If I Wanted to Make F-You Money This Year, I’d Do This

There are a few things that you need to unlearn if you really want to make fuck you kind of money. I'm talking about core ideas that used to work but just don't anymore. Advice everyone's following that keeps them stuck. I've coached thousands of business owners, and the ones who do the best are the ones who totally reframe how they think about making money. So we're going to cover the 6 things that you need to unlearn. And let me tell you, the last one ruins most people without them even knowing it. Starting with point number 6, you need a good plan. Most people think I need a solid plan before I start. They sit down and they talk to people and they research and they get ready. It's kind of like the person that cleans the house before the cleaning lady comes. The point is for you to just take action. No business plan has ever survived first contact with the customer. Never. I still remember the first time I wrote a business plan. Not only did I follow none of it because those were all just guesses,, but I later found it on my hard drive years later, and when I opened it, I laughed at how different my life was than what I wrote down there. That's usually what happens to business plans. Instead, you should realize the only plan is to do anything that gets feedback from the customer. Everybody wants to start perfect. That's a wrong strategy. The plan is to start messy. When you're creating content, post 80% good enough. Post anything. And imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. So now you're taking action, but if you're doing it the old way, you're still going to burn yourself out because the next thing you need to unlearn is point number 5. You need to work hard. Everyone says work hard, grind harder, put in the hours, blah, blah, blah, blah. Work scared. That's the answer. Work hard. That's for people that never move forward. What they mean to say that most people don't hear is do the thing that you're avoiding. I believe our fear is a perfect compass for where we should be focusing our time. Because fear stands for false evidence appearing real, which means on the other side of that is everything you've wanted. Just because you can grind for 18 hours doesn't mean you're making any progress. Don't confuse movement with progress. Stanford actually came out with some research that said that if people work more than 50 hours, there's a massive decline in productivity anyway. Someone working 70 hours usually gets the same amount of work done as someone working 55 hours. It's just the person that sits down and does the thing that moves the business forward, moves their life forward in those 50 hours are gonna get better results. The brain tattoo I want you to put on your brain is that the stuff that scares you is the stuff that shapes you. So here's how you can find and tackle the scary work. I want you to look at the next week of your calendar, and I want you to circle the things that you've written down that you wanna do that you know scare you a little bit, that make you uncomfortable, Maybe it's creating content, maybe it's making sales calls, maybe it's trying to recruit somebody. Be honest with yourself. Now front load your day with those tasks. You wanna start with the scary stuff. Number 3, tell somebody. Tell somebody you're scared. Tell somebody that that's what you're starting with. Tell somebody to create accountability within yourself so that you deliver on it. Oftentimes we'll do more for other people that we've committed to than we'll do for ourselves. So this keeps you from hiding. The last one is you gotta celebrate the attempt, not just the outcome. If it doesn't work, you got feedback, but at least you did it. And I would celebrate that. You got to honor the fact that you tried, even if it didn't get the result. You either win or you learn, and you have to celebrate the learning moments too. I know there's a lot of scary stuff when you're trying to grow your business and maybe you're trying to cross 7 figures. But if you want my cheat sheet, I put together a full workbook of everything I do in all my companies to get it to 7 figures and way beyond to make it easy and less scary. In it, I teach you everything you actually should learn to go from zero to million step by step. If you want my copy, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube scale and I'll send you a copy right over. So now you've learned how to tackle the scary stuff, not just the stuff that keeps you busy. But the next mistake is when people look around at who's winning and just blindly copy them. Which brings us to the next thing you need to unlearn. Point number 4, learning from the best. See, I know you hear model, model, model, learn from the best. Who's doing it? Who's winning? Learn from them. The challenge that most people run into is that they come from a big company. They come from a Fortune 500 company. They come from a winning team. And when they start at zero, they try to copy the playbooks of a Fortune 500, a winning team, when they have a fraction of the market, a fraction of the team, a fraction of the customers. You're copying the wrong playbook for the stage you're at. And if you act that way when you're small, you will kill your company. And there's data to support this. I think it was the Startup Genome that said that like 74% of small businesses fail because they try to act too big way too early because they're copying the expensive strategies of giant corporations and they're just out of sequence. Like I said, they have the resources, they have the brand recognition, they have the customers, they got the money, and you got none of that. So stop copying their playbooks. I remember when I was building my company Clarity, there was a company that got bought by AT&T 10 years prior that did something similar to what I was doing. So I thought, hey, I'll just R&D. Rob and duplicate. I'll go in there, I'll look at all their sequences, their emails, their conversion funnels, everything. I'll just borrow that inspiration and replicate it using my product. It turned out the money they were making and all the funnels they designed was to optimize for people to call psychics. I know nobody told me that. I couldn't figure it out. The way I turned it around is I realized I had to start from scratch, look at who I was selling, how I was selling it, who was paying me, and then figure out who at my stage in the early days was similar and go borrow their playbooks, borrow borrow their positioning, borrow their ideas for creativity because we're at the same level. People don't realize when Facebook launched, it launched at Harvard. If you're launching a social network and you're trying to compete against Facebook today the same way they built today, you're gonna fail. Don't copy Tesla when you're just trying to build electric go-kart. So if you can't copy big companies, who do you learn from? Well, here's my filter. First, find 3 companies that are similar to you and your stage that are just maybe 6 or 12 months ahead of you. Number 2 is then you're going to use these really cool tools. SimilarWeb, Meta Ad Library, BuiltWith, Ahrefs. These are all incredible tools to essentially reverse engineer how these businesses were built, their funnels, their traffic, their strategies. You can even figure out who is their number 1 partner that's generating 80% of the traffic. Maybe you can reach out to them and get them to send the traffic to you. Once you do that, copy the structure, take their frameworks, their best practices, but swap in your own offer. This isn't copy paste. This is understanding the methodology for how they've built the revenue so far so that you can start with the right blueprint and finally run it for 90 days minimum. I can't tell you how often people said, I tried that, it didn't work. Well, you tried it once. How about you try it for 90 days? You put it in place, you let the offer get eyeballs. Don't get creative yet. Just do the one thing that you've seen work and see if it could work for you. So now you're taking action and working smart. But here's one area where old advice will absolutely wreck you if you follow it. And that's when you hear people say, point number 3, take your time with hiring. The old advice was hire slow, fire slow. This is where you had people work for companies for 25 years. Today, that advice is completely wrong. In the new world, it's all about moving faster. You need to hire fast, you need to test fast, and you need to fire fast. Because if you wait too long to bring someone on, you miss the window. Top talent is only available in certain times in their life where they're frustrated at a boss or they got pissed off that somebody did something. And if you just happen to be the person that calls, give them an opportunity, they're going to jump ship. You need to be quicker on your ability to hire people. And even worse, if you bring somebody on and they're totally not a right fit and they don't add any value, don't prolong the decision to move them on from your team because that'll drag down your whole freaking team. I remember back in the day I hired this tech genius at my company and I was paying him six figures. Four months in, I'm paying this guy and I get a call one day from Procter Gamble, number one company in the world. The CTO wanted to personally call me to let me know the guy on site was causing issues with their team. And I'm sitting there going, here's a guy that I hired that's supposed to be the expert, supposed to be the genius, and he's the one messing up. But I feel like I can't let him go because he clearly knows more than me. He's technically a genius. Me waiting too long to fire him almost cost me that contract, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every week that you have the wrong person costs you twice their salary. So let me teach you how I hire across all my companies. And we use this 5-step process every time. The first thing is you gotta run ads to find a lot of candidates. Most people, when they recruit, they just don't have a lot of people applying. So they just take the first person that looks decent. We spend about 5% of their annual compensation, the total comp, on ads. I'm talking LinkedIn, Indeed, local if it's a local job. The role pays $100,000, I spend $5,000 on ads. Most people spend no money on recruiting. Number 2 is have them complete a 1-minute video explaining why they want to join your team and answer some other questions, because that'll help you sort way quicker. I can tell in a video based on how somebody's communicating, what books they like to read, they tell me about why they want to work there, if they're even in the realm of potential. Because I always hire the soul, train for the role. I can see in the video if I got the right soul. If they pass that, then the next step is have them do a cognitive test or some kind of behavioral test. I use Predictive Index. You can use whatever you want. There's tons of them. And it's not a no-go decision, like if they don't pass a certain level, but it just gives me more data to inform myself and the teams when they're making the hiring decision. It understands their default, who they are as a person. At some levels, their IQ or their ability to process information, which is going to tell me how they're going to work on my team. I can even compare them to other people on my team to see who they're most like. Number 4 is you pick the 3 best candidates and give them a paid test project. My whole rule is I can't work with you till I work with you, which means I gotta give them a simulation of how it's gonna work on our team that they gotta do before they even join our team. Usually it's about a 10-hour project and I'll pay them for that if they want. But the idea is for them to get to know us and us to know them. And all 3 candidates do the same project so I can evaluate their output against each other. The last one is let your team make the final decision. I give everybody on a hiring team the veto power to choose who they work with. Why? That allows them to have ownership on hiring. I mean, when they start, they want to see them win because they were involved in it. They don't feel like you're pushing people on them, and it's just the right way to hire. The trick is to move fast at every stage. And honestly, if it's not a hell yeah, it's a heck no. Like, just honor your gut. So now we got you moving fast. And you're building your team. Awesome. Next, we need to unlearn something that you've probably heard not only just in business, but also in life. Point number 2, you got to be well-rounded. Everybody's going to say you got to be well-rounded. You got to be the jack of all trades. You got to know a little bit about everything. But being good at everything means you're not great at anything. The world's best people are tip of the spear great at something. They've decided to master a skill. People making real money got really good at one thing. Everything else they outsource or they ignore. In many ways, you have to almost like be willingly ignorant to not learn other stuff because you could, so that you have the time to become masterful at one thing. It's like an OCD focus level of attention. You have to have people go like, oh my God, you're so intense. It's like I'm trying to be the best at something.. And if they give you a hard time, remind them, if I was going for Olympic gold as a skier, you wouldn't give me a hard time for training. You wouldn't give me a hard time for hiring a coach. You wouldn't give me a hard time for studying other people. That's what I'm trying to do in my career. It's like my buddy Tom, brilliant marketer. And because he could do a lot of stuff, he did everything. He was spending 70 hours a week running his company, but he was stuck at $30K because he was doing everything. And I was like, bro, you're really good at marketing. I dare you to just do marketing. To focus on it. He changed his one focus and revenue doubled 200% in 60 days. His workweek dropped down to 38 hours a week. He was making way more money working less because he decided not to be well-rounded and instead to go all in. The highest performers I know know exactly what to be bad at. So how can you figure out exactly what you need to focus on so that you can be world class at? Here's how to do it. First, you got to list everything that you do in your business. Do a full dump and audit every single task that's taking your time. Then circle the ones that give you energy, that you enjoy doing them. I love selling. I love persuading. I love enrolling people into my world. That's the hardest one to let go. But the good news is when you're starting off, keep that one if that's your thing. Whatever gives you energy and makes you money, keep those. And then number 3, everything else. So create like a big bucket of that stuff. Get somebody else to do it for you. And I know you're like, I have no money. Find an intern, stop doing it, ask for help, maybe block time. And so it's just way more efficient if you actually have to do it. But I really want you to give yourself the space to do the thing that makes you money, that lights you up. The goal is to spend 80% of your time doing the things that light you up and make you money so that you have 20% of your time to keep learning and growing to find out other ways you can make yourself better. So stop trying to be decent at everything and be great at one thing. And if you want to go deeper on this, it's a whole chapter in my book, Buy Back Your Time. But if you just start with what I share with you, it's going to give you massive results. So now you're focused. Awesome. You're getting really good at one thing, but none of that matters if you're going in the wrong direction, which is why the last thing you need to unlearn is point number 1: follow your passion. Everybody says follow your passion, but here's what I discovered. You could be passionate about something and still be a failure. You could say, I want to do this because I'm more passionate about that and still never win because you always just defaulting to your passion and avoiding the work and avoiding the monotonous and avoiding the being consistent. That doesn't work either. Passion without a market is just an expensive hobby, you know, and the data shows this. 42% of businesses fail because they built a product nobody actually needed because the entrepreneur was passionate about the product. They fell in love with the product. They didn't fall in love with the problem. See, if you fall in love with the problem, you don't care about the solution, then you'll go find the right solution for the problem. That's where you should be passionate about. You should be passionate about solving a problem for somebody. The real answer isn't just being passionate or doing things just for the money. It's finding the sweet spot. It's like my buddy Matt. He was super into fitness and he thought, I need to build an app. And then he built the app. He spent like $100 grand to build the app and launch the app. Nobody wanted the app. When he talked to the people that said you should build the app, he realized their number one problem was being consistent. He didn't need an app for that. It's funny how people, they get passionate about a tool instead of working backwards from the customer. When you talk to the customer, you say, what is actually hard about getting this result? And you build a solution for that problem. That's how you get rich. So all he did was he pivoted away from the app and he said, okay, I know I spent a lot of money. I'm going to leave that there. And I'm going to go get passionate about creating accountability. So he created a coaching program where he created accountability as a core cornerstone. That same passion with a different approach was making him $12,000 a month in 90 days. Follow problems, not passions. The money follows problems. So here's how you can find something that, yes, you have passion around, but that you can actually monetize. The framework is called Ikigai. Essentially, you draw 4 big circles, each one representing a different question. And what we want to find out is what's in the middle. So the first question is, what do you love doing? You know what I love doing? I love talking to people. I love creating content that I know could be seen by millions of people because it feels efficient. I'm a nerd when it comes to effective. Second question you want to ask yourself, the other circle, is what are you good at? What do you feel that other people tell you, like, hey man, you're really good at that? That's where you want to go looking. What are things that you do naturally? You're just like, I don't know, why do people keep saying I'm good at this? That's the answer to that question. The third circle is what does the world need? As much as you have a need to print paper, the world doesn't want printed paper anymore. And then the fourth big circle is what can you get paid for? And that one's easy to answer because you can figure out what people are already spending money on. If they're spending money on it, you can get paid to do it. If you look at those 4 questions and think about what fits in the middle, that's your sweet spot. That's what you should be building your business around. But you need all 4. So I encourage you to scroll back, hit pause, watch it, fill it out, and then come back to find the overlap. That's your direction. You see, none of the other stuff matters if you're building in the wrong direction. This is the filter for everyone. It gets you alignment. So all of that will hopefully get you recentered. Because most of what you've been taught just doesn't work anymore. The world has completely changed and it changes almost monthly right now and the rules change with it. But you can still win if you unlearn the old game and play this new one using these new principles. All you need to do is just pick one from this video and unlearn it this week. Maybe it's taking action. Maybe it's not trying to copy somebody's playbook that's way bigger than you. Maybe it's deciding to really double down on what you're passionate about, the world needs and they're willing to pay for it. Maybe today is the day you start. Whatever it is, leave me a comment below and let me know what one of these philosophies did you need to hear today to unlearn, to get yourself set up for the future. And remember, if you're serious about scaling your business past 7 figures, just find me on Instagram, DM me the word YouTube scale, and I'll send you my full workbook on how to scale your business and buy back your time. And if you wanna learn how AI changed business forever, click here and I'll see you on the other side.