These 15 THINGS Are Keeping YOU POOR!| Lewis Howes

Someone who is financially rich is an owner. They're not a consumer.

-You'Re going to need a business and a movement to change the world. You can't sustain the mission if you don't make the money.

-There'S very few people who you see a meteoric rise in their wealth or their success that's keep it.

-Did you know that your mindset is what keeps you from being wealthy? Well, in this video, we talked to some of the top entrepreneurs in the world on what they did to achieve wealth and what you can do as well.

Well.

What is the worst investment people should be making during this time? And what's the best investment they can make?

In my life, when I have become desperate, right after that's when I become stupid.

Yeah.

And- explain. The other one is- the other one is when I get- well, when, you know, when you get scared and you go rushing towards something out of fear, that sense of desperation, this, oh, thing, when you do that, you're getting ready to screw up. I mean, just count on it. And the other time you do that is if you're greedy, if you think you. Okay, I got this one. I can take advantage of this, and, I mean, greedy as a lack of virtue greedy. I don't mean greedy in a positive way where I'm being ambitious. Okay. I mean the negative sides of greed. And so if you're functioning in desperation or in this no holds barred, I've, I'm going to just clean up on other people's pain thing. That's when you're getting ready to screw up and you're getting ready to make a major mistake. And so you're set up also for con artists when you do that. And so if you're functioning in high emotion, your brain just doesn't work good. My friend Art Laffer says, when you're panicked and when you're drunk, you don't make good decisions. And so, you know, when you're on high emotion, your brain is, your critical thinking skills shut down. And so that's when I've made the biggest mistakes in my life is when I was desperate. And the few times that I was greedy where I thought, oh, I'm gonna slip in there and that's gonna be easy money.

What was that?

Easy money.

Can you share a story of one of those greedy times where you tried to jump in?

Yeah, a buddy of mine. A buddy of mine, I was in my 20s and a buddy of mine was buying gold. And now this is in the 80s. Okay, it's a million years ago. And he's buying gold. And he had this friend that was a gold. He was a gold bug. He was picking gold. And this guy had picked the gold prices where they were going within a dollar, like. 14 times in a row. And so we both dropped five grand into this thing. And if we had hit, it was a, it was a margin deal. And so I would have made 50 grand. And I thought, I'm putting 1,000 bucks in here. I'm gonna make 50 grand. But it's a margin play, which means you're either gonna make 50 grand or you're gonna make zero. And so he picked it right 14 times the time I got in the 15th time, missed it. I got zero, turned 5,000 bucks into zero instantly. Last time I bought gold, last time I played stuff on margin, last time I got greedy.

Is there ever a time where... So what's the difference between greed and a great opportunity of being ambitious? Can you make money fast in certain things? Or is typically most things take a certain amount of time and energy and.

Effort The vast majority of people who are successful financially and successful have done it incrementally. There's very few people who you see a meteoric rise in their wealth or their success that's keep it. And I think because you build your character along the way to be able to hold on and be able to do it, I think that's my theory on it. I mean, I got rich quick. I started with nothing and by the time I was 26, I had $4 million worth of real estate. I built a house of cards. you know, and I had a million dollar net worth. I made $250,000 in 1984. I was making 20,000 bucks a month and in my 20s, so I mean, but you thought I had it all figured out, meteoric rise to the top. But the very thing that caused me to be the incredible overdrive of ambition caused me to go so fast.

That.

I missed the blind spots. I missed the detour signs. I missed the bridge out signs. And so I built this house of cards I thought was a stone house. But I was naive and didn't know and along comes some regulations changes, a few shifts in the economy, a little SNL crisis and kaboom.

It comes down.

All of a sudden Dave looks like an idiot instead of a genius. And so it turns out I was a little of both because you don't build something like that at 25 if you're not somewhat of a genius. But I was obviously an idiot in the way I built it and so I get to do it again. Get the wonderful opportunity to start over.

And it went the right way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I mean, in the midst of that, as I was falling, it took two and a half years to lose everything we owned. I had stuff presented to me. I almost got conned, serious conned, like people just a real con artist type guy. There's not many of them out there. Most of the time you get screwed by well-meaning ignoramuses. But these were real con artists coming into my path and I was about to give them money because I so desperately needed to turn quick money into big money to save myself. I was desperate. And right about the time you get desperate is when you get stupid.

So don't make those decisions.

So there's not really, so what I'm hearing you say is the wealthy, wealthy people, it takes time and it's incremental. It's not an overnight thing. It's not a quick rise. There might be some spikes here and there, but it's typically over time.

It's okay to take a spike, but anytime I get a spike, I'm always a little suspicious of it. Really? It makes me even more careful. I draw back and I go, well, that's really cool. Is it okay? You know, because it's not normative. Normative is incremental. And so I always tell entrepreneurs, it's okay to be on the COVID of Slow Company magazine.

I wanted to ask first what the difference is between someone who is financially rich and someone who's financially poor. or what's the difference?

There's lots of differences, but I'd say the first one is someone who is financially rich is an owner. They're not a consumer. They're a consumer also. But when somebody is poor, they're a consumer. All they do is they take, you know, I always tell people we're all financial traders. I people say, I'm not a financial trader. Yes, you are. You're trading time for money. That's the worst trade you can ever make in your life. Somebody who's wealthy has made money their slave. They're no longer the slave to money. And the way they do that is they figured out how to become an owner. And the way you do that in the most simplistic way, I even taught it in my first book, was you have to decide there's a percentage of money that you're going to keep forever. You're not going to give it to Kate Spade or Ferrari or anybody else. You can do that too. But there's a percentage of that income that never will be touched, that you will grow and compound and will provide income for the rest of your life so you don't have to work. Now, when I was growing up, everybody's goal was get rich enough so you never have to work. Now, all my friends are 15, 18 years my senior. People like Steve Wynn, who built most of Las Vegas, he's like 74. Warren Buffett's 85. Peter Guber, one of my dearest friends, the world owns the Golden State Warriors, the LA Dodgers. We're partners in the LAFC football team in LA. Brilliant guy, 74 years old. And they're all working harder now than they ever were. And they don't have to work. So the goal is make enough money so you don't have to work and then you'll do what you love and you'll pour your time and energy into it. You have to make that decision. It's the first most important decision is I'm going to become an owner of American business. You don't want to have an Apple phone and not own Apple. And you don't want to just own Apple because any company can go up and down. You want to own the index. You want to own a variety with enough diversification. But if you can just shift, and I've taught people who've told me they have no money, they can't save, it's really easy once you get momentum. There's a research project I did with A gentleman who was nominated for Nobel Prize on behavioral finance. And what he did was he said, if you can even, you know, you need to save 15% ideally. But if you could even save 3%, because anybody can do that. They took a group of blue collar workers in the Midwest and said, we're going to force you to save 3%. I think it was three and a quarter or three and a half. But then we're, everybody can go on a diet tomorrow. Everybody can save money tomorrow. Right? Yeah. So his tool was, All right, you're not going to save today, you're going to save tomorrow. We'll do the 3.5%, but then you go to your employer and say, the next time I get a raise, the first 5% goes to my savings account, to my investing account. And then every time you get a raise to do that, well, in 14 years, the average person was saving 15% and the top 40% were saving 20. Let me explain what that means. You and I were together before, when I'm trying to explain compounding to people, everybody understands it intellectually. But when I ask some of the richest people in the world, what are most investors failing to do? And they all say, they're not tapping the power of compounding. So if you're in a situation where, as an example, let's take you've got $100,000 that you've saved. You're 35 years old and you put it in the market and just leave it there and never add anything to it. If you leave in the market and you're only being charged 1% in fees, At retirement 35 years later, you got 762,000 from that 100. Never added a dime, it grew that much. But if you pay 3% of fees, which is the average most people are paying, when you ask people what they're paying, they don't know or they say 1%. Because when you hear about fees, let's say a mutual fund fee, you'll always hear 1%. That's the expense ratio. There are 17 other fees. So every 1% you overpay, 1% is the average. If you pay two or three and the average mutual fund is 3.12, Sounds like nothing, one or two percent. But every one percent you overpay because of compounding means you lose a decade of income. So the person who paid one percent has 762,000. The person who paid three percent has $452,000 and they own the same stocks. It's just fees. So while we compound our interest, we also compound fees. So if you could save three percent and build it to five, 10, 15, or you start with 10 or 15 and eventually get to 20, the best example I can give your viewers is that there's a gentleman who worked for UPS who literally never made more than $14,000 a year. You heard about him in the book. And when he retired, he had $70 million. And he gave away $35 million while he was alive. And the reason was a friend of his set him aside and said, Look, I'm going to make you rich. He goes, I'm never going to be rich. I make 14 grand a year. He goes, I'm going to make you rich. I'm going to make you rich later in life. And I'm going to do it by a 20% tax to your business. and he goes, I make 14,000 a year. I can't live on 20% less. His friend said to him, if the IRS came and said a 20% more tax, you'd scream, you'd yell, and you'd pay it. And he said, We're gonna pay it for you. And that 20% compounded generated $70 million. So for the people that are at home, the sooner you start, the better off you are, because compounding does it. I've got an example in the book of a guy that starts at 19. He puts aside $300 a month. He stops at 27. So he does it for eight years. He only puts in, I think it was $35,000. But it's a million dollars by leaving in the market when he turned 65 and he stopped at 28. He has a best friend that starts at 28, invests his entire life, puts in $180,000 and he has less money at the end. The sooner you start, the better you are. Yeah.

So many questions I want to ask.

I don't dominate the list. So many I want to ask.

Is there a way to be financially free just by saying, I'm going to earn more every year as opposed to investing every year? Can you do without investing at all, or do you have to invest? And when you say put it in the market, you mean put it in index funds, is what I'm-- well, in.

The book I explain you've got to have diversification.

Don't just throw it in a stock.

And just-- no, and what most people do is they go to a mutual fund. It sounds logical. I'm no good at this. This is not my skill a person says. You go to a professional, runs a mutual fund. What do they do? They figure out a series of investments to make. They put it in the fund and they do it for you. And you think, well, gosh, they're smarter than I am, they'll do well. You assume that, but the truth is they charge so much that even if they did have an advantage, they lose it. I interviewed David Swensen, who's the head of chief investment officer at Yale. It took Yale 200 years to get a billion dollars that they saved. He turned it into 25 billion. in two decades. It's unheard of. He's the greatest institutional investor of all time. And one of the things that he told me, he said, Tony, you just gotta understand something. He said, you,'re never gonna earn your way to wealth. He said, how many people have you seen, movie stars, actors, athletes? You know, the other day, 50 Cent just went broke, right? He made $100 million on vitamin water alone. Somebody gave him a tip, and he had a half a billion dollars, and he's broke. Completely broke.

Crazy. Mike Tyson made a half a billion dollars and went broke.

You can understand that a little bit. Yeah, I think it's 78% of NFL.

Players go bankrupt two years after that's prior.

And the average lifespan of an NFL player is three and a half years. So these guys work their whole life, they go through these rough injuries, and they don't have invest. So the answer is you can make a fortune. Elton John didn't go bankrupt because it's different rules in England, but he got in trouble. Who I just saw the other day is, what's his name? The Pirates' CaribbEan. What's his name?

Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp's going bankrupt right now.

He's making like 20, 30 million a year.

Jonny Beap was worth $700 million, three quarters of a billion. He's on the verge of bankruptcy right now, can't pay his bills. He was spending $30,000 a month on wine alone. Oh my gosh. He spent $3 million to take Hunter Thompson's body, burn it, put the dust into this giant cannon and shoot his dust into space. Three million bucks. It doesn't matter how much money you earn, you can always get rid of it and lose it. Buy an island and watch how quickly it disappears. So what I show people is, what you really want to do is create an income for life without working. The goal, if you own a business, and I would assume a lot of your viewers are business owners or getting started in business, no matter how good you are in business, think about this. The one universal rule that idiots in finance know is diversification. It's the only free lunch. You've got to diversify. because if you put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how good the basket is, one day that real estate market, that stock market, that bond market, that collectibles market, whatever you invest in, Ray Dalio showed me statistically, it'll drop 50 to 70% on a day. Now, if you're later in life when that happens, it's over for you. So you have to diversify, and yet most people, they know real estate so they do it, or they know stocks so they do it, or they grew up with their parents flipping things. and it's the wrong thing to do. So you've got to diversify in order for you to be able to truly succeed. And that's why when you own a business, if you put all your money in your business, which is what most of us do naturally, you put all your eggs in one basket and there's things that can happen. I mean, you know, you're, let's say you spent 20 years and you figured out how to put together the ultimate map, you know, and you remember Garmin came out with this thing called the TomTom. I don't know if you remember, you used to put on your, are you old enough to remember that? You used to put on your phone? Or you put on your dash? Cost 100 bucks. It was a breakthrough.

They were making like 100 million or something.

Yeah, they were. Six months later, what happened? The iPhone came out with Google Maps. These little bastards. Excuse my French. Came out with it, put Google Maps, put their own map on here, and cost how much? Zero. What are they gonna do to your business when someone takes your product or service and gives it away for free? So I always tell people, competition happens, technology happens, what you must do is have a second business with no moving parts, no people, no time. Maybe it takes you two, three days a year for two or three hours after you've read the book. You put it in place and you measure it two or three times a year. That's it. Go on with your life. Now if there's a trouble in your business, you're financially set. I, in my life, at 31 companies now, we have, you know, what do we have? 1,200 employees, seven different industries. We do five billion in sales. I mean, that used to be, me and my seminar business, it's grown geometrically. But with all those moving parts, the only way I've been able to succeed is because I've taken every one of those businesses and I've diversified my assets so that when things were in trouble, I still had enough economics to take care of myself and keep the business going. So everybody needs to create a money machine that works while you sleep, that doesn't have moving parts, and that's what this is really about.

You have a great cartoon in the book. where there's a kid asking his father, you know, something about like how do you invest your money or how does the stock market work? And he says, you put your money in at the peak, it starts to go down and lose money, and so you get scared and you take it out, and then someone smarter than you makes all the money. Something like that. So how do we, and I've done that in the past, where I put my money in somewhere high, it went down, and I was like, oh, I just lost a bunch of money. Let me take it out. and then I put it back in another time and I'm like, what am I doing? So how do we invest without fear of, oh, it's going down, I need to take it out, or trying to time it? How do we do that?

Great question. It's one of the main reasons I wrote the book. I always tell people, if you just read the second chapter of the book and nothing else, it'll change your life. You can do that with multiple chapters, but that chapter is really about teaching people that winter is coming. We all know winter's coming, right? To coin a phrase. but that winter is the best time on earth. And I know that's counterintuitive. I don't mean like being a positive thinker, I mean pure facts. So, in the book, I take you through 10 facts. I'll give you a couple of them right now. The first fact I give people is, why do people not invest? They're afraid of failing. You're a millennial, right? So, you grew up witnessing 2008 when you were still relatively young. How old are you now?

33.

Okay, so you were, what, 27?

2008. Yeah, 27, I guess.

Yeah, 27, 28 years old. So you're a young man and you're watching the world melting down in front of you. For most millennials, they are the first generation since the generation that went through the depression that is not investing at the ratio they need to, even close. Little more debt than everyone probably, right? With all the-- They have more college debt than everyone, absolutely true.

I have a friend that has $400,000.

Of debt, dental school. President Obama just paid off his debt five years ago while he was still president. What? No, I swear to God. It's mind boggling. And he had a bunch of scholarships, but the last bit it took him that long. So what I tell them is listen, paying off your debt's not enough. You've got to become an owner or you're always going to be in that place. So yes, pay off your debt, but here's what you need to know. You got to become an owner. You got to get in the game, but you got to understand the rules of the game. You don't know the rules of the game, the old phrase is, when a person with experience meets a person with money, we know the phrase. The person with the money ends up with the experience. The person with the experience ends up with your money, right? So I teach people the rules of the game so they don't get screwed. But the most important thing is this, winter's coming, but people react. So let's take last year. Last January 2016, we had the worst stock market opening in the history of the stock market. Worst, first, I think it was 10 days. There was a drop of $2.3 trillion with a T. Crazy. Everybody's freaking thinking the bear market's here, the market's over, the crash is here. I think the market dropped 800 points one day and on that day, all the richest people in the world were in Davos, Switzerland, you know, for the big conference that they do every year. And they went there, MSNBC went there and everybody's freaking, what are we going to do? And they said, let's go ask Ray Dalio. Now, your listeners may or may not know Ray Dalio as, if you're not in the financial business, probably never heard of him. You probably heard of Warren Buffett, but Ray Dalio has been more. You have to have a $5 billion net worth and $100 million to give him where he wouldn't talk to you 10 years ago. Now he doesn't care a shit how much money you have, he won't talk to you. 'Cause he's got a close fund. But they go and they put value on television, CNBC, he's the king. What do we do? And he says, well, you don't need to panic. Corrections happen all the time, but you need a strategy that when markets go up and down, you don't go up and down. And he said, I spent 15 years of my life to perfect such a strategy. All of my money's in that plan. And he said, It's called All Seasons, and I've never revealed it before, but I gave it to Tony Robbins. He extracted from me and it's his book. So you got to go read his book. This is what he says on national television, the data markets are crashing. And that day, to give you an idea, which is the beginning of February, I think it was nine days into February, the market was down 9% in the first five weeks of the year. His strategy, which he gave me, which is made money 85% of the time for the last 75 years. It's averaged a 10% return just under, and the average loss when it 15% loss was 1.6. So if you go to Vegas and you could spend 85% of time make money and when you made money it was 10%, your loss is 1.6, you could go forever. His plan made 2% while the market was down 9. So it was up 11% difference. Now, I'm not suggesting that's the only strategy to do. There's many. His is the smoothest ride with the least risk. But what it did was combination of that and then right after that I interviewed Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. He was the head of our economy, the most powerful man of finance for 19 years, four presidents, he was there running. I was just with President Clinton this last week. He was the Fed chair for him. And I interviewed him for like two hours, three hours off stage, two hours in front. And I asked him, in the very beginning of this thing, I said to him, I said, look, if you could put the Fed today, what would you do? And he looks at me and as I said, he leans forward and he says, resign. So I look at that and go, Oh my God, I need to write a book that'll free people. So here's what will free you. Everybody's afraid of the crash. So here's what we need to know, two terms you should understand. Correction versus crash. Anytime the market drops from its high by 10% or more up to 20%, it's called a correction. If it drops 20% or more up to 80%, like in the Great Depression, then it's called a crash or called a bear market. So how often does a correction happen? How often do we have to be prepared for it? Since 1900, we've had a correction on average every year for 116 years. So when is winter coming? This year on average. It's like how often is winter? Some are harsh, some are light, but winter always comes. So I wasn't panicked when this happened last year. I'm not panicked whenever it happens because I know it's supposed to be. How long does it last? Average, 56 days. Okay, so just under two months. What's the average drop during that time? 14% over the last 30 years, 13.5 of the last 100 years. So I use the more recent one. 14% gets your attention, right? 14% you get a little gut check. But here's what you need to know. 80% of all corrections never become a bear market. 80%. So all this fear and what people do is what you said you did is they see it, it's freaking out, I'm losing money, I'm the hell out of here and they get out. The stock market never took a dime from anybody. Only you can take it from you. you sold, that's why you lost. So if you look back and say, what was it like in 2008? I can remember vividly being with my platinum partners and saying, you see these $80 stocks? This is six months before the crash. I told them in April, I brought them to Dubai and I said, these stocks are going to go to eight and some are going to go to a buck. And by October, and I told them what to do, so they were able to get out. October, I go on the Today Show in October of 2008 and they go, Tony, there's been $3 trillion meltdown. Pump the country up. You got four minutes. Ready, go. That's not what I do, first of all. And I said, I'd be a lie. I'm not gonna, at that point, the $80 stocks were eight. I said, some of those, I said, I'm not a market forecaster, but I work with Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest investors in the history of the world. In the biggest market crash in history, you know, 1987, he made 200% when everybody else was losing their entire life. I've been coaching him continuously now for 24 years every single day. So I said, I work with the best in the world and they're telling me based on history in the 30s and history in the 70s, this $8 stock some are going to be a buck. And I remember the day in March of 2009, Citibank, which had been, I think, $70, sold for 97 cents. You could go and take your money out of the ATM. It cost you more to take your money out than to own the bank. And then I told people, it'll jump from 99 cents to 6, 10, 12 dollars in a month or two, and it's exactly what Good, right? So what you got to know is corrections happen every year. You got another couple months, got to know it's 14% and you won't lose because 80% of the time it doesn't go to a bear. Now, what about the bear? The bear market, it happens, to give you an idea, in the last 100 years, every three to five years, you've gone eight without one. We're way overdue. In modern years, last 30 years, it's about every five years. The average length of a bear is one year. the average drop is 33%. A third of those drops go 40% or above. That, I don't care how well prepared you are, that's a scary thing. But it is the greatest opportunity in your lifetime to go from wherever you are financially to where you want to be. I hope your audience is listening right now. Hear me. If you want to leapfrog and you're a millennial and you think there's no future or you're a baby boomer and you think you're too old and it's too late, the greatest gift you have is coming. I know it doesn't sound like it. This is not positive thinking bullshit.

This is the truth.

Wall Street, the stock market is the only place that when things go on sale, people freak out. If I said you like Ferraris? Sure. If I said to you, Ferraris go on sale for 50% off. Awesome.

But when I tell you Apple's on.

Sale for 50% off, you go, oh, what am I gonna do here? What's wrong? The whole world's coming to a if you think about it, how old are you?

33.

33. So let's assume if you were 35 and you lived to 85, you got 50, 52 years ahead of you. That means you have 52 more corrections to live through. That means you're probably in those 50 years gonna have 10 more bear markets to live through. If you're gonna have a gut checks every time or you're gonna leave out of it. If you didn't participate 'cause you thought, oh, the market's too volatile, I can't trust it, all that stuff, you missed 250% 50% return in the last eight years. I mean, you've missed out on everything while you're waiting for things to be better. And if you won't do it when it's like this, when it crashes, you're not going to get in. So here's the good news about the bear. The good news about the bear, average ones a year. Could be longer, but that's the average. Could be shorter. But here's what's cool. Every single bear market in the history of the United States has led to a bull market, meaning right afterwards. So 2008, this plummeting, What happened in 2009? Up 67% in a year. I can show you every single bear market and the next year when it comes out, it's this explosion. Now, that's not true in every market in the world. It's true for two centuries in the United States. Wow. So that's why Warren Buffett says, I want to be greedy when people are afraid. And I want to be afraid when people are greedy. If you remember 2008, he was telling everybody, Buy. He was having the time of his life. Buy, buy, buy. Everything's on sale. What you have to do to become unshakable is turn, the metaphor I use is turn the snake into the rope. Meaning, we all know the story, it's the middle of the night, you're walking through the yard or someplace and you see a snake and you freaked out, you pull back, you come in the morning and it's a rope. Once you know it's a rope, you're never afraid again.

I think you said you did like 15 or 17 seven-figure launches in a row online. 20, I'm 20. My numbers are off here. 28.

The only reason I didn't do that, because we had to make a presentation for the Influencer Magazine thing and we're trying to like talk about it and it was 28 seven-figure online launches. 19 of them were in a row. So that 19 in a row, wow. That 2009 to 2015, we kind of defined the game for launching, especially personal development online courses. There were a lot of people teaching marketing or launches or how to do a seminar or something like that, but we were like, Personal development is harder to sell.

It's harder to sell, man. It's hard to sell high ticket too. It's harder to sell. So you've been doing that, you've helped so many people launch their brands from their influence because there's a lot of influencers in the world who are really great at building, creating content that goes viral, that attracts an audience. And then grow an audience and they know they have no clue to make money. That's it.

They're broke, but they're changing the world, right? It's like they're broke and they have millions of followers. They think they're changing the world. It's like you're gonna need a business and a movement to change the world.

That's true.

And that's what they're like, well, I'm changing the world. Like, no, you're popular.

Right.

But to actually change the world, change people, you need a curriculum. You need to be able to give them empowerment and tools to be able to help them to do that. And if you're gonna actually make it, I always tell people, you can't sustain the mission if you don't make the money. Which was a big thing for me because I came from nothing, you know, you know my background a little bit. Growing up in Montana, we just had nothing. You know, we grew up in poverty. My parents working super hard between the, you know, two of them to raise us four kids literally till they say, I have no idea how they did it.

Yeah.

So my ambition was like, maybe someday I can make $40,000 because the richest people in our town didn't make that kind of money. But that also can get in the way because sometimes people set their ambitions or their their financial hopes based on where they grew up, and they let their past or their current circumstances dictate the dreams for the finances they want in the future. And then what happens, they do something that becomes really popular, and they're like, oh, this is working. And the number account they're watching is the fans and the followers, which is great, but what I'm always saying is like, Please make sure you build a business, because if suddenly you're not as popular or you go broke or something happens, God forbid, if you haven't built the infrastructure to carry your message, then you're not being a responsible messenger. You know, an influencer without a business is a popular person who's busy.

Yeah. All the time.

And stressed because they're not making any money. They can't pay their rent. Yeah. I was having a conversation with Jay Shetty about this about a year and a half ago.

Yeah.

Because he was, I was always trying to push him to earn more. He was like, you know, I'm happy with, like, just making, I don't know, I think it was like 100 grand or maybe a few hundred grand, right? Not sure the exact number, but he was like, I never felt like I needed to make more money because I felt like I just want to serve people. I want to give as much as I can. And I said, well, you're really doing a disservice unless you start earning more because you can hire more people and transform those lives. You can use the resources to create bigger projects, bigger production of movies and videos that can then infect people in a positive way.

Yeah, you have to. People have to get out of their way about money. And it's the hardest thing, trust me, it was like there were parts of, when we did our first launch, when we did our first seminar, afterwards I went broke, 'cause I didn't know how to do it, didn't know so much, just completely went broke. Had to live with my girlfriend, who's now Denise, my wife, and she was buying my groceries, she was supporting me, she was, Kind of the only person who knew what I wanted to do and really the only person believing and cheering it on. I had that great support. You know, I always say, people say, you,'re so lucky, but I'm like, I am. I had a car accident that smacked me in the head and made me say, I want to live my life. Luck number one. Luck number two, great parents. Luck number three, a girl that believed in me when I didn't even quite believe in myself.

What year was this?

I met Denise in 2003. so we were together five years and I proposed, so we've been together a long time. But I remember even sitting there when I was bankrupt and she's sleeping in the bed and I'm on this little desk next to the bed and I'm writing and all my bills and my paperwork and my vision boards were on the bed. And as I'm typing, she comes over and crawls under the covers to go to bed and I look over and my woman sleeping under my bills, like literally. And I would say none of us want to be responsible for the pain in other people's lives because of our own inaction. I just hadn't taken action, but I also didn't, I just didn't have any attachment to money my whole life. Even now, I mean, you've seen what we do on our big trips. So like, let's go. I mean, I go crazy.

Helicopters and this, whatever.

It's like have a great time because I don't have an attachment to it. But what I do have an attachment to is the mission and I want to help people achieve their goals faster. I want to help people realize they have a second chance on this planet every day that they wake up. And if you have a second chance every day, that's like evergreen. Every day is your life's golden ticket. You get to choose when you woke up this morning, what's my attitude gonna be? How I'm gonna treat people, what I'm gonna focus on, what I'm gonna make happen, how I feel. We get to choose these things too. like an extraordinary extent. So my whole thing is like, hey, you have a second chance. Use that. And this time in your second chance, in your next relationship, in the next job, and the next moment, be more intentional. Be more service driven. You know, lead with more heart. You know, make sure you're doing things that bring you meaning. And if you really, if I really believe that as I tell it to you, then I would have to build the infrastructure to sustain it. That's where the business thing comes in. I had to go, all right. And there was nothing about this business I was attracted to. Like literally.

You're very introverted.

Very introverted.