In this interview, Layla (a self-made entrepreneur who reached a $100 million net worth by age 29) shares the seven habits that propelled her rapid success. She emphasizes relentless self‑education, surrounding herself with people who support a future‑oriented vision and letting go of relationships that hold her back, deliberately choosing discomfort and anxiety as growth catalysts, building a network of specialized mentors rather than relying on a single guru, embracing isolation to develop self‑reliance, curating mental input by limiting social media and consuming books and courses, and practicing extreme self‑discipline that integrates work and life rather than seeking balance. Throughout, Layla reflects on the emotional toll of scaling her company Gym Launch, the humility that comes from repeated failure, and the importance of intentionality in personal development.
Chapters
People ask, how was it growing to $100 million so fast? I'm like, it felt horrible. Actually, your friends and family will not understand, and you should do it anyways.
By the age of 29, she had the net worth of $100 million. Layla, how are you doing today?
What's up? I'm great.
Your post the other day hit me. 7 habits I learned in my 20s that made me millions. Invest all your money into self-education. An infinite budget for learning will give you infinite potential for earnings.
What I never want to become is one of those people that is like, now I think I'm too good to learn from other people. Just because you are learning from someone, that doesn't mean I need to emulate their entire life, but it means there's some things that they are better at than me. The phrase always sticks with me, which is like, nothing fails like success. And you see it so often, it's like people get really successful and they get this huge ego. And the funny thing is, I think it's actually gone the opposite direction. The more success that we've gotten, the more humbled I have become, because in order to attain that amount of success, you have to fail a shit ton, get smacked in the face, feel the pain. And I think there's just a lot of people out there that they would do better if they didn't think they were invincible. It's kind of like in the war, right? Everyone goes to war and then people ask them, it's like, interview question, right? They say, do you think that you're going to die? And then they say, no, I don't think I'm going to die, but I think Johnny could die. So I'm worried about Johnny. The same thing happens in business where people are like, oh dude, I'm not worried about running out of money. Oh dude, I'm not worried about not knowing how to market. Oh dude, I'm not worried about X, Y, or Z happening to me, but I'm worried about it happening to my friend. It could totally happen to me and I want to be prepared. I've never stopped learning. I don't want to. We're not selling anything. We don't have anything that we're trying to like ring our audience for. And so because of that, we're lucky because those people have wanted to help us just out of the goodness of their heart.
Second thing: be willing to let go of friendships that don't serve you. Just as crabs grow out of their shells, you must shed your past to expand into your future.
If you want to change your story, you need to get around people who don't believe your old story. The biggest moments for me where things changed were when I either let go of people or I brought people into my life. And I think it's the same with business, actually. I don't like saying people are toxic. That's not something that you'll ever hear me say because I don't believe that to be true. You have to set boundaries in your own life. There are people who, in their presence, it makes it much harder for you to succeed. Does that mean they're a bad person? No. Does it mean that you should fucking never talk to them again? No, not if you don't want to. But it means that your relationship with them might have to change if you want to make it easier to succeed in another area. You're succeeding in your comfortable friendships when you stay in that kind of like zone. But it's like if you want to succeed in business or in improving your life or in your health or all these things, then you want to surround yourself around people who are emulating that, not emulating your past self. The reason that so many people have a hard time letting go of family and friends, in their mind, it has to go perfectly and their friends and family have to understand or else they won't do it. And the reality is that your friends and family will not understand and you should expect and think that it is normal for them to not understand and you should do it anyways. The right kind of friends you want, they talk about a shared future. You're always talking about vision, driving forward. Whereas the people that you probably don't want in your life, they're constantly reliving the past because that's the only thing that's ever good for them. You are not going to change them. They cannot even change their fucking selves. Why would you be able to change them?
Say yes to everything despite being uncomfortable. You can be afraid. You can be anxious. You can be anything but stagnant.
People see successful people and they assume that the anxiety, the stress, the frustration that they feel, that successful person must not feel that shit. My whole life, people always labeled me anxious, OCD, this, that, stressed, bipolar. And I used to always think, one, those things are bad. Two, that you shouldn't do things because you feel a certain way. And then when I was about 8 or 9 years old, stuff happened with my family and I really had to think about things myself. And I saw where some people in my family went with like drugs and alcohol and really blaming their emotions. I just remember being in a room by myself and thinking to myself, I feel fucking terrible. You don't see me drinking and taking drugs. And I'm 9 years old and I have less life skills than this person who's like an adult. I think that it's the culture and like the generation we've been brought up in, which is like, if you feel bad, it's bad. And it means stop. Where it's like, actually, our brains, if we understand how they work, are like 2 million years old. You're not wired for success, you're wired for survival. A lot of the times on your way to success, you feel these terrible feelings. People ask, how was it growing Gym Launch and like going to $100 million so fast? I'm like, it felt fucking horrible, actually. Like, I felt that like knot in my stomach and in my throat like every day because there was so much pressure and it was new and I'd never done it before and I didn't know what to expect. There's nothing wrong with those emotions, and they are to be expected if you want to be successful. Successful people are just used to feeling that way, and it's your willingness to be uncomfortable that will progress you forward.
Find multiple mentors. Seek specialists for every area of your life. It takes a village to actualize your potential.
I've always kind of gone with like, I have a Rolodex of people. This is my finance person, health person, business scaling person. Does that mean that I need to learn everything from them? No. As humans, it's called like the hairstylist dilemma, right? We go to one person for one thing and we trust them, so we ask them about every other thing. I've gotten mentors who are really good at one thing, and then they've suggested how to run other areas of my life, and it's actually run me into a wall because, oh, they actually suck at that. There are some people out there who are great mentors. They're also probably very old because in order to master all the areas of life, you're usually one much older, and they have so much money that there's really not much you can offer them, and they certainly don't want you to work for them for free when you have no skills.
Get comfortable in isolation. Fighting loneliness brings pain, mastering loneliness brings bliss.
When I was 22, I lived in a cabin in the woods. I didn't have cell service in the cabin, and the internet was like absolute crap. And I lived there for 6 months. I'd heard it so many times, you know, like as you're growing up and as you're going to college, like you want to learn how to be by yourself. And I think until you're in a spot where like you really have no human connection, I learned to be by myself and just like accepting of my own thoughts and feelings when I am by myself. The irony of it is that once you're alone for like a week or two by yourself, then it literally feels like nothing. It's irrelevant. Truly, after that experience, I do not feel like I need other humans to survive and be happy.
Be intentional with what you feed your mind. Trade social media for books. Trade Netflix for courses. Intentionality creates exponential growth.
You only have so much attention and energy when you're getting started and you're trying to grow something from the beginning. There are sacrifices that you have to make. Those things in small doses are okay. The nuances— if some of those things give you back energy, maybe you want to do them. I think that a lot of people though use those tools instead of like recharging. They use them to numb themselves or to avoid or to procrastinate. So it's usually better to just like take them out as much as possible or limit yourself to a dosage of like, I only do this for 30 minutes a day. Because in the beginning, you're usually breaking a habit of using things around you to procrastinate you getting started from like building your business.
Master the art of self-discipline. If you want the rest of your life to be easy, make the beginning of your life incredibly difficult. Get up early, work long hours, and face your problems head on.
Most are not on a mission. And so because they're not on a mission, they have to seek balance because it is respite from the thing that they hate doing. If you're trying to create employees, I would say send them to school and tell them they need to be balanced, right? I don't fucking think about balancing my life because it's all meshed into one and I'm excited about the future. It's like, why would I want to balance that? It's like, you should go watch a movie. I'm like, I'm not fucking tired. I like the word integration, which is everything is of one system. It's usually others and self that are the conflict of balance. When you see people are saying I need balance, a lot of times they're actually not on the same mission together. You don't need to be working together to be on the same mission together, but life is a mission that you should be on together. But I think if you're not on the same page with your spouse or with your friends in terms of what your life mission is, then it feels like an imbalance. I think a lot of the times it's just the symptom of a greater issue, which is like you're not doing what you really want to be doing with your life.
