If You're in Your 20s or 30s, Here's How to Win (at Anything)
In this motivational business talk, Shanli Liu (CPA, CTP) argues that the single most effective strategy for achieving outsized success in business and life is to focus on "doing more" – increasing volume, repetition, and scale rather than obsessing over incremental optimization. She frames "more" as the highest risk‑adjusted return move because it leverages proven systems while avoiding the guaranteed performance dip that comes with frequent changes. Liu contrasts maximizers (who seek the biggest possible output) with optimizers (who seek the best output per unit input), urging entrepreneurs to adopt a maximizer mindset. She illustrates the principle with anecdotes: Sherrod’s 260 real‑estate events in a year that grew a $200 M business to $1.2 B, and the $105 M launch of the "Money Models" book achieved by creating and banking over 2,000 ad creatives. Liu explains the fixed‑cost/variable‑reward model of change (≈20 % guaranteed loss vs. modest potential gain) and introduces the ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) for selecting high‑return bets. She outlines a practical scaling hierarchy for paid ads – more creative, more spend, then more platforms – and stresses that absolute returns matter more than relative efficiency. The talk also touches on the psychological cost of pursuing an exceptional life, the need to accept lower‑quality work during volume‑building phases, and the importance of relentless, sometimes painful, volume to dominate any competitive arena.
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I have used one strategy to win repeatedly across 13 years in business and also outside of business. And it's one of the biggest reasons that we had a $105 million launch for $100 Million Money Miles in 72 hours for my latest book. And I'm gonna explain why it's the highest risk-adjusted return move that you can make to win more in business or just win more in life. And so if you're not sure what to do right now within your specific business, no matter what industry or size business you're in or whatever goal you're pursuing, This will help. I talk about more, better, new a lot, but I want to dive into the one that is near and dear to my heart, the one that is, that has made me the man that I am, which is more. And I want to talk about that because the fundamental question that every single business owner needs to answer, and even every person pursuing any skill or endeavor needs to answer, is why can't I do more? And for most people, doing more is the answer, and it's far more common than it is more. What's very sneaky about more is that you get to a point and then you say, there's no way I can do more. And at that point is where the big unlocks in volume really occur. Her. Napoleon had this really great quote back in the day, and maybe it's misattributed to him, but he said, quantity has a quality unto itself. Meaning like, if you do so much volume, you do so much work, and in the military sense, if you just have so many people, at some point it almost has its, it takes on its own quality of the amount of work, the amount of people, the amount of volume that you're putting into something, whatever it is that you wanna break through. So big picture, I wanted to give you a couple cool little anecdotes to reinforce this. Some of you guys know about Sherrod. He was on the live with me. He's our president at ACQ. I don't tell you two stories about Sherrod. I'll tell you the moment where like we went from, of being friends to me being like, man, I really want him to be, you know, president of Acquisition.com. So he was talking about how he was growing Real. And so Real was a $200 million per year business and he had grown it from $200 million to $1.2 billion in less than 3 years. So like 30 months. And I wanna put that there as a, as a moment for you guys to think about that, how, how insane that is. $200 million to $1.2 billion, less than 3 years. How does he do it? We're having dinner and he says, I just did 260 events in the last 365 days. I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, I flew around and I did every single real estate event. I spoke on every single stage. And that's how I generated, you know, more demand for our platform for realtors. And when he said that to me at dinner, I was like, this guy, he gets it. Now we've been friends for years, but seeing him so tactically involved in the business and being like, that was the thing that took a $200 million business to $1.2 million just Sheer volume. Now, most people might hear that and think, well, yeah, I speak on stages one time a month. And, you know, I mean, I'm on stages all the time. It's like, no, no, you're not on stages all the time. You have no idea what being on stages all the time actually means. Most business owners wildly underestimate the amount of volume, one, that is required, and two, that they are capable of. Your capability is always higher than what is required. But the thing is, is that you might not know it yet. And so I've had so many times in my life that has become my de facto operating principle. And so I want to read you this. This is from my internal sales handbook that I have for my sales team. This is the culture of acquisition.com. Like, we ask, how can we do more? Many people say they want to be in the top 1% or 0.1% or even 0.01%, but saying that has zero bearing on whether it happens. Achievement comes from actions, not aspirations. So let's get real. To be the top 1%, you need to enter a room of 100 people and leave number 1. To be the top 0.1%, you need to enter a room of 1,000 people like a local high school and leave number 1. To be the top 0.01%, you need to enter an arena of 10,000 people and leave number 1. Think about it, a stadium. And in a battle to the death in that stadium, you have to come out on top. You beat everyone, not almost everyone, everyone. And so if you have the goal to be in the top 0.01%, do you think that you can live a normal life? Do you think that you can keep the same friends? Do you think that you can keep the same hobbies? Do you think you can stay up late and sleep in on weekends? Do you think that you don't have to sacrifice what average people care about? Do you think that they will support you when you start to pass them? Do you think anyone will think this is healthy, balanced, or logical? No. And they're right. But it doesn't matter when you want to be the 0.01%. There's no greater waste of time than explaining yourself to people who actively don't support you. It's normal for people to not understand why you do what you do. I say this because you cannot make yourself exceptional and live a normal life. To make yourself exceptional, you must live an exceptional life. And an exceptional life does not always mean better. It just means that it's so different that most people will reject it. And when that happens, you must reject them as well. Oil and water do not mix. That is what it really means to be exceptional. You must become the exception. So I routinely get asked the secret to success, and it just comes down to this. Number 1, get better. Number 2, never stop. If you do only those 2 things, you will win on a long enough time horizon. The problem is people convince themselves they no longer want something once they see the experience of how hard it really is. So I wanna set this expectation for you as you head off to practice scripts, mark your calendar, and set your alarms. The work begins when your motivation ends. Just win. That's from our internal handbook that we have at ACQ, uh, for our sales guys. And I, I wanna read that to you because I wanna frame what I'm talking about today. It seems like a very simple thing just saying, just do more, but like it's almost become become an art form and something that I have like a deep passion about, which is very odd to say, but more actually has the highest risk-adjusted return move that you can possibly make within the business. The reason more has the highest risk-adjusted return for a business or for you is that it's so hard to get something to work, right? Many of you guys have tried anything. You have a new marketing channel, a new sales script, a new offer. You try a bunch of things and then finally something works. The likelihood that you changing that thing and that next thing working is actually statistically very low. Think about how many different things you had try before something actually worked. And so the idea is, okay, I have these limited resources, I can allocate them to take a risk and roll the dice, or I have this thing that I know works and I need to jam more into that machine, which is why the highest risk adjusted return move. Now, one of the other misconceptions that I think is that there's a huge preponderance of people who talk about optimization, getting as much as you can for as little as you can. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The difference is that there are optimizers and there are maximizers. Maximizers try to ask the question, how do I get as much as I possibly can? Optimizers ask, how do I get as much as I can out of as little as I can? When you're looking at returns, maximizers win. So what's the difference between first place, you know, gold in the Olympics and second in the Olympics, silver, right? A tenth of a second in a race. But what is the realistic difference, the real world or pragmatic difference between being the best in the world and second best, everything. And so when you're talking to an Olympian, you're talking to somebody who wants to be the top 1%, 0.01%, 0.0001%. Diminishing returns are still returns. You need to do more because you're trying to win, not be cute about saying that you had great return. And I say this as somebody who was a converted optimizer. So in the earlier part of my life, I really prided myself on doing school with as little work as possible. I was like, you nerds. I was like, you guys needed to study. I can walk in and hit a 91 with no study. And I'll tell you the story that really, really changed my life. So this guy named Kemp Knott, he was like— and hopefully Kemp, you know, maybe you'll see this— I gave Kemp a hard time. I did, when I was in high school. And, and he was a kid who didn't catch on to stuff as fast. And you know what, Kemp's a successful guy now. He's done great. But this thing happened. So all of high school, I, I kind of gave this guy a hard time. And when we went to go apply to colleges, I wanted to go to Duke. So Duke's a top 5 school in the US, and I didn't get into Duke. I ended up going to Vanderbilt, which is also obviously a great school, but I wanted to go to Duke. And guess who got into Duke? Kemp Knott. And so it was really interesting is that this whole time, like, Kemp would go to study hall, he'd be like, teacher, you forgot to assign his homework. Like, he was that guy, right? And I honestly just really disliked him, but mostly because it probably just reminded me of my own inadequacies of like, I was just unwilling to do the amount of work that he was. And I, and I, I shamed him for doing the amount of work that he did. I was like, you have to work so hard just to try and, just try to try and come close to me. Right. But in the end, he got into the better college. And so it was this really humbling lesson for me that none of the colleges cared that I worked less than him. They just cared about who had the best applications and who had the best grades. And it was this really like very eye-opening experience. And so when I went to college, I had a different frame that I was like, well, I'm not going to lose. I want to go here and I want to maximize. I want to study all the hours of the day that I'm not in class, at the gym, or at the cafeteria. I'm in the library. And you can ask anyone that ever went to school with you, ever meet them, like, that's where I was. I was in the library 12 hours a day because I was like, well, if I just study more than everyone, I'll get good grades. And that worked out pretty good. That's just kind of a, just a little bit of framing around why I have such a, such a strong affinity for more. Now I'll give you a second kind of a little bit more heady reason. So I talked about how more is the highest risk adjusted return. I talked about how diminishing returns are still returns. They're still output, right? The next piece though is that change has a fixed cost and a variable reward. All right, so let me explain what that means. So I want you to imagine that this line right here— ooh, nice and wet, how I like it. My markers, calm down, guys. Okay, so I've got this line. This represents your revenue or whatever your current level of activity or output is. Okay? Now what happens is most entrepreneurs, they say, you know what, I'm gonna change something. They think they're going to change something and things are going to get better, right? You tweak something, you mess around, you change your page, change your script, change your onboarding process, whatever, right? So then what happens? Well, if there's people involved, typically output will go down. You have to retrain the team. They have to practice. You know, this variable affected two other variables you didn't know about. And this is completely based on my observation. You typically get about a 20% decrement or decrease in performance. What ends up happening after that is it might not work and then you stay here. It might be worse and this goes here, or it might get better. And it comes back up eventually, right? And then maybe you have a 5% higher output here. This is now your new baseline. Now here's the thing. If you have a 20% guaranteed decrease and you have the potential for a 5% increase, do you take that bet? No. But I see entrepreneurs every day, myself included, for many years taking that bet over and over again because I was like, I just have to get better. I just have to get it better. But it was a fallacy. It's not true. Sometimes, like, your business will never be perfect and you have to accept that fact. It will not be perfect. And the thing is, is you don't even know if it's going to get better. You just aren't sure if it's, quote, good enough. And so you just want to change it. You want to mess with it, right? But the magic is the compounding returns you get when you do the same thing over and over again. You get this, this depth of understanding, this depth of skill that happens with repetition, right? If necessity is the mother of invention, repetition is the father of skill. But let's look at what entrepreneurs will normally do. Maybe they'll start seeing some increase here, but what do they do next? They say, you know what, I've got this other idea I have. And so then they get another 20% decrease. And so they're constantly living significantly below their output means or your revenue or whatever your thing is below what your potential is because you're constantly changing stuff. And I want to be real with you for a second. If you're a small business owner, you've got maybe 10, maybe 20 employees, or if you have anything less than that, then like hear me right now.. The amount of resources that you have to implement change are so limited. I pick like one big thing a year that I do, like one. And what happens is when you realize how limited your resources are in order to deploy successfully a new change or a new experiment, what happens is it forces prioritization. It forces you to focus on what things— if I only had one thing that I could do this year, what one thing would I be like, this is the bet I'm gonna take? Well, it certainly wouldn't be a 5% thing, right? Well, maybe if we write handwritten cards, we'll get a 5% increase in referrals. Maybe, right? But given those resources, what else could you do? And so when you look at the whole thing, the whole spectrum, and this is how I want to, I want to frame strategy for you around this. Most people think about business strategy. I got this from Sharon. I love this. I'm using it all the time. So good. Most people think about business strategy like they think about making dinner. So they go to their kitchen, they open up the fridge, they look what's inside, say, what am I going to whip up?, right? That's how they think about business strategy. But the question that we should be asking isn't, what am I gonna whip up from what's inside the fridge? We should ask the question, what the fuck do I want to eat? And then go get the ingredients and go make it happen. When you're saying, I'm only gonna take one bet or two bets this year, they're gonna be material, then it forces you to be like, it's gotta be worth it. Because here's the part that no one else knows. If you change nothing, believe it or not, people get better at their jobs. They get more skilled.. And so you'll typically have 1, 2, 3% increases that happen kind of month over month from you just not changing anything, from just leaving it alone. And so this has taken me so much time because I'm a natural, I'm a yes hinge, right? I'm like, let's do it, let's shake it up. But why? Because the times I've made the most money in my life have not been when I've been changing the most. It's actually when the business has been really boring and we're just blocking and tackling and doing it over and over again. And so this is something that some people never learn. Honestly, a lot of entrepreneurs never learned this. And the hard question, the hard problem to solve, is not the new idea that you want to try. It's how can I do more once I've already exhausted my existing way of doing more? So for me, the minimum rule is that it's got to be over 20% if I'm going to get a 20% loss guaranteed, right? Of course. But I don't even know if I'm going to get this 20% because we have to analyze this through— this is an investor frame, by the way. It's called, it's called ICE, right? Which is impact, which is like how big, right? Confidence is how likely. And then ease is what are the resources required for us to make this thing happen right now? The perfect world is something that's gigantic impact, gigantic competence, and super easy, right? That'd be the best type of thing. And so when we have a risk-adjusted return move, we think, okay, I think this could double the business. I have super high confidence and I think it could be easy. Then those are the types of bets we want to take. Because said differently, if you know that something could double your business with one move, why would you do three? Just because you have this compulsion to be busy, to mess with your team, doesn't mean it's what the business requires. And so a lot of people use the business to satisfy their own ADD, to satisfy their own need for novelty when the business thrives on same. It's very rare that you're Kodak and you need to adjust to the digital world. It's very rare. We love to tell these stories, but what we don't tell is the guy who just said, you know what, I've got 3 levels of my membership and we're doing $1 million a year. How do I 10x my traffic and get to $10 million a year? And then once I'm there, what do I need to do to get to another 10x of traffic to get to $100 million a year? We don't ask those questions because one of the fallacies or the pains of small business owners is that we, and myself included, right, we consistently think small. We don't think big enough. And so let me, let me give you an example on this, right? So let's say this is where people get obsessed around optimization. They get obsessed around relative returns rather than absolute returns. So let's say that you've got a marketing campaign where you put $100 in and you get, call it, let's say you get $1,000 out. Okay, so this is 10 to 1. Amazing, right? Cool.. But as soon as you scale to $200, let's say that you now are getting 6 to 1. So you get $1,200, which is pretty bad. You know, you spend twice as much money and you only made $200 more, right? Most people would say, oh, I should stop doing this. The maximizer says we made more money. Net-net, we made $900 here, $1,000 minus $100. Here we made $1,000. This is still more and this is what people miss out on. And so what happens is when you're a small business owner, you get obsessed with these relative returns and there's a point where you do want really high relative returns, want big high LTV to CAC and we can get into some of that stuff. But I want to just put a pin in this from a, from a larger thinking perspective because I will see people stay in these optimization loops for years. You know, my opt-in page converts at 30%, right? This is my opt-in and they'll just keep testing it, trying to get it to 35 or 40 or 45%. But the thing is, it's like you will never 10x your business by getting— this 30% will never go. It will never go to 300%. It's never gonna happen. But you can 10x your inputs. You can do more. You can do more and you can send more in, and then that will for sure increase your output, even if your relative return goes down. If I had the choice between spending $10,000 and making $100 back, 10 to 1, or spending $1 million and getting $2 million back, 2 to 1, I would take $1 million in to get 2 back every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Why? Because it's more. It's still more. It's absolute returns, absolute output. When you're thinking about yours, and I'll bring this to business now, right? I mean, I've been talking about business, but like more to business, more tactical. We have our core 4, right? We have our 4 ways of getting customers. We've got our warm outreach, We've got our cold outreach, we've got content, and then we've got paid, right? We have paid ads. These are the only 4 things that you can do. How do we do more? Right? So from an ads perspective, we'll start here. More can simply mean more money. It could also mean more creative. It could mean more platforms. All of these things are versions of more. And so I will typically do this in reverse order of risk, right? And so that means that I think that if I'm going to put this in order for paid, it'd be like, okay, well, the first thing to do is is make more creative. If I have more creative, I have a higher chance of getting more winners. If I have more winners, then I'm gonna get better ROAS and I'll be able to scale to more markets, more avatars, more segments. Great. So that's the first more I'm gonna do. The second more I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say I'm gonna spend more money on ads. How can I take my $100 a day and spend it for $1,000 a day? What stops me from doing that? And then third, if I do step 1 and step 2 and I make way more creative and I spend more money, then at that point I say, okay, what now that I've built this machine that can create 10 times the the creative volume, how do I do this within the context of Instagram? Or how do I do this in context of TikTok? Or how do I do this in the context of X, right? Each of these platforms. So some of you guys don't know this, but for the launch, for the Money Models launch, this puppy, right? So for this guy, the reason we were able to do 105 point whatever million at the launch is because we advertised so much, right? So we did, I think, 2,000+ ads before the 6 weeks out began, we had banked those 2,000 ads. 2,000. Like, count to 100 and then do that 20 times. And if you counted, it'd be like, wow, this is really boring. That's how long it takes to count to 2,000. We made 2,000 ads, which takes significantly longer than counting to 2,000. And so this is what people dramatically misunderstand is the amount of work it takes to do more. Because then I can say, well, my editor, I only have 5 editors. They can only do 5 ads a day each. And if that's 25 ads a day is all we can put out. Well, if I got to 2,000 ads, do I think that I would have a higher likelihood of hitting this big goal? Yes. What would it take? So it turned out we did the math. It took 15 editors. And so that means that we had to contract 10 more to do the editing. What does that cost? A lot less than $105 million. So we did it. So we figure out what would it take to get this big goal in terms of volume? And then what are the resources required to do that? And then is it worth it? And most times the answer is a resounding yes, not a small yes, a big ass yes. And so then we say, then what's stopping us? And the answer is almost always nothing. Just do more. Now that's how I would attack paid from a more perspective, right? From a content perspective, it's the same thing in terms of scaling editors. Now, one of the interesting things about doing more is that doing more is so painful. It's so much work. It's a lot of work to do more, but that pain forces another forcing function, which is you will try and minimize how much work you're doing, or at least you will try and get more. If you have a fixed work, like I'm gonna do 100 calls no matter what, I'm gonna do 100 minutes of content no matter what, what do you think happens? You think, man, it'd be really nice if I got higher pickup rates. So then you start looking at your time and saying, you know what, people pick up more in the afternoons for my market, or they pick up really hot between 5 and 7:00 AM in this particular market, whatever, assuming you, you know, follow the law, whatever. You start getting better. You start looking at the data, you start saying, go like, if I'm gonna do all this work, I might as well make it worth it. Right? But you have to put yourself in that pain, that pain of the lack of leverage, the pain of it being inefficient. But you have to keep it there because what happens otherwise is like the weak-minded, the weak of will, will do 100 for 1 day or 2 days in a row and they'll say, I didn't get the result I wanted. So it's like, duh, of course you didn't. You didn't do nearly enough.. And so this is why I think people stay small. They get obsessed with the margin. They get obsessed with the relative returns. They get obsessed with the optimization. But sometimes you just have to do a violent, unreasonable amount of work for an extended period of time because part of volume is the consistency associated with it. We couldn't make 2,000 ads in a day. We had to make 25 or 50 ads and we had to do it every single day for hundreds of days in a row to get to the point where we could make 2,000. Right. And that was before we started. We ended up, what, with 3,000? 2,800. We made 2,800 ads, but we're like, man, I can't, I can't scale my ad spend to a certain— you don't have enough. We spent $500,000 a day per day at the end of the launch, last few days. And you can only get to that level of scale with an equal amount of scale in terms of the inputs. This is probably my favorite volume story that I have because it was so real for me. I paid somebody who was way bigger than me at the time in terms of like content and all that stuff. Early on in my career and I was like, hey, you know, what should I do? And he was like, dude, he's like, you just need— he said, pull up your, pull up your LinkedIn. And I was like, okay. He said, pull up my LinkedIn. And he had made 10 posts that day and I had made one. He was like, okay, pull up Instagram, pull up your Instagram. He had made 3. I hadn't even made one that day. And then he said, pull up your YouTube, pull up my YouTube. And once we did this 2 or 3 times, I was like, I get it, I get it. I just need to do way more. He's like, yeah, dude, like way more. And so we as humans often think I need to do twice as much. I need to do 3 times as much. We can't fathom what it would mean to do 100 times as much or 1,000 times as much. But if you want to beat every fucking human being in the arena to the battle of the death, wouldn't you want to leave no doubt? Wouldn't you want to make fucking sure that you were going to win? Because here's the thing. If you see someone ahead of you, a lot of people get triggered by this. They see someone ahead of them, they throw rocks at them, like, because it makes them feel bad themselves. I strongly encourage you not to do that. If someone is doing better than you, they are better than you in some way. And in that, you can learn of them. Real. So when someone's doing better, if you're like, I got to beat them, you look at their volume, right? And let's say that someone's doing 3 times as fun that you can see, right? What do you do? Do you do 3 times the volume? No, because now you're just matching them. You need to do 10 or 20 or 30 times the volume because not only that, they're doing volume that you can't see. You're just judging on the volume you can see. And so if you want to leave no doubt, it's like, not only if I did the same amount of work as that guy, I'm always behind. So I got to do more work to catch up. But that's just based on what I can see. I might have to do more, more to make sure that I accommodate for the things that I can't see. And so I think I would ask yourself the question, if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I could do 100 times more than I'm currently doing, I would hit the goals that I have. Then I would then ask the question, great, what resources are required? And then following up to that, is it worth it? And if the answer is yes, what's stopping you?
