12 Rules of The Top 0.01%

The top 0.01%. They don't think like you, they don't act like you. And that's the reason that they get the results they get. I've spent the last 17 years studying billionaires, not only in books and YouTube interviews, but firsthand from friends of mine that are in that league. These are the 12 principles that I stole from billionaires to go from grinding peanut butter and earning $2.50 per hour to making over $3 million per month and becoming a shark on Shark Tank. Starting with principle number one, there are infinitely more people playing small and the fishing is best where the fewest go. And if you look at the business landscape, there are so many more people fighting for a smaller pie than there are of people thinking big and going after a huge audacious goal. And the reason for that is that it is so much easier to think small and to be conditioned by society. Like Steve Jobs said, the world is moldable and it's not something that you need to react to. It's something that you can actually control. You can mold it to your way of thinking if you have enough motivation and you have the courage to go after it. And the reason that a lot of people don't think so big is the quickest way to kill a big dream is to tell it to a small minded person. And most people feel threatened by big goals. Whenever you get together with your buddies and you tell them about these big audacious things that you want to achieve, unfortunately they're the first people to try and talk you out of it or to laugh at you or to say, that's so big and it's so audacious. The people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that often do. In 1994, Jeff Bezos was working on Wall street and he came across report that showed that Internet usage was growing by 2,300% per year. Not long after that, he handed in his resignation and he started Amazon.com at the time, it was a crazy and wild idea to think that people would be buying books online. Today Amazon is worth over a trillion dollars. Proving that a billionaire trait is to think big from the start. When I started my agency, King Kong Digital Marketing accounted for less than 10% of the overall marketing SPE where today it accounts for over 80% of all advertising dollars spent online. I saw the trend. I knew that having a medium that was so trackable and drove real results, that was going to be the future. Because there's that old adage I know my marketing is working, I just don't know what 50% is working. And fast forward to today's day and age where digital marketing, you can track down to the cent what your return on ad spend is and it's only getting crazier. I knew this market was exploded and that was when I decided to build something a lot big than myself. I took out huge amount of risk by getting a physical office hiring team. And for the first three years of my business, I literally only pulled out $25,000 per year in income because I took that additional money and I reinvested it to think big from the very, very beginning. Now if I didn't do that, who knows where I would be and what I would be doing. Whatever the business model that you're in or thinking about starting, think about what would this business look like if it was 100 times the size. If you can't see that, of how this business could be a hundred x bigger than what it is right now, then you need to rethink it. Because you need to build a business on a foundation where it can scale and it can scale beyond you. Because otherwise you're just creating a job for yourself. And you're not creating a business because the business is always going to be reliant on you and your own human capital in order for it to run. And that's not the way that you get rich. Now, another lens that you want to look through is building a business that the top talent would want to come and work for. Because if the business model is, hey, just to make the founder rich, then it's going to be very difficult to get people to want to come on that mission with you. Because small thinking equals small money. You want to aim big and that's principle number one. Think big or stay broke. Which brings us to principle number two. When Elon Musk started Tesla, it literally lost money for 10 years. And everyone thought he was crazy to think that an electric car company could compete with the giants like Ford and gm. Musk ignored quarterly profits and invested every last cent back into making the best product possible, reinvesting in innovation and production to build a behemoth. Fast forward to today and Tesla is worth over $1 trillion and is the number one electric car manufacturer in the world. By playing the long game and really exercising long term thinking, Tesla went from almost being bankrupt to being worth over a trillion dollars and becoming the number one electric car manufacturer in the world. And the biggest issue that I see in the business is that everybody wants those Short term wins. They want to appear to be rich more than it is that they actually want to be rich. So instead of thinking long term, they think about how do I pull out as much money as I possibly can and go flex on the gram and buy a Lambo or buy some Gucci shoes or whatever it might be. When they do that, they don't have any of the funds required in order to reinvest in the business to really win long term. And it's a shift in mindset to go from thinking about how much money can I make this month or this year to what type of business and legacy can I build over the next decade? And when you start thinking in long term horizons, the decisions that you make every day radically change because you're trying to think of the biggest vision that you can perceive for your business and for yourself as an individual. And then you're investing into the business right now as if you're building that business over the next 10 years. And for me, that shift happened when I was working in my bedroom. I was making about $70,000 month. I had a few contractors and freelancers that were working for me and I was making great money. And I thought, what the hell am I doing here, right? Do I just want to continue to be operating this business from my Ugg boots and servicing a few clients and then just building a cash flow business, or do I want to build something that is a lot bigger than myself? I started to reinvest that in getting an office, in fitting out that office, in hiring staff, in building out systems and building out an incredible work environment for my team to come in and work every day and paint a vision that was a lot bigger than me to becoming the number one digital marketing agency on planet Earth. And because I was thinking about building the best agency that I possibly could, making a great service and training team members and paying the salaries that I needed to do to bring those people in. Fast forward just 24 months and I had built the 17th fastest growing company in all of Australia. Everybody thinks in 12 months time what is it they want to achieve in the next year, right? As they write down their New Year's resolutions. Instead, I want, I want you to fast forward and to think about the type of person and the type of lifestyle and business that you would love to be living in the next 10 years. As the old saying goes, most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and they underestimate what they can achieve in a decade. But it is easier said than done. There are Going to be lots of shiny objects that come and tempt you along the way. And it's about building the discipline in saying no. Your will and your resistance and ability to say no to those things is also going to have to strengthen. Strengthen. As you get to higher and higher altitude. Whenever it comes to a decision that you need to make, there are going to be two paths. And one of the paths is going to be the easy option, and the second path is going to be the hard option. You always want to take the harder option because easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. Because the harder road always takes you where it is that you want to go. Longer term, you want to zoom out, which is principle number two, long games only. Which brings us to principle number three. Warren Buffett is famous for saying, it takes 20 years to build a reputation, but only five minutes to ruin it. When you're running a business, the most valuable asset that you have is your reputation. It is the thing that compounds beyond anything else is the integrity that you have and the way in which you operate it. You can either have a reputation that serves you or one that detracts from you. And you need to constantly think about, what is this decision that I'm making right now? Is it going to stretch, strengthen my reputation, or is it just going to make me more profits? Because oftentimes the decisions that strengthen your reputation aren't the things that are going to have an immediate uptick in profit straight away, but it is the way that you're going to make the most amount of profits in the long term. Many times in my career, I have been faced with decisions that would make me a lot of money, but aren't things that I would be proud to put my name on, regardless of how much money that it will make me as an individual. It's not something that I could stand up on stage and say, hey, I am proud of promoting these businesses. Then I don't want to be associated with them. And you need to guard your reputation like your life depends on it. Because it doesn't matter how good that you become in the chosen field that you're in, if your reputation stinks, no one's going to want to work with you, and no one's going to want to give you money. And in the beginning, when I started King Kong and I was wearing all of the hats in my agency, I was the account manager. I was the person writing the copy, designing the landing pages. I never looked at the amount of money that my clients were giving me in order to deliver that work. How do I create the best landing page or the best funnel in the world for this category of product? Regardless, if someone was paying me $5,000 to build them a landing page, I wouldn't care how long it took me in order to build that. I wanted to build something that I knew that I could stand on stage in front of 10,000 of my peers and to know that no one could even hold a flame to the kind of work that I was producing. And over time that compounded people were would see that work, they would look at that, they would say, wow, like this company is producing incredible work. And that forged the reputation that it is that we have today. And while that isn't a good business strategy in the short term, it is a phenomenal business strategy in the long term because you are providing a disproportionate amount of value to them, what your client is paying you for. Instead of them just being mediocrely happy and not really telling anybody about it, they become an advocate and all of their buddies that own businesses, they start to tell them, hey, we're working with this agency and we are getting absolutely phenomenal results. It's about getting that one client and absolutely surprising and delighting so that you get 10 more clients off the back of that work. As Charlie Munger says, your next client is sitting on your desk. The opportunity that you have on the clients that you're working on right now is where your next client is going to come from. If you do an exceptional job with these people, you're going to get much more clients from word of mouth, which is principle number three, your name is your net worth. Which brings us to principle number four. All the most successful people in the world are self motivated. They have an innate hunger inside them that when they wake up in the morning, they want to get after it like a hungry dog on the back of a meat truck. And you want to use whatever fuel that it is that you've got. For some people, it's thinking about what it is that they could achieve by others. It's the pain of thinking what happens to them if they don't achieve all the things that they want to. Or maybe it's anger or sadness or resentment. I think people get pigeon told into this type of thinking that they need to have this big warm fuzzy feeling inside them to go out there and achieve their goals. And I can speak from firsthand experience that oftentimes the seasons in my life where I have experienced the most growth is times where I was trying to avoid the most amount of pain, the pain of being where I was was much more painful than all the sacrifices and action that I needed to take to from this pain. And I use that pain as just logs in. The fire to motivate me was a dark and painful place. And I simply could not stomach being in that place any longer. And I was willing to do whatever it took in order to not experience that pain anymore. Whatever fuel burns the cleanest and motivates you the most, use it. Don't care about what everybody else thinks or how they will judge you. Only you know that internal battle that you've got within yourself and whatever motivates you, you need to use that regardless of what it is. And for me, that period in my life was I had run a few businesses, I'd run a few businesses into the ground and I found myself starting back at scratch with zero, nada. And I never forget it. It was a morning, I woke up, it was a cold and chilly morning. I Woke up at 4am and I went for a run. And then I came back and I started making cold calls. And by midday it was really, really rough. I was like, fuck, I haven't done this in so long, I don't remember hard. And of course the little bitch in your mind starts to be vocal and starts to tell you to look for something that's easier and to quit. And I remember looking at YouTube videos and trying to get all motivated and pumped up. And that is a short and fleeting moment when you rely on motivation and not discipline in order to get to where it is that you want to get to. I just formed a structure that was impossible for me not to win. And that looked like like waking up at 4am in the morning, go for a run, come back, make 150 cold calls before lunch, then have a break and service my clients, answer emails, follow ups on contracts, and do all of the work that I needed to do to actually operate my business outside of actually winning new business. I had to do those things every day, regardless of whether or not I felt like it. I created a discipline and a structure around that and I never stopped until I did those things every single day. And I didn't wait for motivation to just dawn on me and the clouds to part and the angels to sing. If you need constant encouragement and motivation to hit your goals, then you are forever going to be at the disadvantage of somebody who is more disciplined and does things even when they don't feel like doing them, which is point number four, the power of self motivation. Which brings us to principle number five. Billion dollar companies do not grow in a straight line. It is chaotic. One of Facebook's first mantras was move fast and break things. It is never going to be this clean, systematic scale. Scale creates chaos and it does get messy and that is okay. You have to understand that businesses are formed through iteration and adaption. It's not formed by sitting down and having this grand thought of exactly what you want the future to look like. And then it's just a straight line. In order to get there, you're going to get kicked in the teeth multiple times, multiple failures. Things are going to catch on fire, people are going to quit, you're going to have losses. And you need to learn to embrace that chaos and not let it stress you out. If things are chaotic and that is a telltale sign that you are growing fast and it is growing at breakneck speed, whereas everything feels completely controllable and everything's within your power. You're just not growing fast enough. Successful people are always stretching their comfort zone because all of the growth that you want is on the other side of the discomfort that you must experience in order to get it. If you're in a place where you don't feel any discomfort, that simply means that you aren't stretching yourself and you aren't growing. You want to make sure that you are always stretching yourself, that there is always something that is just without a reach and you just constantly need to be up leveling as an individual in order to get it. When you're first starting, this is not a great feeling and it can feel very overwhelming because human beings are used to optimizing for feeling comfort. But as somebody that always wants to be growing, you have to get very comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Now with that said, yes, you want to feel some level of stress so you know that it is that you're growing. But it is so much stress that you can never get the time to actually work on the foundational structures of your business. That is the wrong type of stress. That is just franticness. It's not actually the mess and complexity that comes with scale. You can't let that everyday urgent, stressful work get in the way of the important work. You have to have a tolerance and you have to have systems and a ritual that it is that you do in your life to allow you to operate with that day to day. Otherwise that stress will just kill you. So you need to make sure that you're working out, that you're getting good sleep, that you're eating the right foods, and that you have a nighttime or a morning ritual that allows you to wipe the slate clean and what I call just like, clear any static electricity from your brain to renew you to go and get after it the next day. Because you can't just operate in a constant state of anxiety and having pressure on you without thinking of, like, how do you release that stress? Stress. Wake up in the morning, feel refreshed, but still being able to operate within that environment. In the early days of my business, when I was going from one employee up to 13, whenever something wasn't to work out and that person was to leave the company, then I would quickly have to put on my hat and jump back into the trenches and start doing that work again. It was very stressful when someone wants to leave, and immediately I'd have to jump around to all these different fires within my business. And. And it can feel very overwhelming. You got to understand that in the moment that this is not forever, that there's going to be a certain chasm that it is that you're going to cross and you're not going to be in this situation. And for me, that moment was where I had enough finances to have two people in every single department. So if some person was to leave or to go away on holiday, I wasn't the first line of defense that would be jumping in to fill that role. And this game never stops. So if you're looking for some smooth, calm seats seas, then you're simply not growing fast enough, because calm seas never made for a skillful sailor. But in order to thrive in all of this chaos, you're going to need to simplify things in other areas of your life. Which brings us to principle number six. Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck and blue jeans and white sneakers every day. But most people don't understand why he did it. He was trying to build one of the greatest companies of this generation, and he knew that he had to reserve his brain power with the thousands of decisions that he need to make every single day. So inspired by Sony's outfits, he got designer Issey Miyake to make him 100 black turtlenecks. So when he woke up in the morning, he didn't need to waste his precious mental ram was trying to figure out what it is that he was going to wear that day. I got inspired by that story when I had probably about five or six employees and I started to just wear black T shirts and black Yeezys every single day. And I don't need to wake up and think like, oh, does this shirt look good with these jeans? Some people might say, hey, that's like, very boring. And, you know, fashion is an expression of art. Let those people be happy doing that. That is not me. It's not only in that. It's about what are the foods that you eat. If you think about it, most people, they eat six to eight of the same meals every single week or every single fortnight. And for me, I just streamlined that process and I created a menu from my house with revolving dishes. That kind of structure allows you to have so much more freedom in other areas of your life. The way that you can apply this is looking at all the decisions that you make on a daily bas and think, how do you either delete this, delegate it, or automate it? And you should start doing this right now. Because I'm sure that if you look at your life and you look at all the decisions it is that you need to make, you'll be like, I can't believe that I actually have to make these decisions every single day. And just by removing you having to do that, then you've got more mental ram to apply on the things that are really going to move the needle within your business. Which is principle number six, destroy small decisions. Which brings us to principle number number seven. Richard Branson sold tickets for his first flight before he even had a plane with Virgin Airlines. Then he used those ticket sales to charter a plane, which made for his first flight. And this is a trait that all billionaires use. You must sell first, because without sales, you don't even have a business. And this is a trap that I see so many people fall into. They think everything comes down to the idea. Ideas are worth worthless. Fortunes are made in the execution. How many people do you know that have a business idea that have never ever done anything? They spend all this time and energy deliberating on things that don't matter. Designing business cards, getting a fancy website before they have even proven whether or not they had a business. So much loss and so much hardship can be avoided. Instead of you trying to get everything perfect before you begin to go out there and to sell to your first few customers before you even go and develop the back end and just be transparent and open, open with them and let them know, hey, I'll be ready to deliver this in six weeks from now or five weeks from now. It is a lot better than doing it the other way around and spending five or six weeks in developing it and then going out and trying to sell it and finding out that no one wants it. It's movement, not meditation. Most people spend an enormous amount of time in trying to look like these successful companies before they even have any customers. And the thing is that distribution is far more important than branding because you don't have a brand unless you actually have a paying customer. Nothing's going to be perfect on day one. It's going to be ugly, it's going to be messy. And as they say, if you're satisfied and happy with the product that you launch with, then you simply launched too late. And I had to learn this the hard way. I had started so many businesses where I thought it was a great idea. I sourced the products, I brought container loads in of the product, I created branding, custom molding, built a website, started doing SEO and then a year into it found out that no one wanted the product that it is that I was selling. So I'm telling you from experience, do not go and develop the best product that you possibly can. On day one, build a minimum viable product or a minimal viable offer and go out there, put money in harm's way and start asking people to buy your stuff. My process for practically applying this is to think about what is a bleeding neck problem that my market has and how do I provide an immediate instant solution to that. What is the minimum amount of information that it is that they would need to see in order to give me their credit card number and for me to ding that with my merchant account. I don't put any other bells and whistles or spices or extra fragrances on that. I do the minimum that it is that I need to do to transact and then over the months and years to come is to iterate that and to make it the best product possible. And the way that we do this is by testing the front end before we develop the back end I. E. If you're starting an E Commerce product, build a down and dirty shopify page, put the products that you want on there, use AI to create the images and to do the product photography and go out there run some ads. Then once you take those transactions, simply email those people, refund their money and let them know that that item is out of stock and that you will notify them when it is back in stock. That is completely legal and it is also compliant and it allows you to take test the business and see if our people actually going to give me the money. It might be you're delivering a service, you create that service, put a one page PDF report cold, call some people cold, email them Use my pipe bomb strategy and send them out some loom videos and get on the phone with those prospects and get them to say yes and to write the check. And then just be transparent with them of you will be able to do this next cohort or to deliver this solution for them in six weeks from now. And then you've already got the money. If they're not happy with that, refund them. More often than not, they're going to be fine with that and you can simply deliver it in five or six weeks from now. Sales are not an afterthought. They are the main thing that is the business itself. The value in what it is that you've got is not in the thing that you've got. It's in the selling of the goods and services you've got. Which is principle number seven, sell first and build later. Which brings us to principle number eight. Jeff Bezos owns 8.8% of Amazon on I see so many entrepreneurs get caught up in wanting to own 100% of a small pie rather than 10% of a big pie. And that doesn't just come down to equity. It also comes down with actual revenue and income for the business. In the first three years of my business, all of my employees made more money than I did. One way to look at that was to attach that to my ego and be like, how can these people be earning more money in a business than it is that I own and operate? That is small, small thing. Understanding that the games that you're playing right now, it doesn't mean that that's the games you're going to be playing forever. And there are seasons that you must go through in order to play a big game. And if you're always optimizing for the short term, then you're never going to be able to play the big games that require you to give up a piece of those profits and to be less profitable or to give away equity in order to get a co founder to come into the business. And that has a skill set that you don't have that's going to unlock way more growth than it is that you can experience by yourself. Because if you're just one person, you can't compete with a whole team of a players that are all hungry and getting after it. And billionaires recognize that this game is a team sport. And regardless of what business that it is that you're in, you're going to get to a certain stage within growing your business that the skill set that allowed you to start this business is not the thing that you're going to be doing every day in the business anymore. And you are going to become a leader and collector of people. And you need to have the ability to be able to pass up on those short term opportunities in order to bring in better people into your business so that you can compete on a bigger stage and play bigger games. So early on in my business I was hunting by day and farming by night. I was making 150 cold calls during the day, constantly focused on bringing new clients in the business. And then come the afternoon and I would work late into the night in delivering that work. And I did that for a period of time where I was working 18 hours a day and getting very limited sleep. And I realized, hey, like I can't keep doing this if I keep doing this. Yes, I'm making good money for the time being, but this is not a game that I can continue playing for the long term. And so I started pull very limited money out of the business in order for me to live on, in order that I could bring people in that were able to help me in growing this business. And I hired developers and salespeople and account managers so I could free myself up on a lot of this work that I was doing in the day to day to focus on the things that really move the money needle in my business. Constantly playing those longer games. In order for you to be able to apply this tactically, you need to delegate aggressively. It cannot be the one man show where everything in your business revolves around you. And a lot of people, they have this mindset that holds them back. They have a, a bias that they're trying to confirm, which is no one can do it as good as me. And then they allow that to always be the constraint of their business. And they hire people and they're like, this person isn't as good as me. No shit. Right? You're the founder of the business. You're not going to be able to hire someone off the street. And they're going to be as good as you from day one. Even if they can do something 70, 80% as good as you, that is completely fine. And they're only going to be able to get to that level of 70 or 80% as good as you after being ruthlessly trained. And a lesson that I learned the hard way is that you should always hire for culture first and then train skill, especially in the formative days of your company. Culture is like a DNA and if you have bad DNA, then it is going to spread to different parts of the organization. And when you're very early on, the reason that you're able to get exceptional talent coming in is because they're going to be working one to one with the founder or it's going to be a very small team and there's not going to be a whole bunch of bureaucracy. And then you're going to grow to a place where you're going to be hiring for skills that aren't within your domain and you can hire that skill. That is the biggest shortcut that it is that you can get is to hire somebody that has already won the gold medal and say, hey, how about you come and play on my team and we win that gold medal again? And you can only do that by being completely fine with removing yourself as the bottleneck and allowing people to have the freedom to make mistakes and to learn along the way, which is Principal Principle number eight, lone wolves lose. Which brings us to principle number nine. Mark Cuban once famously closed a $5.7 billion deal over email in a matter of minutes because he understands that time kills deals. And if you're going to hesitate or wait for something when you've got the right opportunity in front of you, oftentimes that hesitation is the thing that results in you losing out on the deal. And the more that I've studied billionaires, the more that I've read, realized is that they really operate from a place where they try to remove as much complexity as possible within their organizations so that they can move quickly. Because the bigger that you get, it's like gravity, things just start to move slower. And that's why industries are constantly getting disrupted by startups, because startups, they don't have this bureaucracy. They're small, lean teams that can move quickly. Yes, you're going to have multiple people within your organization, but you still need to structure them up like small little pods and lean teams where they can still move quickly because it's that slow movement of the wheel that kills businesses. I have over 100 people in my organization and as we've gotten bigger, the way in which we make decisions has to become more and more complex. And it is something that I am always fighting against is looking at certain environments where my managers are overcooking things. And it doesn't need to be be as involved and complex as it needs to be. As more and more people join your organization and they go for bigger and bigger goals that everyone's trying to hit, their expectation will be that they're just going to take way longer and there's going to be way more inputs in order for them to achieve a task. And if you just let everything to go unmanned and you're not setting the pace and in the intensity within the organization, those timelines over time they just naturally, naturally expand. So instead you want to look at the frame of what would we need to do in order to complete this task in a day, in a week, in a month. And instead of thinking about like, oh, how long do you need to finish this? And then it's like, oh, I need six weeks. You would apply the same thinking of like, why can't it be completed in the next six days? Because you as the founder, you're the person that sets the pace and the intensity with an organization and it's the most potent at the top of the business and, and it gets diluted at every rung of management down. So if you're not driving the pace with the leaders within your company, then they're not going to be driving it with the frontline employees on their team. Speed is power. You want to move around with conviction and with certainty. And if you're always looking for every single possible thing that could go wrong, then you're never going to be moving quick enough and someone else is going to eat your lunch that is moving quick enough. Because an imperfect plan violently executed today is far better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow. And that is principle nothing number nine, which is speed is king. Which brings us to principle number 10. Billionaires do not chase shiny objects. They go all in on one thing. Jeff Bezos, he didn't go and launch AWS or Alexa or any of these other products and initiatives until he absolutely became the number one online retailer of books and mastered that category. Then he expanded the product range beyond books and became the number one retailer of all e commerce goods online. And only after he completely and utterly dominated that category did he move into other sectors and then plug them on to the business. Elon Musk went all in and sold PayPal before ever thinking about starting Tesla and then SpaceX. And people look at Elon and they see all the different businesses that it is that he runs and then they try and raise replicate what it is that he's doing at the billionaire status that he's at. Instead what you want to do is just pick one thing and master it before you think about running multiple businesses and having multiple streams of income. Most people, they try to do too much too early. They want to launch five different business models. They want to have SaaS, low ticket, high ticket, all of These different offerings, running 12 funnels on five different platforms. And it's that complexity that keeps them bright. Instead, what you want to do is focus on one business, one product and one service. Because you can get to multiple millions just with that. Heck, you can get to eight figures from just one product and one service. And only once you've completely mastered that, hired the team to come in and help you run that, that it's running smoothly without you. Should you ever think about launching other businesses? Before I started King Kong, I had multiple side hustles, right? I thought, like, oh, I could have all these small little businesses running on autopilot, all feeding into this one thing and making me five times more money. No, that's not the way that it works. You have a hundred units of time and you have to carve up that time for all of those different things. So ultimately what you end up doing is just building five businesses that could be as big as one business with way more simplicity and without all the complexity of running those five businesses. If you were to just to apply your hundred units of. Of time to that one business. Early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I had a severe case of shiny object syndrome. I would say a new funnel, a new strategy, a new course, a new business model. And I would think, hey, that looks like it's a lot easier to run than my business. And then I would go and investigate that and I would carve off some of my time in focusing on that business. And then after a while, all the warts and blemishes on that business model would expose themselves. And I'd say, hey, like, this business has got all these problems as well, and this is very hard to run and it has all these levels of complexity. I would have multiple irons in the fire thinking that I was like some, you know, crash hot entrepreneur that had all these different business ventures. No, I was just a broke bum that was dividing all of my time on all of these different businesses, treading water and never going anywhere. And it wasn't until I made the conscious decision of going underwater with an oxygen tank and putting the blinders on and not looking at other business models, not looking at what my other buddies were doing or what this person said on this podcast and just violently executing on the business that I had within my lap right now and executing on that the best that I can, did I pull myself up for air in 12 and 24 months down the track, and I was in a completely unrecognizable position. But if I just kept on Looking and looking side to side, looking at all these other opportunities, then I wouldn't have violently executed on the task at hand and I never would have made any progress. Any business that you can think of, you can blow it up to a huge, huge, huge height. Water, flour and sugar, you can build Krispy Kreme and build a billion dollar donut company. So whatever the vehicle that it is that you're in, there are countless of stories and examples of businesses that have just blown that up to a hundred x the size, even a thousand exercise than what it is that you're operating right now. The key is that you actually have to choose and you actually have to go all in on it. And a good telltale sign of what other sectors to launch into or when it is a good time is in, the product or service that you're actually providing to your customers then creates another problem that you then create. Need to create another product or service to solve for that. For instance in my business is we help people get leads and grow their business. And then when they do that, then guess what they need to do. They need to hire people, they need to learn how to build systems. So your product creates a new problem for them. And then that is a great opportunity to then launch a backend product or another complimentary product that then helps them solve that problem. And when you're faced with all of the options of what other sectors to launch into, there are endless options. The lens that I like to look through is what are the things that are going to be true for my customer in 10 years from now? What is not going to change for Jeff Bezos, he understood that the things that were never going to change is people were going to always going to want an endless selection of products and they were going to want want them at a very competitive price. Mastering the one thing takes time and it takes a lot of sacrifice to become world class. That typically brings up the question to most people of how do they create a work life balance. But billionaires understand this. Which brings us to principle number 11. Billionaires make early sacrifices by building teams and systems and then using them to buy back their time. When I first started, I certainly didn't have time for children or building a family or anything. And I even let myself, my health fall to the wayside because I was myopically focused on growing the business. And I understood that this wasn't going to be the game that I was playing forever and that I was going to be building a business to bring me the cash flow to build the teams and systems that I could have that work life balance later on in life. I had to say no to a lot of things. I couldn't meet my friends, I couldn't meet my buddies. I couldn't catch up for that sports game or that UFC match. I couldn't play video games. A lot of of the times it involves a lot of sacrifice. But I had done the other thing. I had not made the sacrifices. I had tried to have everything balanced and tried to do everything in my life and I just wasn't seeing the success that I wanted to see. And it was only once I made the decision to put myself on death ground and I had no other option but to be successful. And the pain of staying where I was right now was just so much more painful then cutting off all these other alternatives and all of these other things that I gained pleasure from doing. They were no way near as important for me than hitting my goals. And I went through that period and it was a year and a half of extreme unbalance. It was a lot of long nights. It was a lot of doubting myself in the beginning and not looking around and not looking for other paths that I could walk down. I eliminated any and all other options other than the road I was walking on. Am I saying that it's the only way way to do it? No, I'm not. Am I saying that if you look at most billionaires and you look at their come up story, it was filled with just an unreasonable amount of imbalance in order for them to achieve what it is that they needed to achieve in those early chapters of the business. I think that in the beginning of everybody's journey that it's unreasonable to think that you're going to be having a very healthy work life balance. You just have to understand that there are seasons for everything. And you're going to have to be willing for two to three years to do things that other people aren't willing to do so that you can live a lifetime like other people's can't live because you've made those sacrifices. And yes, it's not easy, but the only way to keep yourself motivated in those periods of time is to think about what is it that's going to happen if you don't achieve your goals. And to also understand that this is a season, this is a chapter, it's not forever, which is pretty. Principle number 11, work life balance is earned, it's not given. Which brings us to the twelfth and final principle. Super bowl winners still have energy at the end of the game while the losers collapse. Because winning fuels dopamine. Having energy and being in momentum is one of the most unspoken drivers of successful people. Lots of people talk about ending up in a downward spiral in life where they can make a few wrong decisions, get a couple of of Ls, few losses along the way, and then it just feels like they just get sucked down this downward spiral. But billionaires recognize that there's also upward spirals. And when you get a win, it's like the wind in your sails. It not only gives you the dopamine, but it gives you that whole conviction and courage to keep going. You take those wins and you roll them into all different other areas of your life and the business. Everybody knows when they get on a hot streak and they feel like everything that they touch turns to gold. And that momentum is such a real thing in business and you never, ever want to lose it. Conviction and energy is contagious. And if you have that within yourself as the founder of the business, it spills on to other areas of your team and the management in your team. And everyone can just feel that momentum building. And then you get a win, you land that client, you hire that salesperson, and then they start selling for you, and then you'll hire another other person. They also do well, and you just get that momentum in your business and it feels like you're unstoppable. You need to make sure that you celebrate these wins because that's the energy that's contagious within your organization. And it doesn't matter how small they are. Every single time in my agency that we get a new client, regardless of how big they are, we hit the gong and everyone cheers in the office. Because the reality of business is that it's hard. There's so many losses that come along the way, and unless you're celebrating all the small wins, then it's very difficult to keep momentum. People rarely surpass the self image that they have of themselves. And unfortunately, most people, they have low self esteem or their ego is very, very small. Oftentimes, the problems that people experience in their business, they are not a business problem. It is a personal problem masquerading as a business problem. If you wake up and you think, yo, I'm the fucking man, that's never ever going to hurt you, right? So the way that you do that is by looking at case studies, reviews for your business transformations that your product or service has enabled and constantly revisiting them. The way that we do that within my company is we start all meetings with the wins. We don't go into the problems that we're trying to solve within that department or that team right now. We simply look at a win that we've got and we talk about it and we celebrate it. And you need to have those that they are front and mind, because if they're not, unfortunately, negativity spreads faster than positivity. And unless you're making a conscious effort to create this environment and rituals that you go through that just rams all this success and positivity right up in your face, then you're going to forget about that and you're going to be thinking about the problem with Sandra in HR or this customer that's not happy or this refund that you need to process, and that is going to cloud your perception of your reality. You need to brainwash yourself to become successful. Momentum is a superpower, which is principle number 12. Chase real dopamine. And if you only take one thing away from this video, let it be this. In order to get what it is that you want, you need to deserve what it is that you want. Because the universe isn't a crazy enough place to reward people that aren't deserving of success. And if you liked these principles, you're going to love this video that I made on everything that I know about marketing. Click that bad boy and I'll see you in the next one.