Success Stories: How successful people do it and what sets them apart

Are back after last night's technical difficulties, which left me crawled up in the fetal position weeping about Internet connectivity. What I realized is it's only one night that we have to be apart. And so tonight, the stars have brought us back together again. And here we are on tonight's Fireside Chat, where we are discussing success stories of my students. That's right. It's going to be basically time for me to glorify myself for the next 30 minutes. And guess what? It's my show. We get to do that. Now, before I get into the success stories, I was chatting with a friend earlier on Instagram who had some troll sending her all this stuff. And she, she takes it really hard. She internalizes it when people try to troll her. I was like, I've been dealing with these losers for, for the last 15 years. I have it down to a science. I was like, send me all this stuff. I'll show you exactly what to say. And then I told her, you know, I have a lot of open Fireside chats. I said, I think I'm going to print out about 1,800 pages of emails back and forth with these trolls, and I'm just going to read them off. And at the beginning of this show, there'll probably be a lot of people watching and entertained and laughing, but the laughter will die down, as will the fire. And soon it will just be me and the remnants of this once thriving fire flipping page by page and reading off troll emails and just going like this. Gotcha. At least one of us will watch the full episode, and that will be me. So that's for another day. If you guys want to see troll Hunter Ramit Sethi at work at my very best. You know, some. Some have said maybe the book was the best. Maybe some blog posts. No, the true best is dealing one on one with these trolls. Let me know. Maybe I can fit it into my very highly scheduled Fireside chats that I've planned out for months and months in advance. All right, so tonight, why are we talking about success stories? Well, I'll tell you why. Because it's really common in the self development world. People spend a ton of time talking about problems, you're in debt, imposter syndrome. I don't think I can find a business idea. And guess what? When I started off, you know what I wanted to hear? I wanted to hear about winners. Oh, shit. I just realized my fly is undone. Hold on. Winners zip up their flies, okay? They don't walk out of the bathroom, put their fly down Whoa.

This thing's going crazy.

Double click the button. Yeah, double the index finger button. Double click it. There you go. All right. So I wanted to know. I didn't want to talk about problems. I wanted to see what winners do and what winning gets you. Right. I wanted to know, okay, if I grow a business, what do I get? I get a flexible schedule. I get to hire an amazing team, I get to go on vacation. I wanted to know those kind of things and I wanted to know what successful people look like. Do you realize if you go online to virtually any money side or business site, you have people talking about problems. But very few people can candidly discuss what it takes to be successful and what they do once they are successful. So that's what I wanted to talk about tonight. I want to share some success stories at three different levels. The first is. Oh, my God. Get this big. There's a huge bug right there on the floor. It's like a millipede. Centipede. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This little guy. Oh, my God. Babe, what are we gonna do?

That's Henry.

It's his grandfather.

Yeah.

Okay, here, get this. Grandpa, can you double click that thing? I don't know what to. Oh, my God. This guy's coming my way. Okay, okay, okay. Hold on. Okay, babe, entertain everybody while I fix it. I'm gonna tell some stories.

This fire is really good tonight. Put a thumbs up if you think the fire is good.

Wow, she's really. Oh. Whoa.

This thing has like 20 legs too.

I'm gonna put them in here. Okay. Okay, ready? Oh, God. Oh, my God.

Wait, is he in there?

Oh, my God.

He's too fast. Wow.

Guy's like a sprinter. Guy runs at 223. Oh, my God.

All right, that pack's gonna start moving soon.

I'm so scared right now. Alright, so I wanted to share success stories in three different levels. And the first one is a really basic level, which is just people who have been following my advice right now during coronavirus, when things are tough and, you know, for a lot of people, the first priority is just cut expenses and make sure you have savings. So I had somebody who wrote me just a couple of nights ago saying after your fireside chat, I was more persistent with getting a hold on. My student loan payment saves me $125 a month. During these tough times, every little bit counts. So this is a simple one. $125. A modest amount, but it means a lot to this person, especially right now if you do this. Remember Your credit card companies, your student loan companies, some of your landlords are willing to be flexible with you. So I'm going to share one more and I'm going to tell you kind of what I learned from this. Another person said Discover and Amex deferred payments until May 15 and will not charge interest or any late fees. If I need that suspension to last longer, they'll do it. I can just call back. And they said they were able to do this because I always pay in full and I've been a customer for several years. So what do we learn here? This is using classic IWT principles. Pick a great company, stick with them for the long term, and ask for what you want. I'm really proud of both of these readers because. Because they're taking action right now. All right, so this is key. The amounts can be modest to start. Sorry.

Gosh, I just flipped it.

I'm on a roll. And here I am. We got the camera operator, babe. We good? Yeah. All right, so what? So I'm proud of these students for taking action even if the amounts are modest, but it shows you that it's approachable. You make a phone call sometimes, not always, but sometimes you can see really good results. All right, the next category is business. And then the third category is the big Kahunas. People have done some massive stuff. So the business one, I got this from a guy named Matt George. He writes, I've turned to you more than once in this crisis. My cousin is the entrepreneur behind Artel Salons in downtown Vancouver. She currently operates three locations and was hammered by Covid as all small business owners have been ahead of the curve. Two weeks ago, she front loaded an online blitz for $50 of services, next month for $35 now and sold $12,000 in 24 hours. It doesn't go very far in downtown Vancouver, but she is fighting like hell. Thanks for all you do. This is amazing. There's a business owner who did not roll over, did not wait for somebody to tell her what to do, but instead said, you know what, I got to get scrappy. I'm going to do whatever I can. I've got a customer base. They want to support me. What can I do? Boom. Let's roll out a deal. We'll fulfill it over the next six months or whatever it is did it. Now, who knows if that will work? I can't guarantee that all businesses will still be standing after all this shakes out, but at least she's fighting to live. So I'm really impressed by this email now, and that's an example of business owners. We heard about runners high in Jersey. They started doing curbside pickup and all kinds of stuff. Business owners. What did I say last week when I wrote this post? Early on I said, you got to accept reality, you got to make a plan and you got to move. Same for individuals, same for business owners. You've been watching what I've been doing. Why do you think I'm here? I'm here because I got to figure out a way to help. And the way I know how to help is to teach. So I'm, you know, some days I'm out here sharing stories, some days I'm teaching. Some days I'm just going to sit here and rant. Okay? And depending on the troll hunter demand, maybe we'll work that in as well. But all of us can do something. We can't guarantee it's going to succeed, but why wouldn't we give ourselves every chance? Okay, now the third category. This is my favorite and this favorite is because you're going to see what true success looks like. These are some of my best students who wrote me and they told me how they've used my material to get massive results over the last few years. So I want you to notice a couple of things. I want you to notice how they describe their results and I want you to notice what they have been able to do in a situation like now where everything is impacted and nobody could have predicted it. Take a look. This is from Dkokelly on Instagram. He says Earn1k was my first course about five years ago. Earn1k is an older business program of ours. It's now replaced by Earnable, which is out this week@iwt.com Earn it's open until Friday. Earn 1k was my first course five years ago. That process connected me to a client that became my full time job, paying multiples of my previous income. That plus I Will Teach youh Be Rich had me saving a ton automatically. I live on a third of my income right now and I've been saving cash for a down payment on a home. Yes, my investments are down, but in time they'll recover. I have about a year's worth of cash saved if I need it. My job lets me work from home and is actually positioned to thrive in a down economy. Right now with my cash I have options. I can save it for the worst case, wait to see what the housing market looks like in a year or buy into index funds at a huge discount. Okay, what do you notice about this person describing where they are today. What do you notice as those comments come in? I'll tell you a few things I noticed. Number one, the reason that this person is so calm and confident right now has to do with decisions they made years ago. That's really important. At a certain point, you can do some things, you can call up your credit card. But if you want to make it to the next level, the decisions you make today that will put you in a position like this five years from now. So I want you to be thinking long term. You want to make big success. You want to be truly confident with your finances, your business, your relationships. The decisions you make today are the ones that pay off five years from now. And very few people have that long term enough of an outlook. Okay, the other thing I noticed from this is that he invested in himself. He joined one of my programs. He didn't sit around like a lot of people saying will this work? Will this not? It could work, but da da da da, spinning in his head. No, he made a decision. And oftentimes it's those tiniest of decisions that pay off. When he bought earn 1k 5 years ago, it cost him $1,000. The guy said, I was making multiples of my previous income because of earn 1k. Right. So I can't guarantee that. But the Guy made a $1,000 investment, but more importantly, bet on himself and then he executed. The final thing is how he describes his situation today. Right now with cash, I have options. Think about the difference. Somebody who hasn't been saving their money, somebody who suddenly got sent home, maybe even lost their job, their backs against the wall, what can they do? They can call up their credit card companies, yes, they can cut a little bit of expenses, they can wait for some type of financial rescue. But there's a limit to what you can do when your back is against the wall. And that's why, when I'm talking about the truly successful, one of the distinctions between the truly successful and everybody else is the truly successful plan before they need to. And that's exactly what you're seeing here. Do we have any comments from what people are noticing about this? Okay, let's keep moving. And I want to get another example here. And I want people to tell me, what do you notice about this? Alright, then we're going to do questions, question Q and A about successful students. You can ask me what patterns have I noticed? How much, how quickly can I tell if someone's going to be successful? What determines that? I'm happy to Answer all that tonight. This is from Culinary Hill Instagram. We DM a lot. She's one of my students. Here's how I'm taking control during the quarantine. Number one. When schools closed on March 13, I immediately gave my nanny the next month off with full pay. I wrote her a check on the spot. This is amazing. I canceled my cleaning services, but offered to leave a check outside for the crew once every two weeks. Generosity. What do you notice? This is amazing. Reached out to my contractors and said all deadlines are flexible. They can scale back if they need to. Signed up for a local Paleo delivery. Helps me stick to my eating, and I'm supporting a local business. I was giddy to make my profit sharing contribution of $23,000 with the market so low, and I asked her which of the iw. Oh, my God, there's another one. Hold on. We're coming back to this. What's going on tonight?

Oh, wow.

Oh, my God.

Where is it?

See it? Oh, God. Oh, no. Wait.

Where did it go?

I don't know. Is it in the cup?

It's in.

No, no, no, no. It ran away. It's under the thing.

Sorry, guys. Intermission right now. Oh, shoot. There's a lot going on tonight.

Where is it? You see it? No.

Just let it be. Oh, gosh. Sorry. Making you.

Oh, my God. This is freaking you. You know, just imagine I'm, like, in the zone, and then all of a sudden, I see something creeping out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, he's gonna be crawling on my.

Face like a whole family. That's gonna come now.

All right, So I asked this person, Culinary Hill on Instagram. I was like, what courses did you use? And she said, I think she's joined several courses. But she said, delegate and done and Call to Action have helped me grow my business the most. Delegate. Done. One of my favorites. It shows you how to delegate your time, how to hire and manage an executive assistant. I've worked with my amazing assistant for over six years. It shows you our entire playbook. How do we do it? And then Call to Action is for copyright. So what do you notice about Culinary Hill and the way she describes her success? What do we see in the chat room, Cass? You ask while I look around. I'm scoping a situation.

Everyone's very concerned about the bug.

Yeah. So. So am I the guy who's gonna get. I'm gonna come up on your show. I'm gonna come on the show tomorrow, and there's gonna be a gigantic bite on my face. And then there's going to be, like, spiders coming out of my cheek. It's like, oh, shit, I hate the country. All right, what do we got? No questions. All right, you guys have the worst question. Here's the deal. I'll tell you why people love to talk about their problems, okay? They love it. People who have problems love to talk about their problems. You guys know someone who's in a shitty relationship, oh, why does he do this? Why does he do that? Why does she do this? Why can't she just do that? They love it. They spin over and over. But once you decide to focus on success and once you actually start becoming successful, boy, those questions go down a lot, don't they? Because why? Why don't people talk about success as much as failure? Number one, there's a lot more people who have failed than have succeeded. It's just pure statistics. Number two, what you find, I call it failure porn. People will be struggling with something. They'll write something online. Oh, my God, I'm struggling with this or that. A million people on Facebook or Instagram will go, it's okay. You're doing great. You go. And suddenly, subconsciously, they're like, wait a second. When I talk about my problems, I get a lot of people giving me attention. I think I should do that more this subconscious. But then you have a certain subset who actually weaponizes that, and they start talking about failure more and more. You can see it, as opposed to people who are focused on outcomes and success. Number one, it's not politically correct to go around saying, Oh, I have $23,000 to invest, and I feel so good. That doesn't get as many likes. It's like, congratulations. But at the IWT community, I want to celebrate that because I think we can help people who have challenges, who are stuck. You know, we've created programs and blog posts and all kinds of stuff. But I also think that we should celebrate success. And that could be traveling for six weeks a year. That could be paying for your nanny in advance, that could be buying books and never thinking about the price. So I don't only want to talk about problems. The reason I created I Will Teach youh to Be Rich was I wanted to hear about success. So I'm not surprised that there are fewer questions tonight. But I think this is very important. What do we got?

What separates a great student from an average student?

A great student, I can spot them. I can spot the people who will not succeed really easily. They're really easy to spot by the questions they ask. They ask questions like, how quickly can I make money from this program? They say, how do I know this will work for me? Tell me about your refund policy. I've tried 20 other programs. What makes you think that this one will work for me? And my answer to, you know, my general answer is I already know my programs work. I've tested them with hundreds of thousands of people. We have 42,000 customers. So I know my material works. Why should I think that you are going to apply this material? And that really shakes them out of this consumer mindset where they're kind of sitting back. Tell me why this, tell me why I should buy this program. No, no, no, no, no. When you're playing from a position of strength, I know my stuff works. So I ask them to tell me why they are going to be great students. And suddenly the difference becomes very clear. People who think short term, they need money, their backs are against the wall, they rarely succeed. This is one of the reasons I don't allow people with credit card debt into my flagship programs, like with earnable. If you have credit card debt, do not join. That decision costs us millions of dollars a year, but it's the right thing to do because if you got $18,000 of credit card debt, you got bills every single day, you're not going to be able to make these long term decisions. They're focused on speed. They only want speed. They don't think about quality. So they're like, how fast, how fast? How fast? They're looking for guarantees and promises. Now we offer a money back guarantee in almost all of our programs. But what is critical is that do you put time on your calendar and are you focused on the process, not the outcome only. It's like somebody going to a personal trainer and saying, tell me when I will lose £40. It's like, well, if you do everything perfectly, if you follow your macros, et cetera, we can actually plug, plot it out, be within about a month of it. But are you going to show up? Are you going to plot, are you going to track your macros? Are you going to eat correctly? What about the wedding you've got coming up in three months? So there's a lot of different variables. Successful students are very different. They come in, they're smart, they're like, I've evaluated three programs. I think yours is great, but does it have lifetime access or do you include something on this particular channel that I'm really interested in? Very specific questions. Outcome focused. Sorry, process and outcome focused. And they're not focused. I know it can work for me too. What do you got?

How do you help someone that struggles with follow through on your information?

I will give them the best material I can. It has been engineered to help people follow through. We've added features like community. We check in with our support team. We do all kinds of things to keep people engaged. But ultimately, if somebody does not want to follow through, there's nothing I can do. And we have to get really comfortable with that. If you're back in school, you have like carrots and sticks and you have grades that their parents will see. But now imagine that there's no grades. Now imagine that someone can show up to class or not show up. And then that student saying, how are you going to guarantee me that I'm going to follow through? I'm not going to guarantee it. You are. So I can show you what successful students do. Successful students tend to set time in their calendar. Successful students think differently about success. They're not hyper focused on, oh, my God, I didn't make a thousand dollars this week. It's over. No, they're focused on, you know what? If I'm doing the process, if I'm showing up every day for even 15 minutes, then the results are going to come. But I'm not responsible for your success. You are.

Okay. Fear in the unknown is holding me back. What have your students done to overcome this?

You know, honestly, most, by definition, most people who read just read. They don't take any action. And that's across self development. It's across anything. People who are reading or watching fitness, YouTube.