6 PASSIVE INCOME SECRETS To Make Money TODAY! | Rory Vaden & Lewis Howes

Don't ask how can I make money? Ask how can I help? I'm telling you, if you ask how can I help, you'll make a lot more money. But money is not the goal. The mission is Somebody watching right now could be like, okay, well like how do I make the money? You know, like how do I get the lead? But this is how you get the lead, is you serve first. In a digital world, you provide value for them.

Value, value, value, value, value, value.

Give out. It's the three E's, right? You're putting out content that is either educational, encouraging, or entertaining. And typically some mix of all three. Educational, encouraging, or entertaining. And the digital marketing strategy that we employ At Brand Builders Group, for Rory Vaden Personal Brand, and for all of the clients that we work with, that we teach these personal brands, is teach everything you know for free, one bite at a time, but in all random order.

So it's not packaged in the right order, as you would have in a book, or a course, or a workshop, or an event.

Right, we've said this before, people don't pay for information. They pay for organization and application.

Yes.

And we have a thing called the Services Spectrum, which basically says, you know, information is down here, it's free. Organization is here in the middle. You can charge a little bit, like in a course or a book or, you know, like a membership site. But applications up here at the top, which is like a coaching program or consulting, you know, like done for your services application. Information is social media, podcasting, blogs.

YouTube, video.

YouTube.

People don't pay for information. But you're just giving them bites size chunks of information. You're teaching everything you know, but not all at once in the right sequential order. People pay for the right order. That's organization. I mean, we tell-- one of the reasons people hire us at Brand Builders Group is because we have a very set curriculum, the Brand Builder Journey. And we say, Look, one of the biggest problems with personal brands is that people do the right thing, but in the wrong order. They're launching Facebook ads the first month, and it's like, that's step 76. You're like, skipping all of that.

They don't have a funnel yet. to nothing.

Yeah, you're driving it back to nothing. You're spending all this time on social media driving back to nothing. So the first thing is find your uniqueness, figure out what you're good at, then extrapolate that into a product, create your service, your product offer, you may already have that, and then after that it's like, okay, how do I drive traffic? And there's two worlds here. When I think of marketing and sales, I think of the online world and the offline world, and we've done both, which is rare. Most of the people have done one or the other, and it's like I've done the door to door thing. I worked for a startup IT company doing inside corporate B2B phone sales. Then when we started our former company, we did phone sales like B2B for like small businesses and we did free presentations and we sold. But the fastest mechanism to generating a lead is to do a free presentation Demonstrating your value, your expertise, it's giving people a sample, and then offering them the next step. Here's what it is. It is the food court. When you go to the food court.

Want some orange chicken.

And the orange chicken on a stick.

Man, tastes good. I want the whole thing now.

It's a sample, and if you want more, I'm right here.

See's candy gets me every time. Gives you a free piece of candy just going to the store, and you're like, ooh, I want the whole box. Yeah, I mean, it's a free presentation. you could do this through many different mechanisms. It used to be free workshops in person.

And by the way, like, when I say-- Local events. This is what everybody does. Like, this is what Jim Rohn did, and Tony Robbins, and Brian Tracy, and Tom Hopkins, and like everybody in the personal development industry, they used to go.

Do, this is how we built our former lives. This is what people in real estate industries do. They do it. They teach at a free seminar.

Free seminar. A 90-minute live free training. Financial advisors do this. Come to my free dinner presentation on 10 Keys to Retirement.

Why?

'Cause it works. Like you're giving value and you're leveraging the law of reciprocity, right? As I give to you before instead of ask, the way you make sales is by giving so much that at some point they ask you to buy versus showing up and asking all the time. In fact, we use a rule called the rule of 10. and this is a pricing, this is more of like a pricing thing. But you know, people get really weird around price and asking for the money and you know, when it comes to collecting a credit card and or if you're on like a webinar or a Facebook Live or if you're, it doesn't matter if it's Facebook Live, it's a webinar, it's a video funnel or it's standing on stage or it's talking to one person, you got to be convicted in the value you're bringing and the way you do that is by over delivering. The number one way to drive your own conviction is over delivering. And everyone teaches sales as like, you know, the voodoo mind tricks on the person you're talking to. The real game is the mind is winning the battle in your own mind and being convinced that what you have is valuable. And the rule of 10 helps you do that. So basically, when people are putting together their first offer, they tend to like swing for the fences and go, I'm gonna charge for a $2,000 video course or something. And they say, well, I saw a video and my coach told me, Charge what you're worth. That's terrible advice. Don't charge what you're worth. What should we charge? When you're starting out, don't charge what you worth. Charge what you can get. Charge what you're convicted on. Charge what you can massively over deliver upon. If I'm charging what I'm worth, there's gonna be a bit of reluctance when I deliver the price. They're gonna feel it and it's going to massively reduce the percentage conversion.

Yeah, someone once told me, Charge What 10x the value.

Yeah, that's the rule of 10.

Right, it's like if it's a...

Charge one-tenth of what it's worth.

Exactly. If it's $10,000 worth of value, then charge a thousand, right? And if it's $1,000 worth of value, charge 100. It's 100, charge 10.

So you always have, you know, if it were a bank account, you always have this like credit, this balance with people. And you go, And it starts for free. It starts on social media, which is amazing. Like the power that social media gives us, it's not that you have to reach millions of people. It gives us a mechanism to push a button and deliver value. Because it's like people go, it's like a chicken or the egg. How do I build an audience? You know, I want to provide value but I don't have an audience. No, you provide value first. If nobody is watching, you record and you teach value, you deliver it and people will engage with that. Now we have a process which I'm happy to talk about, of converting comments into customers. So, you know, I don't know if you want to take this more like online or if you want to do like more offline.

I think online is cool.

Okay, so let's talk about that. So, you know, it starts with the mind, okay? Self-centeredness is the problem. Service-centeredness is the solution.

Yes.

You never feel fear when the mission to serve is clear. You get your mind right. Then you go, okay, I'm going to go out and provide value. So you start pumping out value. We have a thing called the Content Diamond, which I know I've talked about on other episodes. We can touch on that. But anyways, you're putting out value. And now what happens is people like and comment. And what most of us do is we go six views.

Right.

And it's just like, I mean, and we get self-centered again. And we go, I only have six views. Jay Shetty gets like six billion views. And it just makes me feel awful because I'm thinking about myself. And there's like a comment and then you're like, I don't have a time. And then what we do is like, I don't have time to deal with these comments. Or someone sends you a DM and you're like, I don't have time to deal with these DMs and you're missing it. Comments and DMs are where the sale happen on social media. Like, the dollars are in the DMs. Ooh. The dollars are in the DMs because when somebody leaves a comment, they're saying, Hey, I'm interested.

I'm interested. I want to know more.

I like you.

Whether they're not saying, I want to know more or not, they want to connect. They want to connect. They're coming to your door. They're knocking on your door. You gotta open it. Bingo.

Yeah, that's a great way of thinking it is.

You're not going to their door. They've come to you.

They have come to yours. And it's like, if you're too busy to interact with those people, Don't be on social period.

Right.

I mean, unless you're just doing the thing where you're gonna do it for years and years and years and one day you'll have more audience. But even it's like, if you want to really impact lives, impact lives. Like that's what pisses me off is people are like, I want to impact lives. And it's like, great, okay, let's put a video out there. Well, I don't have any followers.

Well, I don't care.

Like, I'm not getting paid to do it. Focus on one at a time. One person. You said you wanted to impact lives. Impact lives. There's no barrier to impacting lives. There's no barrier. It's easier than it has ever been in history to impact lives. You can do it with text, you can record and make it a podcast, you can do video, but you are a button from impacting, I want to change the world. Great. You're one button away. Get busy. The truth is we want to have millions of followers, we want to feel important, we want other people to respect us, and you go, let all that crap go. Just focus on what you originally said. Impact lives. So anyways, so we use a little formula here when someone comments. Usually we will try to move the conversation from comments into DMs. If it's a sales conversation, if it's just chatter, we'll do it in comments. But when you go, I want to convert comments into customers, you do that in the DMs. So you move them over to your DMs.

Send me a DM or you message them.

You message them and then you come and you say, Hey, thanks for this. I just sent you a DM. Now you might comment back on their comment related to what their comment was and then you say, by the way, I sent you, you know, check your DM and I sent you a message, okay? And then here's, we call this the four F's. Super, super simple. Yep. Okay, so here's the four F's. The first F is, how did you find me? And that's it. I just say, oh, Louis, yeah, man, thanks for leaving a comment. How'd you find me?

Mm-.

And they're gonna say something, right? They're gonna say, whatever, I, I saw your, I don't know, I stumbled across organically or a hashtag I was following or whatever, right? And it's like, cool. Then the second F. The School of Greatness. Yeah, School of Greatness. I mean, yeah, a lot of people find you if you get on the School of Greatness, that's for sure. They'll say, what was your favorite part?

Right?

So, like, what was your favorite part of that video? So, wherever they found you, I read your book, I saw this video, I read your blog, I saw you in an interview, I saw you speak somewhere, I saw your ad, I mean, if it's an ad, that's It's probably not the favorite part thing doesn't work. But usually, well, we said you're not running ads yet because you're just starting out. So you said, what was your favorite part? Or what's your favorite thing you've seen me teach? Or what's your favorite thing to talk about? Or even if you don't have that, you could say, what's your favorite thing to learn about? Which leads to the third F, which is, tell me about your future. Tell me about your future. So in other words, what are your goals? What are you working on? Like, before you try to sell somebody something, figure out what they care about. Spend time learning about them. Ask them, and this is what's so cool, and if there's one defining point about our sales philosophy, and I would say specifically AJ, so my wife, she's our CEO at Brand Builders Group, her and I were business partners in our former venture, and she is the greatest salesperson that I've ever seen. And I mean, she outperforms formed three to one record-breaking sales people in 100 year companies. And her and I have a departing philosophy, a defining philosophy about sales that has caused us to separate from other people and constructs because we believe that you should always win the relationship even if you lose the sale.

That's good.

You should always win the relationship even if you lose the sale. And if you focus on making sales, you're gonna feel pressure. If you focus on building relationships, man, it's gonna be great. Here's the other thing. If you focus on making sales, there's wins and losses. If you focus on building relationships, there's only wins.

Yeah, the interesting point to that, the longer you've been adding value, whether it be online or offline or whatever, just in the world, without needing to win the sale, the longer you'll have the ability to have someone buy that something from you later in your life. Yeah, I've had multiple, yeah, I've had multiple people on webinars when I'll say, you know, how long have you known me for? I'll just ask people, how long have you known me for? And when did you first find out about me? And people will say, I watched your webinars back in 2009, 10, 11, 12, whatever it is. Awesome. And you'll always get a comment if someone's saying, I've never bought anything until now. Like, I've always just been a fan. I've always gotten great value. I've always learned and applied it, but I've never bought anything until now, until it was the right time for me, it was the right season, until I was ready for this, or until something you said clicked with me and I finally was like, okay, yeah, now I'll buy. But if I was just like, leave my life if you're not going to buy something now, as opposed to saying, I'm here to add value. I want you to succeed whether you buy or not. But we can support you in this process from our application, from our service, whatever it might be, from our program. We can support you if you're ready for it. And if not, then hey, we've got other great free content here for you as well. I think when you have that mindset, you win long term.

You win. I mean, you're such a great example of that. and you have to be that. And people don't, it's just a win-lose, it's a combative, you know, most people do combative selling and it should be collaborative. It should be, you're discovering them. And this question, tell me about your future, what like your future goals, your future plans, your future dreams. What's so cool about that question is almost nobody ever asks you that question.

Very few.

Even when you meet a stranger, we always ask them, where are you from?

What do you do?

What do you do? We ask them about their past and their present. Almost nobody ever asks us. What's your hope for your future? What are you working on? What's your dream? That's so inspiring, exciting, uplifting. And by the way, it's a great way to create a context for a sale to happen. Because if they say something, Gosh, I really want to blank. If their answer to that question is something that you have done or you have a service for or you know something about, right? Like when somebody tells me, I want to be a speaker, I want to be an author, I want, you know, I'm like, oh my gosh, can I change your life? I mean, I spent my life learning exactly a roadmap that you can follow, like a step-by-step for that dream to come true.

And one of the things to add to that is if you can't sell them something, if they can't buy something from you or become a customer of yours through your products and services, you want to, I always try to ask people this question, like what's your, what's your goal? What's your dream for this next 12 months or the next year or whatever? And if I can't help them in any way through my business, I always want to become the champion of an introduction to them who could help them.

Amen.

Whether, and that could be an affiliate partner or not. It could be, well, I don't do this, but Rory's team does this extremely well. Let me connect you and he can accelerate this goal for you. But I've had that champion introduction mindset of like, let me just introduce to the person who I know can help you. And that always pays dividends in the future as well. You may not get the sale, you may not sell them something, but you help them accomplish their goal and they'll always be grateful.

And they trust you. And you know, more and more, this is interesting, even if you don't have a product to sell, you can earn referral fees. I mean, any of us can go to Amazon and sign up for a link to like have affiliate links for everything and lots of people have, I mean, our whole business runs on referrals. We actually pay our clients to, if they introduce us to somebody and they sign up, we pay them. And that's becoming really, really common. That's actually a great tool. Referral partner marketing, if it's not slimy, like you don't want it to be slimy. Again, Another thing that's kind of similar in this vein is never compromise long-term reputation for short-term revenue. Don't compromise long-term reputation for short-term revenue. Just because I can increase my conversion rates by adding a widget that makes it look like there's a million people commenting even though there's not actually anybody there, you know, I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm saying you should think about that. You should make a decision consciously to go, play the long game. Just play the long game. Like you're saying, even if you don't, I mean, we refer people to stuff that we don't have referral partners for all the time. How can I help? And this is the problem is people go, how can I make money? Don't ask how can I make money. Ask how can I help? I'm telling you, if you ask how can I help, you'll make a lot more money. If you ask how can I make money, you may end up doing some things that are compromise. It's not that money's bad. I mean, we love money. Like, money is good. We're fans of money. We want lots of money. We're good at making money. We're good at making other people lots of money. We enjoy money. But money is not the goal. The mission is the goal. Service is the goal. Helping the person is the goal. And you make money as a byproduct of that. It's solving a problem in the world.

Yes.

And that's the third F, and about your future goals.

Okay, great. Yeah, so then the fourth F is where the close happens, the conversion, the sale. Is a free call to action. So free call to action, which is like, what's your next free step? The next free step is request a call. The next free step is check out this full-length training I did. The next free step is subscribe to my blog. What is the next free step? We always want to give them a free step, a free download, a free training, a free call, and then eventually, after that, you make an offer. But whatever that free step is, typically it's going to be a free call or it's going to be a free training.

You know.

A webinar, a training, a webinar, yeah.

Or just an online. A demo. Yeah, a demo. Like we do a lot of evergreen type stuff where it's just like, there's just this video out here.

Check it out.

It's a hidden video. Right, right. Here's a link to it and they watch an hour-ish. It could be more, could be less, but let's call it an hour. And what do we do on that hour? We drop massive value bombs on them. We're delivering value. We're teaching, teach as much as you can. for free in the time you have, and then they're gonna wanna take the next step if you do a good job.

With all the tools and all the distractions and all the social media and all the apps and all the responsibilities that we have in our life, is there a way to multiply time and to become more productive?

Yeah, yeah there is. So, I mean, this is what you just described was my life. This was pretty much like all the things we study. I was not trying so much to solve the problem for the world. I was trying to solve a problem in my own life. Just busy, buried, behind, overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated. No matter how fast you work, you just never feel caught up.

No matter how many hours you didn't sleep, you felt tired and you were working sluggish and trying to get it all done, everything.

Yeah, you just can't, there's this frustration of like, Am I ever gonna have peace? Like, am I ever gonna have margin? Am I ever gonna have space? Just feeling like things are under control. And so we started looking at this and we started profiling people that at the time we called ultra performers, which were the top 1% ers in different industries.

Is this top 1% earners, top 1% accomplishments?

Yeah, I mean, just what it's kind of used that term loosely, but like, you know, if it's church leaders, large, you know, large church leaders. If it's athletes, it's professional athletes, if it's financial advisors, they're probably top earners.

Sure, sure.

So it's just from different walks of life. And what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged that is, we call them a multiplier. Because most people are trying to manage time, right? Like you even hear this, you go, I need, you know, I need to be better at managing my time.

Time management.

But, you know, what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. You cannot manage time. Time ticks on second by second. I can't fast forward time. I can't stop it. I can't pause it. And so what this conversation really about is managing ourselves, managing our decisions, managing our use of time, But even that is kind of a first shift that needs to happen. It's not like I'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff. No, you're in charge. Like you, everything that exists in your life, you either said yes to it in some way. So it is your responsibility and you created the problem, but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it, that you have the power to change it. But what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and think about time management, I went so far and as the opening line in my TED Talk is I said, Everything you know about time management is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very linear way. And the world today is much more like multi-dimensional.

When you mean linear way, do you mean focusing on our priorities?

Yeah, so a little bit about that. So if we talk, we love to take people on a quick history of time management theory. So, Era 1 time management thinking was very one-dimensional. We refer to Era 1 thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was, I got 10 things on my to-do list. How do I crank them out faster? And time management and productivity as a body of work really develops. Like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was how can I be more efficient? Now, efficiency is good. All things being equal, Doing things faster is great. The problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity. Which is that no matter how fast we move, the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available. So, it's more like quicksand. It's just kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up. doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast. It's just not going to get you what you're looking for. Then in the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies. And Dr. Covey pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought that we the world refers to as prioritizing. But we would classify prioritizing as era two thinking, which is still to this day the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time. And so here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Super powerful, super relevant. Dr. Covey had this thing called the time management matrix that he explained of urgency and importance. And basically he taught us to score our activities so that we could reorder them and say, it's not just about getting these done faster. It's saying, hey, item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one, which is valuable. And so that's super valuable. Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. But what I noticed in my own life, because I was a student of Dr. Covey and several books on time. I mean, there's no shortage of books on time management. There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy. And yet, the majority of us are still overwhelmed. So, it's like there's something missing. And what we started to notice in these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers, is that they are doing a different type of thinking. It's like evolution, like their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious.

They weren't even aware of it.

Not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do. They did it instinctively, you know, like instinctually. They figured out and most of them couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain it. To me, and they couldn't explain it to most people if they said, why are you so productive? How do you become a billionaire in 10 years when most people work for 40 years and they can barely retire? It's a different type of thinking. And one of the things, this is true in many areas of our life, the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So here's what it is. So error three time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency, it's not prioritizing, it's multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation. So it's really, it's not, it's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he, you know, presents this two-dimensional figure like a square, where the y-axis is importance and the x-axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance. So it's kind of like if you were doing algebra, it would be the z-axis. It would turn the square into a cube.

Three-dimensional.

Three-dimensional thinking, era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking. And so here's the difference. urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now. Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still. Significance is how long is this going to matter? So how is, what is the impact of this activity in the future.

10 years out, 20 years out.

Even 10 days out, yeah. It is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow and the next day and the significance calculation changes everything because this is how it's possible to multiply time. So I'll just tell you in one sentence. Okay, so if you say Rory, How is it possible to multiply time? This is the answer. So you want to write this part down. You don't want to miss this. The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. There's certain things you do right now that create more time in the future. That's the significance calculation. So when I say multiply time, people often think I'm exaggerating or that it's like a marketing hyperbole, right? As I'm like, I'm sensationalizing a concept. When we say this, we're not exaggerating. We mean this literally. Now, it kind of fries your brain because you go, you,'ve been told your whole life, you can't, time is the one thing you can never get back. It's the one thing you can never get more of. And it is true that there's nothing that we can do, there's nothing I can do to give you more time inside of one day. So one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours, which by the way is 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. So I can't teach you to create more, I don't have control over time. Right? There's no such thing as time management. There's only self-management. But that's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day. We wake up and we say, what's the most important thing I can do today? And it's not that that's a bad question. It's just not the question that multipliers ask. Multipliers don't say, what is the most important thing I can do today? Multipliers ask, what are the things I can do today that create more time tomorrow? What are the things I can do now that make the future better? You're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here, right now, and you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul.

Right. How do you know which actions to focus on urgently that will have impact over the long haul?

Yes.

When you've got everything's significant.

Yes. Well, there's a tool called the Focus Funnel that we developed here to help people apply this. So there's only one big idea in this whole conversation which is spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. That's how you multiply time. And then you go, How do I do that? And there's five core methods, strategies, We call them permissions because there's an emotional side. What we've also learned is that most people treat time management logically, but it's actually an emotional conversation. For most of us, it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list. It is our underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry, as well as ambition and our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make impact in the world. These underlying emotional drivers dictate as much as dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list.

What do we feel most guilty about?

We feel most guilty About not doing.

Something that we want to do, about delaying something, about wasting our time.

I would say that guilt, so guilt corresponds with the first of the five permissions, which is eliminate. Okay. So if you were to picture a funnel, okay, so if I was going to draw this out, right, like you think of all of the stuff there is to do comes into the top. And then the focus funnel is our attempt to create a visual illustration that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through intuitively in their own brain so that the rest of us can kind of like see it and follow it. So the very first question is can this be eliminated?

So give me an example of your life or someone's business or career or whatever it might be.

There's tons of things. I mean in your personal life, I mean I used, I like the example of TV because it's hilarious how people Will in the same dinner conversation talk about how they're so busy and married and overwhelmed and then talk about the three series on Netflix that they have binged in like the last month. Right. Which took 20 hours of their life. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, and I'm not saying you shouldn't watch TV. By the way, I'm not telling you anything you shouldn't or shouldn't do. I'm just introducing the framework for you.

To decide how to spend your time. But you're saying you're too busy and overwhelmed. check to where you're spending your time the most. That's right. Nielsen says-- Nielsen says six hours on Instagram a day and you're not creating something of significance and you're just browsing or if you're 20 hours a week on TV and you're overwhelmed and tired.

And exhausted, then just look at where you're spending your time.

Yeah.

And Nielsen ratings, this is from a few years ago, but they said the average American watches 27 hours a week of television.

A week. A week.

It's a part-time job.

So... 27 hours a week. How much is that a day?

I mean, so seven, seven times, it's like four hours a day.

Four hours a day of TV?

It's like four hours a day. That's a ton.

That's a lot of time.

I mean, you could build a big side hustle in a couple hours every day.

Let's just say... Even if you just cut half of that down, and you watch two hours a day of TV, and you spend two hours on your side hustle, or something out, your health, your relationships, Imagine the benefits you would have down the line.

-So, yeah. There's anything eliminate is the first opportunity to multiply because anything I say no to today creates time in the future.

How?

It's preventing me from doing something that I would have otherwise been doing had I not given myself the permission to eliminate. Like had I not said no. So basically, this is is saying no and people really struggle with saying no. In businesses, this happens all the time. People have all these, so at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy, right? So we're coaching all these like people on building and monetizing their personal brand. Well, they have like a hundred business models. It's like, I want to have a video course and a membership site and a live event and consulting. I want to do keynote speaking and I want to get a book deal and, you know, and sponsorships and brand deals. And it's like when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So you have to, by saying no to some things, you power your ability to focus on the few significant things that will multiply time. So you have to say no. But this is something that people struggle with. I struggle with it.

You know, especially when you get to a certain level of success where there's a lot of opportunities and cool things and exciting things and new shiny objects, we want to do lots of things.

Yeah.

High achievers, people that have gotten out of the weeds of their life and they have different problems which are opportunity problems. Again, first world problems. It's how do you focus your time and energy and making the decisions that you want to focus on now for your future and that is a challenge in just making decisions. Decision fatigue is a thing for people and learning how to place importance on the things that you want to spend your time on is going to be key for you.

Totally and a lot of people, the decision fatigue, what happens is it does wear on you and so a lot of people don't make conscious decisions. So what happens is...

They make what? Emotional decisions, reactions.

Yes, they're unconscious. emotional impulses, right? And if you're not consciously saying no to the things that don't matter, you end up unconsciously saying no to the things that do matter.

What if everything matters to you?

So, you know, that's what I said actually. So I, in, so we were, you know, this became the procrastinate on purpose book. So this was my second book. When we're profiling all these people, I was doing interviews. And I told one of the multipliers, I said, I don't like this one. I got to where I am by being a yes man, by like doing a lot of things and doing them well and like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time. And they said, Rory, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I was like, oh, okay. And here's what they said. They said, you,'re trying to go through life without saying no, which is admirable because you're a nice guy. But what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something. Anytime you say yes to one thing, you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things. So even when you think you're saying, yes, everything is important to me. No, nothing is important to you. Nothing is important enough for you to focus on and you don't have a method for focus and focus is power. So, most of us are losing because we're wandering, we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant, trivial tasks feeling productive when really we're just diluted.

Right.

So, that's a first one, eliminate. Now, if you can't eliminate the task, then it drops down to the center of the focus funnel, which is automate. the permission to invest. And this is so powerful because anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future.

-Yes.

Now, we if I set up a process for it or a system or if I write code, you know, there's a lot of automation like actual technologies and things that you can deploy. If I take the time to set it up today, then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me. So, it's multiplying time. Now, here's the challenge is that most of us are aware that those tools exist. But if you ask someone, Louis, I mean like if you ask the average business owner or you know whatever, you know achiever or you know somebody pursuing greatness, are you aware of Tools and systems and processes and technologies that you could implement or deploy or improve inside of your goals that would automate things. They would all say yes, but if you said, why haven't you done it yet? What do you think they'd say?

It takes too much time.

It takes too much time.

It's easier to do it myself right now, just a couple minutes every day as opposed to building a system. figuring out the software, learning it, going to the training, hiring someone, teaching them all the time and energy. I might as well just do it myself right now.

Bingo. Yeah, so it's like, it's so ironic because the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say either I don't have the time or I don't have the... Patience. Money.

The patience.

The patience. We'll talk about in a second.

We might talk about time. I don't have the time or the money.

I don't have the time or the money. And it's wild because those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation.

Because if you did automate, you would save time or you would multiply time and you'd earn more money from your time doing something else.

Yeah, so an easy example is bill pay. You know, that's a quick example.

Right?

If you had two hours open in your day today and I said, Louis, what's the most important thing you could do today? You'd have a list of things that you would do. And if I said, Hey, I think you should consider setting up online bill pay. For most of us, we would be like, no. That is not important. That's not significant. That seems totally trivial. But if you look at this the way a multiplier would, you go, okay, if you spend two hours today setting up online bill pay and it saves you 30 minutes every month from paying your bills in the future, then after four months time, you will have broken even 30-30-30-30. You will have broken even on those initial two hours and then every month thereafter you'll get something that we call ROTI, return on time, invested because now the system is doing the thing that you would have otherwise been doing. Another way that we say this, I know this is one of your favorite Roryisms, is that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and and it turns it into more money. Automation takes time and it turns it into more time. Just like nobody has extra money to invest. I mean, not nobody. Some people are so rich, it's like that's all they do. But the average person doesn't have an extra 10 grand just laying around to be like, yeah, I'm gonna invest it. Usually you have to sacrifice something in the short term. You don't go on a trip, you don't buy the car, you don't buy the TV, and that is where you create the margin to reinvest into, you know, whatever the stock market, mutual funds, like real estate, real estate, whatever you do. That is also how time is. Nobody has extra time to set up a system. You know, marketing automation is one of the big things we teach our clients. I know you guys do a lot of it here. We're experts in marketing automation. One of the reasons we became experts in it is we realized, oh my gosh, if I can build a funnel, which is just a sequence, a series of emails and automating trust basically, giving value to people, then that system basically becomes like an employee for me that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's always out there. But I don't have time to build it. And yet you only say that in the absence of significance. And that's what happens in the absence of the significance calculation. We inadvertently overweight the urgency calculation and we doom ourselves to a lifetime sentence of always feeling busy because we're constantly making decisions only about what needs to get done today and never thinking ahead via the significance calculation of tomorrow.

What were the keys for you to switch your mindset from Just having one stream of income with your career to having passive multiple streams of income.

Yeah, so I think I can probably trace it back to when I was 17 years old and I first read the 4-Hour Workweek and came across the idea of passive income. And immediately my mind was blown and I could, you know, it's sort of like in there's like Japanese animes when the good guy gets this special power and suddenly they can see all the chakras around them. It was sort of that that kind of moment where I had just by default been following the traditional path of just assuming that, oh, okay, you know, I'm going to be a doctor, I'm going to make money, and then I'm going to hopefully ascend the hierarchy and eventually make enough money to buy a bigger house and then retire. And I just hadn't really considered any of those assumptions until I read a 4-Hour Workweek. And then from that point on, it seemed to put a terminology on something that I'd sort of been feeling anyway, that maybe just the traditional career path of medicine, maybe it wasn't quite for me, but it was reading that book, the Parable of the Mexican Fisherman, which he talks about as well, that made me realize, okay, what I really want to do is I want to do medicine for fun, and then I want to make enough money to sustain myself through multiple streams of income. And so from my first year of med school onwards, when I was 18, I decided, okay, this is going to be the path. And that was then my hobby in the evenings when I wasn't writing an essay or studying for an exam or hanging out with friends, I'd be tinkering away at websites and trying to slowly.

Slowly, slowly build these streams of passive income. Really? And can you explain for those who.

Have not read the 4-Hour Work Week yet, can you explain the parable of the Mexican fisherman? Oh, certainly. The parable of the Mexican fisherman is one of my favorite stories. Essentially, the story is that there's an American investment banker and he goes to this small coastal Mexican fishing village, and he sees this Mexican guy on the boat, and the guy's like fishing a few fish, and he has some of the fish, he's like, oh, this tastes amazing. And the guy's like, yeah, you know, it's enough to support my family's immediate needs. And the American asks, well, why don't you go and fish more? Like, why are you only fishing like five fish a day? And he says, well, you know, I'm quite happy. I'm making good money. I get to spend time with my family. I get to have a nap in the afternoons. I get to to go down to the pub in the evenings to play the guitar with my amigos. And then the American investment banker goes on some big rant about how he's a Harvard MBA and he can transform this into a business empire and how he can then get the Mexican to move to New York and then open up his own warehouse, open up his own empire, and eventually make millions 30 years down the line. And then the long story short, the Mexican goes down this, asks the American, okay, what next? What next? What next? And the clincher at the end of the story is that, well, the American says, well, that's great, you know, once you're 65, then you can retire and you'll have all that money, and then you'll be able to live in a village, you'd be able to like have a nap with your wife, you'd be able to play the guitar with your friends in the evenings. And that story really hit me hard because it really shows the importance of building a life day to day that we enjoy and get value out of. rather than the deferred life plan of working really hard and grinding and hustling to get to the point where we have lots of money and then we're retired. And then kind of going back to that life that we could have had much like when we were younger. So I'm probably butchering the story. The actual version is much more concise than that, but that was a real powerful moment for me to realize that kind of day-to-day happiness is what matters. And I sort of felt maybe I wouldn't necessarily get that within the traditional career of medicine.

Right.

Yeah, it's a great story. It's a great kind of approach to life. It's like, okay, if you're going to work this hard to kind of relax when you're older, why not kind of incorporate some of that, integrate that philosophy in your life right now and set yourself up? And obviously there's different seasons of life where we've got to be working hard and learning a new skill and developing and to build something in the first place is going to take time and energy to do that for a lot of people, but especially in our modern world. But there are things we can do to build up passive streams of income. to hopefully not have to overwork ourselves so we can have a happier, healthier, productive life. I'm curious, what were the keys for you building passive income in the beginning when you started it? And how many recurring streams of income do you have today?

Okay, so today there's probably around somewhere between eight and 10 big categories. And within those eight to 10 big categories, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller categories, which we can certainly go into. I think the key, like one of the keys at the beginning was actually learning to code. Is that like, yeah, like anytime I get an Instagram DM from someone being like, hey, how do I build passive income? Like, I think even today, even in 2021, even with all the no code tools and everything out there, I still think learning to code is just a ridiculously valuable thing that anyone can do and anyone can learn. And it just immediately unlocks the ability to generate income from the internet. which you just don't really unlock when you don't know how to code. So kind of in two ways. Number one, I think when you learn how to code, then any time you have an idea for something. So for example, when I was in med school, I had an idea that, hey, I want to help other people get into med school. And it kind of the non-coder way of approaching that is, okay, cool. Let me run a course, let me create my materials, and let me advertise it to my local neighborhood and see if one or two students will bite and take my course. Because I knew how to code, because I knew how to make websites, because I'd been doing freelance web design for, since the age of like 13, I knew that I could make a website for this. And I knew something about marketing, I knew something about ads, I knew something about content marketing, I knew something about SEO. Those were all things that I learned through the learning to code web design trajectory, which meant that when I had this idea for a business, immediately it had a scale far greater than anyone else could have done who didn't know how to make websites and didn't know.

About this world of the internet. more than just like, let me print some flyers and put them at the coffee shop and hope someone pulls a number and calls me randomly and then I have one client.

And then, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's one aspect of it. And then, you know, later on, a few years down the line, again, in medical school, sort of on the side while I was preparing for my med school exams, me and my brother, we were both, you know, we both knew how to code. Neither of us did a degree in computer science or anything, but we kind of dabbled with it on the side. And so we created this software program again, helping med students because that was the niche that I was in. It was like an online question bank with subscription billing and an interactive kind of system with JavaScript and like React. And again, if we didn't know how to code, that wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone something we could.

Have created for ourselves. Or you would have thought, okay, I need to make some money to go hire someone to code this and try to tell them exactly what I want. And this long process of edits and clunkiness without the speed and the knowledge that you had of what you wanted to create in the moment.

Yeah.

And I think even if you do hire someone, so since then, loads of people have reached out to me saying, Hey, I don't know how to code, but I have this idea. How much would it cost to hire a developer to build this thing? And that's always a hard question. It's like, well, it could be 10,000, could be 50, could be 100,000. Usually that number scares people off. They're like, Whoa, I was hoping it would be like $200 for someone in the Philippines. following the Tim Ferriss method. And having tried to outsource things in the past, it's genuinely really hard to outsource something, especially when you don't know about the thing that you're trying to outsource. So I know how to edit videos being a YouTuber, and therefore when I outsource editing to an editor, I know what I'm doing. Equally, when you know a little bit, at least the basics of how to code, that doesn't mean you necessarily have to code everything from scratch yourself, but it means that you're more able to outsource that to because you now have an understanding of the landscape.

Yes.

Okay, so you learn how to code and that was one way of really learning. So when you can code, you can develop your idea and potentially make money from that idea. There are other things.

Yeah, definitely.

Is there anything else from coding that's allowed you to understand the internet besides building software and sites? Or how else can you use that skill?

Yeah, I think the other thing about coding is that So the first one is that if you get an idea, then you can just build it over the weekend and ship it, and it can do quite well. I think the other thing of it is, again, when you learn to code, it unlocks an aspect of your brain and opens up your mind to ideas that you just wouldn't have had before.

Really?

Explain. So for example, let's say I were to generally, when people talk about coming up with startup ideas, they say that you shouldn't just try and sit down and think of a startup idea. you want to find a problem in the world, preferably a problem that you're having yourself, and then think about how you might solve that problem. So let's think a few years ago, let's say you were to think, you know what, it's a real pain in the bum trying to get a taxi because, you know, the taxis are expensive, they don't take card, you know, it's an absolute nightmare. Now, if you're not a coder, you think, okay, this is a problem. I wish someone solved it. But if you're a coder, you think, huh, this is a problem. Right, what would it take to solve this problem? Well, I guess all we really need is a middleman app that connects taxis with people who want taxis. And I suppose you could build that by essentially making a database, by having one table of taxi drivers, having one table of passengers, be filled with figuring out some kind of integration with Google Maps API, figuring out some kind of payment system, maybe using Stripe. And all of a sudden, you've built a very prototype version of Uber or Lyft in your head because you know how to code. And if you don't know how to code, your mind wouldn't even go in that direction. But if you do, it does. And that is where a lot of the most interesting and most profitable businesses over the last like two decades have come from. People who know a little bit about how to code, being able to apply that knowledge to a problem they're having, and then kind of, you know, the rest is history.

Coding seems like it can be very daunting for people that have no understanding of it. What would you be doing? What other skill would you have taken on to generate passive income if you didn't learn coding?

Ooh, interesting. If I wasn't going down the coding route, I would learn how to edit videos. And that's because basically every single YouTuber above about 5,000 subscribers hates editing videos and needs someone to edit their videos. And there are so few YouTubers who actually outsource their editing because to them it feels too hard. It feels like, oh, I could never do this. No one can match my style. and I know hundreds of YouTubers at this point who are making good money who would pay to outsource editing if someone made it easy for them. And so if I were, let's say I were 14 years old and I wanted to create a side hustle or let's say even I were like, I don't know, 26 or 35 or whatever, and I wanted to create income on the internet, I would learn how to edit videos. I have a Skillshare class on this that people can access for free. In two hours, you learn how to edit videos from zero to YouTuber level using Final Cut. So you just take a course or just follow free YouTube tutorials because they're all for free anyway. You learn how to edit videos within a few days. And at this point, you can then outsource, you can then market your services as video editor to other YouTubers. This is not passive income, but I think one of the things with passive income is that you have to start with active income initially and then you passive-ify it over time. It's very, very difficult to just go.

Straight for the passive income.

Right.

How would you pacify it over time? as a video editor or as a coder if you weren't doing it yourself, product to product.

Yeah.

So I think as a coder, the key would be building a product. So software as a service or some kind of app. Those are the sorts of things that you build it once and you can sell it multiple times. And then obviously, you know, the marketing angle comes in, the sales angle comes in, and you start to learn so much about these sorts of fields. and even if the thing doesn't fail, you know, I tried building apps and websites for seven years before anything was successful. But all of the lessons I learned throughout that time, yeah. Yeah, because I started aged 13 and I was doing freelance web design. Every year, me and my friends would come up with an idea that, oh, we're going to make money through this. This is the next big thing. 100%. We tried like MLM, multi-level marketing, we tried like pyramid schemes, we tried the whole which we tried everything and it all failed, but it was all such a good learning opportunity, such that when I was 19 and I had the first idea that was actually successful, I knew enough to be able to build it myself. So I think on the coding front, you passive, you passive if it by creating a product, a digital product. I think on the video editing front, there are two ways to pacify that. Way number one is to teach the thing. So there are still loads of people out there who want to learn video editing and teaching something. turning into consulting, turning into a course, and probably not an e-book for editing, but that kind of stuff is passive income. The alternative way to do it would be to kind of build essentially a services agency. Like if you really understand the market of being a YouTuber, and this is probably the business I would be in if I lost everything else, I would start editing videos for other YouTubers. I'd initially offer my services for free for 30 days. I'd make it super easy for them to say yes. And then once I've got a few clients, I would then hire my own team to edit the videos for them, and I would just be the final kind of final cut, like final level of quality control, and build up that sort of agency system over time where I'd be able to say to any YouTuber, look, we can edit your videos. We're priced competitively. The quality is really good, and we'll take care of it. And it wouldn't, again, it wouldn't be passive as such in that I would have to do a lot of work to build up the business. We scale. The skills I'd be learning along the way.

Yeah, it's extremely scalable.

At that point.

Right. What is the top three revenue streams that you have on a monthly basis? You don't have to say the specific numbers unless you want to, but what are the top three revenue streams?

So all three are... You said you have nine, right?

There's nine roughly.

Yeah, nine roughly. So I'd say the top one is a live online course that I teach called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. That's something that started about a year ago. In that time, we've taught over a thousand students. I think we've done about $2 million in revenue, of which about $1.5, $1.6 million is profit, which is pretty good. And it's been really fun. In one year. Yeah, that's great. In one year.

Yeah.

So that's our sort of, I wouldn't.

Really call that passive income. It's very active in that it's a six-week live course. I'm on Zoom calls all the time helping people out. It's a very high-touch, very accountability and community-focused so that's revenue stream number one. Revenue stream number two is actually Skillshare. This is completely passive and it's completely mind-blowing how much money you can make from Skillshare. So I started making Skillshare courses in September 2019. It's actually about two years ago now. And the very first course I made was just a how to edit videos in Final Cut, because I'd been doing it for two years at that point. I didn't really have any experience beyond that, but I just filmed myself editing one of my own videos and talking through it. And that class, Skillshare class, took me one day to film and I hired a freelancer for two days to edit it for about $500. And that class has been making somewhere between 2000 and $5,000 a month every single month since September 2019 for the last two years without me doing anything marketing at all. I just have a link to it in my YouTube descriptions and people find it through YouTube, people find it through Skillshare itself. And it's just insane how much money just that one class makes.

What's the revenue split for Skillshare?

The way it works is that you get paid per minute of watch time. And so, interesting. Yeah, it's sort of like Spotify streaming royalties. And so, last time I checked, the number was round about somewhere between three and five cents per minute of premium watch time. So if someone has a Skillshare account and they watch your thing for five minutes, you'll make like 15 cents. But if you have, I don't know, a few thousand, a few tens of thousands, a few hundreds of thousands people are doing that, that really adds up.

And so- so they have to buy the course or is it a free course?

So it's sort of like Netflix in that people have a subscription to Skillshare and then they can watch anything on the platform.

For free after that. Yeah, they don't have to buy the course.

Yeah, gotcha. Skillshare has a pretty good affiliate program as well where anyone- in fact, this is a good way of generating passive income for anyone. Anyone can become an affiliate for Skillshare. and if someone just signs up for a free trial, they pay somewhere between seven and ten dollars per sign up. Right. And so each month we make about fifteen thousand dollars just off of a Skillshare free trial signups and another like 50, 60, 000 per month off of people just watching the courses that we've made over the last two years.

So that one course brings in two to five thousand, but 50 or 60, 000 a month on all the courses you have there.

Yeah, we've got about like eight somewhere between eight and 10 courses on Skillshare. And every quarter, every few months, we just think, you know what? Let's make another one. And we've got an endless list of course ideas.

Really?

Yeah.

And the nice thing about doing a course is that there's just an endless amount of stuff to teach. And because for me, teaching is the thing that I'm most passionate about. And the thing that brings me intrinsic joy far more so than saving lives as a doctor or even the coding thing. I've always been super into teaching since the age of 13. And so it's pretty easy for me to learn something and then teach it to other people through camera and I enjoy doing it. So it's that perfect match of a thing that pays well, a thing that adds value to the world, and a thing that I personally enjoy doing as well.

That's pretty cool. Okay, so you've got Skillshare and then what would be the third biggest revenue stream?

Probably third biggest is actually YouTube AdSense. So I think these days we're making somewhere between 40 to $50,000, $30 to $50,000 a month off of YouTube AdSense. And it's actually most of that money comes from our older videos. So videos that I made three years ago, four years ago, two years ago are generate, are still generating money each month. And that's why anytime I make a YouTube video, I sort of consider it, I sort of consider it as their own asset class. It's sort of like an investment, you know, real estate or crypto is an asset class. and you put money in and you expect that money to grow over time. It's sort of the same that if you make a YouTube video, you put the effort in once over a few hours to make the video. And then once it's on the platform and hopefully it's evergreen, people are just watching that as long as it's good. And then you just keep on making money. And so we've got like, I don't know, 400 videos on the channel and each one brings in a few dollars a day. But, you know, at scale, that ends up being somewhere between 30 and 50k every month.

It's pretty fun to watch, isn't it?

It's pretty fun to watch, yeah. It's not very fun in the early days when nothing is happening. I mean, but it's like any kind of compounding.

I didn't make money for, I don't know, first five years of really... When I was on YouTube, I don't know, a long time ago, 2006 maybe, but just playing around. But it wasn't until five years, six years ago, where I started being more consistent. But I didn't make any money, literally any money. One, because I didn't turn on YouTube ads. because I was just like, I don't want to have free value out in the world. I just want to help people. I don't want to have sleazy car commercials before my videos or something or whatever. And so I made zero money. I was just investing a lot. But then when we turned it on about a year and a half ago, I was like, oh, this is a lot of fun. You can see the payoff of years of work, of years of adding value, of years of showing up for people. And those are like assets. People continue to find them. They continue to watch them. So now I'm getting paid. those returns, those dividends for the time that we put in years ago, which is nice to see. Because on other social media channels, you've got to work hard to try to get attention or get people to watch something in the first eight hours and then it kind of goes away and you're not monetizing it. So that's why I like YouTube as a platform, because it's evergreen. It doesn't have to be like this new timely trend thing that goes away. in two days and no one sees on your stream.

Yeah, I think that's one of the great things about YouTube. And we've touched on again, like one of the secrets of passive income, which is that it really is just about adding value consistently over a very, very, very long time. And then you just kind of automatically make money. You don't even have to think about it very hard if you're doing stuff like YouTube. And I think one mistake I see a lot of people make is that they focus on the income side of it too early. and they don't recognize that ultimately money is just an exchange of value. And so if you can show up week after week like you've been doing for the last eight years, then of course you're going to make money. You won't not make money. The more value you add to the world, the more the market rewards that. And the nice thing about the sort of stuff that you and I make, generally educational content, stuff that inspires people to live better lives, you don't need to be sensational about it. You don't need to be too clickbaity. You just need to make stuff that's useful, that's helpful for some people and it just adds up over time.

That's it. What would you say are some of the habits that have helped you think this way and start earning more money? Are there a few specific habits that you've learned or things you learned the hard way not to do that you've been consistent on now in kind of developing these revenue streams?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I think one habit is that basically anytime I find myself trading my time for money, I always think, okay, this is fine for the short term, but it's definitely not where I want to be in the long term. And so this is why I'm not really a fan of like, you know, medicine, for example, trading time for money, consulting, coaching, trading time for money, like however we spin it. And I always think, okay, how can I take this value that I'm offering in exchange for my time and turn it into some sort of product that can preferably live on the internet where you benefit from the scale of the internet, the zero cost of distribution, the zero cost of reproduction. And so, if initially people are, initially my med school admissions business started because people were coming to me and I was offering them tutoring on how to ace their med school interviews. And then I thought, you know what, let's productize this into a course. And then I would teach a course and now I can teach it to 30 people at a time. And it's still trading my time for money, but it's now at a greater scale. and then the next step is, okay, let's take my time out of it. Let's hire someone else to teach instead. Let's build a team around it. And then let's turn it into an online course where now I've done the work once and I never have to do it ever again. And so I think that sort of way of thinking is one habit that's really helped over time. I think another one, which is a bit underrated in this, is I always try my very best to enjoy the journey. And I think people often say, how do you stick to doing YouTube videos for so many years before it's Before it's successful, before it starts to make money. And I genuinely think the only real way to do it is to find ways to enjoy the process.

And when you're not making money, that's the key. How do you enjoy it when you're not making any money? When you're working actually really hard, more hours than you need to to create something, or then maybe you want to, but you're like, you know what? I'm enjoying this process even if I don't make money. And I think that's not to interrupt you, but for a second, I started my podcast with the intention of I want to create something that's fun for me that adds value to others. And I'm going to do it for a year. I'm going to do it every week for a year. And I'm, my intention is not to make money in the first year. Eventually, I would like to make money. But the first year for me was all about how do I learn this new skill that I've never done before, podcasting? I had no clue what I was doing. How do I have great conversations with people so I can learn something? and improve my life. And then how can I share this in a way that other people get value from listening as well? And I remember saying, I don't want to have any sponsors. I don't want to sell anything for the first year. I just want to become better. And then after year one, I'll reassess and see if I like it, if it's working, if it's not working, and then if I want to start making money, how to make money. And that approach really supported me. And I feel like because I was so clear on my intention, and I came from that space, not how do I make as much money or this, but how do I add as much value? Sponsors started coming very quickly. And I was kind of like shying them away because I was like, well, let me just keep figuring this out and get better. And then it just started coming in lots of different ways. And I was thinking, okay, maybe there's just advertising, but then people said, well, can you write a book about this? Can you do a course about this? Can you do a live event so we can all come together, this community? Can you do coaching? Can you do a mastermind? All these things came from just trying to be good at one thing. And it sounds like it's what's worked for you as well. You just did YouTube because you enjoyed creating YouTube videos. And then all these revenue streams started to come after you said, let me focus on adding value to people first.

Yeah, exactly. I really like that line that you said, which is I think you said, how do I do something that's fun for me that adds value to others? I think that's just the key. if you can do something that's fun for you and adds value to others, then you're just bound to make money at some point over the long term with a long enough time Horizon.

I come from a very poor background, and we had no money for food at times, quite literally. And it was. It was rough. So I want to make sure money wasn't a, you know, an issue for my future family. So I figured how to make money. And I figured when I was, I don't know, 23, I figured how to make a million dollars. a year. I went from 38,000 to a million. And you don't do that by some new strategy. It was a psychological shift as well as a strategy shift. But then I made the same amount of money for seven straight years, even though I built a dozen more companies. I have more people than ever. But it was like unconsciously, you want more than a million dollars? What are you, you know, you greedy? And I was actually staying, where was I? I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I arrived at 2 o'clock in the morning on my birthday. I didn't have a private plane, so I had to go like four different connections from where I was. And I get in this place, and it's a horrible place. And I call my kids, and I'm talking to this woman on the phone named Maria, who used to run my house and take care of my kids. I said, you know, Maria, I'm sorry it's so late, but I want to talk to my kids. Oh, happy birthday. She gives me this whole thing. And then she walks me to Mr. Robbins, you know. She says, I never dreamed I'd live in a castle, because I have a place called the Robbins Castle. And I just want to thank you. I feel like a princess. She goes, last night I was sitting in a Jacuzzi looking out at the water. and thinking how lucky I am, but I'm in the Ramada Inn in those days. Looking at this moose head going, this woman is really rich. So I finally decided, listen, if I can make a, you know, 38,000 a million, that it's not about money. It's like growth. So I want to make three million, but I want to make more of it while I sleep. But then I really began to realize it doesn't matter how much money you make. It's really your capacity to take your creativity and stop trading time for money. It's the worst trade in the world. Everybody's a financial trader. They don't realize they're trader. They're trading time and you can't get more time. So this book is how to take anybody, an average person, a millennial just getting out of college with a bunch of debt and saying, how do I really make this work? Or a baby boomer saying, how do I still retire? And the way I did it was I said, I want to interview 50 of the most brilliant financial people in the world. Most people don't know that I've been working with Paul Tudor Jones, one of the top 10 financial traders in history for 21 straight years. And he hasn't lost money in one year in 21 years. We made money in the tech blow up that happened in 2000 and 911. In 2008, when the market was down 51% from top to bottom, he made 28% positive. Incredible. So every day, literally, he emails me, I monitor him, I come see him, I work with him, and he pays me seven figures a year to be able to do this. And I've been able to continually help him go to the next level. But quite frankly, I've learned more from him, I think, than I could ever teach him. And he helped me open these doors. So this book is the best from every self-made billionaire that I could find. Carl Icahn, I mean, I'm sitting down with this guy. He just made $2 billion in the last 18 months off a $30 million investment off Netflix. He sent an email or a tweet out. Tweet out. About Apple saying it was undervalued. And two hours later, it was worth $17 billion more by a tweet. So the people I've got to hang with over the last three, four years have been, I've got a PhD in and the people controlling the world's finance. And what I've tried to do is the reason they did that is make it simple, bring it so I could train anybody else. Because in this business, what you don't know will hurt you financially. So I want to know how to.

Protect people and how to help people maximize. And that's the point of the book. It's incredible. And what I want to know is.

Why we weren't taught these things growing up. Me too.

Tell me.

Right?

So if you were, if they were like, okay, Tony, we're giving you the key to the education system. Yeah. And how would you apply, what teachings would you apply into about finances, learning about this, how to generate wealth as opposed to trading time for money, but really leveraging it and investing it the right way.

What would you start implementing? Well, the first thing you want to teach anybody, a child, a kid, anybody, is that you'll never earn your way to freedom. You just don't. You look around and you see, you know, Kurt Schilling, if you remember from Boston Red Sox, he had $100 million a year, he's broke, bankrupt. I asked Warren Buffett, I said, what made you the the wealthiest man in the world. And he smiled and he said three things. He said, living in America is great opportunities, having good genes. I lived a long time. And he said, the last thing is compounded interest. And we all know about compound interest. But I give an example. A book of this guy, Theodore Johnson, worked for UPS, never made more than 14, 000 in income in his entire life in a year. And in old age is worth 70 million dollars. And how did he do it? All he did was he took a percentage of his his percentage was 20%. Now, his family said, you can't, we can't save any money. But he met a friend who said, if you pretend there's a tax and the tax just took the money away from you and you never see it, the money just comes out of your account and goes in investment account, you'll be financially free. So, he was disciplined. He didn't look at it. It happened $70 million by compounding. So, people's mistake is, and kids don't know this, adults don't know this, that you won't earn your way there, but you can compound your way there. What I wanted to do is say, where do you put that money?

That's a trick, right?

That's like a secret. Well, the first trick is actually doing almost nobody does.

Right.

The second trick is you really have to understand where you're going to get hurt because the fees.

The fees are just destroy people.

Yeah.

A whole chapter about the fees. I was like, this is incredible.

Isn't it wild? It's nuts. I mean, there's so much money just on the fees. Well, it's just so people have an understanding. 96 of all mutual funds never match the market. I mean, they never beat the market. So I was just on a morning show this morning, and Michael Bloomberg's one of his guys that has some of his money. So I'm, you know, this is the only industry I know of where people think they could be a doctor. They think they could be a financial planner. And I said to him, I said, well, look, the statistics. Warren Buffett taught me this. He said, Ray Dalio told me this. David Swenson, who took Yale from 1 billion to 24 billion in two decades, these are people telling me this. Nobody beats the market except a couple unicorns that nobody has access to. And I said, I didn't say you're not one of them. I said, here's the truth. 96 of mutual funds don't match the market. That means four percent succeed. Now, what are your chances of picking the right mutual fund? People don't know what they're doing. They put their money in a 401k. They pick a mutual fund, not knowing what it is. If you play blackjack and you and I play and you get two face cards and your inner idiot says, hit me, I want to give one chance in a million. You're ace. You have an eight percent chance of winning. If you try to get a mutual fund, you got the four percent chance of winning. So what I show people is not only do you not get the result, thinking logically, if I hire someone else to do it, they'll do better than me. But in addition, you pay around 2, 000% more than it's worth, meaning you get the same exact product, the same stocks. If you own the index, right, you want a piece of all of America's best companies, say the Vanguard 500 index, 500 top companies, that costs point 1.7% like less than two tenths of a percent versus the average mutual fund is 3.17.

Incredible. Compound over time. Compound over time.

But first just hear that so you understand it's like if the average car sold in America is a Honda Civic, it's $20,000. You get the Honda Civic for 20,000 or you can pay 350,000. That's the difference between 0.17 and 317. But if you look at it over a period of like, how old are you?

31.

31. Okay, so let's assume you and a group buddies at 35 managed to put aside 100 grand and you manage not to add any more money but to grow it at 7% in spite of ups and downs in the market. And you're 65. How much money do you have? Well, if you paid 1% in fees over those 30 years, 100 grand became 574,000 bucks. Not bad for never adding another dime. If you had 3% in fees, had the same growth but 3% in fees, you now have 300. Oh, and 24,000.

Almost half as much.

Quarter million dollars, 77% less money. And you had the same return. It was just the fees. So the world, most people you ask them, what are your fees? They have no clue. So I've created a site where people can go, they can type it in, you find exactly what your fees are and what you should be paying. And it's just, it's highway robbery. Where in the world would you pay 2,000% more for the same exact product? You can only do it because the financial industry makes things so So opaque, so convoluted, and people feel overwhelmed.

They're hard to understand.

That's why I try to come in here and go, look, time to become the chess player, not the chess piece. Let me teach you so you understand what's going on. It's not that complex. They use all these big words, but when you know what's going on, you don't get screwed. And more importantly, you take advantage of.

The system instead of letting the system take advantage of you. Yeah, I like that. Now, you've coached some of the world's greatest athletes, former presidents, the biggest CEOs, who coaches you? I've had a lot of people asking me to ask you this question. Who mentors you? Who coaches you today?

I have always looked for people that were playing the game at a different level than I am and/or knew the road ahead. I always tell people, anticipation is power. If you ever play a video game against a child, it's pretty disastrous, right? Maybe not for you, you're maybe a different generation. For me, it's like, you know, it's not the kid is faster and smarter. If they played this game before, Eight million times. So they know the first shot's here, the second shot's here, the third shot there, and you're like reacting. So when you're reacting to things, you fail. So my mentors have been people over the year, different people. My earliest mentor was a man named Jim Rohn. He was a personal development speaker, just touched my life. Then I was involved in neuro-linguistic programming, NLP, when I was gosh, 21, 22, 23 years old. I became partners with a man named John Grinder, brilliant man, co-founder of that. But in my last couple of decades, It's been people like Peter Guber, who owns the LA Dodgers and owns the Golden State Warriors NBA team. He's got 52 Academy Award nominations. So he's a mentor for me. Paul Tudor Jones, I coach, but also I'm coached by him because we get to pitch and catch. And then I've got some people in my life that, like Steve Wynn is.

A dear friend of mine.

Yeah, most of Las Vegas. He's brilliant. And these guys are all 18 years my senior, so they know the road ahead. and I'm able to learn from them in advance and then kind of anticipate things. And that, to me, is incredibly valuable.

Yeah, very cool. Now, I want to ask you how you personally handle a breakdown. I've been to your workshop and incredible experience. Thank you. And you teach people how to overcome their fears on how to handle breakdowns, but how do you personally deal with it?

And do you even have any breakdowns? Yeah, they sent me a list of questions you had just to kind of give me a peek. And that was one of the questions I was like, you know, It's interesting, it's breakdowns, it's certainly not something I experience, but it's not because I'm so talented or so brilliant or so fearless, it's just you're like an athlete, you're an athlete, you're in shape, you're not going to have a reaction in your body like somebody who doesn't take care of themselves. So, you know, I don't believe in emotional intelligence, I think it's useful, but I'm more interested in emotional fitness, because intelligence is a capability, fitness is a state of readiness. Interesting. fit, you can take that demand right now. You can deal with it. You can deal with that physical stress, that emotional stress. Same thing's true with psychological fitness, emotional fitness. Right? So I'm pretty fit. And part of that is not because I'm so smart. Part of it is I've taught this for decades. I remember I had a woman who came to one of my seminars in, in her, I don't know, early 80s, probably. And she would run in this room, five, ten thousand people. I think it was, you know, she went a couple of ten thousand person events, and she would get in this front row, fight her way through there, and she jumped. Go for it. And one break, she came up to me, I was signing a book for her, and she says, she goes, Mr. Armstrong, I've seen you at like eight of these. I've seen you like when you're really-- I know, I can hear your voice. You're hurting or you haven't slept. And she goes, you, always seem to be so up all the time. How come you're so up? And I said, well, part of it is I attend all these seminars.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm teaching it. So there's a fitness of that. But there's also, you know, I've buried three fathers and one mother, and, you know, that affects your life. I've had a physician look me in the eye and say, you have a tumor in your brain. And so I've had those moments that when you've had extreme stress and you push your way through it, you build psychological muscle. It's like it takes a lot to knock me off. In the early days, we didn't have $50,000 to keep the doors open. How do we do it? Then I graduated to $5 million. I graduated to a partner of mine who kind of didn't do things well and I ended up owning $100 million because I had to take on his bets, $100 million. And, but when you do all that stuff, you know, now my companies do five billion, you know, a year. So you, you keep expanding what I would call really the circle of your, the threshold of your influence. Sure. You know, everybody has a threshold of control, and if you get beyond it, you kind of freak out. So it takes a little bit more. I don't have breakdowns. I don't have a breakdown. Do I get pissed off or get frustrated or tired? Yeah, but break down, honestly, no.

So, how do you handle if you get tired of something?

I sleep when I can.

Okay, cool.

I mean, it's honest, it's pretty simple. But, you know, when I've had challenging times, I mean, I have so many tools. Yeah. You know, I pull them out. Exactly. And mostly, it's like you as an athlete, you know, you don't just physically break down.

Right.

You take care of yourself. So, I think most people don't train their mind and emotions. It's like, I think the most powerful Muscles to me are not physical, they're as strong as important as they are. It's like faith is a muscle, courage is a muscle, determination is a muscle, playfulness is a muscle. Passion unexpressed, weakens. Faith untested gets smaller. So I call it deep practice, always pushing myself to the edge and pushing yourself to the edge makes you stronger.

In the book, I was really excited to hear you talk about you say the Secret to Wealth is gratitude. Somewhere in the book it says that.

And I think maybe it was someone.

Else you were referencing. Yes, it came from Sir John Templeton. And every day I practice gratitude. When I wake up and every night I always try to say to my girlfriend or someone I'm talking to before I go to sleep, three things I'm most grateful for. That's great.

Now why, so I was pleased to see that. I was like, I'm on the right track if I'm living in gratitude, but why is that the secret to wealth? Well, Sir John Templeton is probably one of the greatest investors in history. People don't know his name. He started out with nothing. He wasn't Sir, he wasn't from another country, he came from the US. And he decided that he wanted to understand wealth, and so he saved $10,000, a huge amount of money in those days. And when Hitler invaded Poland, he developed a belief. His belief was, you make your money in times of maximum pessimism. Like if you were around in 2008-9, you remember what it was like, right? You could have bought the Sands in Las Vegas, you could have bought their stock for $2.28. $0.01 today at $67. It's a 3,000% return.

It's not bad.

You could have bought Citibank for less than a buck. So people in those times, he understood that. And so what he did was, and everybody thought the world was gonna end, he took $10,000. He bought every stock on the New York Stock Exchange that was a dollar or less, including companies everybody thought were going bankrupt. But when things are bad, people think it's gonna be bad forever. When things are good, they think it's gonna be good forever. And they're always wrong. cyclical. So there's a season for everything. So once we got through World War II and a few years later, guess what? Those same stocks made him a billionaire. So when I asked him, I said, what's the secret to wealth? His response was, you know it, you teach it. I said, what's that? He said, gratitude. And I said, why do you say that? He said, because if you got a billion dollars and every day you live pissed off and frustrated, the quality of your life is called pissed off and frustrated. But if you have nothing, but your you're euphorically grateful for whatever you have. You're the richest person that you're going to know. He said, so it doesn't matter how much money you got if you don't have gratitude. So, I do the same thing, by the way. I have a process I call it priming where I get up every morning, I do mine in the morning. I just radical change to my body, kind of alter my state, and then I do 10 minutes, I never miss. And my first three and a half minutes is what I'm really grateful for. And I make myself think of at least one of those three that's something really simplistic instead of something giant. You know, the wind on my face, the look in one of my the eyes, you know, something of that nature. And then I do three minutes of strengthening and healing, and then I do three minutes of when I'm going to create my world. And I do that for a minimum of 10 minutes every day because I.

Believe you have to condition it.

You don't just hope that stuff shows up.

You set your intention each morning. But I do that every day.

Yeah.

Very cool. So what are you most grateful for recently in your life? So many things. Well, it's Thanksgiving. So one piece. Well, one is my daughter is 40 years old and she's been working. forever and she's gonna bring me a grandson. -Wow.

-Wow.

Congratulations. -Thank you very much. -That's cool. But also it's Thanksgiving. So for me, it's a very emotional time because my family was fed when I was 11. We had no food at Thanksgiving and it touched me so deeply and I decided I was gonna give back. So, when I was 17, I fed two families and then four and then eight and then I didn't tell anybody I was doing it and then I.

Got my friends to do it and.

My companies grew and you know I've fed 42 million people now over 37 seven years. But you have a challenge for this, right?

A hundred million?

Well, this one, what I did is I decided, you know, I'm writing this book and in the middle of writing it, last summer, most people didn't even notice. Congress cut food stamps. They don't call them food stamps anymore, but I lived on them, so I know what they are. Food stamps. My family lived on them. But they cut it by 8.7 billion, which means you eliminate two million people from the rolls overnight and they still need to eat. So I support all these nonprofit organizations and Feeding America is the largest in the and so I thought, I'm going to call attention to this. So if I donated all the profits of this book in advance, how many people can I feed? Because I normally feed 2 million through my foundation and I match it, so I feed 4 million a year. And they said, you, can feed 10 million people. I was like, wow. I mean, and then as the year's gone by, I've gotten more and more inspired. And so now I'm going to feed 50 million people personally. Not just from the book, I'm writing a larger check on top of it, but also I'm working with Feeding America to get matching funds to feed 100 million people. Incredible. So to go from my family not being able to eat to feeding 100 million people is a pretty amazing sense of gratitude and a sense of grace. And I've done my part, but there's.

Been grace in that as well. That's amazing. It's incredible what you're doing and very inspiring.

So thank you for doing that. So anybody who has a book, I.

Get a prominence for you. But it also feed on the average.

50 families every book. 100% is being donated.

Not only 100%. More than that. Yes. That's amazing. Now, I think I also read in the book, I don't know if you said this or someone else said this, but the key to living is giving.

Yes.

Now, I think I might have heard you say this actually back when I first saw you when I was 16.

And.

I remember thinking, I don't have anything to give. I don't have any money. How am I supposed to invest my money? 10, 20% every month. And then how can I give on top of that? But I really understood you know, it's so valuable and important to give and I work with a lot of nonprofits myself, building schools for kids around the world. And I've seen a big impact in my life in the way I'm able to serve people.

Sir John Templeton told me that he's never seen anyone tithe, which you know tithe is usually 10% of what you earn for at least a decade. He didn't become incredibly financially free. And I think the reason is I had a moment like when my whole life changed. It was kind of twofold. I was really young, like yourself back then, working my tail off, trying to build a business. I mean, you had big goals, you know, you don't always succeed to start with. You just come together, right?

It was hard.

And I remember I was so frustrated because I was working 18-hour days and nothing was working and I was broke and I felt embarrassed, you know, I should be doing better than this. And so I was driving home from Orange County on the 57 freeway in San Gabriel Valley, out near Pomona, California, probably just I remember so vividly because it was almost midnight. And I was at this breaking point. And then I was like, why am I not doing better? And then I just pulled over the road and I used to keep these journals. I still have them, written journals. And I wrote in big lines, the secret to living is giving. And I started to cry. And I realized I am so focused on what am I not getting, I'm focusing on what I'm giving. So for six months, man, it turned me around. But then, something else I get in your body, it was in my head, it was in my heart, but I had to get in there to stay. And I started going through some really tough times, and I lost everything financially, and I was mad at everybody because, like, I loaned a friend a thousand bucks and, you know, I had them doing well. And he didn't even return my phone call. Oh. And what changed me was I. I was down, I don't know, 22, 23 bucks, something like that. I don't know. It was 24. Enough that I knew that I didn't have money for food for the next week, clearly, and I didn't have any prospects. And I was living in Venice in this 400 square foot apartment, feeling sorry for myself, and I thought, you know what? I gotta eat. So I'm not gonna drive my car because I'm not gonna spend the gas. I'm not gonna pay for parking. I'm gonna go to an all-you-can-eat place and load up for the winter, right? So I could get more, like, one meal a day. Right. And so there's a place called Marina Del Rey, not far from Venice, and it's beautiful community, and it's right on the water. And there's a place called El Torito. It's still there. It's a little restaurant. It had taco bar. and all that kind of stuff. So I walked there for the three miles and I go, I'm gonna go and load up. And I was all about myself and getting through this. And this little, well, this woman walked the door, actually very attractive lady, that's probably why I caught my attention. And I'm waiting to see who her boyfriend is. And there's nobody up there. There's a little guy down here. It was obviously her son. And he's wearing this three-piece suit, you know, a little vest. He opens the door for her, he pulls out the chair for her, and it was just, he stared to his mother's eyes I mean, it was just pierced into her eyes. I don't know what it was, but something about him was just so moving. It was such a sweet, caring, loving young man. It was mother that moved me. So I paid for my meal. I don't know what's left, 17, 18 bucks. Put it back in my pocket, was left. Walked up this young man, introduced myself, and I said, hi, I don't remember his name. I think he said his name was Ronnie. And I said, Ronnie, I said, you,'re really, I said, you,'re a class act. I saw how you opened the door for your lady. I saw you hold out the chair for your lady goes, she's my mom. I said, that's even more classy. And I said, so cool that you're taking her out to lunch like this. And he goes, well, I'm not really taking her out to lunch because I'm just 11 and I don't have a job. I said, yes, you are. And I had no plan. I literally just reached in my pocket, took all the money I had, changed dollar bills, and threw it right there in front of him. You looked at me like this. He goes, I can't take that. I said, sure you can. He said, well, why? I said, because I'm bigger than you are. And he got this big grin in his his face. His eyes got this big. And I didn't. I just shook his hand. I didn't even look at this while his mom. And I just walked out the door. But the reason I tell you the story is I had no car. I had no money. I did not. I was euphoric. I was, like, flying home. I was like, you know, I probably looked like an idiot, probably skipping or something. I mean, I was just. I. And what I felt was, I should have been like, what the hell did you just do? I have no meal or I wasn't gonna eat. I went on that night. I laid out a plan, and the plan was gonna take me. you know, 10 days, two weeks. So I thought, well, people fast for a week. I could fast for a week. You know, that kind of thing. And I have this great mindset about it. I woke up the next morning and I get the old regular snail mail shows up. And it's this guy called a zillion times. He wouldn't return my call.

I open it up.

There's a check, thousand bucks, plus interest and an apology. Wow. So I'm sitting there and I, and I started to cry, honestly. And I was just like, why did this happen? You know? And I don't know if it's true, but I decided that day this happened because I did the right thing. Because I didn't have a plan, it wasn't a strategy. I just felt this little soul beside me. I knew it was right and I did it. And I didn't do it because I thought I could or I couldn't. I didn't even think about it. And that's the day I became a wealthy man. Because I didn't have any money, but scarcity left my body. And I have plenty of ups and downs since that time, in various times in my life. But I never went back to that, oh my God, how's it gonna happen? It's like breathing. Do you stop and say, God, is there going to be the air before you take a breath? You know it's going to be there. You don't run your life by that aspect. And so that to me is what it's about, is showing people if you won't give a dime out of a dollar, don't bullshit yourself. You'll never give a million out of 10 million or 10 million out of 100 million. It's just not going to happen. But if you can do that now, you don't ever get beyond scarcity.

You start behind it. You make a decision to get beyond it. So how does someone, you know, when they're living in scarcity, fear.

Yeah.

And it's like this emotional feeling. It's in your body, like you say, when you're like, I can't even pay for my meal. How am I gonna, like, start giving? What are some things that people can do to start overcoming that mindset or start strengthening it or shifting it?

I'll tell you what I did when I was first on my own. You know, I got my dad. My mom kicked my dad out when I was 17. She's very powerful woman. I have four fathers, so they all learned how to get the boot. She thought I was in his side, so she kicked me out.

Next.

I was 17. She chased me out with a knife. She wouldn't have hurt me, but I wasn't going back in the room. And that's how I figured out what to do. And I didn't play stay and, you know, I had to stay in somebody's laundry room for a while. And then I started reading and feeding my mind. And then I developed this little system. And the system was really simple. And as I tell people now, as I say, number one, every single day, you got to feed and strengthen your mind. Until you do that, you're always going to be in fear, because fear is automatic. The human brain is designed. for survival. It's not designed for success. Your brain is not designed to make you happy. That's your job. The only way you're gonna do it is if you feed your mind, because otherwise weeds grow automatically. My mentor, Jim Rohn, used to tell me, Tony, every day you gotta stand guard at the door of your mind. You gotta watch what's going in, because if you're not careful, stuff will go in. He said, not all the times is somebody who cares about you. He said, you know, if your family, yeah, if your worst enemy puts sugar in your coffee, he said, what happens? I said, you got sweet coffee. your best friend by accident or your family, they don't mean to, they drop one drop of strychnine in your coffee, you're dead. He said, so life, sugar, and strychnine are watch a coffee. So every day I decided, I'm old enough, honestly there was no internet those days, and pretty ancient, I used to go to the library, because there's the only place you go, and I would read biographies, I'd read people's lives, and it'd make me go, wait a second, as bad as I think it is, the greatest people in the world had it worse. So there's something here. So you feed your mind Jim Rohn, you're saying to me, Skip a meal, but don't skip reading. He said, Read 30 minutes a day, I don't give a damn what it is. And today, I don't mean internet crap. I mean, read something, a biography, read something that's a strategy, read something that's gonna change your life. And the second thing I tell people is, Feeding your mind is great, but you've gotta also strengthen your body. And you do that as an athlete, naturally. I learned to do that because fear is physical, right? You know where you feel it. And if you go work out, if you go lift, if you go run, even if you're out of shape, you just go for an intense walk. That experience alone changes your life. Every day in my life, the first thing I do before I do my priming, if I'm in one of my homes, I jump in some hot water for fun and then I jump in freezing water. And I have, you know, a river, you know, in one of my homes in Sun Valley and I've got cold plunges everywhere else. So I go in 57 degree water. Boom. And what it does is like, it's teaching my brain. I do, I tell my brain what to do and it does it. It doesn't feel like it doesn't want to do it. And every selling your bodies alive, right? So it doesn't have to be like two hours worth of something. It could be something you do for 30 seconds, but it's training your body to be strong because a strong body could strong mind and vice versa. The third thing I tell people is find a role model. It seems impossible till you see somebody's done it. So Ray Dalio is one of the greatest investors in history. The guy was a caddy, right? His dad was a jazz musician. His mom was a homemaker. He's worth $14 $14 billion.

He found someone to mentor him.

He found multiple people to model. You don't always find a mentor, but you find somebody you can model. And when you start seeing that somebody else can do it, and you see they really did, you start to believe. You start to get certainty. And then the fourth thing I tell people is massive action can constantly change your approach. And then it's find somebody worse off than you are and help them. Because when you do that, it gets you out of yourself.

What do you think most millennials are dealing with right now the most when it comes to money? Is it just that they're overspending, that they don't understand how to use money, that they don't understand investing, they don't understand saving tax?

None of those things. None of those things.

What is it? What are they missing out on?

They're not making enough money, actually. That's the root of the problem. And so maybe some people are overspending, maybe they need to learn more about investing. fine, but those things are marginal, I think. If you have a lot of debt and you don't have high income, you can stop buying lattes, right? You can be frugal and never eat out and all this kind of stuff.

Discipline your life.

Yeah, it's not bad to do that, but are you going to solve the problem if you're $30,000 in debt or $50,000 in debt? By the way, this is graduation season. We've got 2 million U.S. college graduates. 30% of them have significant student loan debt, and the average debt is like $30,000. So a lot of them could be a lot more. So if you're in that situation, being frugal is not really going to solve the problem. You actually have to make more money. That's what you have to do. And they're also entering this job market, which is a lot different than a job market even just a generation ago or even a decade or two ago. That job market is not going to provide them with high paying jobs. that will provide the security for a long period of time. So they have to do something for themselves.

Why are they not- They have to.

Do something for themselves.

And why are they not high paying jobs out there for people that are just graduating?

Because there's a lot of people just graduating. There's a lot of people just graduating. The world has changed, the economy has changed. It's not that there are no high paying jobs, that there are no good jobs, but I think job security has changed quite a bit. when I hear about millennials or Gen Z being kind of, you know, there's a stereotype of like being unreliable or like disloyal and stuff, I think, well, they're they don't trust the system, right? Because the system has let them down and they're the ones who have borrowed so much money because they're told this is what you have to do. You can't get any job without a college degree or without whatever the prerequisite is. So they do that, but then they're entering a system that's not looking out for them. So no wonder that no wonder they're cynical and skeptical. But even though you're cynical and skeptical, you still have to solve the problem for yourself. Which is making more money. It is making more money. You can't just get mad. You can't just be like, this sucks. It does suck. Absolutely. But in your documentary last night, you kind of went through this situation of just like being on your sister's couch and life was not good in lots of ways. But you couldn't just get mad.

You can, but that's not going to solve the problem.

Yeah, exactly. You can get pissed off. I'm mad at whoever you're mad at, right? You're mad at the government, you're mad at the corporation, or whatever. Whoever it is, you know, whoever that other is. But meanwhile, you solve the problem. And the way you solve the problem, for you, right, you had to figure stuff out. You started the LinkedIn business. You went on from that and got.

Your health back and everything. What about with people that are like, well, I'm just not a money earner. I'm more of an artist. You know, I'm more of a thinker, a planner, but I don't, want to think about making more money. I don't have that skill set. So is there a what can you do to learn how to earn?

Because for me, I felt like I.

Didn'T know how to make money at all. It was out of necessity. It was out of I'm broke, I'm in college debt, I don't have my father who can give me money anymore. You know, my family's not giving me money, so I can't beg for it anymore. I got to figure this out to survive.

So I think what you need to do is get away from this model of quote unquote being an entrepreneur because a lot of people don't relate to that, they don't connect to that, they feel intimidated by that, they watch shows, Shark Tank, great show, but it's all about essentially begging people for money. It's like I need somebody else to come and give me their approval, their investment, their capital. I can't succeed in my business without this investment. Whereas the model that I'm trying forward, which I've been trying to talk about for years, is there's all kinds of people all over the world who aren't taking any capital, they're not going into debt, they're not spinning on their credit cards, they're finding a way to start their own little business. And it's all in the book, the Money Tree. But also, I have this daily podcast, Side Hustle School, completely free. Every single day, I'm telling a different story of somebody who's found a way to do this, case study model, how do they get idea. How did they make it happen? What was problematic or what difficulties did they encounter? And then how did they overcome those difficulties and rise to greatness?

Yeah. What's a story in the side hustle? What's called side hustle show?

Side hustle school.

School. What's a great story in there that a millennial could relate to if they don't look at themselves as an entrepreneur, they don't think of earning money as an intimidating thing that they're not gonna be good at.

Right, right.

But that someone had a case study where they took it out with their skill, their talent, and they made some extra money. What's the story?

I've got people that range the gamut of like, I've got a lot of artists, you know, people who wanted to like sell stuff on Etsy and somebody who wanted to sell like dog collars actually on Etsy, starting with this really simple thing, you know, and she actually built that to like a million dollar business.

Selling dog collars?

Dog collars. yep. On Etsy. On Etsy. Yep. We'll link it up. You know, like I said, artists, but also coders, you know, any technical skill you have, whatever skill you have, I think that's also the first step, right? The first step is like this skills inventory. What am I good at? What am I really good at?

Skills inventory.

Yeah.

Not what am I passionate about? What am I good at? So if you're 22 graduating, what do you think? What are some of the common skills that most 22 year olds might have from liberal arts college type of experience, you know?

So I think what you're alluding to is like this question I have sometimes where people are like, I don't have any skills. I'm like, what are the skills?

They don't do that.

You know, in a two-minute conversation with any person, I have yet to be defeated in this challenge. Like, I can pull out this defeat you. I don't think it's possible. Everybody, everyone is an expert at something. That's what I believe. Everyone is an expert at something, right? Whether it's a hard skill, you know, like engineering or coding or something, or could be like a soft skill. Like, what was the skill that allowed you to succeed with all the stuff you did with LinkedIn?

I was thinking about that when I watched the documentary. I think my-- I was trying to.

Figure out what were my skills after I was done playing football.

Right. Because you played football. Did you-- I forgot. Did you graduate from college or not? I left to play football. Then I came back to graduate after I was on a cast and surgery on my sister's couch.

I was like, well, I should probably get a degree, even though it was 2000.

I was an eight when the economy was really bad. I was like, I should probably get a degree just to say I finished.

I had like five credits left. Okay, but how did you get into this? Like what was the skill that led.

You to say, I'm gonna be a master connector on LinkedIn and start these groups? I think my skill was like, I'm a curious person. Right. But it was like, is that a skill? You know, it's a very valuable skill. Yeah, I was like, I'm a passionate person. I'm curious. I'm a hard worker. Like I can create goal and then stay consistent to like accomplishing the goal. So those were the things but I wouldn't think you could turn that into some money making. Didn't shoot.

Isn't that what you did?

But I did. Yeah.

Okay. I think so those are traits.

You know, those are traits.

That's called a trait. Passion, curiosity, hard work.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, passion, we can say maybe enthusiasm or something. I like the curiosity and the hard work because there's so many things that you could be curious about that other people might never notice.

Right?

But you notice that there's like this whole like industry and people have this desire to connect and all that and then you took action on it, right?

Yes.

And so, I mean, I think a 22 year old has a lot of life experience and it's whatever they have learned through their education, whatever they've learned through their job, but also just in their life and like if they're playing Destiny at night, if they're whatever they do with their friends, whatever their friends are asking them about, like they're an expert in something. I really believe that.

Yeah.

So there's got to be a way to like pull it out and transform and adapt it. And the answer is not like, go get your MBA, right? That's not the answer.

Go spend two years, more money to find more skills.

And to learn how to be a middle manager, you know, in a Fortune 500 company, which is that's what's gonna.

Show you how to do it.

Right.

So what's the answer? If it's not to go get an MBA, what should it be? I've gotta make money now.

Right.

I don't know how to trans, I don't know what my skills are and how to translate them into money. Or a side hustle. or a side thing. Yep.

So in the book, the guy Jake, yeah, basically has the same situation. He's like, what am I good at? I don't know how to, you know. And he goes to this group called the Third Way. And the guy gives him- the Third Way. The Third Way group. The Third Way, yeah. Okay.

Not the second way.

Nope. Third Way. First way is like the old school model of starting a business. I write an 80-page business plan, I go to the bank, I get a loan.

Loan.

Right, yeah.

Second way is Silicon Valley.

Go ahead.

Go pitch, raise, whatever. Exactly, that whole thing. Here's my slide deck, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to operate unprofitable in third way, right? It's like, here we are, we don't have access to those resources. We are 22 or however old we are, it doesn't really matter. We've got to make the money. So he goes to the group and he gets this challenge, Jake, you got to make $1,000 in the next week. You got to make $1,000 in the next week. What are you going to do? And first he has no idea. you know, and then he starts thinking, okay, well, you know, I had a college textbook. I had these college economics, you know, textbooks that I saved because I thought I would always use them as reference material, but they've been in his closet, you know, for six months. He's never taken them out. So he gets the textbooks out and he, like, lists them for sale on an online auction on eBay, right? Starts making a little bit of money. Then he notices, like, oh, I can actually buy other textbooks and sell them. There's a whole continuous market for this. And he starts, he realizes, he can make $20 to $30 an hour doing that without knowing a whole lot about it, like without being an expert. And so then he's like, okay, well if I can do that, where can I get more textbooks? What else could I sell? And like one thing kind of leads to another, right? So he's just like, there is something in front of you that you can do. I think maybe we ask people that too. I ask like the listeners, the viewers, if you had to make $1,000 or whatever the number is.

What would you do?

What would you do? And like when you're oppressed, I feel like people kind can figure it out.

And if there's pressure on the line.

When there's urgency, a deadline, you have to at stake. Exactly. So he starts going to like yard sales and buying and selling and he's not like the goal is not for every person to like become a professional yard sale reseller. But I would say if you've never made any money for yourself, like it actually can be very empowering to make.

A small amount of money. It feels great.

I mean, you know this, right?

50 bucks in a day, 100 bucks in a day. It's like like the first time you sold your Of course, or whatever. It's amazing. You're like, I am rich, right? It just feels great. You became an alchemist and you created something from nothing.

So you don't have to do the MBA thing. You don't have to create my company. It's not about your company. You need to make money. Don't start a company.

Don't worry about a logo.

Don't worry about a name.

None of that stuff.

Just make money. There's something you can do. Start a service, start a product.

Lots of different examples in the book and on the podcast. Mm-. Okay. So what's he do after that though? Well, so he does that for a while.

Third way, he goes the third way.

Right.

And then, you know, the next challenge that he gets, he gets a second challenge. Second challenge is, okay Jake, that's good that you learned how to do this, you know, but you probably don't want to do it for the rest of your life. The next challenge is to create a service, essentially. So create a service, like the product is reselling, your service is something that you're doing, you're providing for somebody, and they pay you money for that. It could be some kind of consultant thing, coaching thing, advisory thing, expertise, you know, whatever it is, go and create a service. And with that he has a little bit of a false start. Actually, with that he kind of goes and the first thing he tries, it doesn't work so well. I don't want to give away all the secrets. But first he doesn't work so well. He doesn't lose money. He doesn't lose money. This is the key thing. He doesn't lose money because he's not spending money. It's just a question of his time. He's losing time and energy. which is valuable. He's learning through the process.

It's his MBA.

Right, without spending the tens of thousands of dollars or whatever. So anyway, so he goes back to the group and they kind of debrief it. Like, why didn't it work, Jake? He's like, well, I thought it would work because it explains all the reasons. And then they kind of point out, actually, you're not really an expert. You thought you were an authority in this thing, but you're really not. And also, the product wasn't really specific enough. The service wasn't really clear. what you were trying to do, what the benefit was, how you're gonna reach people, all that kind of stuff. So he learns this, and then he goes back and creates a different service, kind of applies the lessons from there.

Okay, and that service I'm assuming takes off? Eventually. Eventually. Is there another thing after that?

In the last part of the book, there's another thing.

There's another thing.

To take it to a different level.

Yeah, there is. So there's lessons, I think it's really hard to go from like, I have don't know what my skills are, Never made any money before to, in the next three months, I'm gonna magically make a million dollars. Yeah, well, I'm not telling people they.

Can magically make a million dollars in.

The next three months.

Exactly. But I would say they can make a thousand dollars in the next month or whatever, and that's huge. It's huge. As we said, you know, that is huge, especially the first time, especially if you're in debt, if you're struggling, if you're trying to figure out how am I gonna get out of this situation of desperation? In some ways, I mean, I would say almost in some ways, like the The $1,000 in that situation is more powerful than the million dollars that comes later, I think, because of the mindset and what it does for us.

Absolutely. What do you think entrepreneurs and employers need to know about how to find the right talent that's coming out of school and how to inspire and empower them to stay with them? Because I feel like a lot of people will say, I'm hiring these young people and then they just leave within a few months. I teach them, I train them, I educate them, I give them the skills, and they take it and they go somewhere else.

Yeah.

And start their own search.

Right, right, right. I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that because I've always been self-employed. I wasn't good at working for other people.

Yeah.

You know, and I'm also not a great manager. Like, I'm not trying to hire a lot of employees. You know, I would say- so- you-.

Have a small team.

Yeah.

Very by design, because I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm good at, what I'm not good at. And, I mean, I think, you know, the classic thing is about like being open to your employees having your side hustle, like providing them free understanding why they're motivated because people are motivated differently, you know, as we know, creating some sense of mission. Like we're doing this because, you know, like we're not we're not just doing this because of a sales goal. Like that's important in a business, of course, but we have the sales goal because this is how our company is trying to change people's lives. And the more resources we get, the more people will be able to help. I think just connecting getting to a sense of mission is always good. Yeah.

So how big is your team right now?

I have one person who works for me full time. I got a few people who work for me part time. And for things like WDS, the World Domination Summit, we have a team for that. But most people are volunteers.

Now you launched this event WDS 10 years ago.

Exactly 10 years ago.

It's the final year is happening.

That's right.

Is this July?

Yeah, end of June, end of July.

End of June. And what were your biggest lessons from launching the event? Because you inspired me to launch my event almost five years ago. -At least five years ago. -Thank you.

-Fantastic.

And I remember just being like, you did a great job of being different than everyone else. And I was like, if I want to do it, I need to be different than you and everyone else. And be my unique thing. And bring a community together. So why did you do it 10 years ago? What was the biggest lessons from launching an event? event series for a decade and why are you stopping?

I think when I started it, I felt that there wasn't anything else like it. And when I started, I felt like there were all these people connecting in lots of little micro ways of, you know, gonna be a digital Nomad or I'm gonna be, like, an artist or an independent traveler or, you know, start my little business, whatever it is, or not even that, but just, like, I want to live my own life and, like, I don't want to do the same thing that, you know, and they were kind of disconnected, right? And like disparate and spread out. And especially like doing your event in Ohio, I think is so important because so many of these people are not in like San Francisco or New York or whatever, they don't have a connection to like a greater peer circle. So I wanted to kind of, you know, just bring those people together in one place and say, what kind of magic can we create together? But there wasn't like a great strategy behind it. I didn't know, I mean, I called it the World Domination Summit, you know, like here it is, you know, let's just do it. And then it's been a wonderful experience. I think it's one of the few things that I've done that I can look back and say, I think it actually has lasting value. I don't say that about all my projects at all. I mean, I think it's probably like one in ten, you know? That actually this endures. So I'm very proud of it. I'm very proud of the team and everyone who's been involved with it. But I think it's also important to end well. I think nobody does that.

Not like, Okay, it's getting worse and worse. Less and less people are interested.

Exactly. Fizzle it out. There's so many other events now. I mean, there's a lot of other events, a lot of gathering places for people who are connected in that way. And yeah, I didn't want to just like peter out or just keep going for the sake of going, you know, because, I mean, you know how it is. A lot of work that goes into it. A lot of work. More than people think. Full year planning. It's not just the event. The event is wonderful. It's like everything that leads up to it. And so I thought, Let's actually plan for an ending rather than just have it end. So we announced it three years out, two years ago now, said it's going to end in year 10. And interestingly enough, that's brought this revitalization to it. It's so weird. Everyone wants to be there. Yeah, which is this weird-- how do.

I get to take it?

I know it's the strangest marketing lesson. I feel like I should end WDS every year.

Right?

I mean, every year, it's like, it's going, okay, it's back this year only. Scarcity is the most powerful I know, it's so funny. But I think it's not just with that, it's also with the team, like the core team that works on it. When we said we were gonna end it, at the end of every year previously, I'm always worried, like, should I ask them to come back? They're gonna be burnt out, you know? All right. I hate it, you know? And like, they're so valuable, but I don't wanna take advantage of it. But when we said it was gonna end in three years, pretty much all of them were like, I'm in. I wanna see it through. And so I think that's been really good. And so it does, you know, some parts of me are really sad about it ending, for sure.

It's gonna be over like this and then I'm gonna feel.

I'm gonna feel terrible, actually, but I know it's the right thing.

Why is it the right thing to end something that people love and they want more of?

Because, as I said, nobody ends anything well, you know? And the DNA of the experience is still there. The experience is not like the ticket that I purchased in this city that I travel to and this hotel that I stay in, it's in the relationships. And those relationships have gone on and on. And all kinds of stuff has happened out of them. And like, you know, we've had, you know, marriages and families and kids and businesses and all this stuff. And so that's valuable. And I'm gonna keep doing that in different ways. You know, I'm just gonna do different things.

Yeah.

Are you gonna be sad? You think the last day, the day after, like all the next year, when it's the same month, Yeah, all.

I was sad last year actually when I was going through the rehearsal, I was like, next year this time, I'm gonna be a last rehearsal.

What do you think is the greatest skill for every entrepreneur or side hustler to get? If they had no skills, what's the skill that you should master today?

Asking questions, like curiosity, which you said earlier, asking what is that? the daily annoyances that we encounter, the problems, the inefficiencies, asking like, what could be a different way to do this? What could be a better way to do this? And if you're annoyed by something, probably a lot of other people are annoyed by it too. And so maybe also, I talked earlier about focusing on skills more than passion. Maybe also thinking about what bothers you more than what excites you is good. What bothers you about the world?

Because people pay for a solution to pain.

Yes.

Sometimes more than they will for pleasure.

Right, and I feel like even with School of Greatness, I mean I'd be curious to know your one sentence behind it or something, but to me it's providing this positive message, but it's also pushing against something. It's pushing against the notion of mediocrity. It's pushing against complacency. I'm bothered by being complacent. How many years ago was that? you were on the couch, your sister. 10 years ago, right? 10 years ago, right? And you were complacent for a time. And it bothered you. Finally, you realized, Finally, you're like, I.

Gotta get up off this thing, right?

I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Right, so it wasn't so much about being passionate. It was like, I am sick of this. I want something more. So I think thinking about curiosity, like.

Asking the questions, and then also like what really bothers me. That's motivating.

So what do you call that a soft skill then?

Like curiosity?

Sure. Yeah, I don't know if I label it per se. Skill of traits, you know? But it's some, I think it's something that can be acquired, right? It's something that can, it's not like something that you go to school for. It's not something innate. Anybody who is listening or watching this, they've already kind of like raised their hand and said like, I want, I want to be great. I want to be better than I am. Isn't that greatness, right? Like, it's like, it's like, it's not meeting some objective you know, standard or threshold. It's like to be better than I am. You can always be better. Yeah. No matter what you achieve, it can always be something.

Now, I'm curious about mentorship, because especially we're talking about more of, like, Millennials right now. It seems like a lot of them are looking for mentors. They're looking for people to support them. They're looking for advice.

Right?

Yeah.

If curiosity is the main thing, you got to ask people questions who know. Sure. Answer. mentors.

Sure.

But people who are mentors are usually pretty busy. They're doing things and they may not have the time for a millennial.

And they may not be the best person to talk to that person.

True.

I would say as well.

So how does someone find the right mentor or advice when everyone's spreading advice online?

Yeah. Okay. Well, when I say asking questions, I don't just mean asking questions of an expert, you know, Louis, tell me how to do this. You can also be asking questions of yourself. Like discoverability or reverse engineering something. This thing didn't work. What's a better way it could work? Just thinking through steps and processes or even it doesn't have to be waiting for someone to bestow their knowledge from the mountaintop per se. And to be fair, in the book there is a mentor figure essentially. So it's not like I'm against all mentorship. But I think for a lot of people, when they ask for advice, they're really asking for affirmation as opposed to permission. Yeah, like what do you think about this idea? Your friends are like, what do you think about this idea? That's great.

Yeah, that's what they want you to do.

Right?

It's a great idea, you should do it. It's okay to know that about yourself and to know, actually I say that I want people to tell me what to do, but I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. I think there's so much knowledge within yourself, within the human self and spirit that I think before it You figure out you go on this quest to find the right mentor. It's like, what can I learn on my own?

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. We're talking about the top 10 ways to make money online. Now, I did an episode about this a couple of years ago and it blew up. People loved it. There's thousands of comments. and it's been helping a lot of people. So I thought I would do an updated version of this talking about how to make more income for yourself, whether you're working with a job right now or you're completely a freelancer or you're a business owner, it doesn't matter what category you're in. This is all about how to make more money online and build your business. And the reason I wanted to do this again is because I remember the feeling of when I was completely broke about eight years ago. I remember the frustration around money that I had. I didn't know how to make money. I didn't understand it at all. And it scared me to be honest. And I think I was so scared of it that I wasn't able to bring it into my life. I was so worried about talking about it and being shameful that I didn't have any, that it was a frustration of mine and it was really hard to attract more income coming into my life. So I really wish I would have had this video and this episode eight years ago because it would have helped me along my journey, making it an easier process to attract and bring money into my life. So this is all about the top 10 ways to make more money online. The first thing is teaching and training. We all have some type of expertise, we all have something we love or something that we're good at. And there are so many channels online, so many teachers who are all ages, young and old, who are teaching about beauty tips or health tips, relationship tips, any type of how-to videos or teaching and training do extremely well online. So once you start to build up your content around this and you're serving an audience, teaching them something that they need, that's when you can really start to build an audience and sell products around your how-to. Number two way to make money online is offering a service. Now, there are so many people who have great services. You could do copywriting, you could do design, you could do SEO, you could do videography work. There are so many different services that you could offer and all you need to do is put it out there online and start attracting new clients. Number three is creating and selling products. Now there are so many different people who are making money on Amazon right now. They're writing e-books, they're creating informational products and they're uploading it to Amazon and making a lot of money there. I have a lot of friends who are creating software as a service and they're creating these products online to offer a service to people as well. And they're making money through their software. People are starting Etsy shops. There are lots of different things you can do to build a product and sell it online. Number 4 is digital courses and membership sites. Now, I've got a number of courses online. I've probably created over 15 courses over the last 8 years. And all of these do extremely well. You know, School of Greatness Academy, Legacy which is our premium product that helps people build a big online business around doing what they love. There are a lot of fitness communities that have continuity, meaning every single month you sign up, you pay a fee, and you get your meal prep, you get your nutrition plan, you get your workout plan, and every single month you pay to get access to this training as a membership. So digital courses, membership communities, all these are great ways to make money online as well. Number five is affiliate marketing. Now, if you don't feel like you're creative enough to launch a product or have a course or have a service but you can attract an audience, this is where you can really make a lot of money by selling other people's products, other people's services. There's so many people who are driving traffic to Amazon or other sites and they're generating sales and getting commissions from bringing leads to these companies online. Another great example is AppSumo. My friend Noah Kagan at AppSumo started this and he is crushing it. He finds the best apps, the best products, the best services, and sells them at a discount for these companies and makes a big commission as an affiliate because he has the audience that wants these products. So figure out a way to attract the audience and you can sell other people's products and services to create your own commission. Number 6 is building a site and selling ads. Now, this is more of a challenging and long-term solution. For me, this is not going to be the fastest way to generate income but if you can do it right, you can really make a mark online. I'm talking about sites like Mind Body Green, Huffington Post, entrepreneur.com, all these places have built publishing companies where they have consistent content. They're building large audiences. and they're selling ads to the eyeballs that are coming to their audience. So again, it might take a little more time to build this up if it's something you want to do, but it can pay off big time if you do it. And number seven is selling sponsorships to branded content. So something that we do at School of Greatness is sell sponsors on the podcast. We find a couple per episode that are premium sponsors that align to the vision of what we're doing and that makes sense for the audience that we have. Another great company is Attention, ATTN. They create amazing video quality online and they sell branded sponsorship content to those videos and they generate a lot in sales based on the traffic they're getting for those videos and those eyeballs. So whatever it is, if you have a podcast, if you have a video show, YouTube channel, selling sponsored branded content around your content. The eighth way to make money online is selling events. Now, I've got a big event called the Summit of Greatness. You can check it out at the show notes after this. And I was also inspired by creating my event from World Domination Summit. My friend Chris Guillibeau started this years ago in Portland. I've got another buddy Cole Hatter who's got Thrive which is all about entrepreneurs and helping entrepreneurs make money matter. So all these ways to launch events in real life, but selling them online, using social media channels, using your email list, using other people's audiences to promote and sell your live event online. Number nine is masterminds and coaching. Now early on, I used to do a lot of one-on-one coaching about LinkedIn, believe it or not. Then it evolved into more general online marketing coaching and business coaching. over the years as people wanted to learn more from me. There are so many coaching opportunities out there. It's a massive industry coaching in itself. There are health coaches, relationship coaches, meditation coaches, business coaches, any type of need that someone has. If you can help them solve their problems, solve their challenges through one-on-one coaching or group coaching or high level mastermind coaching. Also, I offer a high level mastermind called the Greatness Mastermind, where I bring in the top of the top entrepreneurs from my entire community who are making multiple six, multiple seven, eight figures a year. And we guide them and mold them into how to 10x their income and 10x their impact each year. So that's something that we offer, but there are so many different types of group coaching and mastermind programs out there. So take a look at a few. and look at which model you like the best. And number 10 is to open your mind and get creative. There are so many people on Instagram that are making a lot of money. They have big Instagram inspirational accounts, beauty accounts, fitness accounts, and they're figuring out ways to leverage it, whether it be selling products, whether it be selling sponsored posts, whether it be partnering with other brands to bring in income. Figure out creative ways. It doesn't have to be a set way that everyone else is doing something. If you've got an idea, if you've got an audience, if you've got an offer or a product, then get creative of how you can bring an income or make money around that creative idea. So this is my top 10 ways to make more money online. Again, if you're struggling trying to figure out how you're going to pay next month's rent or how you're going to make some more cash on the side or whatever it is that you want to do, have a conversation about money. Don't allow money to frustrate you or scare you. Be open to talking about it so you can be open to receiving more of it in your life. But you got to add a value in some way. It's not just going to fall in your lap. You've got to add a value. And all these 10 ways, there's a value exchange. Think about how can I best serve people? How can I best give people what they how can I give them some type of unique skill, talent, service that's going to optimize their life in some way? And when you can do that, you're setting yourself up to win to bring in more money.

What I think is actually a highly advanced question is what do I do with this money? And this is a key thing I want everybody to pay attention to. Everyone teaches you how to save money but almost no one teaches you how to spend it. So, what do high earners do with their money?