Warren Buffett: 3 Things Rich People Do Every Day.

Your busy calendar might be a massive warning sign that you're failing as an entrepreneur.

I just flip through it and, you know, there's practically nothing in it. You've got to keep control of your time and you won't keep control of your time unless you can say no.

I think it's the secret to all of my success.

I have calendar anorexia.

I want as little in my calendar as possible. I'm meticulous about it. You got to be very careful if you're somebody who feels like you're busy all the time. To understand that busyness can become a habit and busyness can become your biggest excuse. Warren Buffett creates massive wealth because he uses 3 completely different daily habits to protect his focus and reject 99% of requests.

Focus has always been a strong part of my personality.

When he came to Columbia and spoke to the business school, the very last question that was posed to him was what his secret was. And he had this I'll never forget it. He had this giant pile of paper and he pulled it out. It was a complete hodgepodge and said that he reads 500 pages a week. And anyone can do it. And, you know, it's like compound knowledge. If you start today, it would just build over time.

I just read and read and read. I probably read 5 to 6 hours a day. I like things quiet. I shut the door actually at the office because I don't want to hear anybody talking outside. I still probably spend 5 or 6 hours a day reading and— or thinking while I read.

If you don't aggressively take control of your time right now, you'll become a prisoner to other people's priorities and never build the empire that you deserve.

I buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time. And so to have time is the most precious thing you can have. I better be careful with it. There's no way I will be able to buy more time. You have to prioritize your time really carefully.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Years ago, Bill Gates thought being productive meant packing his schedule. He booked his calendar down to the minute. Then he looked at Warren Buffett's personal pocket calendar and was shocked. I also remember Warren showing me his calendar and I love this.

You know, I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way you could do things.

And, you know, the fact that he is so careful about his time.

Can I show this to the audience? Yeah. He has days that there's nothing on. This is the week of April, of which there are only 3 entries for a week.

Warren explained that you control your time, and sitting down just to read and think is far more valuable than rushing to another meeting. He built a $130 billion fortune mostly by sitting in a quiet room, completely ignoring the busy culture everyone else falls for. Now, right now you might be saying, hey, well, that's easy for Warren Buffett to have a blank calendar. You think you got to hustle 15 hours a day to keep your head just above the water. You feel like if you stop grinding, you'll lose everything. But constantly grinding is exactly what keeps you stuck. Buffett didn't buy his freedom after he got rich. He acted like his time was priceless long before he made his first million. I'm going to show you the 3 exact things he does every single day that you can start doing right now to take back your time. 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. The leaf. The 25/5 Focus Method. Okay, you wanna be successful. You've got massive goals for your life. You have a huge list of projects that you are trying to complete. You're trying to build a business. You're trying to grow your YouTube channel. You're trying to get in shape. You're trying to invest your money. You think that working on 25 different things at once makes you a hard worker. You think juggling all these priorities proves that you're dedicated. Warren Buffett completely disagrees with you. He believes that chasing too many things is exactly why you're failing. He uses a strategy called the 25/5 rule. The story goes that Buffett was talking to his personal pilot. He told the pilot to write down his top 25 career goals. The pilot made his list. Then Buffett told him to circle his top 5 most important goals. The pilot circled his top 5. He told Buffett that he would focus his main energy on the top 5. He said he would work on the other 20 goals when he had some spare time. Buffett looked at him and said, No, he said those 20 goals are now your avoid at all costs list. If you don't completely ignore those 20 goals, they'll destroy your chances of success. They'll steal your time. They'll drain your energy. You'll never achieve the 5 things that actually matter. You're probably doing this right now. You're spreading your energy so thin that nothing gets your full attention. You have a massive vision for your life, but you're getting zero results because you refuse to focus. So you have to realize that good is the enemy of great. You might have 20 good ideas, but pursuing those good ideas is exactly what stops you from executing your 5 great ideas. So you have to cut away the distractions. You have to be willing to ignore things that you do care about just so you can win the things you care about the most. Your brain, it's going to tell you that you're missing out. Your brain will give you really smart reasons why you need to keep all your options open. But all that happens is you stay stuck. You have to learn how to say no. If you don't ruthlessly cut your goals down, you'll always be average. You'll never reach your full potential. You'll watch other people pass you by because they had discipline to focus. So you have to stop treating your focus like it's inevitable, like it's a cheap commodity. It's the most valuable asset that you own. If you want to know exactly how to do this, you need to build your avoid at all costs list. Building your avoid at all costs list. Okay, so how do you actually do this? You have to write down your list today. Write down every single project that you're working on. Write down every goal that you have for the next 5 years. Look at that list. It's probably huge. Now force yourself to pick Just 5. This is gonna hurt. You wanna pick 10? You're gonna try to negotiate with yourself. Don't do it. Warren Buffett says, don't do it. Pick exactly 5. Take the rest of your list and put it in a drawer. You aren't allowed to look at it or touch it until you succeed at the top 5. You have to protect your attention like it's your most valuable asset. The wealthiest people in the world are extremely aggressive about what they ignore. If you wanna make millions of dollars, you must ignore almost everything. You have to cancel projects. You have to say no to people. Every time you say yes to a distraction, You're delaying your ultimate success. Your 6th most important goal is your biggest enemy. You like it just enough to spend time on it, but it won't ever give you the massive success of the top 5. When I joined my first software company at 19 years old, I was struggling. I didn't know what to do. I had to focus entirely on modeling success. I studied how Bill Gates started Microsoft. I applied his exact strategy to my business. It landed me my first deal for $13,500. It only worked because I ignored everything else. I focused on one specific model and put all my energy into it. You have to do the same thing. Find your top priority, commit to it completely. People will invite you out, they'll pitch you new business ideas, they'll, they'll ask you to join their exciting new startup, right? You have to tell them no. It's going to feel uncomfortable. People might even get mad at you. Let them be mad. You can't let other people dictate where your time goes. If you don't take control of your schedule, somebody else will happily take it from you. You're built to serve a specific purpose. And you can't do that if you're constantly distracted. So you have to stay laser focused on your top 5. But focus alone won't make you rich. You need to know exactly how to compound your value. Which brings us directly to Warren Buffett's second daily habit. The 500-page knowledge habit. Once you have your focus, you need to execute. Warren Buffett spends up to 80% of his day reading. When a student asked him how to prepare for an investing career, Buffett held up a stack of paper. He said to read 500 pages like this this every day. He said, knowledge builds up like compound interest. Everyone can do it, but it guaranteed very few actually will. Now, you might think you don't have time to read 500 pages. That's not the point. The point is that you must aggressively consume knowledge about your specific focus. Most people consume garbage. You wake up, you immediately scroll through negative news. You look at social media and compare yourself to people who are faking their success. You load your brain with all sorts of distractions. You have to change your environment. If you want to be great, you have to put greatness into your mind every single day. So start your morning by listening to someone who inspires you. Put on a video of a successful entrepreneur. Listen to the greats. When you surround yourself with massive thinkers, your own problems start to look small. You begin to believe that you can overcome your current struggles. You borrow the belief from them. If you aren't learning every day, you're falling behind. Your competitors, they're studying. They're getting ready. They're getting better. You have to make learning a non-negotiable part of your daily routine and ideally first thing in the morning. So I go for a walk every morning. I call it my believe walk. It's my dedicated time to clear my head and find my focus. And while I walk, I listen to videos and interviews of successful entrepreneurs. I want the greatest minds in history speaking into my ear. I want their belief to transfer into me. You can do the same. Find the authors, the speakers, the leaders who've already accomplished your goals. Consume their content relentlessly, right? Let their knowledge compound inside of your brain. It's the highest return on investment you will get. But consuming information is only half the battle. If you don't know how to translate that knowledge into real-world action, you're just wasting your time, which is exactly what we're going to fix right now. Turning knowledge into action. Reading and learning are completely useless if you don't take action. Watching this video is useless if you don't take action. You can read 100 books a year. If you don't change your behavior, you just wasted your time. You're just trying trying to feel productive without actually doing the work. So you need to implement what you learn, and when? Immediately. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just check the link description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. You have to start taking risks. Your fear of failure is the number one thing holding you back. You want everything to be perfect before you launch. I get it. You want the the perfect website, the perfect camera, the perfect plan. Perfectionism is really just fear. It's a mask for fear. You have to expect to suck at the beginning. When I started my YouTube channel, I was terrible. You can go back and watch the videos. I hated my first 350 videos. I couldn't even watch them because I was so embarrassed by myself. And it took me 700 videos before I actually felt a little bit proud of my work. But I kept posting, I kept learning, I took the knowledge I had and I put it into action. And you can get there faster. You can do the same. Make the messy video, send the awkward email, Launch the ugly product. Just get it out there. The market will tell you what works. You will learn far more from 10 days of taking action than you will from 10 months of just reading books. Every time you test a new idea, you're gathering new data. You're figuring out what works and what doesn't work. So stop overthinking your next move. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment, it doesn't exist. You just have to start where you are with what you have. Action builds confidence. When you combine massive knowledge with massive action, you become incredibly dangerous to your competition. But to make sure that you're taking the right actions, you have to master the third habit of the ultra-rich. It's a habit that almost every entrepreneur completely ignores. Scheduled thinking time. The third habit is the most difficult for entrepreneurs to master. It's the habit of sitting in a quiet room and simply thinking. Warren Buffett doesn't just read. He schedules large blocks of time to just Think. Bill Gates used to schedule every minute of his day. Then he saw Buffett's calendar and realized it was mostly blank. You think that being busy means you're being productive. You fill your calendar with meetings and calls and emails. You pride yourself on working 15 hours a day, but you're running on a treadmill. A lot of times you're moving fast but going nowhere. If you don't schedule time to think, you'll never solve your biggest problems. You'll just keep reacting to fires. You have to pull yourself out of the daily grind. You need time to step back and look at the whole or the bigger picture. I call it CEO time. You have to ask yourself the hard questions. Are you actually moving closer to your ultimate goal or not? Are you spending your time on those top 5 priorities that we identified earlier, or are you slipping back into your old habits? You have to protect your thinking time. Treat it like the most important meeting of your week. Turn off your phone, close your laptop, sit with a blank piece of paper and a pen. Let your mind wander. The best ideas come when you give your brain the space to breathe. Most people are terrified of silence. You constantly need a podcast, a song, a video playing in the background. You're afraid to be alone with your own thoughts, but your thoughts are where the million-dollar ideas live. You have to practice being bored. You have to force yourself to sit and strategize. This isn't wasted time. It's the most profitable time of your entire week. But to make this actually work, you have to ruthlessly engineer your physical and mental space, which is what we're going to cover next. Designing your daily environment to make thinking time work. You have to ruthlessly control your environment. Your environment right now, it's perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to change what surrounds you. You have to limit access to negativity. You have to shut down the voices that tell you that your ideas are crazy. Sometimes those voices are your friends and family. Sometimes the loudest negative voice is in your own head. You have to fight back by engineering your surroundings. When you sit down to think, you can't be in a place full of distractions. You need a dedicated space. You need a place where your brain knows it's time to work. So you need to find your version of that. Maybe it's a quiet corner in your house. Maybe it's a park bench. Doesn't matter where it is. It only matters that you guard it fiercely. If you let other people interrupt your thinking time, you're telling them that their priorities are more important than your future. So stop doing that. You have to value your own mind enough to give it the silence it needs. So when I'm creating something new, that's when I feel the most free. You need to give yourself permission to explore your ideas without judgment. So don't worry if the idea sounds stupid at first. Let it develop. Write it down. Look at the different angles. You'll have these moments where you doubt yourself. You'll wonder if you're sitting there wasting your time. You'll want to go back to checking emails because it feels easier. You get that dopamine hit. Don't give in to that urge. Push through the discomfort of deep thinking. When you create an environment that supports deep focus, your productivity will absolutely skyrocket. You'll start seeing opportunities that were totally blind to you before. You'll finally have the clarity you need to push forward, but there's one final piece of the puzzle that ties all of this together. Building unstoppable momentum. Okay, you now know the, the 3 habits. You need to ruthlessly focus on your top 5 goals. You need to aggressively consume knowledge about those goals. You need to schedule quiet time to think and strategize. Knowing this is not enough. The only thing you're missing right now is momentum. You don't need a massive breakthrough. You don't need a viral moment. You just need to take one small step today. And then another small step tomorrow. Momentum is created by doing the boring, repetitive tasks every single day, even when you don't feel like it. You're going to wake up tomorrow and you won't want to execute. You're going to feel tired. You might feel overwhelmed. That's the exact moment that defines your entire life. Are you going to give in to the comfort or are you going to push through and do the work? You have to believe that the work you're doing today will eventually pay off. The results will not show up immediately. You'll put in massive effort and see zero results for a long time. That's the test. That's the filter that removes the weak. You have to keep pushing until the momentum takes over. And when it does, you'll become unstoppable. You'll look back at your life and realize that mastering these 3 daily habits changed absolutely everything. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world today. That's what I think. You have to believe in your own potential before anyone else will. You have to trust that if you put in the daily reps, the compound interest of your effort will eventually explode. So stop waiting for someone to come and rescue you. Stop waiting for permission from anybody else. Give yourself the green light right now. Protect your focus, expand your knowledge, and guard your thinking time. Everything you want is on the other side of that consistency. Your next step. Your dreams aren't impossible. They're just waiting for you to actually commit to them. You have everything you need right now to start making a massive impact. So trust your vision and take the very next step today. And congratulations, you're one one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn all of investing with no fluff and no BS. You don't need a lot of money or finance degree to become a millionaire. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort.

To get rich in America, I do not need a college degree. I think earning money is one of the simplest things I ever learned, and it's one of the most misunderstood things.

The secret to building massive wealth is just understanding a few simple investing rules that the financial industry overcomplicates on purpose.

You don't need to be a genius in what I do. 90% of the people that buy stocks don't think of them the right way.

There's 3 basic parts to a financial statement: income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow. You can teach a monkey that, but our schools don't teach that. We're told that investing has to be complicated. That you have to be some genius looking at a screen with these numbers like P/E ratios running through it all day. That's not true. If you keep waiting for the perfect time or enough money to start, you will miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in compound interest and be forced to work decades longer than you want to. If you really want to make $100,000 and do it relatively quickly, basically save 15% of your paycheck and put it into an index in the market, sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. But over time, you generally make 6 to 8%. That compounds. Within 7 years, you'll get to your $100,000.

You got to make money while you sleep. And the only way to do that is understand compounding. So if a child is a young person, 19, 20 years old, puts aside $50 a week, they put it in the market over historical returns, it's $2.2 million. You should get money, take the money, invest in assets.

Look at the story of Ronald Read. He worked as a gas station attendant and a janitor for most of his life. He never earned a massive salary and he definitely didn't have a finance degree. But when he died at age 92, his family and friends were shocked to learn he had an $8 million fortune. Ronald didn't find a secret stock tip or trade options all day. He just saved whatever small amounts he could, bought shares in solid companies that paid dividends, and let that money sit there for decades. He let compound interest do the heavy lifting while Wall Street bankers tried to sell everyone complicated day trading systems. Now, you might be telling yourself that Ronald Read is a nice story, but you're barely scraping by and you don't have any extra money to invest. You think you need to wait until your business takes off or you get a promotion before you can open an investment account. But wealth isn't about how much you make, it's about the habits that you build. Waiting until you have a ton of money to start investing is like waiting until you're in shape to go to the gym. And today I'm going to be breaking down the absolute absolute basics of investing so you can start building your fortune with just a few dollars. The mathematical miracle of time. The absolute biggest mistake you can make with investing is thinking that you are too late or too poor to start. You look at your bank account, you see a few hundred dollars, and you tell yourself that investing is only for people who already have millions. That's a lie. The greatest asset you have right now is not your income, It's your time. There's a concept in finance called compound interest. Albert Einstein supposedly called compound interest the 8th wonder of the world, saying that he who understands it earns it and he who does not pays it. Compound interest just means that your money makes more money and then that new money makes even more money. It's a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and faster the longer you let it roll. There's a simple math trick trick you can use to see this in action. It's called the Rule of 72. You could take the number 72 and divide it by the percentage return you expect to get on your money. The answer is exactly how many years it will take for your money to double. So let's say you invest in the stock market and get a 10% return. You divide 72 by 10, that equals 7.2. That means every 7.2 years your money doubles without you having to do any extra work. This is exactly like building a business or starting a YouTube channel. When I started making YouTube videos, it took me 5 years to hit a couple thousand subscribers. I had to make 350 videos until I was not completely embarrassed by my content. I had to make 700 videos until I actually inspired myself. The growth at the beginning is so slow that it feels like getting nowhere. Most people quit right there. But if you are consistent, the momentum eventually takes over. The exact same thing happens with your money. If you invest $100 today and you leave it alone for 40 years at a 10% return, it turns into over $4,500. That's the power of momentum. But to get that momentum, You have to put your money into the right places. So where do you actually put your money to get those returns? I'm going to give you the exact answer right now. Buying the entire haystack. When you think about investing in the stock market, you probably picture guys in these expensive suits screaming on the trading floor, trying to pick the perfect stock. You think you need to find the next Google or Amazon before they hit it big. That is a trap right there, because picking individual stocks is incredibly risky, especially when you don't know what you're doing. Even the smartest professionals in the world, they fail at it. There's a massive report published every year called the SPIVA report. It measures how professional, highly paid fund managers perform compared to the regular stock market. Over a 15-year period, nearly 90% of active professional fund managers actually lose to the market. So if the guys with the supercomputers and the finance degrees can't pick the right stocks, you should not try to do it either. Instead of trying to find the needle in the haystack, you should just buy the entire haystack. This by buying something called an index fund. An index fund is just a single basket that holds small pieces of hundreds of different companies all at the same time. The most famous one is the S&P 500 index. So when you buy the S&P 500 index, you instantly own a tiny piece of the 500 biggest, most successful companies in America. If one company goes bankrupt, you do not lose all your money because you still own 499 other successful businesses. I talk a lot about about modeling success. If you want to achieve something great, look at the people who have already done it and model their path. You do not need to invent a brand new system. The most successful long-term investors in history all use simple index funds. It takes away the stress, it takes away the guessing, and it guarantees that you will capture the growth of the greatest businesses in the world. You just buy the fund consistently every single month and ignore the news. But keeping your money in the market is only half the battle. You also have to protect it from the silent thief that is robbing you right now. The silent thief in your bank account. A lot of entrepreneurs, they tell me that they like to keep all their cash in a regular checking account. They say it feels safe. They say they can see the numbers on their screen and they know the stock market goes up and down, so they choose not to participate. If you do this, you are not playing it safe. You are actually guaranteeing that you will lose money. The silent thief that I'm talking about is called inflation. Inflation just means the cost of living goes up every single year. The price of your groceries, gas, rent, everything else, it's constantly increasing. Historically, inflation averages around 3% every year. That means if your money is just sitting in a bank account earning zero interest, it is losing 3% of its buying power every 12 months. Over 20 years, your cash will lose more than half of its value. So to beat inflation, your money has to grow faster than the cost of living. We can look at the historical data from 1928 to 2024. Cash returned about 3.31% per year. That barely keeps up with inflation. Bonds returned 4.5%. Real estate was 4.23%. Gold returned 5.12%. But stocks returned 9.94% per year. So you have to take a calculated risk to protect your future. Big decisions made with your heart. Small decisions should be made with your head. Your heart tells you that you want to be financially free. I hope you want to provide for your family and fund your dreams. I hope. But your head has to look at the math and realize that hiding your money under a mattress will never get you there. You have to invest. Now, even if you do start investing, there is a massive trap that the financial industry uses to steal your wealth, and I'm going to show you how you can avoid it. The hidden fees keeping you broke. So Wall Street makes billions of dollars by making you feel stupid. They use confusing words to convince you that you need to pay them to manage your money. They charge you a percentage of your total wealth every single year just for the privilege of holding your investments. This is called an expense ratio or advisory fee. You might think that paying a 1% or 2% fee is not a big deal. It sounds like it's a tiny number, but over 30 years, a 2% 2% fee will eat up nearly 30% of your total wealth. That is hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from your retirement simply because you paid a guy in a suit to do something that you could easily do yourself. One of the most important rules in business is to eliminate, automate, delegate, right? You want to eliminate useless tasks, automate the repetitive ones, and delegate the rest to talented people. But you should never just blindly delegate your total financial future to a salesman who charges you 2% a year for an expensive mutual fund that's going to lose you money compared to the market. You can bypass the expensive advisors completely. You can open a free account at an online brokerage. Think about Vanguard or Fidelity or Charles Schwab. You can buy low-cost index funds yourself. Some of those funds charge fees as low as 0.03%. That means you keep exactly what you earn. You keep your money working for you instead of you paying for a banker's new sports car. But picking the right index funds with the lowest fees is just one step. Step. You also need to put those funds inside the right accounts so the government does not take all your profits. Building your tax shield. Taxes will be your single biggest expense over the course of your life. As an entrepreneur, you already know how much it hurts to see a huge chunk of your hard-earned income disappear to the government. When it comes to investing, you have the legal right to shield your money from taxes, but you have to use the right accounts. And now, every jurisdiction is going to be different, but a regular brokerage account gives you zero tax benefit. You pay taxes on the money before you invest it, and you pay taxes on the profits when you sell it. But the government created special accounts to encourage you to save for your future. You need to use them. I'm going to talk from the American side of things now. The first one is a Roth IRA. A Roth IRA is an individual retirement account. You put money in after you've paid taxes on it today. But the magic is that the money grows completely tax-free forever. When you pull the money out in retirement, you do not pay a single penny in taxes on the massive profits that you made. If you have a 9-to-5 job while you are building your business, you might have access to a 401. A lot of companies will match the money you put into your 401. If your company offers a match, you must take it. It's literally free money. Then there's the absolute best investing account in existence. It's called a health savings account, HSA. An HSA has a triple tax advantage. The money goes in tax-free, it grows tax-free, tax-free and it comes out tax-free if you use it for medical expenses. If you just take a few hours this week to set up these accounts, you will save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes over your lifetime. But eventually a day will come when you log into these accounts and see a massive negative number. You need to be prepared for that day. Surviving the market roller coaster. If you invest in the stock market, you are going to see market crashes.

Crashes.

It is a mathematical guarantee. Every few years, the market drops by 10%, 20%, even 30%. When this happens, the news goes crazy. People panic. They log into their accounts, they see their life savings shrinking, and they sell everything in fear. Selling when the market drops is the worst financial mistake that you can make. When you sell during a crash, you lock in your losses permanently. You turn a temporary dip on a screen into real permanent loss of cash. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world have incredible emotional They know that growth is hard and that success is hard and entrepreneurship is hard. The highs are very high and the lows are brutally low. Remember, your purpose comes from your pain. The moments when you are tested the most are the moments that define your ultimate success. When the market crashes, you have to train yourself to see it as a massive opportunity, not a financial disaster. Think about it like a sale at your favorite store. If you went to buy a laptop and it was suddenly 30% off, you'd be thrilled. You would buy it immediately. The stock market is the exact same thing. When the market drops, it means the greatest companies in America are suddenly on sale. You are buying the same exact assets for a massive discount. Now, historically, the stock market has recovered from every single crash, every single recession, and every global crisis in history. It always bounces back and goes higher. You just have to believe in the long-term progress of the economy. You hold your investments, you stay calm, and you keep buying. If you can survive the bad days, you will capture the massive rewards of the good days. Funding your mission. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the math, some of the stats, and the strategies you can use, but the real secret to investing is understanding why you are actually doing this. You are not investing just to have a high score in the bank account when you die. You are investing to buy your freedom. If you're an entrepreneur, you have a massive mission. You want to serve people. You want to make an impact. We are all built to serve. If you're not happy, it's because you're not serving. But you can't serve the world at the highest level if you're constantly stressed out about paying your rent. You can't hire a massive team and build an empire if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Money is not a bad thing. It is a completely necessary fuel for your business. Try driving a car without fuel and see how far you get. Money can't be number 1 on your list. It can't be number 1,000 on your list. It has to be in be top 5. It just shouldn't be number 1 because the mission comes first. But you must learn how to make money, keep money, and multiply money so you can fund the changes that you want to see in the world. When you get your investments automated, you buy back your mental energy. You stop worrying about your financial survival and you start focusing entirely on your creative genius. You get to wake up every day and do work that matters to you. You get to impact lives. You get to take risks on new ideas because you know your financial foundation is call it. That is what true wealth looks like. Your belief is your superpower. The only thing separating you from financial freedom right now is the decision to start. You have the rules, you have the strategies. Now you just have to have the courage to take the first step. You do not need a perfect plan, you just need momentum. Expect to make some mistakes, expect to learn along the way, but promise yourself that you will not stay stagnant. You are capable of building massive wealth, and the world desperately needs what you are going to create with it. I analyzed 50 billionaires, and here's what they had in common. 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 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 people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into two companies that looked like they were about to die— Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had three 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 $40 million 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 SpaceX a contract. 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 If you cannot bet on yourself 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 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 Acadia Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the 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. 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 5 things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all 5 of them fail. You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says, "If you can find just 3 wonderful 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, 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 nonconformists. 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. 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 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 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 thinkitating, using his brain power 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 6 months researching a logo. You want to start a podcast and you spend 3 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 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 client. 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. 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 solve 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 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 their money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They 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. If you want to learn the billionaire habits you can apply today, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You think success comes from talent, luck, or the perfect moment? That belief is why most people stay stuck.

Natural human tendency is wishful thinking.

Work your ass off. There is no magic pill.