that new businesses fail. Because every time you say yes to a new side project, you are stealing time and energy from your main goal. So you have to be incredibly Be incredibly ruthless with your calendar. Say no to the networking events that do not matter. Say no to the extra features that your product does not actually need. Keep your offering as simple and pure as possible. When you strip away all that noise, you're left with a crystal clear vision that your customers can instantly understand and trust. Start a business development show. You do not need a million subscribers to make a million dollars. That is one of the biggest myths. Miss in the entire business world right now. You think you need to go viral to be successful, but going viral usually brings you the wrong kind of audience. If you want to make money with $0, you need to start a business development show. This is something we teach inside our Movement Makers program. The strategy is simple: you create a podcast or video interview series, and you only invite your ideal clients or referral partners to be guests on the show. You're giving them a platform to share their story. Nobody's asking these people interviews. So they're incredibly flattered and they often say yes. You'll spend an hour with them building a real relationship and showing them exactly how you think. This strategy works because you are delivering massive value to them before you ever even ask for a single dollar. You turn a cold prospect into a warm friend just by shining a spotlight on them. You do not need a giant audience for this to work. If you do an interview with 50 of your ideal clients and one of them signs a huge contract with you, your business is instantly Transform. Stop chasing random followers and start building deep connections with the people who actually want to buy what it is that you sell. Expect to suck at the beginning. The biggest reason that you're stuck right now is that you are terrified of looking stupid in front of your friends and family. You are a perfectionist, and your perfectionism is actually killing your greatest dreams. So you have to expect to suck at the beginning when you try something. Completely new, you're going to be really bad at it at the start, right? That's just how life works. When I started on YouTube, it took me 350 videos before I was not completely embarrassed by my own content. I hated watching myself on camera. My lighting was terrible and my audio was awful, but I kept posting anyway. It took me 700 public videos until I actually inspired myself. Now, most people quit long before they ever reach Video 700. Steve Jobs had massive public failures too. You only remember the iPhone and the iPad, but you forget the painful failures that came first. The Apple Lisa computer was a giant disaster that lost the company millions of dollars and failed in the market. He was even fired from the very company that he created. He started another company called NeXT, which also struggled to sell computers to everyday people. You have to stop hiding behind your lack of money and your fear of judgment. Go make your first piece of content today. Build your first ugly prototype right now. Do the work and expect it to be terrible. The only way you get better is by putting in the repetitions. Your fear of failure is not a good enough reason to stop trying. You got to get out of your head and just take the first step. The first step is always the hardest, but it is the only way you will ever build true momentum. Momentum. Turn your pain into your purpose. So you need a massive reason to wake up every single day and fight for your business. Making money is important, and you absolutely need it to survive, but it can't be your number one goal. If money is your only goal, you will quit the second things get really hard. Your true purpose always comes from your deepest pain. Think about the hardest moments in your entire life. Think about The things that you struggled with the most. Now build a business that helps other people survive and get through the exact same struggle. You are built to serve. You want to wake up every day feeling like your life actually matters to somebody else. To do this effectively, you have to put yourself out there. You have to become the fearless face of your brand, right? So this year, people do not buy from faceless, boring corporations anymore. They buy from real human beings that they can relate to. A major study by BrainFrog discovered that 82% of people trust a company more when the leader communicates directly on social media. So you have to tell your story. Tell people why you started this journey in the first place. Use your empty bank account as a powerful badge of honor. Show your audience the raw, unfiltered truth of your daily grind. When you share your heart and your struggles, you build deep, meaningful connections that no amount of money could ever buy. So stop waiting for permission and start serving your community. When? Right now. Borrow belief until you have your own. The single biggest problem in the world right now, I think, is that people just do not believe in themselves enough. You have massive world-changing potential locked inside of you, but your environment is holding you completely back. If you are surrounded by negative people who tell you to be realistic, then you need to cut them out of your your life immediately. You must fiercely control what you feed into your mind every single day. Start your morning by listening to people who inspire you to take massive action. I call it the believe walk. Wake up, get outside 15 minutes, put on something that inspires you. You can borrow their belief until you have your own. When I'm struggling, I look at the stories of famous entrepreneurs who started with absolutely nothing. I look at Steve Jobs returning glass bottles just to buy a meal. I look at the giant who change history from a dirty garage. If they can do it, you absolutely can too. You have to protect your mindset like your life depends on it. So stop scrolling through negative news that drains your energy and start consuming content that makes you want to get to work. Build a daily routine that fills you with belief and courage. You are just one video, one idea, or one brave decision away from completely changing your entire life. You You have everything you need right now, even if your bank account is absolutely zero. You just have to decide that you are going to win and take the first step today. Your next step to greatness. Never let anyone tell you that your dreams are too big for your current reality. You have greatness inside of you, and it is finally time to let it out. So keep taking massive action, keep pushing forward, and never give up on your vision. To learn how to start a profitable business without money, experience, Experience or connections, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You already have everything you need to start a profitable business.

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.