If I Wanted to Make My First $100K in 2026, I’d Do This
In this motivational personal‑finance video, Shanli Liu (CPA, CTP) shares a six‑step, highly actionable roadmap for earning and banking a first $100,000. He begins by describing the emotional breakthrough of having $100K in the bank – the point at which he stopped worrying about basic expenses and could think long‑term. He then outlines concrete tactics: (1) slash all living costs to free cash flow, including extreme frugality on food, clothing, housing, and transportation; (2) reclaim and structure time by eliminating 9‑to‑5 distractions, using a 4‑4‑4 split (promotion, delivery, building) and separating “maker” and “manager” blocks to avoid task‑switching; (3) research marketable skills that already have paying demand, focusing on a single product‑service‑avatar‑channel combo; (4) learn deliberately through high‑iteration feedback, analyzing the top 10 % of outcomes, iterating 10,000 times, and using one‑on‑one mentorship; (5) invest the saved money wisely in three buckets – tools, implementation help (courses, tutoring), and trial attempts (ads, software) – to accelerate active income; (6) resist lifestyle inflation, keeping expenses low even as income rises, to ensure the $100K stays in the bank. Throughout he peppers personal anecdotes (sleeping on a gym floor, sharing a bedroom with a roommate, the “business backpack” book giveaway) and motivational encouragement, positioning the plan as a Maslow‑style checkpoint for anyone who wants to pursue bigger dreams.
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$42 million in distributions, a $46.2 million exit, $106 million in a weekend. Most people hear those numbers and think, oh, that's probably when he felt the richest. That's actually not the truth. The moment that I felt the wealthiest in my entire life was when I had $100,000 in my bank account. That was the first big unlock for me as a person. And the reason is before that I was sleeping on a gym floor and doing math on whether I could afford groceries., right? And once I had $100,000, that was when I stopped having to worry about tomorrow, right? About paying rent, about paying dues, about paying my cell phone bill or paying my car insurance. You can't think about your long-term vision if you're trying to pay rent, right? That's just real. And so in this video, I wanna give you a 6-step roadmap, as clear as humanly possible, to making and banking your first $100,000. If you're a, a big baller business owner, then you can skip this one. But if you don't have that yet, then this is just a pure give on my part of trying to help you get there. The first step is that we have to cut all costs so that we can take more risk. When I say all costs, I mean all costs. That means you don't eat out anymore for anything. And if you're hungry, you deal with it. And if it's not from a discount grocery store, you don't buy it. Clothing? Like, what you have right now on your back is everything you need for the next 2 years, period. No exceptions. Just keep reusing it. Trade or go to Goodwill. You go to work, you go home, and home is ideally with your family or worst case with another family also trying to make it and save. And it's got to be as cheap as you possibly can. And I say this as somebody who lived through this. When I was beginning my journey, I was splitting a bedroom in a 6-bedroom house with one guy just in that bedroom. As in, like, every night we'd stare at each other and I'd be like, good night, John. He'd be like, good night, Alex. Then I blow out my candle. Everything about that was true minus the candle. And pro tip, if you sleep with a fan on your face, you can't hear anything. So, you know, if you have to deal with it, that's one way to do it. But I had roommates that I was paying like $300 or $400 a month for a very long time while I was beginning my business and started to actually make real money, and I still stayed there. Now, the next thing is gonna be your car. So if we think about expenses, ideally a paid-off clunker is the best way to go. If you can't, you want it to be as cheap as humanly possible, but ideally just pay off your car so you don't have to think about it again. All right, so then comes your food, your car, your shelter. And the reason that this is so important for us to basically stack up this cash flow, because you're working and making money, but right now you're probably spending all of it. So it's like we need to make this, we need to decrease it from the downside so we have this cash flow, this fluff that we can start spending and reinvesting in getting more skills, which I'll talk about in a second. All right, real quick, if you are on this path to your first $100K, I want to make it faster and easier for you. So this, these books, I had 3.6 million of these books that were donated by other entrepreneurs. These books I'm personally donating. And so if you are on the path, you can get all 3 of these books for the, like nothing basically, for just covering the shipping. So I think it's $16 or $17 all in for all 3 hardbacks shipped to you plus a 30-day trial of school. So you actually use this stuff and have the tools to apply it in. All right? So it's like, it's the best thing we call the business backpack. Pack. It's literally everything you need to get started, uh, online. I'm not promising you're gonna be a zillionaire. I'm not promising you make $100,000. I'm just saying it's a great, great way to start, and it's the best— it's one of the most valuable things I could possibly give you. And again, special thank you to all the entrepreneurs who donated the books, because we're doing our best to give them out. Now we have to cut all of our time costs. Step 2 is save time. And so if you work a 9-to-5 job, this is kind of just the reality of it. Your 9-to-5 job is not killing your dreams, all right? So just stop subscribing to that. You're wasting the 2 4-hour chunks of the day that you do have available to you, which is you're 5 to 9 in the morning and you're 5 to 9 at night. So what you wanna be doing is instead of just like mindlessly doom scrolling through life, right? Instead you're like, I have 4 hours before I have to go to work right now. If you work remotely, even better, cuz you can be more efficient with it. If you're not remote, then it might be 3.5 hours or you just wake up earlier. And I also say this as someone who did this, right? The reason that this whole like I wake up early in the morning became a thing for me was because that was the only time I could get ahead. And so I, I very much believe in Kobe Bryant's perspective on this. It's just like if everyone else is, is, you know, going to practice. He's like, well, if I do 2 extra practices a day, I'm going to move forward 3 times faster. And so one is we got our money back. Two, we got our time back. Now that we have our time back, we need to minimize the distractions in that time period because focus is achieved not through addition, but subtraction. When you remove everything else that doesn't matter, focus is what's left. Now, if you happen to be just— if you're on your path right now, so like let's say that you have— you're not at job. So you started a business, but it's not making as much as you want and you don't have the $100K in savings. Let me just give you the simplest formula that I had. It's kind of like the 2.0 version, which is a 4-4-4 split. So if you're at 9 to 5, then you got 5 to 9 and 5 to 9. If you don't have a, a, a 9 to 5 during the day that you gotta go to, then I like to do 4 hours of promotion. First thing I do when I get up is let people know about my stuff because if nobody knows about your stuff, they can't give you money. The second 4-hour chunk is delivery. So you give the people that gave you money what you promised them. The third 4-hour chunk is building. So this is building the future, figuring out what to do next and how to do it. This is a combination of two things. It's going to be the curation of opportunities, like what are all the things that are out there? I have to see them, find them. And then the second is the prioritization of those. Okay, there's 10 things I could do. This one thing is gonna get me the highest return. This is what I'm gonna prioritize my time and money towards. So big picture, you promote, you deliver, and you build. That's what you do with your time. Now, regardless of what job or business you have, If you want to save time, you need to understand this concept, which is understanding whether you are a maker or manager. A maker is when you're in the build mode. This is when you're completely locked in. You're like, no distractions. I have to go learn stuff. I have to go write copy, I have to go edit videos, I have to go make content, I have to go build this template that I'm going to sell to my customers, whatever. Manager is when you're interacting with other people. Now that could be client calls, that could be team calls, it could be vendor calls, any kind of conversations that you have to have. Slack messages, whatever. The thing is, is that managers, their perfectly productive day is no blank time, right? It's 5-minute chunks and you're just trying to have as many touchpoints and decisions as possible. A maker, a perfectly productive day is a completely empty calendar. So I don't know if you're anything like me. When I look at my calendar, I truly have nothing on it. I feel one, this immense sense of relief, and two, this huge amount of energy of possibility. Like what big thing can I get done today? And that's when I really move the ball forward. And I'm telling you, like the, the life hack of all hacks, a single habit that has changed my output was having my first 4 to 6 hours of my day to myself. So when you're in that maker-manager decision mode, I like to block at the micro level, my day is maker time, manager time, and then keep 'em separated because the biggest killer of productivity is task switching, right? So if you're trying to make and then you're slacking and then you're making and then you're texting. You're, you're screwed, right? So instead you just have to put the blinders onto your maker period. And then when you're in the manager period, it's like, go for it. Just be distracted and know that that's like the rest of your day is screwed. And I accept that. Like for me, Mondays are my day that I'm a manager and the rest of the week I try to do my absolute best to be a maker. Now that we have the money saved up and we're still, we got some cash, we drove down our living expenses, we drove down our time expenses. So we have free time and we're organizing it well and we're focused and productive during that time period. What do we do with the time? 3, which is research a skill that people already pay money for. And this is a key part. What you want to do, especially if you're like, I need to make more than I am right now, go find what people are already paying for. All right? So on a B2C side, it just looks, you look at all the things that a business does, right? So a business gets advertised, so they make content, they do outreach. There's the funnel building process that's associated with that. All of those things, each of those, are skills that on their own you could go build yourself a million-dollar-plus business off of. Just one of those. And so that's just on a B2B side as an example. On the B2C side, here's a very easy hack. Just print out your credit card statement or your bank statement and look at what you actually spend money on. So just think when you're selling to consumers, I'm going to give them time back that they otherwise wouldn't have. And for business owners, You're giving them money that they otherwise wouldn't have. But don't get overwhelmed with the zillion things that you can, that you can learn there. Pick one. And so I have a, a, a 1-1-1 rule, which is you wanna sell one product or service to one avatar on one channel until you make $1 million. That's it. So we saved our money, we saved our time, and then we researched the skill that people are already paying for today. That leads us to number 4, spend time learning. All right. So first of all, it's important that you understand what learning is if we're going to say what it means. So I say this because a lot of people spend their time trying to learn or sitting in front of a computer or listening to podcasts or whatever, but it doesn't actually change behavior, which, ding, ding, ding, that is the definition of learning, which is same condition, new behavior. If you're in the same condition, meaning you're in the same bedroom, you're looking at the same computer, and what you're doing every day is not changing, you are not learning. So use that as a simplest litmus test for understanding whether the content that you are consuming is valuable. If you cannot translate it, or the person who's teaching you, whoever it is, me or anyone, into what do I do now? So there's this big thing Malcolm Gladwell talked about, 10,000 hours is this common theme, which is it's not 10,000 hours, but 10,000 iterations. And the reason I like that framing is because it assumes that you will fail and it assumes that you will get better As you learn, right? It is that 10,000 iterations is a proxy for feedback loops, which means that if you do something, you get no feedback, it's virtually impossible to learn. So when we are doing stuff in the real world, a lot of times the real world will give you a feedback loop, but you post a piece of content, nothing happens. That is still feedback. It's that it sucked, right? But you can still get better. The fastest way to learn skills is to find somebody who's really good and hire them one-on-one. Fastest way to learn skills. I still did this in my early days even when I barely could afford it. So when I say I learn with first-party data, I give you a handful of examples, but this is a do this instruction list. So number one, you have to do a lot of volume in order to learn, right? I can't just have one sales call recording. I have just one comment that I try and learn from. I have to have lots of comments that I have to aggregate. I gotta put 'em together. Number two is that I analyze the top 10%. So what are the top 10% of sales calls? What are the top 10% of content? What are the, the top 10, you know, customer service resolution, uh, you know, person? What are, what are, what are these top 10% outcomes? What do they have in common? That the other 90% don't have. And you can apply this to any subject matter that you're trying to learn. So that is step 3. You analyze the difference. Step 4 is you figure out the most important details, like the eyes, like the feet, like the whatever. And this is, this is where a lot of people struggle, is that they, they don't know which part is important. And that's part of learning, is that you're like, there's 6 differences. I don't know which one was the reason. So you start trying them one at a time. It just is what it is. And so the final step is avoid the mistakes that the 90% is making., that are keeping them at the bottom and do more of the stuff at the top 10%. And you just continue to do another 100 repetitions. Look at the top 10, try and make the next 100 look like those 10, and do it over and over and over again until people are like, man, you're so good at this. You must be a natural. And that is fundamentally how you learn any skill. We saved our money so we could get aggressive. We saved our time so we'd have time to, to actually do the work. We researched which skills to learn. Then we spent our time actually learning and we went, walked through exactly what those 10,000 iterations look like. So what do we do now? Step 5 is you spend the money in the right places. So I think of this in 3 bigger buckets. You've got tools, you've got implementation help, and then you've got trial attempts. So think about that as like, where am I going to spend this time and money? Because you actually have to do this in order to get out. Like if you're, if you're just like, okay, I'm saving my time, save money, you're not gonna get to $100K, right? Like you have to do stuff too. So for tools, that might mean that you might buy a software too., right? That might mean like a CRM or a landing page thing or school. It's $9 a month, right? Like chill. All right. Um, to get started, right? Because for you to like, the alternative is you could try to rebuild the entire thing. Yeah. Or you could just like go to grab a tool that's already there, save yourself some time. So that's what kind of tools looks like. Implementation. This is where you can buy courses, you can buy, uh, communities on school if you're looking to, to learn anything. You can get tutoring, which I'm a huge advocate of, and for some reason this is like fallen out of vogue. But if you can get someone to just give you one-on-one help, my God, it's so valuable. The next is trial attempts. So that means like, okay, I want to start running ads. Okay, great. Well, you got to spend money on ads. Or like, hey, I want to start, you know, making content. You're going to have to spend money on maybe some of the editing software that goes with that. Like, of course there are free things and be as cheap as possible, but accept that some of these things are kind of minor investments that will give you huge leverage on your time. So the last step and the whole point of all this is to just increase your active income. People look at the billionaires, they're like, oh, they live on passive income. What people miss is that most billionaires who are self-made made their money from making money, meaning they had active income. They had monster active income that they could deploy. Like, you get rewarded for the risk you take on. You cannot take any risk on if you have no time and no money. So you need to go, go find that risk, create something that you can put at risk so that you can get rewarded for it. And we do that through increasing our skill sets and our active income. And so You're like, okay, well those are the 5 steps. What's the last step? Number 6, do not increase your lifestyle. All right, I know guys who are making $40,000 a month and made it for years, great sales guys, and spent every single dollar. I've got multiple friends who didn't start saving money until their 40s, and they were like, oh my God, I can't believe I just like lived that way, right? You wanna be rich, not look rich, right? This is about $100K in the bank, not $100K in revenue. Everything minus food and shelter is your profit. I say this as once things started working out for my gym, my first gym, I was making about $20,000 a month in income, personal. I was still splitting the room, paying $400 a month in rent because I was like, well, dude, I need to say, like, my goal was not to stop at $20,000 a month. I was like, I want to go big and I'm going to need all this cash to open a new location, to learn more stuff, to attend more conferences, all of this stuff because I wanted to learn. And so basically the day that you stop spending money on learning is the day you decide that you do not want to make more. And so zooming all the way out, The 6 steps to getting your first $100,000. You gotta stop spending money so you have money to spend on the right stuff. You gotta stop wasting time so that you have time to invest in the right stuff. What stuff do you invest in? Number 3 is you have to research. You gotta pick, you gotta look. And the best way to look is not to risk it on something that you don't know, but find stuff people are already spending money on. The 4th is now that we know the thing that we're gonna focus on, we're gonna eliminate all the other distraction and we're gonna spend all our time learning. Number 5, the money that you do have, you wanna spend on tools, implementation help, and attempts, trying it and failing. And then finally, once things actually start working, you'd never get to the $100K in a bank account just by increasing your income. You also gotta not let your lifestyle take back over so you can finally bank it. And the reason this is so kind of near and dear to my heart is that when I had the first $100K was the first time that, I mean, I remember looking at Layla and I was like, we did it. I said we could do nothing and fuck off for 3.5 years. And it was crazy 'cause like I think about that now, right? 2 people, $100,000 in savings, 3 years. And I wasn't thinking about it in terms of investments or anything like that. I just knew that I didn't have to worry about rent. I didn't have to worry about food. And that was when I was able to really start thinking long term. And so I want as many people as possible to get that point because many of you have bigger dreams than that. But you can't get there until you pass this checkpoint. Like it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like until you're, you're not thinking about food and shelter, it's amazing to wanna change the world. But if you gotta pay rent tomorrow, You got to pay rent tomorrow, right? And so this is the plan to help you do that.
