In this motivational monologue, the speaker—who claims to have become a millionaire at 24 and amassed a net worth of over $100 million by 30—outlines five daily habits that he believes are essential for achieving massive wealth in one’s twenties. The first habit is waking up early (or otherwise creating uninterrupted time) to gain extra productive hours. The second habit is incorporating physical breaks (walks or workouts) to alternate between physical and mental energy, a practice he calls the “split shift.” The third habit is pruning one’s social circle, surrounding oneself only with people who positively influence financial, physical, spiritual, and emotional growth. The fourth habit is deliberately learning from the mistakes and teachings of more successful individuals—through mentors, books, and copying proven beliefs. The fifth habit is refusing to internalize failure; instead, quickly pivoting to new approaches without dwelling on sunk costs. Throughout, he provides concrete examples from his own experience building Gym Launch, collaborating with a partner named Alex, and applying these habits to accelerate business growth.
Chapters
I want to share with you the 5 habits that you can build today to become a millionaire in your 20s. I actually became a millionaire by the age of 24, and I had a net worth of over $100 million by the age of 30. The first habit is waking up early. I know a lot of people say this. When I was 17, I worked at a cafe, and because I took class later on in the day, I had to do the opening shift. And I remember when she was like, okay, great, you're going to do the opening shift, so I need you at work by 4:45. And I was like, what the fuck? 4:45? Are you fucking kidding me? I don't want to get up that early. That sounds ridiculous. I'm going to be exhausted. It's going to be terrible. I didn't realize that this would translate to success later on. I got into this habit of getting up extremely early, like 3:45, 4 o'clock. I'm not saying you need to get up at 3:45 or 4 o'clock, but I think getting up before 6 AM is a habit that a lot of successful people have. By getting up early, I was able to do more than most people did. Now, for others, it might be that staying up late allows them to do more than most people do. And so it doesn't really matter if it's getting up early or staying up late. It's creating more time in your day. Most people don't actually work that much. In fact, what they're doing all day is they're reacting to their environment rather than controlling their environment. Create space that has uninterrupted time where you can actually focus and people aren't trying to take energy from you. The second habit is taking walk or workout breaks. I started doing this when I was like 23. I felt like I had a lack of energy. You know, I would sit at my desk and I would try to work for 8 hours or 10 hours or however long I need to work. I would just find myself feeling exhausted. Exhausted. And rather than chug energy drinks all day, I put intermittent breaks in my day so I can keep my energy up. And so I call this the split shift. If you're trying to make sure you can work longer hours, split your day with something physical in between. I'm using physical energy, then I'm going to mental energy, then I'm going back to physical energy. And because of that, I'm able to kind of replenish the opposite energy than the one I'm using at that moment. So the best split shift that I ever had was when I started Gym Launch, and I would work from 5 AM to 8 AM. Then at 8 AM I would go for a walk. Then at 9 AM I would work again. I would work till 1 PM. Then I would eat lunch and I would go lift. Then I would come back around 2:30, 3 PM, and I would work from 3 to 7:30 or 8 PM. And then I would eat and go on a walk. And I got so much done because I was constantly using different kinds of energy rather than trying to power through using one kind the whole day. And you're like, Layla, but I have so many meetings I have to attend or all these things I need to do. You can encourage other people to do this too. If I'm having a one-on-one with somebody or a meeting, I can say, let's make it a walking meeting. Let's make it a walking one-on-one. So I can encourage other people to kind of mix up their energy uses as well. And oftentimes people really appreciate it. The third habit is pruning your circle. In my very early 20s, I realized that a lot of the friends that I had, though I loved them dearly and they were great people, weren't necessarily aspiring to do the same things in life as me. I started listening to Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn. I heard them all saying you become who you hang out with. And then I thought to myself, why would I hang out with anybody that I didn't want to be like, that I didn't have something I admired about them? I looked at how each of those people affected me financially, physically, spiritually, emotionally. And I realized that a lot of my friends at that point in time were actually detracting from all those areas of my life rather than adding to those areas of my life. And I pruned my circle. I got new friends that I actually felt like I wanted to be like. And then eventually, within, you know, a year or 2 years, I realized, hey, maybe these friends actually— the friends that were good for me at one point now aren't good for me at this point. And so as I moved through seasons of my life and the vision of who I wanted to be continued to get bigger and bigger, I had to prune my circle more and more because you want to make sure that you're hanging out with people that you want to be like. The fourth habit is to learn from the mistakes of others. I once heard someone say, the only difference between humans and animals is that humans can learn from others' mistakes. They waste the time, you get the lesson. We don't have time to learn all the lessons ourselves. So what we wanna do is be selective about the people we learn lessons from and then take those lessons and assimilate them into our minds, into our bodies, into our belief systems. Anytime I hired a mentor, advisor, a coach, I read a book by somebody that's more successful than me that I want to be like. Anything they said that was a turning point, that was a belief that they held, I just took it as my own. I think there is a good time to copy rather than create. And so it's copying others' beliefs, copying others' lessons, copying others' mistakes. We can just learn them now and we can have the success. I had a mentor that when I was 23 told me that people were more important than anything in a business. And I had no idea what was really important. I knew I didn't want to manage people. I didn't really like the idea of managing people. And what do I talk about now? Managing fucking people. Because guess what? I took what he said to heart, that managing people was the most important thing, and it paid off dividends. I just took what he said, I applied it, it worked, and I moved forward faster. The fifth habit is not taking failure personally. A lot of people ask, they're like, I just wanna understand how you and Alex have just done this so fast. Let's look at unsuccessful people. What do they do? They try something, it fails, and then they dwell on it. They don't try something the next day. They don't try a different way of doing it. They dwell on the failure. When I was building Gym Launch, we would fall on our face time and time again. Something wouldn't work, we would try something else. Something else wouldn't work, we would try something else. Dwelling on my mistakes was unproductive. It was literally stealing my future from me by keeping me stuck in the past thinking about something that I couldn't even change. And so I realized that I could take that energy from dwelling on the mistake and I could put that towards building a new future. My automatic reaction is go try something else. That didn't work, immediately try something else. Alex and I would fly out to gyms and we would launch gyms ourselves. We would do the sales and marketing and sell people into their facility. We realized within just a few months that that was not scalable. So we immediately switched to hiring a team to do that. We realized that hiring a team to do that wasn't the right way. So we immediately switched to a licensing product. And it was that ability to switch quickly without dwelling on the sunk costs that allowed us to move forward faster. So bottom line, if you want to move quickly and you want to make more money faster than anybody else, you can't dwell on your mistakes. It's not a good use of your time.
