Everything I Learned From Being Around the Top 0.01%

Billionaires follow rules that 99% of people don't even know exist. And I'm not talking about the stuff you've heard from everybody before. Work hard, wake up early, read books. I'm talking about the actual operating system these people run on. I've spent time with Richard Branson, Naval Ravikant, Travis Kalanick, Toby Lutke, Tony Robbins, and dozens of other billionaires. And every single one of them taught me something that completely changed how I build businesses and live my life. So in this video, I'm going to break these down into 5 buckets, and every bucket builds deeper understanding of how they operate, starting with the one they all have in common. Bucket number 1: they just play a completely different game. You and I grew up learning one game: go to school, get a job, work hard, save some money, retire at 65. That's the game we were taught. Billionaires aren't playing that game at all. They essentially Deleted it and they installed something completely different. That's how Richard Branson is able to run 400 companies and was able to ski with us all day long while we hung out at his lodge in Switzerland. But before we can install anything new, you need to take the old programming out, which brings us to bucket number 2, delete your old software. Your mind is like an operating system. Okay. Think about it like your phone. If you don't start updating it, your phone starts to lag. That's when you need the new software update. Your life works the exact same way, but before you can update it, you need to delete the old one. So to delete your old software, we need to follow these rules. Our first billionaire rule: laws are meant to be broken sometimes. Travis Kalanick, who is the founder of Uber, was one of my first investors in my company Flowtown, and we used to spend time in the jam pad watching him build the first version of Uber. And what we immediately saw Travis faced with was all the taxis in the city that were threatening to sue. There's 13,250 taxis in New York today. There were 13,250 taxis in New York 60 years ago. Those original taxi guys all got their license for free, and then they lobbied city government to give out no more, and they created artificial scarcity. Every time somebody took a ride, it was illegal. Travis just didn't accept that. He had a vision for the future. He didn't just break the rules, he changed them. By 2017, over 36 states passed new laws for ridesharing, not because the industry asked nicely, because Travis made the old rules irrelevant first. And my belief is very simple: if everybody had to follow the letter of the law, then no business would ever be started. But obviously consult your lawyer. I'm not responsible for what you choose to do. But just so you know, every day I get 1 or 2 tickets on my car for where I park. I pay the fine. I consider it adding to the economy because I choose every day to have my cars be available for the dozens of kids that come with their cameras to take pictures. That's an example of where I break the rule. That's what I got to pay. That's what I'm willing to pay. Next, we go to billionaire rule number 2: think in first principles. It's kind of like starting from a blank slate and saying, I want to go from point A to point B as fast and cheap as possible. How would I do that? And the best example of this is Elon Musk. That guy literally breaks everything down into first principle. I'm talking to quantum level. His whole rule is that if it doesn't break the laws of physics, it should work. See, NASA paid roughly $380 million per launch of their rockets. SpaceX cut that down to $67 million because Elon asked, Why not? That is a first principle framework where you break complex problems down to their most basic undeniable truths. So here's how it works. You don't ask, how was this done before? You ask, what's actually true about that? And those are totally different questions that will get you totally different answers. They will help you find how the billionaires think about innovation. So that will start to delete the old software in your brain. But what do you replace it with? Bucket number 3, install the new software. This is where things get really interesting. I want to bring back the phone example again, because once you've cleared that old software and you deleted it, now you're able to install new software because the hard drive's open to make it even more effective. So let's talk about billionaire rules that help you install your new software, which leads us to billionaire rule number 3, look for leverage, not labor. Most people think more work equals more money. Billionaires think more leverage equals more money. Leverage means a little bit of input and a lot of output. You know, if you haven't heard Archimedes' quote, he says, give me a place to stand with a lever and I can move the world. Meaning that with the long enough stick, if he was sitting in the right place with the right lever and he pulled on it, he could literally create the force to lift the world. For me, I learned this from my billionaire mentor, Naval Ravikant, because he breaks it down into 4 C's of leverage. There's only 4 ways that if you study and master them, you can create anything in the world without hammering your calendar. And the first C is code. Those tools are incredible leverage to get a lot of output 'cause you create it once and it lives forever 'cause it doesn't take you doing anything for the computer to continue to run every night and crunch numbers to actually get your result. The second C is content. And if you think of content in two buckets, both the ability to create a checklist or a playbook for how something should get done or for you to document your content for your ideas, to give it out to the world. I believe your genius is better used as content than as labor. The third C is capital. And I'm sure you've already heard this, which is it takes money to make money. It takes you understanding how to deploy your dollars to work through investing to actually make money. The fourth C is collaboration. And this is my favorite. And that is understanding how to recruit, work with people, partner with people, but essentially unlocking the labor force, working through a person that might have access to thousands of people. One person, many customers. That's collaboration. That's why Naval and every one of the billionaires I mentioned have mastered these 4 Cs to build their empires without increasing their labor. Next is billionaire rule number 4: Focus on net worth and network, not active income. The billionaires that I just mentioned aren't billionaires because they made $1 billion. They're actually billionaires because they own something and made it worth $1 billion. Most of them don't have $1 billion in cash in a bank account. It's the value of the thing they've built, either a business or their value of their stock or their companies. And that's what makes them a billionaire. And to do that, the biggest lever you could ever build is your network. I believe the more hands you shake, the more money you make. You need to be out there talking to people because when I bring people into my business to co-create companies with me, partner with me, invest in my businesses, I don't control the whole thing anymore. See, most people think you need to own the whole thing. That is the biggest mistake people starting off in business make. Elon Musk only owns 19.8% of Tesla, and that business makes him a bazillion dollars on paper. So stop asking yourself, how do I make more money? And start asking yourself, what do I own that can compound? For example, Martell Ventures, which is my AI venture studio, we own dozens of companies. This is where I took my knowledge and my skill, documented it, partnered with people, and have built all of these companies. Literally, we're on pace in only the second year to do almost $250 million in value. And that's why all the billionaires I've ever met, They don't think about how much cash they have in a bank account. They ask themselves, how much do I own equity assets? And then who do I know that can solve the biggest problems that I might face? That's valuable. Now that you've got some new software installed, a new understanding of building net worth, not active income. Next, we need to make you the laziest person on your team, which brings us to bucket number 4, just act lazy. Every time I've met a new billionaire, I will tell you, I am often surprised not by how much they work, but how little they work. All the billionaires I know, when I text them, they reply right away. They're the fastest to reply. They're always available. If I say, hey, I'm thinking of doing this thing, they're like, yeah, no problem. Their whole philosophy is I don't want to be the bottleneck. I don't want to be the person that needs to be there to move something forward, because if I am, it can't move forward. And what's funny is you watch them, you would call them lazy, but but they do it on purpose. So here are 2 billionaire rules on how to be lazy. Billionaire rule number 5, create your filter. And I learned this from Richard Branson, one of the smartest. You see, Richard, when I last saw him, he doesn't carry a phone. What he does have is his assistant, Helen. She is the filter. Nothing gets to Richard unless it's supposed to. Now to you, if you didn't know, you might think he's lazy, but what you would hear if you could listen to those conversations is that he's using his time for the best resource he can, not operationally, but looking and identifying for those next opportunities. When I spent the week with him, I saw him do several multimillion-dollar deals just through conversations at dinner. And watching him work made me realize I had to redesign my whole day. And that's when I got an in-person executive assistant to help me deal with all the noise. By the way, if you want to know exactly how I've set up my life and my executive assistant to handle all of this, I'm giving away my EA playbook. Just DM me @YouTubeEA on Instagram and I'll send it right over. This took me years to create, perfect, and it is my gift to you for free. Which brings us to billionaire rule number 6, stop working so hard. See, most entrepreneurs fill every fricking minute with tasks. They do calls, they do emails, they do meetings. They feel productive because they're always doing something. They're busy. You want to know what the top people do? Like Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon? He actually brags that most mornings he putters. He doesn't run to work because he said to himself a long time ago, the truth is I got to ramp up my brain. I got to be ready. And I just got to make 2 to 3 really good decisions every day. Not 50 like some of you, not 100, but 3. And if he does those 3 every day with consistency, that creates leverage and compounding. What makes billionaires different than most entrepreneurs is billionaires protect their thinking, not their time. They understand their best work, their best energy is whenever they decide to do it and they guard that. So now that you've got that mindset, the leverage, the systems, all of it is useless if you don't know the reason why all this matters in the first place. Which brings us to bucket number 5, fall in love with the game, not the outcome. Recently, I was sitting across the table from a bunch of people and they were worth billions of dollars. And not one of them talked about how much money they were making. They all talked about the people they were building. They talked about who they were becoming. They talked about what scared them for years. They talked about what they learned and how they overcame that. The numbers were a byproduct, not the primary reason. They didn't give a shit about their bank account. They looked at it as a way of being and that life is a place to do the work, to become more, to help other people achieve more. Which reminds me of a quote I heard which said, "Your personal income is tied to your personal development." If you want your bank account to go up, you have to personally develop yourself. If you're not doing anything to make yourself better, don't be surprised if the money doesn't show up. There's two rules that I watch billionaires execute that taught me this. Billionaire Rule #7: Never, ever, ever stop growing. I've watched my friend Tobi, founder of Shopify, do this every year. Tobi has this rule that the company has to grow 40% per year. And if you can't keep up, you become the bottleneck. And he's the first one to say this. If you actually go on GitHub right now, which is like this nerdy software platform, you will see Tobi, the CEO of Shopify. He's put more code into his GitHub in the first 2 months of the year than he did the last year so far. But here's what most people miss. The growth isn't just about the business, it's about you. What skills are you developing? You'll get paid for the value you bring to the world, not the time, not how hard the time was, not how hard you worked, but how much value you created with that time. So if you think about it, every problem could make you sharper. Every failure could make you tougher. Every hire, fire, and hard conversation could be an upgrade for who you are if you look for the lessons. So the point of business isn't the outcome of getting to a place of buying a thing or making a lot of money. It's who you become in the process. Finally, billionaire rule number 8: build a life resume. Jesse Itzler, super cool dude. I mean, if you haven't seen him, he's not only a world-class speaker, he's a world-class person. And he essentially schedules his whole life around the most important parts. We were talking last week and this is what he said to me. I take every Friday off. Every month I take a whole week off. That's not something he decided to get to eventually. He's been doing this for a long time. If you read any of the books he's written, I mean, this is how he's operated. And he has a thing called the annual misogi, essentially a life-defining activity, something that's challenging that for many people should be 50% impossible. It could be an Ironman or hiking a mountain or even writing your first book. That way every year has a thing you can go, oh, 2024 was this, '25 was that, '26 was this. What's my misogi for '27? And the biggest takeaway I've had from spending time with billionaires is they don't just focus on adding zeros to their bank account, they prioritize living a life worth remembering. So when you think of all these billionaire rules, I need you to bring them together and remind yourself of one thing. Stop trying to win a game someone else designed. Build your own game. That's what the billionaires have done. They said, I've got my own rules. My friend Lori said it the other day. She goes, when I feel bored, I realize I'm being boring. And if I'm bored, I should probably start doing things that are not boring. And if you're feeling that way today, take that inspiration. Start building a life worth remembering. So here's what I need you to do is below, based on all these rules, I need you to write down the one that resonates the most with you. Drop a comment and tell me which one it is. And remember, if you want my Executive Assistant Playbook, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTubeEA and I'll send it right over. Now, next up, if you want to learn how to scale your business in 6 simple phases, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.