No BS Advice to Get Rich Like the 1%

I crossed $100 million in net worth at age 31. I'm 35, significantly higher than that now. And I have the privilege of talking to lots of people who are at billion-dollar-plus. And so in this video, I want to break down a handful of themes that I've seen repeated that can make you significantly more successful. The rich buy time, the poor buy stuff, ambitious people buy skills, and lazy people buy distractions. As much as these seem like 4 different groups, it's really like you have these pairings. Rich people use money to buy time. Ambitious people use time to buy skills. And the reason it's ambitious people is because generational wealth isn't transferred through assets. It's not transferred through stuff. It's transferred through education. It's transferred through skills. And so there's this Sanskrit proverb that I love. If you have a good son, you don't need to accumulate wealth. If you have a bad son, there's no point in accumulating wealth. And so the idea that you're going to pass on your wealth to a child who doesn't have the skills makes it irrelevant. Because fundamentally, either it is a good son who has skills, and then if the son has skills, then whether you transfer the wealth or not makes the wealth itself irrelevant. And I find that there's so many things that are like this in wealth creation that you don't understand until you're on the other side of it. Because the answers that you're looking for are not in your newsfeed. They are not in the distraction. And so the vast majority of lazy people that I have encountered continue to distract themselves because the difficulty of looking at themselves in the mirror and saying, I am inadequate, is too painful. And so instead, they would rather watch fluff videos on the internet that make them feel good and tickle their ears rather than confront reality that they are just not good enough. And so they consume the stuff that's like, I am worthy, I deserve these things. In other words, entitled to them, which by the way, if you feel entitled to something, then when you get it, you are never grateful because you thought you deserved it to begin with. We know that gratitude, for example, is something that increases your subjective well-being in life, which is that you enjoy life more when you are grateful for what you get, which means that you have to, by very definition, expect nothing, which means you are entitled to nothing, which means that you deserve nothing. In reality, you are worthy only of the things that you currently have because you have already gotten them. You have proven that you can work a minimum wage job, so you are worthy of the compensation of minimum wage. And as much as this is painful, and I'm sure this will get clipped 100 times to show me as some evil rich guy, I'm willing to take that hate for the few people who will hear this message and decide to change the way they act. You can be ambitious and distracted, which keeps you poor. When I started out at my peak, I had 9 businesses because I heard 7 income streams make you wealthy, but it doesn't. 7 income streams just spread you 7 ways. And I had 9. I was like, well, 7 good, 9 must be better. To give you context, I had a chiropractor agency, I had a dental agency, I had a gym turnaround business, and then I had at the time 6 locations. So there's 9, wherever it is. Boom. And I had partners in each of these businesses. I was still the one who was required to rain make, meaning I was the one who was required to sell customers into all 9. If you are required to work inside of the business, then you can only really do one job. And so when people hear that someone has 7 income streams, it's because they own assets that generate that kind of income. But in order to gain the cash to then buy the assets that create the cash flow, it requires time and focus. Let me make focus real for you. Focus is a very amorphous term. Focus is measured by the amount of things you say no to. And inversely, you could measure it by how few things you say yes to. Meaning the most focused person says only yes to one thing and says no to literally everything else. And so the next thing that separates the rich from the poor is it's 100x, not 2x. And so this concept is one that I had dinner with a friend of mine who's a public CEO. I asked him what he had done to grow the business, I think from a $200 million market cap to a $1.2 billion market cap in less than 2 years. All right. So that's absurd growth for a company. And I was like, so, you know, what are you doing primarily? And he said, I'm shaking hands, I'm kissing babies, I'm going to events all the time. And I was like, well, how many? He's like, well, I'm going to do 66 events this quarter. And I was like, in person? And he was like, yeah. I was like, are they coming to you? And he's like, no, I'm going to them. I want to make this real. He has a wife, he has kids, and before anyone listens and says, "I can't believe he—" Well, cool, he makes trades. If anything, I would hope that people watch this and say, "I wouldn't make that trade," in which case, great. Also, don't complain about not having what somebody who has made that trade made. And so one of the big misconceptions, by the way, this is a sales thing too, is that people want your outcome their way. They wanna have their cake and eat it too. They wanna say, "Hey, I wanna not change the way I'm eating, I wanna not change the way I'm living, but I wanna have a six-pack and I wanna be in shape. I wanna continue to live this way and I wanna get the 10, the 10 guy. I want to continue with my work-life schedule as I currently have, but I want to have hypergrowth. They are trades, they're price tags. When you go to the store, you either want the shoes and you're willing to pay the price or not willing to pay the price. That's it. You can't pick the price for the shoes. You pay it or you don't. My telephone back to myself is that I thought I worked a lot when I was younger, and I did spend a lot of time working, but I made so little progress because a lot of that time I wasn't actually creating output. I encourage people to do something called the 12 by 30. All right, so it's, it's very simple, and it's actually not as unsustainable as people would think. You work 12 hours a day for 30 days straight, no weekends. By the last day, you realize: 1, you aren't made of glass. 2, how much more you could be working. 3, how much faster you could be achieving your goals. 4, how much you could be getting better every single day. 5, You don't need to work like this forever, but if you need to do it for a season or for a reason sometime in the future, you've got that gear in you. And 6, there are people who are working more than you who are beating you. And you get all of those lessons for the low price of getting more done in a month than you probably did last quarter. And so everyone, and like, of course you've got one, you know, one side of people who are like, I work more than this now. And of course they don't, they obviously don't. And the thing is, is that people are like, well, I work like that, but I take a couple days off, right? That's the point is that you have to push through it. Now, can you work 16 by 30? Sure, if you want to, you're welcome to work more than that. 'Cause I've found that working 6 to 6 is kind of like what I do every day anyways. I'm on 12 by 100, you know, in terms of how I think about working. There's plenty of days that I work 15, 16-hour days 'cause I get here at 5 or 6 and then sometimes we have an event, sometimes we have dinner, things like that afterwards and it ends at 9. And that's where you have to be on, not just at the office, not just in front of your computer, but people actually demanding things of you on a regular basis all the time, being on camera. And I'll tell you that there are levels to this. Like working alone, for a full day is not as exhausting as being on stage for a full day, being on camera for a full day. Because every second that you are not peak, you are losing. You can take a break while you're working alone. You can't take a break when you're on stage, when you're meeting customers, when you're making content, like, right? Like every minute that is not recorded is basically a minute wasted. There's a whole team here behind this camera, right? That is making this stuff for you. And I'm costing them every second I'm not showing up. I remember there was a period, a season of my life where I think I had like 9 straight, 9 months of this, and it was not 12, it was 15, 16, because I had to wake up at 4 to get to the gym where I was at the gym. But I'd wake up at 4 and then I would get the, the class ready. I'd open the gym doors at 4:30, would start the classes at 5, and the last class at night would end— it would be a 7 o'clock class, would end at 8. And then at 8, I would then do billing, I'd reach out to old customers, I would confirm lead appointments for the next day, all that sometimes until 10, 11 at night. And then I'd wake up again at 4. And so I don't know what the hours are there, but it's more than 12. And I did that for 9 months straight and And I used to describe it as the kind of tired a good night's sleep couldn't fix. It was like, it was tired, it was deeper than like one sleep. I needed like weeks to like basically come back to normal. And the thing is, is that I think it is valuable because you have to learn that you have that gear. I think that that gives you supreme confidence when you're entering any new endeavor because you know that you have acquired the trait of being relentless, that you do not relent, you do not let up, you do not stop until you get what you want. And you know that you can push through being tired or being underslept or being overwhelmed because you realize that you didn't die and that you've done this before. And so the difference between the newbie and the veteran is that the veteran looks on something and looks back on what they have done to get to that point and says, I've seen this before, this is another one of those. And that's why they don't have the anxiety, that's why they don't have the stress. That's when they get on stage, they crush it. That's when they— the high-pressure situation, they still breathe normally, their heartbeat doesn't go up because they have done it before. And the only way that you can get to the point where you can say you've done it before is to do it now.. And so I define work as volume times leverage. And so it's about how many times you do something and how much you get for each time you do it. In the beginning, you need to do a lot more of this, right? You do way more volume. Because of that volume, you gain skill and then the leverage also increases. And so you get 100x the volume, which then over time builds skill, which then gives you more for what you put in. And then over time that continues to increase your output. The thing is, is this concept of 100x, not 2x, has applied to so many different areas of my life. Like when I paid a large brand for insight into how I could grow my personal brand when I decided to get into this game, I was like, hey, I'm not growing that fast. And he said, oh, well, pull up your social media profiles. And we pulled them up one by one. And he said, look at what you're doing with what I'm doing. And he had genuinely been doing 10 times more volume than I was doing. And so he basically said, you're not doing enough volume. I then said, okay, that was clear as day. I need to do more volume. And the thing is, is when we did more volume, we got better at doing it. And so now we continue to do the same volume as I did in the beginning, which is 10 times more than when I started. We get even more output. And then I had a different friend who talked to me, billionaire guy. He was thinking about getting into content and he said, hey, I'm really not growing that fast. And I got to have the exact same conversation with him. But the thing is, is that this guy had done 100x, not 2x before in his life. It was just that he got to realize, like me, that it has been 100% domain specific. And so when he— then I showed him my Instagram and his, I showed him my TikTok and his, I showed him my YouTube and his. And I said, "Dude, I'm making 450 pieces a week. You're making 7." And he was like, "Got it. Like, understood." He immediately got it because he had already learned that lesson in a different domain. I wanna zoom out for a second. Right now is a period of time where I'm working really hard. I'm working a lot. I'll give you context as to what a lot is for me. So this year, the first 100 days of the year, I didn't have a day off. And so my time was only spent working. And so it's like, well, what's the difference between when you were, quote, working all the time when you were younger and working all the time now? Is that what I get done in a day is significantly greater than what I got done, and the quality of that work is also higher. Because the thing is, is that you learn how to work. You get better at working the more you do it. And so a lot of people are like, man, I feel like I'm not that productive when I work. Like, what should I do? It's like, work more. Like, you work more until you get better at working. I remember when I was a legal intern at a company in France called Arkema. Arkema. If you wanna know how they say it. And I was a legal intern and I was spending the whole summer there, which by the way, they always try and like use and abuse interns. I was like, man, I'm working so hard. And I talked to one of these legal partners and I only had one exchange with this particular legal partner who's, you know, high up in the firm. And she said, oh, she was like, that's cute. You don't even know what work is. She said, you don't even know how to work. She's like, you spend time here. She's like, but you don't know how to work. And I just remember how dismissive what she said was. But I understood, I mean, I understand now, especially what she meant was like, you're spending a lot of time here, but you're not getting anything. Done. And it takes time, it takes reps to get better at working itself. And so that measure of focus, the equal opposite of distraction, is just how long you can stick with it. And I can tell you that me, from a very visual perspective, when I work, there are many times like, you know, when you work and you're like, man, I feel like I like need a break. The thing is, is that that break period for people who aren't as good at working might be like the rest of the day. And the better and better that I've gotten at working is that I can like kind of like whip my, like whip my head back in and be like, confront, like, keep going. And I'm like, oh, all right, I'm going to keep going. And then you kind of realize that there's like a 5-minute, sometimes 15-minute period where like your output slows a little bit, but then you catch the next draft and then you're in again. It's being able to whip yourself back in. And that muscle of doing that takes practice. And the only opportunity that you get to flex that muscle, to practice it, is to work yourself to the point of fatigue, to the point of distraction or respite or rest. Would be beneficial or you feel like it's what you crave right now. And then being able to be like, no, I can power through this. And the thing is, is you can, you can power through it. It just takes practice and practice takes repetition and being willing to be uncomfortable for an extended period of time. And it's kind of like when you're eating and you're dieting, there are moments where you get these cravings where you're like, man, I'm starving. I want something sweet. If you've ever dieted before, and this is where repetitions help, it only lasts like 20 minutes. So if you ever do this, by the way, dieting hack is just set a timer when you're like, man, I really want something. Wait 20. And if you still want it, which you rarely do, 'cause it usually lasts less than 20, sometimes just 5, it'll just go away. And the same thing happens with focus, but we then just take off, we take off for our diet for the day. We order a pizza, right? We order ice cream, right? Or we take off working for the day, right? And we just say, I'm just gonna watch Netflix for the rest of the time, or I'm just gonna go hang out with friends, whatever, or I'm gonna go out. But I will say now that I have worked for 100 days straight And that was in the earlier part of this year. I think this year I've probably taken 3 or 4 days off since the year started. And I still probably worked until like 2 on those days, but I still consider those like more or less days off. You're not gonna die. And so I think back retroactively or like historically, like there were people who were forced to work for years on end or they would get killed. As gruesome as that may seem, I see that as hopeful in that they have already demonstrated that it's possible. Like, you can work continuously for an extended period of time because fundamentally you're just alive, you're moving, right? And like, you think super ancestors, it's like they didn't have computers. They did— like, they just were around. And so you do keep busy while you're awake. And so you might as well keep busy continuing to nudge things forward. And I can't tell you the amount of times where now I'm like, my mind checked out, and I was like, I'm— I— my brain checked out a little bit, but I'm gonna— I'm just gonna keep— I'm gonna keep going. And then 3 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours more pass. And I'm like, oh, I actually finished everything that I said I was going to do. And it's just so much more work and it's fewer days off and it's earlier mornings and longer nights. And it, it, it just, it's being able to do that for an extended period of time. I know the whole idea of like, you know, work on the things you love and you'll never work another day in your life. That's just, I just don't think it's true. Like there's the so many things that I don't enjoy doing that I have to do. And that's why, at least for me, my saying is always, um, I will do what is required. How I feel about it is relatively irrelevant because the things that have come from doing what is required have made doing the requirements something that I know will pay off. And so I kind of like feast on those morsels of past achievements as the fuel to continue doing things that may be uncomfortable or unpleasant in the moment. And most work isn't unpleasant. It's just work. It's like, I have to get this done, right? And you're like, I get to get this done, sure. But like, I'm just being real. For me, it's usually not sunshine and rainbows. Like, I work a lot and I get— and I'm tired. You know, I slept 9 hours last night, which was the first time I slept 9 hours in a while, and I feel amazing right now. But sometimes you got to work on 6, sometimes you got to work on 5. And so think about this hypothetical extreme. Let's say that you played video games. That was all you did. When I say that's all you did, you didn't go out, you didn't talk to people, you didn't see anyone, you didn't eat. You didn't sleep, well, you would be incredibly focused. Now, at that point you say, well, in order for him to play more video games, he needs to sleep. So there are contingencies, right? You do need to eat or you'll die. And so there are the fewest requirements necessary to maintain consistent focus on the one thing. And those things become requisites for focus rather than distraction. Like there are periods of time where you will need to rest. That rest therefore is productive because it increases your total output in the one thing that gets you the most leverage, that gets you closest to your goals in the shortest period of time. And so this isn't a video of me saying, you know, work until you die. Well, you will work until you die because we all will die and we all probably will work at some point. But it is more video of saying that every single thing that is not a requisite for you continuing to do the one thing, that one yes, are all distractions. They are all things that take away. And people have a hard time with this because they like to say like you need to have balance. But this is what poor people do not understand. And I am going to do my very best to kind of like pass down a message from the future to my past self about this. And this goes for entrepreneurs specifically, which is you do not understand how much work it is. Like, you think you understand how much work it is. And I've had multiple times in my life where I've met someone who was way further ahead than me, and I saw them actually working 5 to 10 times more than me. And I was like, wow. And there's this scene in Invictus, which is a movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. I love this moment. There's an exchange. I'm paraphrasing, but he says something to the extent of, I've heard that you've been playing with an injury. And Matt Damon just kind of says, well, no one ever plays at 100%. And I just love that because to me that kind of encompasses the champion mindset, which is that it's not about playing when circumstances are perfect, it's that playing creates perfect circumstances. We have to learn to play when the chips are stacked against us. It's like having values Values are only valuable when they are tested. You can say you're loyal, but if, you know, a girl, if you're in a hotel room and a girl is there and your wife isn't there and there's no way that she finds out, that is the test of whether you're loyal. It's when there's stakes. Test of whether you have work ethic is whether you can work when you're tired, is whether you can work when you're distracted. It's whether you can work on things that you don't find pleasant. Because all of the, and I see this with, you know, some of the young guys, like there was a guy we hired and then in 3 days he said, I don't think this is for me. And he got hired to a sales role and he was making outbound calls. I was like, you don't think this is for you? I was like, you don't even know what's happening. For you. You were here for 3 days. You didn't even get the ability to get good at the basic thing. And so there's a level of intolerance for discomfort in some sort of expectation that it's going to be this amazing thing that you're going to love at all times, and it's just not. And so I would— I'm okay being a different voice in the entrepreneur space that's not like, you know, passion is what gets you through the hard times. I don't think so. Passion has not been the thing that has gotten me through my my harder times. It has been desire. It has been wanting to make something into a reality by dragging something from your mind into the world. And sometimes I feel like you're giving birth to this thing, which for every mother— which I obviously haven't given birth— it's like you give birth kicking and screaming. It's a painful experience, but then there's life that happens afterwards. And I see work as very much labor, and we even use the same word. It's labor, it's work. It's painful. The pain is that like you're halfway through, I would imagine, and you're like, I still have to keep pushing because it's still not alive yet. It's still not out. And so I think learning to push through that, and this is the part that my friend was saying where he's like, they don't get it. They don't get it. They think that I do one of these speaking events and they see my Instagram and they think, oh, okay, well, why is my brand not growing like that? He's like, well, I was in 5 different cities this week and I just had to do FaceTime with my kids. In order for them to see me. And people are then like, I wouldn't make that trade. Fine, but don't want what he has. And so let me draw this out for you in a nice little visual to show you how I see work, right? This volume that you need to do. So you have excitement, right? So when you have this new idea, which we have them, and you're like, oh my God, this is amazing, right? This is so good. The thing is, is that once you become neutral and then you become worried and stressed, this is when work begins. And so in the bodybuilding world, they'd be like, okay, once you have achieved failure, that is where your working reps begin. It's an old school bodybuilding saying. I'm sure the science bros will be upset about it, but I think that it very much qualifies for how it relates to work in this world is that your motivation fades very quickly. It's that work begins once motivation stops.. And I think if you measure it that way, then you will measure how much you work and how hard you work very differently. So it reminds me of this Muhammad Ali quote where he says, I hated every minute of training, but I would tell myself, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. I have this tweet that I said a minute ago that I really like. And so whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother? I just try and remind myself, this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win. That period, that wall that you hit, Like, that is, that is the champion wall. That is where you, you leave everyone else behind because everyone only works until their point of excitement and then they stop. It's like you have to find that next gear. So the next point is that they cannot copy your proof. People want to gain reputations, they want to be known for certain things, they want to get status, but people can copy your promises, they can copy your services, they can They can copy your logo, they can copy your name, but they can't copy what you've done. I have sometimes younger entrepreneurs who reach out and they're like, hey, I wanna build a big brand. And they're like, I wanna start making content. But I advise them to only make content if they're truly documenting and don't transition into teacher mode because the thing that will build your brand is the stuff you do. Like we look at the business titans that are out there, right? You look at Elon, you look at Bezos, you look at maybe now Sam Altman, you look at Jensen Huang from NVIDIA and they now have these quote, business brands, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they are considered probably the leaders of the business world in terms of thought leadership. But did they get there by building personal brands or did they get there by building personal businesses? And then by building personal businesses, which I'm joking here, they just built big-ass businesses. By extension, people wanted to know who was the person behind this big business. And then they built their credibility before they built their likability. Everyone wants to put the cart before the horse. Everyone wants to put the, they want to eat the pudding before they have the proof. The proof comes before the pudding in the real world. In a world where anyone can say anything and get instant reach, trust is the thing that is the scarcity. That is the rare commodity. And so the idea is if you want to build a really big brand, then you want to index super hard on trust. And the way that people can trust you is that you do what you said you have done. The reason MrBeast videos worked is because he used his videos as proof. He didn't say, I am super knowledgeable. He said, look, I did something that no one else is willing to do. His first video that went viral was him counting to a million or something crazy, right? And so he did something that other people were not willing to do. And so he just happened to have documented that thing. And so if you're like, well, how do I get proof? I'm so young. It's like, well, you just do epic stuff. And then people will be like, wow, he did epic stuff. This is interesting. And so it still requires epic amounts of work in order to do that. The reason that there's such a misconception about overnight success is that it's just that there's a threshold over which you are good enough that you go viral. All right. And so this is, call it like, here is the viral, you know, viral moment. All right. So this is our viral moment right here. The thing is, is that we, the person, lived this whole life. What we in the public see is this moment, what happened since. And so we have the perception of overnight success. And this is why it's so difficult for people to wrap their heads around because they want to model what they see, not what occurred.. And so we have to model what they did, not what happened. And so this fundamentally is the inputs. This is what they put in for a long period of time. What we see here is the output. This is what's visible. And so this is where it gets especially difficult for people trying to learn is that most people get rich and then they get weird. And then what happens is people then try and copy what they do here, not what they did to get there. And so they copy the wrong stuff. They model the plateau, not the rise. So you don't get rich by flying on private jets. You get rich then you can fly on private jets. And so a big thing that richer people do is that they will act with urgency. And I would say this is just not even richer people, this is entrepreneurs specifically that I'm making this video for, is that they act with urgency. All right. And so you can tell in some ways how, how successful someone's going to be by how quickly they do things, the gap between thoughts and action. And so this is something I personally work on a lot, which is like how quickly between when I make a decision to do something does it actually occur? And you can improve your potency as a person, how powerful you are, by decreasing the gap between thoughts and action. Like, if you think about the hypothetical extreme of this, the god figure, if you will, thoughts and reality are one and the same. He thinks planets and universes and they appear. And so that would be the ultimate demonstration of power, in my opinion. And so we can approximate that, we can get as close to that as we can by shrinking the time it takes between when we think and when we decide, and then when we ultimately do. When you don't have any more information to collect in order to make a decision, then you make the decision. And you make the decision by eliminating alternatives. So like literally the word decide comes from decidere, which is Latin for to cut off. And so the question is, what thing are you eliminating by making the decision that you're going to make? And a really easy tactical thing is, is whenever you say I'm going to get this done by the end of the week, ask yourself, can I get it done by the end of the day? And that seems like a very small hack, but that increases your pace of progress by 7x. And so if you hear that, you're like, wow, 7x. It's like, yeah. And for that reason, there are people who are working 100 times faster than you. And I think that this is a really good cultural thing, which is you can just say end of day, not end of week, and not end of month, end of week. So in each of the instances, this is a 4x increase, this is a 7x increase, right? And you can even go end of day goes into end of hour. Now this is one that Layla talks about a lot, and she's a master operator, is that she heard this from a mentor. She said, if it's a 5-minute task and you have 5 minutes, do it now. And so the amount of times where I'm like, hey, we should do this thing. And then literally in 60 seconds, it's handled by Layla. Like while I'm just walking around talking, just like shooting ideas out there is baffling. And so her speed of like, that's a great idea. It's already been delegated out. Like she doesn't keep things on her plate. And so there's this big falseness that I think is propagated by a lot of the social media world because it feels good and you get lots of shares because it gives people permission to be lazy. It gives people permission to tell themselves that they're great just the way they are. I wholeheartedly reject that entire notion. The idea that they sell you is that you're young, you've got time. And I think that is false. Because all this does is extend how long it takes you to remember that number one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Like, I just looked at my newsfeed this morning and there was a guy that I knew who's my age and he just died of stomach cancer. Really sad, really nice guy, wife and 3 kids, into fitness, really in shape, just a freak thing that happened. And so the assumption that you've got time assumes that you know you're gonna live forever, that you know you're gonna live to 100, and we know that that's not true. And let me put this in perspective. 3 out of 10,000 people live to 100. And so everyone has this assumption in their mind that they're like, yeah, I'm at 50, so I'm going to make it to 100. Yeah, well, you've got a 3 in 10,000 shot at doing that. Very unlikely. More realistically, you'll die at the median, which is 74 for men in the US, which means that at 37 you're actually at the halfway point just in years. But if you adjust for the increase in speed of time, so the same reason that your kid at 5 years old thinks that something takes forever when you say it's going to happen next year, and when you're 40, something that happens next year feels like you blink your eyes and it's there, is that when you're 5, 1 year is 20% of your life. When you're 40, 1 year is 2.5% of your life. And so it very much in real way is 9 times faster than it is for your 5-year-old. And so it's my belief that as we get older, we don't become more patient. Time just moves faster. And so if you adjust for that time speed, your midpoint isn't 37, it's closer to 21. And so this is also why, in my opinion, when you think back on your life, you have so much meat in the first 20 years. So much stuff happens, all these material life events. And it's because in that time period, it was half of your life. And then after that, everything happens real fast. And so what you have to realize is, one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Two, nothing is gonna be easy. Just get over it. Every time you think, oh, this could look, just get immediately skip to, oh, that's not true. There's something I don't know about that. Just skip to it. The faster you can train that muscle that as soon as you have this FOMO, just slow down and realize that you don't know enough. 3, it takes time to get good. There's no one who's good at anything that was immediately good at it. And the people who were immediately good at it, I remember telling a professor, I was like, you know, I've just naturally been good at languages. He was like, when you were a kid, did you have multiple languages in your household? And I was like, well, yeah, I'm bilingual. And he's like, what are you even talking about? Like, you literally started with that. So of course languages are easier for you. And so the thing is, is that the people who have things that come naturally to them, they just only came because they forgot the work that generalized to the new skill. Once you realize that it takes time and repetitions to get good, then you also realize that the sooner you start, the sooner you get, and don't stop until you do. So let's assume you act with urgency, right? You've gotten that done. You've moved end of week to end of day. You've moved end of day to end of this hour. You moved end of month to end of this week, and you've massively increased the speed that you execute. Well, then you start running face forward into the fact that things are going to get really hard really fast. And so I will, I will tell you this one is that hard is for now, not forever. And so the good thing about bad times is that they end. And the bad thing about good times is that they also end. And so whenever you're going through a good season, it's also a good reminder that this too shall pass. And so what ends up happening is that when you're in the hard time, that can give you that necessary respite. It can give you the end of the tunnel that you can look forward to. There's only 3 outcomes. You either quit, it gets easier, or you get harder. So think about that, because no matter what, it always ends, but you only lose when you quit before you see it through. Because 2 out of the 3 outcomes get easier. Either it relents, the outside circumstance gets easier, like the hard thing moves, or you become harder, and then by extension, it no longer feels hard for you. Which, I'll make this real for you right now. Think about the problems that you were stressed about 5 years ago in your business, right? Think about the things that you were dealing with, what you were stressed about. Now think about you trying to solve those problems today. It's probably a joke to you now. You'd be like, well, yeah, obviously. It's not that those things became less hard, you became better. But here's where this gets really interesting for me. It just means that nothing is inherently hard to begin with anyways. We are just always inadequate. For me, I remember when I had 5 employees and I was like, man, it's so many people to manage. Or, you know, I was like, where am I gonna, you know, I have to manage cashflow. How do I do that? Or like, how am I gonna get new customers? Like, I can't sell really expensive stuff. What if someone gets upset if I charge more? What if someone finds out I charged this much as though it's something wrong? All of these things are just irrelevant to me now, just so silly. Though for me at the time, they were difficult. And I can only imagine how inconsequential the problems that I deal with growing hopefully $3 billion companies right now within the portfolio compared to what Elon deals with having 6 multiple hundred billion dollar companies. And I compare myself to that so I can always feel like I have a long way to go. But let me give you one thing that'll also give you a little bit of hope about these hard times is that these hard times are also your best times, but only in reverse. And so let me explain what I mean by that. Think about the times when you were younger and you were in love and you were poor and you're like, man, those were the good old days. The thing is, is that when you were in that moment, it was stressful. You didn't know how you're gonna make ends meet, how you're gonna make rent, where you're gonna get food, whatever it is. You have these, these hard times, the hard times that you go through today, but these hard times become the good old days. And so we only see the truth when we look back. You have to go through them to get the perspective. And it's something that I try and like remember on a regular basis that like, I'm going through the good old days. And if they're the good old days in the future, they might as well be the good old days today. So let me tell you a little bit about what it feels like throughout this entire process, because if you were consistently growing, you were consistently in pain. That's why they're called growing pains, not growing joys. And if you have stress from growth, remember the alternative is that you can have stress from stagnation and you can have stress from decline, which fundamentally means that hardness and stress is a fact of life. You will always have stress. You will always have problems. And the largest problem of all the largest stressor of all, is determining that having problems is a problem, is that being stressed means there's something wrong with you. But being stressed just means you're alive. Having problems just means that you are actually doing something. I'll tell you this story that I think can drive this home, and I think this is the path to fulfillment over comfort. So imagine you talk to the creator of the universe before birth and pick the person you get to become. You say, I want to be The most courageous. The creator replies and says, well, then I will give you monsters to terrify you so that you can conquer them. And you say, well, I want to be patient. The creator replies, well, then I will make you work harder and longer so you can learn to wait. So then you say, I want to be wise. And the creator replies, then I will give you failures that will crush your spirit so you can learn the value of judgment. You then say, sounds like a rough life. Can you give me a good life? Creator replies, just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer it took to make you.