What I Learned From Being Around The Top 0.01%

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The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. I spent time with people in the global top 0.01%. We're talking about people worth $30, $50, $100 million. And I want to tell you something that nobody in this space will say out loud. The ultra-wealthy don't look the way you think they look. They don't act the way you think they act. And the thing about them that makes them so different from everyone else is most certainly not not what you're expecting. Listen, I've been in the rooms, I've gone to the dinners, I've been in the mastermind tables, I've been in the hotel lobbies at 1 AM where the real conversations happen. And today I'm going to share everything I've observed from these people because 5 of these observations will directly change the way you think about growing your wealth. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Let me put some numbers behind this so you know exactly who I mean. Globally, the top 1% of adults have a net worth of approximately $1 million or more. The top 0.1% globally have a net worth of $5 million or more, and the top 0.01% globally have a net worth of $30 million and above. And let me be clear about something before I share what I've learned. I'm not name-dropping here. I'm not flexing. I'm sharing observations from real interactions, from real dinners or conferences, masterminds. I've been a part of because I genuinely believe what I'm about to share with you will be useful to you. Some of it's going to be inspiring to you. Some of it is going to surprise you. And one part I really believe will actually make you better at what you are doing right now. Observation number 1, and this is the first thing that hit me every time. These people don't look the part. I'm serious. You walk past most of them every single day and you wouldn't know it. No signal, no aura, no obvious display of wealth. Most of these people that I've met don't really have anything that is showing their wealth. No flashy jewelry, no entourage, no real performance of wealth. Now, of course, there's exceptions. One or two of them will have a nice watch, but overall they do not wear their wealth. Why? Because they don't need to. They are already secure in who they are. They don't have to prove anything to anybody else anymore. They're not trying to make an impression on anybody. And I think this is deeply intentional. At a certain level, there's no need to signal your wealth anymore. You know what you have, right? You don't need anyone else's approval. And what I found is the people who are loudest about their money are almost never the wealthiest people in the room. The wealthiest people in the room are usually the ones you haven't even clocked yet. The people that are quiet, that are at the end of the table asking questions, that are listening. Because guess what? That's how they got wealthy. Observation number 2. And with this one, I want to push back on a stereotype I think does real damage. A lot of people think that rich people are cheap. They're guarded. They're protective of their money. And in my experience, at this level specifically, it's the opposite. Now, there is no doubt that there are some cheap and stingy rich people, but the vast majority of the financially successful people that I've met and I've been around are among the most generous people I've encountered anywhere. I'm talking about somebody who's picking up the tab at a dinner for 10 people that's worth $10,000, and they'll just do it spontaneously in the spur of the moment without making a big deal about it. One time I've observed somebody pick up the bill for the dinner for $6,000, leave the restaurant, say, "Good night, guys. I got to go. Take care." And we found out later when we wrapped up that they took care of the bill. And listen, I know you're thinking most of the time this is not to show off because they generally want everyone at the table to have a great evening. They want everybody to enjoy themselves. They have an abundance mentality. And when you have an abundance mentality, you understand that if I give now, there'll be more for me to give later. It's not like I'm going to run out. They don't hold tight to money. They know that money comes and goes. They know that they can earn more. The most successful people I know, they don't calculate what they're getting back from every interaction. They're not transactional. They give freely because they understand something that most people at a lower wealth level don't. And that is money is not scarce. People think that there's only one pie and that if I eat some of my pie or give away some of my pie, there'll be less pie for me. No. Rich people know that money is not scarce, that they can make more pie, that it's renewable. And I found that generosity, real unconditional generosity, tends to return to you in ways you cannot predict and you can't even engineer. I believe this to my core, that one of the reasons I got wealthy is because of this mentality that if I give, I will get back tenfold. Now, let's just break this down for a second. Why do I believe that? Why do wealthy people feel like they can give and that they're not going to lose? Because when you give, you become valuable. By the way, this is with anything. If you give money, if you give time, if you give information, if you give value of any sort, you become more valuable as a person. And the world values valuable people, and therefore you'll be compensated to the measure of your value. That's how the world works. The most valuable people are compensated for their value. I'll give you a perfect example. You look at these AI companies, right? Why are these AI companies so valuable? Because the product they produce is so valuable. People are using it constantly. It's helping people's lives. People are chatting with Claude and ChatGPT every single day to get answers, and it's helping other people. And because of the value it produces, the company and the founders of these companies are valuable. Put everything negative aside. That's just how the world works. When you give, you get. 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Try QWO for free plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to qwo.com/mbd. That's quo.com/mba. Today's episode is sponsored by Upwork. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I've been banging on about how the fastest growing businesses aren't doing more, they're delegating smarter. Good news, Upwork helps you bring in expert freelance help fast so you can delegate and keep moving. I've been using Upwork for over a decade, and the reason why I love it so much is that it's a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Upwork helps you grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories. So you can fill in skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent On Upwork and with AI-powered shortlistings, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under 6 hours. No endless searching required. This is why I love it because you get top talent quickly so that you can keep growing your business. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com. Upwork.com. Observation number 3, and this one is the most practical one of all, and it directly contradicts the hustle culture that you hear all over the internet. The ultra wealthy people that I spend time with, the ones that are in the $30 to $100 million range, they are not working hard in the way that most people define working hard. They're not grinding 12 hours a day. They are not in the weeds of their business. They are not doing all the implementation. What they are doing consistently, almost universally, is thinking. They're reading, they're strategizing, they're meeting people, they're learning from people, they're figuring out what's the best way to approach any situation. They're looking for patterns, they're anticipating what's coming on the horizon. They're positioning themselves ahead of what's going to happen. And here is the takeaway for number 3: their primary output is not task completed. Okay, what is it? What do they do? Well, their primary output is decisions made— high-quality, well-informed, strategic, sound decisions. Why? Because they know that a solid decision has higher leverage than anything else they do. Because they make the right decision and they put the manpower behind, they put the money behind it, they put the technology behind it. It could make all the difference in their life and business. This is why they spend so much time making sure they cultivate their mind. So then when they make decisions, it's the right one. And what they understand is that they need to protect their time and energy to make solid decisions. You can't make good decisions if you're stressed out because you're working to midnight every day. And this is why hyper-wealthy people understand that they need to delegate almost everything to everybody else so they can make exceptional decisions. Now, I get it. When you're starting out, you might not have the luxury to do that. You can't afford that. I get it. I've been there. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't adapt. You understand that this is the goal. My goal is just to make decisions and everybody else does the work. Right now, I'm doing all the work and I'm trying to make decisions at the same time. As you progress on your journey, as you go on, you should be doing less and spending more time cultivating better decisions. It's a spectrum, right? It's a journey. It's not black or white. So make sure you are getting closer and acting closer to this type of person as you grow your business, as you grow as an entrepreneur. As they say, what got you here won't get you there. So hard work is going to take you so far, but then you got to start deploying better decisions. Hiring great talent so that you can get to the next level and the next level. At some point, the hustle phase ends and the leverage phase begins. You got to start leveraging other people's talents, other people's time, other people's capital, and using the power of your decision to move forward. And that transition from doing to deciding is one of the most important shifts an entrepreneur can make because that's where most people get stuck. They hustle and work hard and they get to the point where, okay, they're making $1 million, $2 million in revenue, but then they just can't get out of the rat race and they're just trying to work harder to get past that mark. And that's just not going to take them to the next level. What they need to do is start hiring great talent, start being a leader and less of a doer. You got to become allergic to work. I learned this from Ayman Abdallah, who is a great business coach, and you got to start Acting like you're allergic to work. Why? Because when you're allergic to work, somebody else has got to do the work. You come up with the ideas, you come with the strategy, and you tell somebody else to implement them. If every quarter that goes by you have the same amount of work on your plate, then there's something wrong here. You're not growing as an entrepreneur. Because here's what I learned from all these highly successful people is that they're fully aware that they're not the best people for every job. There are smarter, more talented people that can do whatever job that the business needs better than them. Hey, if you're enjoying this episode today and you're asking yourself the question, am I even cut out to be an entrepreneur? Is business my thing? Because you're in luck. Don't worry, I got your back. I'm working on an episode on that exact topic, so make sure you subscribe to the show so you get it as soon as it releases. Observation number 4. Here's one of the cleanest patterns I've observed in all of these people and all these ultra-wealthy people that I've hung out with. They spend money to solve problems. A better way to put this, and this is one of my favorite phrases, is they optimize their life for convenience. Most of their money is spent on this, not flashy things. Their entire lifestyle is engineered to eliminate friction and to save themselves time, to get their time back. Why do you think anybody flies business or first class on a flight? Especially an international flight. Like, for example, if you go from Australia to Europe, it's a 24-hour flight with a layover in Singapore, for example. Why would somebody go business? You probably guessed it. It's more comfortable. It feels great. Yeah, it's super expensive, but they value their time more than the price. Why? Because they know they can sleep on the flight. They know that they can arrive refreshed and they're not going to need to waste a day or two trying to make up for the horrible experience in economy. I say horrible because it's a 24-hour journey. They don't want to arrive drained or distracted or behind. They want to hit the ground running because that day is worth more than what they are spending on that flight. Like, literally, they can make more money in one day than the price of that ticket. A personal chef or a meal preparation service is not a luxury to them. It's a time recovery system. Ask yourself how much time you spend on just meals at home. You want to eat healthy, you want to eat well. So in order for you to do that, you're going to go to the supermarket. Hopefully it's just one shop. Maybe you have to go to the butcher to get some healthy meat. After going shopping, you gotta come home, you gotta put the stuff in the fridge, and then you gotta go ahead and think about what you're going to prepare. You're going to have to then prepare it. Now this is just for one meal. You're gonna have to cook it, you're gonna have to clean after yourself. How many hours are spent just on one meal. And what would the difference of price be if you had a meal preparation service or ready-made meals that are healthy and fresh delivered to your door? For most people where their hourly rate is more than $300 an hour, that's a no-brainer decision. A house cleaner, a house manager, a personal assistant, or an EA handling every errand, every admin task, everything that you otherwise would just sit on your to-do list and just be like, oh, I'll get to that next week. How many things are on that list right now for you? The wealthy know they need to outsource every low-value task on their list of to-dos in their head immediately. And the reason is simple: their time. And by the way, I say their time, but your time too. Your, your time is the most valuable thing in the world. You know how valuable is it? You're not going to get any more. You can't make any more. They know that if they spend their time on other things like making high-quality strategic decisions, It's worth more than anything else they could spend their money on. So they protect their time obsessively. I've been on this path for the last few years, and every single month I'm trying to outsource one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, and getting my time back. And I got to be honest with you, this is very hard because I didn't grow up like this. My parents were immigrants from Egypt, came to the U.S. My mom didn't spend a dime on anything we didn't have to. But a big reason why people do this is because of the two things we talked about. One, they think that money is not a renewable resource. They don't think they can make more money. They think that money is scarce. And then number two, they don't value their time enough. And by the way, you don't need to be worth $30 million to start applying these principles. You can start little by little. Let's say you want to start a side hustle business, but every weekend you're doing household chores that are keeping you away from it. Let's say, for example, you're mowing the lawn one week, the next week you're washing the cars. And these tasks are taking 3 hours or so. Imagine you spend those 3 hours every weekend working on your business. You can make more than it costs for you to pay for those tasks. And I'm encouraging you to start now. Why? Because most entrepreneurs, they start too late. They start applying this thinking too late and they get into really bad habits because this whole buying back your time thing and outsourcing, it's a habit and it's a muscle that you have to build. And the more you do it, the more compounds and the more results you get. Observation number 5. It's, in my opinion, one of the most important things. And this is why I wanted to leave you with it, because it might be the most honest thing I can say about the ultra-wealthy. 99% of the people that I've met at this level are not particularly brilliant. Seriously. And I mean that genuinely. They're not the most charismatic people in the room. They're not the most talented people in the room. They're not the most artistic. They're not the most analytical. There's nothing obvious about them that screams, "This person's exceptional." They are in a lot of ways pretty ordinary. And personally, I found that very inspiring when I've met these people and found out that they're just normal like us. I was like, "Wow. Okay. So you don't need to be special to be wealthy." But there are 3 things they all share. Every single one of them. Have drive, ambition, curiosity. These 3 things. They have a relentless hunger to understand things. They don't like not knowing something. They want to get better. They want to learn from whoever's in front of them. And you pair that with something I genuinely did not expect, and that's humility. Most of them are surprisingly willing to say, "I don't know. I'm not an expert at that. Tell me more about that. I don't understand that world." They're not trying to perform confidence or certainty. They're genuinely curious, and that's how they got wealthy. Now, I always promise to be honest with you. So here it is. The one thing about being around these people that I didn't expect is that they don't make great friends. I don't mean that harshly. I mean that practically. The people that I've met at this level are busy in a way that is genuinely hard to comprehend from the outside. They are traveling constantly. They have obligations elsewhere. Their business and their investments demand their real attention. Their family demands their attention. They don't have the bandwidth to create new deep friendships. Right? And honestly, they probably don't need them. By the time you reach this level, the deep relationships in your life are already established. The people who knew you before— most of my closest friends are the ones that I knew before I kind of came up in the world financially or in business, or they came up with me. We're on the journey together. And in a lot of ways, because once you start getting to a certain level, you start to be a little skeptical about why this person wants to be my friend unless they're at that level. Because a real friend is somebody that will be there for you, that will listen to you, will be around you, have your back regardless of what's in your bank account, regardless if they can benefit from being around you or not. Those are the real ones. The people you meet at this level, they're valuable connections. They're interesting acquaintances, and potentially they're good collaborators in business and life. But if you expect them to be your closest friends, it's pretty slim chance that's going to happen. Okay. Well, what does this mean for you? Well, let's get practical. Okay. 5 observations, 5 things you can act on now, not when you hit $30 million. Number 1. Stop performing wealth. The loudest people are rarely the richest. Okay? There's no reason to really need to show off. Let your results speak for themselves. Observation number 2: Develop an abundance mentality right now. Generosity is the key to a better life and a better business. Don't be a pushover, but understand that if you give, you'll always get back. Don't try to keep score. By giving, you become more valuable. Observation number 3: Shift from hustle to leverage as fast as you can. Okay? Your job as a business owner is not to do more. Okay? It's to make better decisions, is to build systems, to hire talent, to build the machine so that the machine can work for you. Observation number 4: Buy back your time before you buy anything else. Okay? Every hour you spend on low-value tasks is an hour not spent on high-value decisions. And activity. Figure out what your time is worth and spend accordingly. Observation number 5: Ordinary people with extraordinary drive. You don't need to be the smartest. You don't need to be the most charismatic. You need to be the most curious, the most consistent, the most ambitious, the most humble. Because when you're humble, you keep learning from the people around you. Before I go, I want to leave you with this: the top 0.01%, they look ordinary. They act with abundance. They think more than they work. They buy back their time obsessively. They're maniacal about it, and they are exceptional when it comes to drive, curiosity, and being humble enough to continue to learn. The formula is not secret. It's not locked behind a vault only rich people can get access to. No, every single thing I just described is available to you right now. The question is whether you're willing to apply it. 'Cause most won't. But that's good for you because if you do take action, you will stand out. If you found this episode helpful, then I highly recommend you check out a recent episode we just recently published called "Are You Rich? The 5 Levels of Wealth and What You Need to Do to Reach Each of Them." If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. You turn the wrench. You call the shots. When you want the right parts that are the right fit, there's only one choice: GM Genuine Parts and ACDelco Original Equipment. Visit gmparts.com to get the right parts for your GM vehicle today.