If I wanted to build wealth from scratch (again), I’d do this
In this motivational business monologue, multimillionaire entrepreneur Nick Kugelman outlines a practical, mindset‑driven framework for creating real wealth. He begins by asserting that the top 1 % think differently: they see themselves as deserving of wealth and adopt an identity of abundance. He then warns against hoarding cash, introducing a "buyback rate" formula (annual income ÷ 2,000 ÷ 4) to determine the minimum hourly value of any dollar spent and urging immediate delegation of tasks below that threshold. Kugelman stresses the importance of expanding one’s time horizon, recommending a 25‑year vision, a work‑backwards planning process, and a focus on long‑term compounding. He introduces the concept of the MINS (Most Important Next Step) and a 48‑hour execution rule to overcome paralysis. Finally, he presents the "die empty" philosophy: wealth is not just money but a rich life of giving, urging viewers to allocate a fixed percentage of income to others and to build a habit of generosity early. Throughout, he peppers the talk with personal anecdotes (Jake, Peter, Tom) and offers a free executive‑assistant playbook for those who DM him on Instagram.
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The top 1% don't build wealth by waking up early or working hard. They build it by having a completely different mental model that allows them to turn cash into more cash. I became a multimillionaire at 28. I'm building a venture studio on track to be worth $1 billion. And these are the exact strategies that have helped me build real wealth, starting with number 1: change your identity. If you have two people in the same scenario, one believes they deserve, the other one doesn't. This one asks for opportunity. This person never speaks up. This one gets opportunity. This one never does. It's that simple. It's how you see the value you bring to the world. And do you feel worthy of it? And that is identity. No amount of tactics, strategies, courses, podcasts, YouTube videos is going to fix that. The 1% know they deserve to be rich. Have you ever met a rich person that didn't have some level of confidence? And when you realize that you don't get what you want, you get who you are, the whole thing unlocks. This is the foundation. But now we need to build on that. So you have to unlearn the things that have killed wealth for 99% of the people. Number 2, stop hoarding cash. Most people hoard money. They're like professional collectors. And I can speak because I used to be one of those. Remember one time I woke up and I realized that even the coffee points that I had collected going to the same coffee place, I never used them. I never traded them in for free coffee ever. I like made it a game and I just like save it and save it. Money should flow into you and then back out to do things that help you improve your life. Buying back your time, investing in your business, saving your money in stocks so that the money keeps growing. If you act like you're protecting your money, it's like this sacred pile of cash, then there's no room for more money to come in. And I've seen this over— people are so stingy and they don't realize that stingy mentality is telling the rest of the world they're not ready to receive more. Once you decide to stop hoarding and start deploying it, you then have to ask yourself the question is, what task should I deploy dollars to?. And the best place to start is what I call the buyback rate. First, you need to take your yearly income, how much money you make, divide that by 2,000. That will give you your hourly rate. And it's 2,000 because that's the average amount of hours a person will work per year. Second is we divide that number by 4 because we want to make sure that we get a 4x ROI on our dollar deployed, right? So we don't take how much we make because that doesn't make sense. Instead, we divide it by 4 so that if I pay a dollar for something, I'm getting $4 back worth of value. That's your buyback rate. And the final one, number 3, is anything underneath that amount, you should delegate it immediately. The other day I was working with my buddy Jake, young guy, super motivated, one of my companies. And I was, hey man, let's meet up in a couple of hours and we'll talk through that. And he's like, hey, I kind of get home. It's 3 weeks now. I haven't done my laundry and I really got to get some stuff done. I didn't say anything, but the next morning I said, hey bro, can I remind you that you make a couple hundred thousand a year and that you should probably be doing wash and fold instead of not meeting with me to move your dreams forward? And then the next day, he not only found somebody to help with the laundry, he found somebody to help with his house and all of his errands because he knew the best dollar to deploy was in those low-value things that other people could do. So he had the time to actually do the things only he could do. It reminds me of my best friend growing up. His dad grew up with parents that taught him that cash is cash is cash is cash. So what did he do? He built a business that was all cash, and then he hid the cash in the walls of his house. He put the money in the wall because he thought that's the best place to save his cash. Then one day my friend calls me to tell me that his house is on fire. Yes, his dad lost all that money. Now, this has nothing to do with hoarding cash, but it has to do with the mentality around money. I look at it like this. You want to have your money out in the world doing things for you, like little worker bees trying to go and collect more for you. And look, 90% of the time, the first task that you'll get off your plate are admin tasks. The problem is, is most people don't know what to give to an admin. So if you want my internal executive assistant playbook, it has every template, every SOP, every workflow that my EA uses daily. It's all in there for you. Just find me on Instagram and message me the word YouTube EA and I'll send it right over to you. Okay, so now that you've bought back some time, awesome. But we got to take things to another level, which leads me to my next point. Number 3, expand your time horizon. The big thinkers, the real wealthy people, they think in long periods of time. You can actually audit yourself. Listen to the conversations you have. Do you talk about what you're creating or what you're doing? And unfortunately, most people never think about this because real wealth doesn't get built in one-time shots. They get built in a way that it compounds. And compounding only works if you look at things over a long period of time. See, most people quit after 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years. The top 1% are in this game for a decade, 15, 20 years. That's the gap. The other day I was talking to a new friend named Peter. He's 88. I'm 46. Peter has built an incredible life and a career and a, just a resume that's impressive. And I'm thinking to myself, hey, if I only get to 88, I got another 42 years of building. Do you see how different that is? In 42 years, what could you create if you gave yourself a time horizon that was 10 years, 25 years, 42 years? How big of an impact could you have? And now we know how to focus on the right things. We have to do them for longer periods of time. It's like my YouTube channel. Over 11 years ago when I started, I made a commitment to myself to do this for a decade. So when people look at my YouTube channel today and they see almost 3 million followers, they think, oh my gosh, you grew so fast. They don't realize that this is 10+ years of effort and focus and dedication. And the crazy part, it was kind of flat for the longest time, 8 years. It was only in the last 3 years that it went pew. So here's what you can do to start practicing thinking in longer time horizons. First thing you have to do is write a 25-year vision for yourself. The challenge most people have with this is that they feel greedy wanting more. They feel that having a vision 25 years that is massive means that they can't appreciate what they have. That's not the case. I want you to pretend like you couldn't fail. I want you to pretend like you had all the resources. I want you to pretend like you could wave a magic wand and get whatever you want. What would you want to commit, dedicate, invest 25 years of your life to? My rule is if you can't describe your future to the same level of specificity as you can describe your current reality, the room you're in right now, then you don't really have a true vision. And the good news is, is you don't have to be right. You just have to have one done so that you can have direction. Then we have to build what I call a work backwards plan. We go from 25 years to 10 years to 3 years to 1 year to this quarter, and each thing points and builds upon itself. So there's some level of sequencing. At the end of the day, if you want to be worth $1 billion, you got to first start by being worth $100,000 and then $1 million and then $10 million and then $100 million. But if you actually stack it that way, it doesn't seem so daunting. Step 3 is we got to pick our MINS, which stands for Most Important Next step. See, everybody gets overwhelmed. I got too much to do. I don't even know where I'd start. How about we just start with one single action that unlocks everything else? Like if you wanted to start dating, maybe the reason you're not doing that is because you don't have a haircut. So maybe the first thing you should do is go schedule a haircut. Maybe you're like, I really want to start being an entrepreneur. What do I need to do? Maybe you go ask a stranger to buy something from you. Maybe you have some services you could offer. One customer getting you paid starts the process. That could be the most important next that. And finally, we have to do it in the next 48 hours, JFDI style. Just fucking do it. Above my door in big letters, it says default to action. My rule is if it speaks to your heart and your soul, don't let your brain overcomplicate it. Take action before you commit yourself not to do it. And the people that win in life just stay with things longer than they think they should. They don't give up. They don't pretend like, oh, it's not working after 7 days. Do you know that most podcasts only have 9 episodes? 9 episodes. Their dreams were bought from them from a lack of discipline with 9 episodes. They did all the heavy lifting to start. They actually got to 3 episodes and 6 episodes and then 9 episodes and then just decided at 9, oh, this feels like work. No shit. And they stop. And then they see the Chris Williamson's and the fucking Cassidy Warren's and the Joe Rogan's and they go like, how did those people build these brands? They didn't stop and they went longer than they thought. All right, so we've rewired our identity. We've deployed dollars to buy back our time, and now we've also stretched our time horizon. So we start operating like the best in the world. But there's one final shift that matters more than anything we've talked about so far. Die empty. When I say wealth, I actually don't just mean money. I mean rich. I mean a rich life, rich relationships, rich environment, the whole thing. So what's the point of having money if it dies with you? Why wouldn't you take the money to invest it in the experiences, into the people in your community while you're alive? Some people go on this like legacy thing where they're like, yeah, when I die, I'm going to give all this money to people. Fuck that. Why wouldn't you want to be there when you give the money to the person? Why wouldn't you want to commit yourself, your time, your energy, your resources, your relationships to the people you want to help? I feel like I am the steward of a resource. It doesn't matter if it's money, time, or people, their attention, your attention. And it's my responsibility to deploy it, to give it back, to use it in a way that helps other people. If you stop making it about yourself and hoarding and you start making it about other people, your whole life will change. Most people will never get truly wealthy because they don't want to see other people get wealthy. It's like one of my clients I was coaching one time, this guy named Tom. I said, Tom, go out there and build that 25-year-old vision. Make it a picture. Show it to me. Be detailed. And he brought it back. And here's a photo of all the stuff, the yachts, the planes, the cars, and no people. What the fuck, Tom? Where are the people? Where are the bazillionaires that you made? What do you mean? If you're worth a billion, there's got to be people around you that are worth $10 million that you help create that for. Because if not, you're always going to be the person working so hard. So it's actually really smart to think to yourself, how many people can I help get rich? I always say that I want to die empty. And what I mean by that is that when I'm down, when I take my last breath, I want to know that I use the resources I have accumulated to live the richest life possible. When I think back to when I was 14 and I need to get a haircut, my dad gave me $20. And instead of going and get a haircut, I walk by a homeless person, I give him the $20. And my dad watches me do this and he goes, why would you give the money to the person? I just gave it to you to get a haircut. And I said, because Dad, I know you'll give me another $20. That person needed it more than I did. And that for me always felt like the right thing to do. If I've been gifted with skills and the ability to generate income, then I should take some of that to help other people around me. Other people showed up in my life. They didn't have to do that. They didn't have to show up and support me and put up with my bullshit. As a teenager, I was fucking wild. If I didn't have that $20 when that was all I had, I knew I wouldn't give more when I had more. See, most people are like, I will help other people when I have more to give. And I'm saying, you got stuff today. And if you don't help when you got a little, you're not going to help when you got a lot. And for me, I just honor that. I honor the people that wake up every day to help other people. And if my contribution to that is my time, my influence, my income, then so be it. But I will tell you, you will live a rich, a wealthy life if you build that habit. So here's how I recommend you build a habit of giving away. From the beginning, pick a number. I don't know if it's 1% because you're feeling a little scared or it's 10% because you're feeling brave, but some number of your monthly income should be given to other people and not the extra, because you'll always spend the extra of the top line number you take in. And then 2, pick a specific cause. And again, if you don't have money, you can show up with your time. But think about the people that are serving the folks that you once were. If you came from a place where you had challenges, Who are the people that are helping those that were essentially you when you found yourself in your darkest times? People always ask me, Dan, how do I find my purpose? I'll tell you where it is. It sits right next to the hardest thing you've ever gone through in your life. And it's uniquely yours. And if you wake up every day committed to giving whatever you make, a percentage to people or organizations that are helping those folks that was once like you, you will see yourself light on fire to go accumulate and create more. Because now you have more to give those people. And number 3 is you gotta give before you're ready. Don't wait till you have. You have to give when it feels hard, when it is scary, when people are like, oh, I don't know why you involved yourself in that organization. No, I'm doing it today because I'm starting, I'm building the foundation for the future. And it also tells yourself that that's just proof that you've built that new identity, right? If you don't decide you're a giver and when you give, you get back, back and you start doubling down on that identity by your actions, you're just never going to build the abundance mindset that's needed to actually create real wealth. See, 99% of people that just get rich, they wait to get rich before they give. The top 1% become rich because they give. Whatever you want out of life, if you help other people get it, you will get more of it. Okay? If you want more money, help other people get more money. You want more health, help other people get healthier. You want deeper loving relationships? Guess what you should do? Help other people find, get deeper loving relationships. Die empty by giving everything you have. The reason I'm so passionate about this topic is I learned a long time ago you weren't born broke. You weren't born blocked. When you came into this world as a little tiny baby, you came in with this like you were created from a creator that had access to all things. It's your birthright to become and actualize everything that you are.. And most people say, well, no, to be rich, you have to be smarter. To be rich, you need to have relationships. Or to be rich, you gotta be this. No, you don't. You have to make a decision. You have to decide who is that person that becomes rich? Am I showing up as that person? What are the habits I need to change? What are the vices I gotta get rid of? And who are the people I need to spend time with that encourage me continuously to go for my dreams? Because if you keep showing up here, you keep investing in yourself, you keep coming back right here to this channel, I'm telling you, on the backside of that commitment, I will convince you to win. I will pull you across the finish line to win. I will be the person that's up front showing you the way to win. The wealth was always yours. The question is whether you have the courage to claim it. So I need you to leave me a comment and just let me know what did I share with you that resonated? What did you need to hear? What did you like most? Just leave me a comment below with what comes to mind. And remember, if you want my full EA playbook to help you buy back your time and get the most out of your executive assistant, just DM me the word YouTube EA on Instagram and I'll send it right over. Now you know how to think like the top 1%. You want to learn the skills that will get you there, so click this video and I'll see you on the other side.
