How the Top 1% ACTUALLY Make Their Money

How do the top 0.1% in the world actually make more money than everyone else? There's 3 layers. Let's start with layer 1, global. So if you zoom all the way out, the top 1% of countries in the world do things differently than the rest of them, and we can measure the productivity of a country by something called GDP, which is gross domestic product per capita. Now the per capita part just means how much total production the economy does. So just think revenue, think sales. And then per capita is per person. And so this allows us to normalize different countries that are big countries versus small countries and see how much the individual is making. Now, the reason this is so important and why we start at layer 1 global is because if you even out everything, you will be able to see the strongest levers on wealth creation because they're just done in aggregate. And to be clear, within each country, of course, there are some people that get way more of that slice of the pie than others. But even at the global level, there are some countries that get more of the slice of the pie than other countries. And so for example, the United States has the largest GDP in the world and Tuvalu has the smallest. Now per capita, it shifts around. Luxembourg is actually the country in the world that has the highest GDP per person. So $151,000. Now I'll give you an example of number 2, which is Singapore. They have the second highest GDP per capita and is also the home of Michael, who's our media director. Uh, and the reason they were able to do that is because they invest, these countries, in 2 major categories. Number 1 is education and number 2 is technology. And so if you look at GDP per capita for a country, the increases can almost directly be tied by reinvestments in education and technology. Singapore has $148,000 in gross domestic product per capita. Now, how do they have that? Well, the entire culture in Singapore is flipped compared to say the United States. Teachers, believe it or not, there are actually seen as one of the most prestigious positions that you can hold and they're paid very well because the country understands that attracting good teachers is one of the ways to make the country more competitive long-term. And so if we think about this at a global level, which is I think is important, is what are the inputs that every country has that's even? The inputs are time and bodies. And so at the very basic level, someone, anybody at all these countries at level 0 can do menial labor, which is basically things that have required no skill to do. So if I had a conveyor belt of switchboards and I had to plug 2 things in, another one comes in, I plug 2 things in, it's typically something that you can train someone to do in about 5 minutes. And then you're just basically having them trade their time and doing this very simple task repetitively. Now that is typically not valued nearly as highly as other skills, which is why countries will invest in technology and education. The education so that they have more skills, the technology to do 3 things. Technology does number 1, it allows you to do more of what you currently do. So that switchboard person, if there wasn't a conveyor belt in front of them, wouldn't be able to do nearly as many of those things as someone who did. The second thing is that technology allows you to do what you can already do even better. And so think of both of those in terms of units of time because remember this is one of the key inputs that everybody has that's even. Whether you're in the richest country in the world or the poorest country in the world, every single person has the same 24 hours, and yet some countries massively outcompete other ones, just like some individuals in every individual economy massively outcompete people within them, which we'll peel back in layer 2. Let's think about it like this. If you have a brain and 2 hands, then what allows you to do more with that brain and 2 hands? Well, technology lowers the skill requirement to do anything. Right? Like if you had to figure out how to build a house but you couldn't use tools, you'd have to have a tremendous amount of skills. But all of a sudden if you have a saw and you have, you know, some nails, then you wouldn't have to figure out how to like break trees and interlock them and do all sorts of craziness, right? That's at a very basic level. But on top of that, it allows you to do more of what you're already doing. So that means you're doing more per unit of time. Remember, everything's going to be traced back to time or you do higher quality, which also is traced back to time because maybe it would take you a longer period of time to make something that good or it would just simply be impossible, right? Which is why it's such an advantage that in the early days of smartphones, and I don't even know if they still do this anymore, but you're not allowed to use a smartphone when you take tests because it's such an advantage that it shifts the whole curve. Which I think, by the way, they should allow you to do that because that's how the real world is, and I think the point of school is to prepare you for it. And so imagine you have two different sets of people. You've got 100 people on one side and 100 people on the other, and the 100 people on one side have electricity, Wi-Fi, internet, computers, versus the others don't. Well, which one's going to produce more economic value? Obviously the one on the left, not because these people are inherently better than the others. They just have technology on their side, right? And so we have to think about ourselves from the country all the way down using the same tools. So at the first layer, the wealthiest people in the world, the 0.1%, invest in gaining skills, buying technology, or learning skills to use that technology. Now, if you're hearing this, you might think like I would, well, cool, that's great for them, but what about me? So that enters into layer 2. So let's zoom in on that. What are the skills that actually create the production at the individual level? So instead of global, now let's talk about that per capita, that person just like you, just like me. Now how do the 0.1% actually create that gross domestic product, that gross production, that revenue that then gets categorized for the entire country? Well, there are 3 skills that I'll call BSL, And then they're multiplied by something that I'll use as R. And you're like, what do these all stand for? Well, the first thing, category of skills, is around building. You make stuff. You either build bridges, you build software. Sometimes building is putting together things so that you can do services, but you build stuff. The second is you sell stuff. The third is you lead people. And these also chunk up, if you want the fancier terms here, to mechanical, verbal, and social skills. So these are the 3 overarching categories that skill development as it relates to GDP can get bubbled up to. Now, to be clear, each of these skills are not binary. It's not, oh, you know how to build, oh, you know how to sell, oh, you know how to lead, but it's how well can you build, how well can you sell, and how well can you lead. And so with each of these, they create leverage. They get you more for what you put in, specifically time, because if I build something, then I can have many people use it over and over again. If I learn how to sell, I can sell many people at once. If I learn how to lead, I can get many people inside my company to do many things on my behalf. And in each of these situations, that one person starts to accumulate the aggregate production of everyone else that touches either the thing they built, how they got people to exchange money for it, or the people that they were able to lead to deliver. And the outcome of all of these things is the big thing that everyone cares about, which is money. Now, the longer that this lever gets, meaning if I get better and better at building, then more money happens on this side. If I get better and better at selling, more money happens on this side. If I get better and better at leading, I can pull this lever with more leverage and get more money. Now, what do the richest people in the world have in common? Well, not only do they have one of these skills developed out a lot, many of them have all of these skills super maxed out. And the difficulty with this drawing is that it's very hard to show that maybe the average person's lever looks like this compared to what the richest people, the 0.1%, actually make. So let's zoom in on some of the biggest financial success stories of our time. So if you look at Zuckerberg, for example, who's the founder of Facebook, when he started, he probably mostly just had build skills, but those build skills were enough that eventually he learned a little bit more about promotion. He built some promotion into the product, which allowed him to get more and more people on. Then over time he developed leadership skills so that he could lead the company. And it's very common that building and selling happen in the beginning and then leading develops over time because in the beginning, who are you going to be leading besides yourself? Right? Not many people. And this skill naturally will develop in time, but it gives you more leverage on the other two. So let's get tactical on build. So in this book, $100 Million Offers, I talk about the concept of trimming and stacking. So it starts with looking at all the different problems that a customer presents with and then thinking, okay, how many different ways can I solve them? And so I use something called the delivery cube to say, okay, if we have this one problem, how can I solve this by thinking about what level of personal attention I want to provide? What level of effort would be expected from them? If doing something live, what kind of environment or medium do I want to solve this problem in? Do I want, how do I want these people to consume my solution? How quickly do I want them to get a response or get their problem solved using my services or product? And then if I were to create a product that was 10 times as expensive, what would that look like? And if I had to create a product that was 1/10th as expensive but still had to produce the same outcome, how would I build that instead? And so this is a wonderful framework that I like to think through and also wondering, is there a way that we can psychologically solve a problem rather than simply logically solve a problem? And Rory Sutherland talks about this when he explains that some people used to complain about having slow elevators. You could either replace the entire elevator system, put a bigger motor in and try and get people there faster, or you can just put mirrors in the elevators and then people stare at themselves and don't notice the time pass. And so that would be a psychological rather than logical solution because customers are by and large illogical. And so we want to make sure that the solution that we have solves the problem. And sometimes it's not even in the way that you'd logically expect. Now the way that this problem solution cycle actually works, which I talk about in the Leads Book, is that you're going to have one problem they present with and then you're going to solve it. And then what happens is that creates yet another problem because let's say that you solve someone's hunger problem with a salty pretzel. Well, what problem comes up naturally? Well, now they're thirsty. So then you solve that with a glass of water or a soda. And so this, this cycle continues and continues and continues. Now once you've solved those two problems, what's the next problem? Well, now their dessert stomach is empty, so we have to present them with a cookie, right? And so there's always, if you properly solve a problem for a customer, there's almost always another problem that gets presented as a result of the solution. And the main reason for that is because people are never satisfied. And so over the span of many years, a good builder will develop an ecosystem of products that solves many customer issues at once. So if you look at Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, if not the most valuable, is that it's not just that they have one product. They've built an end-to-end ecosystem that's closed so that someone can use just their products and solve most of their digital needs. They've got a browser, they've got computers, They've got a phone, they have music where you can buy the stuff. Everything is interconnected. But if you're like, oh, I'm gonna build that, well, that also took them, you know, 50 years or however long it's been. So this stuff happens over time. So that covers build, but what about sell? Well, selling is about the perception of the prospect, which is that fundamentally you might have the best product in the world, but if they don't perceive it to be the best product or even know that it exists, then there's no way that they're ever going to use it. And so we want to make sure that we can communicate that value to prospects, ideally at scale. So the simplest, lowest leverage, so think about this thing shortening, the lowest leverage version of selling is selling one-on-one. You sell somebody in person, you sell them via chat, you're just selling and you're closing one customer at a time. Over time, you increase the leverage of sales by either you selling more people at once or getting through leadership, which I'm getting ahead of myself, getting other people to sell on your behalf. But in either situation, you gain more leverage on the amount of people that find out about your stuff and ideally shift their perception of it so that they want to buy it again and again and again. And when I talk about sell, I actually talk about everything that takes someone from completely unaware to giving you money. All right? So that's all of acquisition. So that's advertising, marketing, sales, branding, promotion, and conversion, as in getting the person to buy. And so the easiest way or the most important part of this is what I would call the callout, which is people noticing your ad. And when I say ad, I mean if you reach out to somebody, that's an advertisement. You let people know about your stuff is the most important part. And so I love this quote by David Ogilvy. He says, after you've written your headline, you've spent 80 cents of your advertising dollar, which just goes to show that that first impression is the part that one, I test the most and the one that will shift their perception the most. Which is also part of something called framing. And so how you position, again, how people perceive, the reason the intro of a video is so important, the reason the intro of an ad is so important, the reason the moment you introduce yourself, how you introduce yourself is so important is because it frames everything else that happens afterwards. And so let's imagine that you're at a cocktail party in a big ballroom, lots of people talking in groups, loud music playing in the background. In all that noise, a single sound pierces through it all and you turn around. You wanna know the sound? Your name. You hear it and instantly look for the source. And so a callout is whatever you do to get the attention of your audience. Callouts go from hyper-specific to get one person's attention to not at all specific to get everyone's attention. So let me explain. So if someone drops a tray of dishes in that ballroom, everyone looks. If a child yells, "Mom," then all the moms look. If someone says your name, then only you look. But again, they all get attention. And so we wanna make our callouts specific enough to get the right people and broad enough to get as many of them as we can. And so with each of these skills, you will typically start narrow and go broader. Facebook, when it started as a product, was very narrow and then it just started with college students and then it expanded to high school students and then it started going to adults, right? When you sell in the beginning, you're, you're just going to advertise to a very small niche, as close, you know, as tiny as you can, mostly because you can't compete in the ocean. You're, you're not a big enough fish yet, but you can win in the tiny pond. Or maybe even a puddle. But then over time, as you get better and bigger, you can expand the breadth of the people that you choose to target. And so you will always convert a higher percentage, not absolute, but percentage of an audience by being more specific. And so the easiest way to figure out what your customers want to hear when you're advertising and selling to them is to simply ask them. And if you wanna be a super advanced student, go look at user reviews of all your competitors and figure out the things they complain about. And then talk about those pain points and the things that you want to attract them with. Now the 0.1% know how to build things, then how to let people know about it and get them to give them money for it. The second core skill here, which then leads us to the third skill, because once you're building and selling and building and selling, you're probably going to need help and that enters into leading. So these are the social dynamics. The reason I think leading is arguably the most important skill besides learning is that it is a meta skill. It gains you access to everyone else's skills. And so at its most basic form, if you were the best leader in the entire world, you would be able to get the best builder and the best seller to come work with you and align with your overall objective. I consider building, selling, and leading to be the tripod of business. You must have all three. They are the tripod of business. You must have all three. Now you can be, uh, imbalanced and have a stool that looks a little bit weird, but if you don't have one of these legs, this thing's going to fall over. And so you must have all three. Now the extent to which you have all three will dictate how much money you're able to make. So if you can only sell and you can't build and you can lead, then you'd have a bunch of people who are really good at selling something terrible. So this would be like the Wolf of Wall Street's business. So what he went to jail for. And so that is basically lying at scale. Not good. If you just build and no one finds out about it and you're good at leading, for example, then you'll just have this thing that's sitting in your garage that you promise is amazing, but no one knows about it. And so if no one knows about it, no one can buy it. And on the third extreme, and this is why this one's a little bit more interesting, is that if you could lead and somehow you found a bunch of people that no one in the organization knew how to sell or build, this is why this is a meta skill, then well really nothing would happen because you'd have nothing to build and no one would find out about it and you'd just have a lot of people that were somehow organized around doing nothing. And so these are the core things that actually generated the activity. The leadership aligns those activities in one direction. So fundamentally, Every single time you're considering bringing someone into an organization, and this is what we're thinking about, like either you are the person getting brought into the organization or you're the person that owns the organization, but we're talking about the 0.1 wealthiest percent of people and this is how they think, which is that every new person needs to support either selling more people or making them worth more through making the product better. Because the sad truth of it is that every new hire is a guaranteed cost but is not a guaranteed return. Unless they are building or selling, they must support the activity of building or selling or they are waste. To give you a classic example that's been touted a lot is Steve Jobs, the late, great Steve Jobs, was a very good leader. Now, a lot of people say that he was tough, but they say that they did the best work of their lives when they worked with him. It's commonly stated that Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone. He built the team that built the iPhone. This is why it's such a high leverage skill. And this is why it's a skill that the 0.1%, if you look at the top of the Forbes list, all have this. That's fundamentally why it's the third bucket of the biggest skills that generate the most money. But if you're like, huh, is there any other variable that dictates how much the 0.1% make? Well, I'm going to give you the advanced one, which is all of this is multiplied by risk, which is the risk that you're willing to take on. And so whether you're an employee of a company or you're an owner of a company, there is a risk that you take on for the building, selling, and leading activities that you do that generate the economic activity that gives you the percentage of the production out there. If you're willing to take on more risk, this is a multiplier on all of these skills. So if Steve Jobs, and I'll give you Steve Jobs as a perfect example. When Steve Jobs had the company when it originally went public, he owned 15% of the business. He ended up leaving for a period of time, starting Pixar, and then he came back like 10 years later. When he came back, he was gifted a much smaller percentage of the company. Now here's where it's crazy. When he originally IPO'd Apple, he had 15%. If he had not sold those shares, that 15% today would be worth $465 billion, making him by far the richest man in the world had he lived to this point. And kept his shares. And so the reason that he was never the richest man in the world is because when he sold his shares, he gave up a lot of his risk. He gave up a lot of his upside. Bill Gates, to the same degree, when he IPO'd, had about 49% of Microsoft. Now, if Bill Gates had continued to double down on that risk rather than selling and diversifying, which is what he did, today Bill Gates would be worth $1.5 trillion. He would be more than a trillionaire. But because he chose to diversify, he decreased his risk. And so he got less on the asset that he owned, which was built through building, selling, and leading. If this video is helping make things click for you, which is, okay, I, I want to make the most money humanly possible. I want to model the 0.1%, and I understand that I have to build, I have to sell, I have to lead, and I multiply all of that by the amount of risk that I'm willing to take on. If you know somebody else in your organization or you want to share this with your employees, it would mean the world to me because I'm trying to make the world a better place through economic activity. And I believe that fundamentally every economy in the world could be super developed if everyone had enough education and skills. So building and selling, that feels relatively straightforward. You learn how to code, you learn how to make a service, or you learn how to advertise, you learn how to sell. But how do you learn how to lead? Well, I think an important part of this is learning how to orient behavior in a specific direction that yields the highest returns. And when I say orient behavior, I mean the behavior of the people who work for you or work alongside you. And the strongest way that I have been able to get better as a leader is by eliminating wasted communication.. And so what that means is both internally amongst themselves but also for me to them. And so that means that I think the vast majority of people are very ineffective communicators, is that they say many words and most of the times they don't even know what they're saying. And I'll give you an example. So I had a director a couple days ago who came up to me and they wanted to reconcile. This director was over a department and they said, hey, one of the people on my team has basically complained that somebody who's a direct report of mine, is doing this issue. And so I said, and I'll tell you the words that they said. They said, I'm here because I want to bridge the gap between this department and this department, and I want to support the growth and the overall initiatives of the business. And all of those sound like wonderful corporate words, but I looked at the person and I said, what do you want to have happen? And they kind of looked at me differently. What behavior are we currently doing that you would like us to stop doing? Or something that we're currently not doing that you would like us to start doing? And so what's interesting is that when that question was posed to the individual, they actually didn't have the answer. And so this is very common, is that someone will know that there is a problem, but they will not come with an intended change in behavior. And so you have to take that extra next step and say, okay, there's a problem. What potential changes in behavior on my team or someone else's would need to occur in order for us to decrease the likelihood that this problem happens again in the future? And so when you frame things from what would I like to occur, what would I like to have happen as a consequence of this conversation, you'll find that many conversations don't need to be had to begin with because most people don't even define that. And so they basically just make face noise at each other for 30 minutes and call it a meeting, but no one actually changes what they do. And so if you don't change what you do as a result of communication, It was wasted. It literally took effort from both people, time from both people, and then no change occurred. And believe it or not, this is the vast majority of people in the vast majority of companies, which is why the biggest threat to big organizations is waste. And so if you want to lead, you need to learn how to communicate clearly what you want someone to do, what you want them to stop doing, or you want them to do instead. And by defining it in those terms, it cuts away a lot of the ambiguity. I had a meeting not that long ago with a different person in the company, and I said, I don't understand what you do. Please explain it to me. Now, most people you could imagine would be terrified by this question, but I said, I'm not intending to intimidate you. The point is that I actually don't understand and I'm seeking, seeking clarity. And so one of the first things the individual brought up is, I do a lot of this research so that I can better understand X, Y, and Z. And I said, what does that change about what we do? And the honest answer was it hadn't changed anything about what we do. And I said, so then if all of this time that you spend researching doesn't change our behavior, you don't need to do it. It is a waste of time. And so just like I could measure the temperature in the rooms when I record them and I could measure the temperature of every room that I walk in throughout the day, just because I can measure it doesn't mean it's gonna change anything. And so many people spend a lot of time trying to, quote, understand, but the only way you will get a return on that understanding is by changing what you do. And so finally, after several kind of peeling back the layers, I was able to say, you do this, this is what you do. You click these buttons, you do this stuff. Okay. And then all of a sudden the scope of what this person's role was went from this to this. And I was like, these are the only things that drive economic activity. So how do we get you to do more of these things, do them faster, do them better? That is the question that we need to answer together. And by doing this, it just, it just melts away a lot of the pretense, a lot of the corporate jargon. And so if you get into a conversation with someone and you don't know what they're saying, don't assume that you're dumb. Assume that no one knows what's going on. And I think that if you seek clarity and you seek truth, then you will ultimately find the best outcomes rather than seeking agreement. And so we started with education and technology. Now we zoomed in at the second layer of the individuals, what the actual 0.1% wealthiest people did.. They zoom in on their skills of building products that people love, being able to communicate the value of that product and sell them on buying it and using it, and then leading the team of people that could help do that at scale over and over and over again. And if you're like, well, which one of these should I start with? Well, everyone starts on a different BSL path. Now I personally started with selling because it's a chicken and egg issue. At the very beginning, you must have something to sell. As soon as you have a basic amount of something to sell, then you must sell it. Once you do this well, then you will have to recruit people to help you out, so then you will learn leadership. And so this tricep will continue to expand as you get better and better and better at all 3 of the tripod skills. So if you're starting from scratch, you first have to figure out what to sell. Once you figure out what to sell, you need to learn how to sell it. No economic activity can occur without both of these things. You can't sell nothing and you can't build and not sell. A dollar must exchange for goods and services. So they have to know about it and you have to have something to exchange. And so obsessing over your logo and your branding and your website is neither of these things unless you're selling the websites, right? And so you want to just start on how do I get people's attention so that they can give me their contact information so that I can communicate with them and explain the value of the thing I have. And then what is required for me to deliver that thing I have. The first business I ever started, I just gave people my email and my phone number and then I emailed them personalized nutrition plans and workout plans. So I had no CRM, I had no website. I just did those two things. If you are a business owner, at some point your business will get limited by either the quality of your product or the product offerings you have, your ability to sell them, meaning you don't have enough people coming in the door, Or you have both of these okay, but you can't seem to scale it because you need more people. And so being able to properly identify which of these things is the constraint will tell you where you need to reinvest your time to get more out of yourself. And then when you do that, you expand the lever and then more money shoots out. So how does build, sell, lead relate to education technology? Well, the educational component is fairly straightforward. You develop the skills around each of these three. But what about technology? Well, if you can use technology in order to build more things faster, then you will make more money. If the thing that you build is technological and allows more people to use it, then you will make more money. If somebody builds a table, they will make less money than a developer who knows how to make an app that a million people can use because they're able to provide value at scale just with their own skillset. But it's the skill of using technology. So these things are very much interwoven. With sales. Sure, you can sell one-on-one, but the leveraged way of doing it is using technology. If you can develop a personal brand and have trust with a larger audience, then you can sell one-to-many. If you run advertisements one-to-many, you're using the technology of the platform and media so that you can get more people's attention and then ultimately convert it. From a leadership perspective, if you can track what your employees are doing, if you run a project management systems, you can increase the output per employee, by using technologies around leadership. In each of these core pillars of value creation, you're going to have the education to use the technology to maximize your output per unit of time and ultimately the money that you make, which is what the 0.1% do. And so with the advent of things like Copilot for coders, coders can actually write code 10 times faster than they could before. And so with that as our working model, anybody who is not using technology is always going to be at a disadvantage. And so if you want to be in the top 0.1%, it means you're competing with everyone. And so you want to use as many advantages as you can. And on a personal note, I would say that I have been someone who's been more hesitant to use technology. And I think that it has been a limiter to my success. And so it's something that I'm spending more and more time on of, okay, how can I incorporate more technology into the products and services that we build? How can I incorporate more technology into how we advertise and sell? How can I incorporate more technology into how we lead, recruit, manage people? Even on the recruiting side, it's like if we can have predictive analytics to figure out which candidates have higher likelihood of matching with the organization and being good long-term productive employees, then that decreases so much waste for us. And again, it increases our output per unit of time. And the coolest thing about education specifically, not necessarily technology, is that when When you have these skills, they cannot be taken away. They can't be confiscated. They can't be stolen. And this is near and dear to my heart because, you know, my family was, or that we are Iranian, but during the revolution, we left the country and all of our assets were seized. And so in the United States, this seems like a very crazy thing that you could lose everything overnight. But in other countries, this happens all the time. The government just says, oh, all that money is ours now. All that land is ours now. Your house is actually our house now. But the thing is, is that the family members that I had who had skills and then were able to scatter all over the world, which my family is, they were able to start all over again and rebuild what they had lost. The ones who didn't have skills and only had the few assets they had struggled a lot and still do to this day. So the first layer was global and we figured out education technology. Underneath of education technology, it's like where are we investing That education technology, technology around building, education around building, technology around selling, education around selling, technology around leadership, education around leadership. And so in each of those settings, if we invest in them, the lever expands and more money shoots out the other side. And so the final layer is environmental. So BSL creates the money and then that money is either wasted, so it goes off the map, boop, it's stored, meaning it basically stays the same, or what the top 0.1% do is it's multiplied. And the way that they multiply it is they either buy stuff or they lend. So you can only do two things with money. You can give it to people and then they give you a little bit more of it back in the form of debt, or you buy stuff with it that either goes up in value, sometimes it can go down, but the hope is that it goes up in value and it produces an output. So an example of the storage would be I buy a brick of gold. A brick of gold does nothing, and it's speculative in that we hope that somebody else in the future will pay us more for that brick of gold. And no matter what currency I have, I can trade gold for euros, I can trade gold for, for, for Bitcoin, I can trade gold for US dollars. It doesn't matter. It's a store of value. And as far as we've had in human history, people still value gold. Now, you could take all of the gold in the world, and this is a Warren Buffett example, You could take all the gold in the world and put it in the middle of a baseball field and it would be about as tall as the stadium and be a big round globe. It doesn't matter what you do to that big ball of gold, 100 years from now it'll still be a big ball of gold. But if you took that same amount of economic value and then you put it, you would be, and you invested it through buying, you could buy all the farmland in the United States and about 13 ExxonMobils. And so the amount of money that those farms and ExxonMobil would spit out every single year over that 100 years would be at least greater than zero. And so in that way, this is how this loop of wealth gets spun. And so when you are buying or lending, you're either lending to people who are doing BSL and the risk that you incur is that they don't actually succeed and you never get your money back. You're compensated for the risk based on the interest that you charge for them. So you basically sell them money for more money later. With buying the assets, what you're doing is you're buying a percentage or the entirety of their build-sell-lead. Now if you recall earlier, I said this is all multiplied by risk. This is where that money goes. You take on that risk. And so as a result, you get to have an outsized percentage of what other people are doing to build, sell, and lead. And then this gives you even more money over time. And so in understanding this, this is why I built Acquisition.com the way I did, which is we have these companies that generate money and then that money either goes back into the company to make it a bigger company or it goes into buying another company that generates money. But then this process repeats itself over and over and over again and it compounds unto itself. So no matter how big you get, you can keep reinvesting all of that money and then it's a percentage-based growth. So whether it's $1 million growing by 10% or $1 billion growing by 10%, you're still growing 10%. But the absolute amount of what that 10% is is $100,000 versus $100 million. And so if you're the individual, you can take this money and you can invest it in people who are going to do build, sell, lead in your company where you take on more risk, which means that you get outsized returns on the investment in the people that's within an organization. You can buy a slice of an organization of all of those people and not have to necessarily do anything. That's what the public markets are more or less all about or investment funds do. Or at the most micro level, you could just take that money and invest it in yourself by buying skills. And what does buying skills even mean? It means you pay someone to give you feedback on an activity such that you can replicate the outcome that they can already do. Fundamentally, that's what buying skills is. And so you find someone who has the skill that you want and then you offer them money so that you can continue to do the activity in front of them. Until eventually you replicate the outcome that they have because they have taught you the variables that they use to recreate that skill. And once you can do it without them and get the same outcome, then you have learned. And so if we're thinking about this in terms of levels, you can have a piece of a company, you can have people that you hire in a company, Or you can put that money into yourself, but all 3 of these are going to relate to BSL, build, sell, lead, and to what degree is the risk that you take on. So buying a piece of a company would be probably higher risk. A little bit less risk would be bringing somebody in and paying them. The lowest risk is going to be investing in yourself. But here's where it gets kind of interesting, is that when you invest in yourself, this can also give you all of the skills that you need to do all of these things better, which is why, and I will continue to hit this until the day I die, you will always be the best investment. And so you want to max out this bucket to the greatest degree possible. And the limitation that you will have when you do reinvest in yourself is the time it takes to learn the skills and how many skills you can learn. But at any given time, you should always be spending as much money as you can to buy the most valuable skill that is constraining your growth. And so if you look at build, you look at sell, you look at lead, you figure out the one that's limiting you the most and you put as much cash into that thing as you can, you pay every expert you possibly know or don't know or need to know in order to get what you need to move forward. If I could isolate one decision that has changed my life forever was the willingness to invest my money in the potential to learn a skill from someone who is further ahead than me. And I, I will probably do that till the day I die because I have gotten better returns on that money than anything else in the world. And if you enjoyed this video on what the 0.1% wealthiest people invest their time and money into, then you're going to love the video that I made on leverage. It's the number 1 video on my channel. It's basically how to go through a wealth warp of time. It was one of the first presentations I made before I became public, basically a consolidation of many of the thoughts that I had that created the generational wealth that my wife and I have been able to experience. I hope you enjoy it.