4 Millionaire Skills I Wish I Knew at 18

These are the four skills that made me a millionaire in my twenties. So let me show you this notepad real quick. This is one of the notepads that I used in my 20s to make millions. And it's not some airy fairy journaling system either because this little bad boy is responsible for taking me from working out of my bedroom with no more than $50 in my bank account to then earning $10,000 per month, then $100,000 per month and then onto multiple millions of dollars per month. Get to that later on. First, let me be crystal clear. There are only four skills that I learned and then mastered that got me to exactly where I am today. Skill number one, asking strangers for money, aka sales. I got my start when I was 16 years old working out of an old shipping container selling ink cartridges over the phone. I remember my first day in the role. It was like a cold, hard sleep, slap to the face, being on the front lines of capitalism and getting my teeth kicked in. After my first eight weeks I was making eighteen hundred dollars per week, just shy of one hundred grand per year. I truly believe that nothing teaches you more about human psychology and forms your character more than getting abused and bruised up on the telephone all day long. It really teaches you what gets people to listen, what gets them interested, and what the payoffs are that you have to promise people to even get a skill second of their time. Regardless of what it is that you choose to do for the rest of your life. You've already been met with so much rejection that all the hardship that you're going to have to do in your life are going to seem a lot easier compared to just having constant grinding and rejection on you for long extended periods of time. It's also teaching you the ability to effectively communicate. Jamie Foxx even says that two years of door to door sales is equivalent to a four year college degree in communication. Now you might be thinking, who hell cares what Jamie Foxx has to say? Well, the reason that I care is that comedians are some of the best communicators in the world. These guys go from venue to venue to city to city to show to show, literally split testing every single nuance of what they say to make their jokes actually hit and land. And they'll change it from okay, I need to inflect here. I need to put a little bit more of a pause here. And I got a better reaction from the crowd. When it comes to communication, when you're on the telephone doing high frequency sales, each single second of those call is earned if you pause for too long, if you upward inflect at the start of your call and just reeks of it being a salesperson, then you're just going to get a hang up immediately that allows you to become extremely precise in the way that you speak. And the way that you speak is everything. Because everything that you do all day long is some mode of communication. And my tips for getting into sales is you want to start off at the bottom, so selling something for a cheap price so you can get lots of reps in. And then as your skill levels increase over the years, you want to go to higher and higher ticket. The millions are made in selling the most expensive products that there are. And it's no more difficult to sell something for $15 than it is to sell something for $500,000. Believe me, I have sold both of them. And I believe in this skill so much that it is going to be the first job that is going to be mandatory for all three of my daughters. Skill number two is the art of deal making and negotiation. This is something that you do every single day. Competent and silent people get ignored and everything is negotiable. So you better damn get good at this thing. And the way that you get good in it is like anything, you have to get the reps in, you need to start negotiating like it's a sport. And I'm talking about anywhere that you possibly can negotiate, you should do it. I became the assigned negotiator for my whole family. If they wanted to buy a couch or a camera or an old computer, I would be the person that would sort that out for my family. And you learn the skill. What is the best way to communicate? Is it via text? Is it just to get them on the phone? How long should you wait to get back to somebody? These are all the things that you begin to learn the more reps that you get in. But this feels like very unnatural for, for a lot of people, like they just don't like negotiating. So a great challenge to get out of your comfort zone is just asking for discounts in the most ridiculous places that you can think of. Like whether it's your local coffee shop, anywhere that you possibly can negotiate, or even at a gas station and say, hey, I always come to this coffee shop. I've been coming here for ages. I really like you guys. Would I be able to get a 10% discount on this coffee? That in itself that makes you feel uncomfortable, just hearing that, that is a telltale sign that it's something that you actually need to ask, then you don't get. And a way to get good at asking is just to ask more. Now, here are some of my tips for negotiating. First of all, the person who cares the least is the one that's in a position of power. Because if you really need the deal, the other person can feel it. They can smell it on your breath. So the best thing to do is just to put yourself in a position where you do have options, so you're not afraid to walk away from that deal. Now, the second tip is if you're ever in a negotiation on something on price, it's the person who says the price first that loses. So you want to do anything in your power to get the other party to cough up their starting point. And at that stage, they're either going to go ridiculous and highball you, or they're going to go ridiculous and lowball you, depending on if you're asking or receiving. In this negotiation, the first thing that you want to do is not react to them. You just want to be silent and nonchalant to whatever the number is that comes out of their mouth. People hate confrontation. They're not used to negotiating. One of the things that you've got to get really comfortable in these negotiations with is just sitting there in an awkward pause, allow yourself the time to think, and then play your hand. The other thing that you want to do is set specific deadlines. This negotiation doesn't go on forever. There is a defined deadline to when this thing is going to run out. With a negotiation, the thing that people think is the most important thing out of absolutely everything is the price. And that is not indeed the case, really. You have price, and you also have terms. Now, your. Your job in a negotiation is to find out what is the most important thing to the party that you are negotiating with. Is the price the only thing? And they don't care about the terms. Do they just want to get this thing sold immediately? The first thing that you need to understand is what is important to the person that you're negotiating with and making sure that you're operating from that point of leverage in all the negotiations. This brings us to skill number three, which is storytelling. Not only is it the oldest form of communication that exists, but you can't argue with the story. With all other parts of communication, people are constantly going to have their defenses up. But when you sit down to tell somebody a story, automatically their defenses fall to the wayside, and they're much more receptive of the information that you're telling them. And in any form of communication, people won't often remember what it is that you said, but they will remember how you made them feel. And story is the most powerful way to make people feel feel a certain way. And when it comes to story, we're going to break this down into two categories. The first one is direct response. When I was 21 years old, I used to wake up every morning, make myself a cup of coffee, and then read a proven piece of sales copy. I read my first copywriting book and I was like, this is awesome. And then I went from just reading theoretical books around copywriting to then reading proven ads that I knew were winners. From reading it, you begin to start to see patterns, how they catch your attention, what's the close? How do they create scarcity? How do they present their offer? I started to just think in terms of sales messages. And my tips for really getting good at direct response copywriting is first to read Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. But once you have this foundational understanding of like the old school direct response, don't fall down that rabbit hole and then go read every single direct response copywriting book. What you really need to understand is that these guys didn't have to compete with the chaotic blizzard that is the attention Hunger Games of the Internet. It doesn't matter how good your sales message is, is nobody is consuming it. And if you're only looking at the old school train of thought, then your sales message simply won't get consumed. Then what you want to do is you want to start reading proven ads. And the exercise that Captain Suby is prescribing for you is to do 180 days of reading proven ads. Sales pages, Facebook ads, video sales letters, I don't care. Just make sure that it is a proven piece of advertising. And a way to know that it is proven is typically, if you see it for long and extended periods of time, that means that it is making more money than the company is spending to advertise. That the best thing to do then is then start to get some reps in. You have to practice. Nothing is going to teach you more about writing copy than actually doing it. This brings us to the second category of storytelling, which is attention harvesting, AKA organic content. The reason why organic content is such a great place to start, it allows you to get reps in as well. But if you don't want to make lots of content and you don't want to build a personal brand and start uploading videos onto YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all this thing you also want to keep a story bank. It's like a Google document. Of all the stories that you come across, either in your own life or other stories from other people that you find fascinating, you want to pay very close attention to the stories that grab you, whether that's in documentaries or it's on Netflix or YouTube or content creators that you follow. Listen to a story and just pay attention to when you start to, like, be on the edge of your seat and wanting to listen more, just ask yourself, like, why did I consume this? How did they start the story? How did they retain my attention? How did they reward me for listening to that story? This brings us to skill number four. And I think that this is probably the most underrated yet most powerful because it compounds on all the other three skills that preceded it. And it's like this silent competitive advantage that people aren't really aware of, but it is so, so powerful. And that is the skill of design. You see, when I was 16 years old, I thought that I wanted to be a graphic designer. I used to spend so much time studying good design and reading design blog and spending my time designing a lot of things as well, until I really looked at the career of graphic design and found out how little money they made. And I thought, okay, look, this, this isn't the thing for me because I grew up in a house that had a lack of money. So I knew the first thing that I wanted to do was to have a lot of money. And then I thought that all of the time that I had invested in learning design was wasted. Until I started my agency, I was the person that was actually designing the landing pages and putting together all these funnels and designing all the elements for them. That really became a competitive advantage. People completely judge you by how something looks straight out of the gate. The way that you increase the way that people judge you is to by having clean design. We've all seen like these super spammy sales letters with, you know, black text on a white background and there's like yellow highlights and big red buttons and underlines and things circled out and arrows and tickers and all of those kind of things immediately as soon as you land on those pages and you have a visceral reaction to that. So whether you like it or not, people judge you by the design of your funnels, of your videos, of your website. Good copy is like good food. And a lot of that comes down to the presentation of that copy, not only in the words that you say, but the way that you actually packaging up and the branding that supports that copy and the offers and the funnels that you put out into the marketplace. Remember this notepad from earlier on? You might be thinking like, okay, what does this notepad has to do with anything? Well, all of these four skills, I used to write them down every single day in this notepad. I would wake up every morning, make myself a coffee, flip open this notepad, and just look at those core things that I need to do every single day. Read the sales letter, look at the design blogs, listen to sales calls, look at sales messages, read stories every day. And I would fill this thing up over the course of the year, and then I'd have to get a new one. I still have all of these notepads to this day.