No BS Advice to Get Rich in the Next 10 Years
In this video, the speaker—who reached a $100 million net worth by age 31 after losing his money twice—lays out a pragmatic, no‑fluff framework for building wealth over a decade. He begins by debunking the passive‑vs‑active income myth, urging viewers to measure earnings as a return on time (dollars per hour) and to focus on scaling the activities that generate the highest hourly return. He introduces the “buy twice” rule, calculating the time cost of purchases and only buying items that can be afforded multiple times, turning saving into capital for risk‑taking. He stresses a long‑term, ten‑year perspective, encouraging people to envision adding one or more zeros to their net worth and to make decisions that support that trajectory. The speaker outlines criteria for partnerships—only engage if the partner contributes money, experience, or time—and warns against equity dilution. He advocates rigorous time‑money management, such as checking bank balances daily and tracking hourly earnings, to develop discipline. A core theme is learning to make money before trying to invest returns, emphasizing skill acquisition over chasing passive yields. He stresses paying down ignorance by investing in both declarative (awareness of opportunities) and procedural (how‑to) knowledge. The video warns against status‑driven spending, urging viewers to buy time (outsourcing low‑value tasks) rather than luxury goods. He recommends automating investments and creating friction around spending to enforce the “invest first, spend later” habit. The speaker also reframes money as neutral, cautioning that the love of money, not money itself, leads to harm. Finally, he presents a wealth‑creation blueprint: create unique value, negotiate a fair share, and scale through a stack of complementary skills that form an unreplicable moat, concluding with a call to adopt a speed‑and‑time mindset to achieve million‑dollar wealth within ten years.
Chapters
I hit $100 million in net worth at age 31, but before that, I lost all my money twice. And the difference between me losing all my money the first few times and now are these rules. So this is no BS advice for making money and keeping it. Number 1, passive income is a lie. If you think about how money is made, you make money during time because every minute we're alive, a minute passes, time passes, and we make money over that time period, which means every single person on planet Earth has a dollars per hour that they make. And so it's not that passive income doesn't exist just as much as active income doesn't exist. It's a spectrum where it's how active is it or how passive is the activity that I'm doing relative to the time that I'm investing. And so I would eliminate active versus passive and simply say, what is my return on time or how much do I make per hour? It's just that most people get really scared of that 'cause they're like, no one should trade their hours for money. Everyone trades their hours for money. It's just that when they receive the money, it's just not denoted in hours. And so I think there's two downstream impacts in terms of changing your behavior around this that I had to apply. Number one is that I was obsessed with trying to find quick, easy, low, you know, effort money things. And so I ended up spending tons of money on things that I was obsessed with, hoping would cost me no time to make. And I would put not nearly enough time to the things I was actively making money with and thinking, how could I just make my active income significantly higher? And I would get obsessed with the idea that everything I did actively had to be scalable or it wasn't worth it. Because if it's not scalable, then why should I bother? I shouldn't trade my time for money. But if I looked at what I was making over the last year and divided it by the amount of money I made per hour, This activity was 15 times what I was averaging per hour, so I should absolutely do as many hours of that until all of my hours are that, and then I should find something else I can trade my time for that's even higher. And so if you want a very humbling experience, look at how much you made last year and then divide it by 2,000 if you wanna know how much you made just in a 40-hour work week. Now, if you want to look at how much you made per actual hour of being alive, you can divide it by around $8,000, or just take that number and divide it by 4. And that's actually how much you make per hour. And so when you're looking at, is this worth my time, if it's more than that number, it probably is. And so what I should have done, and what changed for me, was that I stopped trying to invest my money from my active into trying to find more passive things, and tried to say, how do I invest my money more into my active to multiply my active that I know is working? Number 2, if you can't buy it twice, don't buy it once. Or even buy it 3 times or 4 times or 5 times over, don't buy it once. And the way that really shifted how I started spending money, or rather started saving money and not spending money, was when I started looking at how much time it took me to make the amount of money post-tax to buy whatever I wanted. And I remember this clear as day. I was working at Smoothie King as a blender tender and I was making $6.75 an hour and I had just gotten a raise from $6.25 an hour. I'm dating myself. Anyways, and while I was there, the coworkers that I had and I would always go to lunch next door at Cosi, which was like a sandwich shop, and it was like $13 for a sandwich, right, and a drink and chips and whatever, right? And so I remember looking at my check and my $6.75 an hour after taxes and fees was like $6 an hour, and I was like, man, I gave up 2 hours of my 6-hour shift every shift to go buy lunch. And I was like, I'm literally giving a third of my earning away for lunch every single day. If I knew that I had to work the first 2 hours just to get the sandwich, I don't think I'd ever make that trade. And yet I was making it every day. And then I started thinking, I'd go to the mall and be like, oh, do you want a new shirt? And it was at the Gap and it was $30. And I was like, okay, well shoot, that's a whole shift. And I was like, would I work a whole shift if someone just held up a shirt that I didn't need to do it? And I was like, I don't think I would. And so all of a sudden it started shifting how my buying happened because I started feeling the pain associated with what it would take if I had to do that before getting the thing I was going to buy. And it completely changed my buying behavior. And to be very clear, saving money won't make you money, but saving money allows you to have money And having money allows you to look further out. And when you look further out, you can take on bigger risks, which absolutely will make you more money. And when you're looking at the price of whatever the thing you're trying to buy is, obviously when I was a teenager looking at a shirt, I was looking at, okay, I'm making $6 an hour, shirt's $30. But when you're an adult and you're making $100 an hour and you're looking at a $500 or $1,000 purchase, would you work 2 days in order to do that? I don't know, would I? Probably not. And sometimes you think, hey, would I work all day for 2 days to go out with the boys for 3 hours on Saturday? I'd probably be like, guys, I'm not gonna work for 2 days just to go have 3 hours of fun, right? That feel like, I'd rather just not work the 2 days. And that was the thing is whenever I had the, well, I'd rather just not work than do that thing, then I was like, I shouldn't buy that thing. For example, when I was poor, I only spent cash. And so my easiest way of actually creating a budget was that I had a personal training client who paid me $2,000 a month in cash. And so 100% of my money that came in through the business and credit cards and everything else is just what went into my bank account. And the only thing I knew I could live on was inside of my wallet. And so as that got replenished, and the thing is, is that I'm so scared with money, or I was so frugal with money, that I would always make sure that I had more than that to make it for the next payment. 'Cause sometimes the guy would take a day or two where you pay on Wednesday rather than a Monday, or whatever, and I need to make sure that I have food for Chipotle. 3, most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and they underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade. And every new employee that I have that walks into acquisition.com, the number one thing that they say they want is growth. And I have this talk with them, which is the 10-year million-dollar contract. But it's less about the million dollars and more about take whatever your net worth is now and add a zero to it, or add 2 zeros to it. You can accomplish that in a decade. If you look at the biggest companies in the entire world who were worth multiple billions from their inception until the time they were worth multiple billions, many times it's under 10 years, but it's still more than 5, more than 7. And so you can accomplish life-changing, crazy amounts of wealth in a decade. And so if you could write a contract to yourself and say, I will make no money for 10 years, but on the 10th year, I will add a zero or 2 zeros or 3 zeros to my net worth Would you do it? And if the answer is yes, which it almost invariably is with every person who comes into my business, then I say, great, now act like it. And so if you knew that you would make this amount of money over that period of time, you would stop this obsession, myself included, this is me giving my advice to myself who lost it twice. When I was able to shift to, okay, what would I have to do that would make it unreasonable that I don't 10x in 10 years, then all of a sudden I started making very reasonable bets that I knew would compound unto itself over that period of time. And then winning became inevitable rather than a game of chance. And so oftentimes you have potential earning and then actualized earning. And usually as you're realizing the potential earning you have, you're usually losing out on your investing into that potential, right? You're realizing the potential. And that's kind of like the kid that learns one skill and then immediately says, I'm going to start a business opportunity around this one skill that makes me $5,000 a month. Or they have this one skill and say, hey, this company's willing to pay me $100,000 a year to go do this skill, where I have this other company that'll give me a free internship where I could 10x my potential earning in 3 years, but I'm gonna make $35,000 a year for the 3 years. Which one would you take? The problem is most people will take the $100,000 now and forego the investment in self. And that's the thing is we are the asset that we invest in, and the currency we invest into ourselves in is time, experience, and skills, right? Skill is the outcome. The time and the effort is what we put into it to gain the experiences, which ultimately give us the skills. But if you're in an environment where you're not compounding your potential earning, then you're actually losing out long-term. You're ripping up your million-dollar or your 10x or 100x contract for a decade from now so you can get the short, fast money today. And that's why in the early days when you have limited amounts of money but lots of time and energy, instead of putting your money in the S&P 500, I like to say put in the S&P 500 because the asset that is you will always beat the stock market. Number 4, you should only have to get rich once. In other words, don't bet what you have and need for something you don't have and don't need. And some of the gravest mistakes I made manifested in, for example, me getting into a partnership that I shouldn't have gotten into because I wanted even more faster. Now, When you get into a partnership, which is usually the time where you put the most risk on the table, one is you guarantee the largest decrease in your earning power. You pay with the most expensive thing you have, which is equity, to somebody else. And so people get obsessive about what they're, you know, 5%, 10% later when we're making money. But day one, they're like, all right, we cut the pie in half. Oh, we cut the pie into thirds. Right up front before anything's really happened. If you work with a partner or decide to partner up with somebody, one of your friends, one of your coworkers, this is coming from somebody who has 9 failed partnerships before I met Leila, and then that has now worked and now I have successful partnerships. A partner needs to have one of these 3 things that you do not have. They either have to have money that you don't have, and then the clear contribution is that money. They need to have experience you don't have, and the clear contribution is that experience. Or number 3, they have time and energy that you don't have, and the clear contribution is that time and energy. And so I added that second part on is that just because someone has experience, if they're not contributing it to the partnership clearly, then you're still not going to get the benefit from it. If they have the time and the energy but it's not clearly defined how they're gonna invest that time and energy into the things you both get a return, then it's not going to be a good partnership. And I've lost so much money in partnerships, especially early on. One of my two big losses was from a partner. And a big part of it was I was insecure and I thought I just had to have somebody else 'cause I was afraid to do it on my own. Real quick, if you're trying to make your first dollar online, you can go to school.com/games. We've got a whole system that's set up. It's a platform. You can start it for free. I've got instructional videos. I take a call every single week. And so if you do do that, you can hop on the call on Monday and I'll say hi to you. Just let me know that you're brand new. If you are a business owner and you're trying to scale and you're doing a million bucks a year and you want to go bigger, go to acquisition.com, hit scale, And we'd love to see if we could help you out at one of the workshops we run here in Vegas. Which brings me to number 5. If you never learn to manage your time, you're never gonna learn to manage your money. And so the thing is, is that all of us obviously have equal amounts of time that we're given. Not necessarily in life, but at least every day. And so the people who get the best returns on their money are the ones who learn how to best invest their time. And so a big misconception around money is that money, in my opinion, is an encapsulated version of time. And since all of us trade time for the money that we get, that means for each person, money represents a certain amount of time. And the wealthier you get, it's just that the denomination of money represents less time for you. And so for someone else, $100 may represent 4 hours. For a wealthier person, $100 may represent 4 minutes. And so it's a constant appraisal that you do on a regular basis, looking on your calendar and saying, What things do I have here that I could trade my time for, for more money? And so again, this video is about making money overall. I'm not saying that you can't spend time with your girl, but there is a transaction cost for that time. And as long as you're willing to make the trade, then trade it all day. But the bad trades are the ones that when you actually think about it in terms of what it costs, you'd say, I wouldn't do the trade. That's a bad deal. And so over time, if you continue to trade up how much time you invest for what it makes you, you will always make more in your income year after year after year. Number 6, check your bank account before you check social media first thing in the morning. And if it hurts you to check your bank account first thing, then you need to do it even more. Because for me, I started not knowing where my money was going. And so I had a friend who was like, dude, just look. And I honestly had anxiety looking at my bank account, looking at what money was going out and all that kind of stuff. And so I started making that habit and I had to confront it. But the crazy thing is, is as I started looking at my money, as I started paying attention to my money, my money started paying attention to me and hanging around. And so Peter Drucker said, what gets measured gets managed. And so one of the most fascinating things that I found with human behavior in any kind of change is that The first thing that you can do to improve any metric for any skill is to actually measure it. And so if you wanna lose weight, if you weigh yourself every day, no matter how painful the number is, that intervention alone helps people lose weight. You don't even have to talk about diet. You don't have to tell someone to exercise. If they look at the scale every day, they become aware of it, and when you become aware of a problem, you start consciously or subconsciously making moves to change it. You have that hesitation before you put that food in your mouth. You have that hesitation before you take your wallet out when you're looking at your bank account every day. It doesn't matter what it is, whatever you're trying to improve, but look at it, confront reality, and then reality will start to improve. And if you're curious, how long do you still check your bank account every day? And I'll, the honest truth is I stopped checking when we had about $20 million. And so that started when I had in the hundreds to thousands and continued to check every day. And when I stopped checking it was when I realized my daily fluctuations in, in market movements and things like that across my assets. Uh, it like— I didn't— I basically wasn't able to really see it on a daily basis, so I had to start extending my time horizon for when I would check it. So it'd be monthly or quarterly that I started checking it, because that way at least I know I should have some movement upwards. And that is something that if you've done checking your bank account every single day for years, you start to already have developed some of those discipline skills, which then you can delay gratification of having saved money for a day to having saved money for a quarter. Number 7: Learn how to make money before you start trying to learn how to make money make money. So I see so many guys, especially young guys, who are like, I've got $1,000, how do I invest the $1,000? They're trying to figure out a way to get that $1,000 to compound. They put into a compounding calculator and they're like, man, If I get 50% returns for the next 40 years, I'm going to be a billionaire. But the thing is, is that one, it's most likely that you're going to buy a fucking Dogecoin and then it's going to tank and then you're just going to lose your $1,000 and be like, wow, think about this. I just worked for 2 weeks or 1 month to save that $1,000 and I lost it in seconds. So alternatively, if you take that $1,000 and you put it into how do I make more money, how do I actively improve the actions and skills that I have That will get you far more, and that is where you invest the time rather than how do I make money make money. Because let's be real, you don't have much. So take the money you have into the skill, the flow of making more money rather than trying to take this tiny thing and going from a 10% return to a 20% return. Because the $100 extra that you yield on that $1,000, I promise you, if you learn how to add 50% to your skill set, it'll take whatever your annual earning is up by 50%. And that's gonna be a hell of a lot more than 10. And that's assuming everything goes up this year, which 1 out of 4 years it doesn't. When you say you don't have time, just immediately think to yourself, I'm lying, this is bullshit. Because every single person has between 5 to 9 AM and 5 to 9 PM every day of the week, even if you have a 40-hour job, even if you're a full-time student, because everybody has those 8 hours per day. Now the thing is is that we're not willing to make the trade-offs because we have these things that make us comfortable. Cool, if you reframe that thing as the thing that makes me comfortable today is the thing that's gonna make me uncomfortable for a decade, all of a sudden the cost of that comfort goes up. And so then it flips to, if I can become uncomfortable for a day, I can be comfortable for decades. And so then you can seek out those 8 hours and say, you know what, I'm gonna flip this thing. And here's the crazy part about work. Work makes you money in 2 ways. One, you work and you make money, and secondly, when you're working, you're not spending money. And so when you're starting out, you literally have a double effect. The, the money that you're making the whole way through is stacking up because there's no drains on it either. And so one of the biggest advantages you have is that you stay busy. One of the keys to investing is patience. What is patience? Patience is figuring out activities to do in the meantime. Think about it for a second. Unpack that. Patience is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So then if the goal is to get rich, and we know that that takes time and it takes time for money to compound and grow, then what you do in the meantime is that you work so that you have even more money to invest and that money has the time to invest and compound while you're working. And I am so passionate about this because this isn't something that I didn't do, right? Like when I had my job in the beginning, I just wasn't really taking the time that I should have. And then I was like, you know what? I don't wanna do this thing forever, I gotta get ahead, but I couldn't stop doing my job, so I started spending my mornings and my evenings every day and both weekend days working on what I was gonna do next. And in the beginning, that was studying for the GMAT 'cause I thought business school was gonna be the next move. But after studying for the GMAT and crushing the test, I came to another realization, which was, I'm gonna go to business school 'cause I wanna start a business. Well, you know what? It's gonna cost me less than 2 years and $180,000 plus what I didn't make during the 2 years of not working, I could probably net $10,000 a year of income, which is what the average business school person graduated with when I was looking at business school. And I was like, I think I could get to 10 grand a month if I had 2 years to work and didn't spend 180 grand and I took that money and just put it into a business. Now you're like, well, you didn't even have 180 grand. You're damn right I didn't. I was able to save up 50 and I was like, I think with this 50 I'll be able to spend it to learn enough to make 10 grand a month. And that's what I did. 9, if you don't know how you can lose money in something, then you're going to lose it. Think about this for a second. If something looks amazing and you're like, dude, there's no way I can lose money on this, you're absolutely going to lose your ass because of how little you actually know. And so you have to figure out, one, what is my downside and all the different ways that downside can occur, and then attach a reasonable likelihood that that happens, and then probably multiply it by 3. Because whenever you have your rose-colored glasses on, you're an entrepreneur or you wanna be an entrepreneur, one of the quintessential traits of entrepreneurship is optimism. We are optimists, we think it's all gonna work out, and you have to have that level of optimism to start. But when you start, you can't continue to have that optimism around every other opportunity because then you are going to lose your ass because you're gonna be split between multiple things. And so if you don't know how you can lose money, You absolutely will because it just is an index of how little you know. 10, the biggest cost that you have is ignorance. So every single month you've got your rent, you've got your food, you've got your clothes, you got your car, you got whatever else you spend, and you think that's my fixed costs. Years ago, I was sitting in the audience and I saw a man write $1 million on a whiteboard, and he called someone from the audience. He said, how much do you make per year? And they said, "$50,000 a year." And he said, "Would you like to make $1 million a year?" And the person said yes. And then he put a minus sign and he said, "Did you know that it's costing you $950,000 per year to not know how to make $1 million a year?" And it was such a light bulb moment for me that I realized that the cost of ignorance is the difference between what your goals are and what you have today. Because if you knew how to achieve your goals, The difference is the value of that education. And conversely, the difference is the cost of that debt of ignorance. And so the number one priority in my life has always been to pay down ignorance as fast as I possibly could using whatever currency I needed to. So if that was relational capital, that means using my network or doing favors for people or paying money, which is the least efficient way of doing it, I would try and find a way that I could pay down ignorance to achieve the things that I wanted so I could get the information so I could get the learning. When I started, I paid to get into rooms. I paid $25,000, $35,000, and you're like, wait, I don't have that right now. I get it. Well, you pay $10,000 was the first thing I ever bought that was information-based. That's what I was, the first thing I ever invested. And how was I able to do that? Because I had saved for 2 years and I'd saved 50 grand up. And so for me, I was like, okay, this is the direction I'm going in. I'm gonna invest in learning. And when I got in that room, The first room I was in was a gym owner room and I didn't have a gym and I paid to be in that room so that I could start the gym the right way. When I paid for the $25,000 room, it was an internet marketing room and guess what? I didn't have an internet marketing business, but I paid there so I could try and learn how to do it the right way rather than try and start it the wrong way and have to fix it. And so I think a lot of people wait too long to try and learn. I always wanna grab my future and pull it towards me. And so I was willing to spend as much money as I had available to me to make those bets 'cause it was a bet on me and I knew I would never lose that. You can't lose you, you always have diamond hands on you. Like till the day you die, you've got you. And so the thing is about investing in education is that sometimes the lessons you learn aren't the lessons you expect to learn, but you learn 'em nonetheless. And so sometimes you go into an education thing and you don't get what you thought, but you still get something and it was still more than what you paid. And so when I went into those rooms, I'd already used up all my money to get in the room, so I was like, okay, what else do I have? And so at the time I knew how to sell. And so I just went to every single person in the room and was like, can I help you sell stuff? And so they'd be like, well sure, my sales team sucks, or sure, my script sucks, or sure, my offer sucks, or I don't know how to overcome these objections. And so I would spend an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours on the phone with these people training their teams, writing scripts, and they were like, dude, thanks so much, this is way, I can't believe you did all this. And the thing is is that if you're going to pay for help from someone, pay in full. Don't half-ass a free gift. And so if you're good at something, you're good at a skill, you're an accountant, you don't do one page of someone's taxes. If you're gonna do a favor, you do the whole thing. You treat 'em like they're a paying customer, and then they will respond as though you have paid them. And so it will be like you've given them money, and then you will get that reciprocity. And at the time when I did those favors for all those people, I didn't know what I was gonna ask for. I just knew that I would need someone's help in the room, and I'd rather have more phone numbers I could call for help that owed me one than none. And when I wanted to make a webinar, I called one of the people who was good at webinars. When I wanted to run ads, I called the guy who was really good at running ads. When I wanted to, uh, figure out funnels and landing pages and stuff, I called the guy who was really good at funnels and landing pages, because each of those guys wasn't good at what I was good at. And so we were able to barter, which by the way, still to this day is is the most efficient form of trade because Uncle Sam don't take any piece of it. For us or them, everybody wins. 11, there's two types of things that you can learn. And so if you're trying to pay down ignorance, you gotta know what you're buying. So you can learn about something, something that exists that you didn't know existed, and then you can learn how to do something. And so one is called declarative knowledge, knowledge of existence. The other is called procedural knowledge, which is knowing how to do it. And so if I explain to you that private equity exists and this is how You can buy a package and sell a business for a lot of money. Now you know about it, which is a prerequisite for learning how to do it. And so when you buy into access to networks, to people, to relationships, the primary thing that you're learning is learning about things that exist. They're going to tell you tax strategies, investment strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategies, business models that you haven't heard of. That is what you learn there. But if they tell you those things, you leave and you get excited. But then you're like, well, shoot, how do I do it? Which is the second thing that you learn how to do, which is the how part. And so when you're going into any kind of investment, whether you're investing time, you're investing trade, you're doing some work for someone so they do work for you back, or you're investing money, you better be sure what you're buying. And the interesting thing about those two types of knowledge is that the declarative knowledge tends to teach you things that you didn't know existed. It's the unknown unknowns. That is why some of these are the biggest breakthroughs when you get into those rooms with someone making 10 or 100 times more than you. They see the world in a different way. Whereas when you go for how-to, it's more predictable what you're going to get because you're specifically trying to learn how the skills, you know it exists and you just need to clarify the steps to getting there. And so just delineating what you're trying to learn will help you actually learn it. So the first time I learned declarative knowledge was that Facebook ads existed, that was in 2013. And so I learned how they worked and I learned just enough to make them work. So I learned declarative knowledge that they existed and I learned how to do them in one weekend, super valuable. Now I was able to ride that skill set for a couple years until I was like, you know what, I need to learn how to do this at a bigger scale. I wanted to go national, we'd start a gym launch, do the turnarounds, and so I was like, I need somebody, 'cause I had only run local ads, which by the way are much easier than national style ads. And so I tried to go all around asking people for help, and at this point I'd probably used up the relational capital that I had before, so I called a bunch of agencies, all of them said they were gonna charge me too much money that I could afford, and then finally I just asked one guy, hey, instead of your monthly rate of $5,000 a month, which I couldn't even come close to affording at the time, I was like, can I just pay you per hour? Now of course he said, I don't trade my time for money, except of course he works overtime and then he gets money later, but sure, anyways, he doesn't trade time for money. But I said, it's America, everything's got a price. And he said, you know what, $750 an hour, I'll do it. And I was like, done. Now mind you, $750 an hour was still a ton of money for me, and so I showed up like it was Harvard on steroids for these calls, 'cause I would prep for the call, I had my notes out, I recorded it, I was like, I had 2 people in the room be like, make sure I don't miss anything, right? And so I would go and I had him first document the process of what he did to run ads as though he were me. Then I had him demonstrate it, so he clicked the buttons so I could see what he was doing, and I had him stop and explain to me each of the steps so I could put it into my little checklist too. And then finally, I duplicated in front of him, which means document, demonstrate, duplicate. I then did it in front of him to make sure that I was doing it right. And so once I did it right, and I did it right multiple times in a row, and I didn't need him to correct me while I was doing it, that's when I had mastered the skill. It took me 8 sessions, so it took me 8 hours and whatever that is times $750 in order to learn. 12, a watch isn't gonna replace work. A Rolex isn't gonna replace reality. And so what happens a lot of times when you're coming up is that you want to get status, right? You feel downtrodden, you feel like no one respects you, and that's normal as a young man. That's what you do. You don't have any status. That's what you come into the world as, and you gotta go make it. And so the thing that you wanna do early on is get status as fast as possible. The thing is, is a lot of times you trade short-term status at the expense of long-term. And so as somebody who has lots of young men in my audience and middle-aged men in my audience, you'll never impress someone who's wealthier than you with assets. You'll only impress people below you. So you have the wrong target audience. Because to impress poor people, you outspend them. To impress rich people, you outwork them. And once I understood this, I was like, oh, the guys who are at the top of the game give me respect because they know I'm a future one of them, because they know when they were my age, they doubled down on the hustle, not the highlight reel. And that overspending on status happens at every level. So in the beginning, it's a watch, right? And a little bit later, it might be a car payment. And a little bit later, it might be a really big expensive car payment. And then it might be a really big condo. And then it might be a really nice house, and then it might become a yacht, and then becomes a jet. And the thing is, is that you add zeros to it, but again, you only impress the people underneath of you, not the people above you. And if you want to impress the people underneath of you, by all means do it, but know that that's what you're about. Buy time like a rich person, buy stuff like a poor person. And so when you're thinking about time being the most valuable thing, if you've already dedicated yourself to working and earning an income and learning the skills, then you just wanna pour as much time into that as you can. And so fundamentally, you're buying your time back, your low-cost time or low-income time, so it's prepping food, going grocery shopping, cleaning your house, whatever else you do, with more income-earning time. I remember the first time I closed a $500 sale at my gym, I realized that that sale took me 30 minutes. And I knew that for me to buy groceries for the whole month 4 times would take me $500 and far more than 30 minutes. And so I thought to myself, my God, if all of that time I was grocery shopping and food prepping and cleaning up after myself and then doing laundry, if all of that time I could just sell more, in a couple hours I could do all of that stuff for free. And my poor mind was like, hey, that's wasteful. You could be doing that stuff on your own. You buy time like you're rich, you spend money on stuff like you're poor. So buy time, not stuff, because when you buy time, you can replace the money you bought it with and some. Let me put some real numbers to this. So the average American spends $1,500 a month on 96 hours of work, and that breaks down roughly to cleaning their house, cleaning their clothes, buying food, preparing food, and cleaning food. I'm not even going to get into the 4 hours a day that the average person spends on social media and watching television. You're going to keep doing that, so I'm not even going to try to convince you not to. But if you just replace those things that you probably don't want to do, it costs about $1,500 per month. And so as long as you make more than $15 per hour, because it costs about 96 hours to replace those activities, which means if I can replace 96 hours of work for $1,500, And it's also 96 hours of draining work. Like, it expends energy. It's not like you just sit there for 96 hours. You're actually getting actively tired from doing that stuff. If you took that same thing, and if you make more than $15 per hour in your active job, it makes sense. It's the logical decision for you to buy that and then go make more, because you're also going to make money twice. Not only are you going to save the time and then work and make more, but you also get better at your job because all of those extra hours aren't just making you more money, you're also becoming more skilled. So you get better faster. And so if I have a year-long guy where he spends $1,500 a month to replace all of those things, at the end of that year, not only does he have more money at the end of the year, but because he had an extra 100 hours of high-energy time that he didn't have to spend per month, he's getting 50% better per year. And so that assumes that he doesn't get rewarded in his work for getting better, which by the way, in reality, you typically do as long as you ask. Who you compare yourself to, not who you spend your most time with, will be the highest predictor of how much you make. And so we are motivated by the things that we lack. And so if you are very hungry, it's because you lack food. If you lack sleep, you're very tired, you're very motivated to sleep. And so if you want to be motivated to make money, it's not enough to not have money. You have to have a desire to make a lot more money. And the strongest way to create that desire is to visually see the people who are making far more than you. And so it's about who you compare yourself to, not who you spend time with. Fundamentally, the richest man in the world only spends time with people poorer than him, but he continues to get richer because he's comparing himself to the future version of himself. That's his reference point. That's his reference group. And when you start out, there's real people. As you evolve, it becomes imaginary. I heard this quote from one person to another when I was walking through the street, and he was talking about buying something that was a no-return investment. Let's call it a big toy. And he said, "There will always be time to make money later." And I remember hearing that and thinking, "That's what someone who's poor says." And so to be clear, I think if you want to enjoy life, by all means do it. This video is about making more money. That's the stated objective, and so that's what I'm talking about. And so the idea that you're going to spend now, work later is the fundamental crux of poverty. And so you have to break that with all your heart. And when you have those people around you— and this was a toy, but it could be Let's go out. It always comes under the guise of YOLO, we have to live life. But everyone who says that assumes that getting better and learning is not life and is not living. And for me, the purpose of my life is to learn as much as I can and pay down ignorance as much as I possibly can and squeeze the last drop of potential out of me that I can. And the way that I do that is through learning. And so for every person that asks you to sacrifice working now so that you can have fun now, just make sure you know the trade you're making. I'll be real with you, there's no perfect way to live your 20s or even your 30s. You either end up an underskilled 30-year-old or 40-year-old or an underlived 30-year-old or 40-year-old. And so fundamentally, it's not either or, but knowing the trade-off and living with the consequences because you can't do them over. And on a personal note, I sacrificed— or said differently, invested my 20s in order to have lots of skills and underlived. But in that same time period, I built to where I am now, and I genuinely am very happy with where I am now in life. And I would not redo those years to have, quote, lived more. Because the real secret is, as I was doing it, I loved the game. And so, some of the best moments of my life, when I look back, were some of the moments that I felt like I was struggling the most, because it was when I underwent the most growth. And so, it's interesting because the pain that you go through in the moment often becomes the purpose that you look back on in your life. And so the idea that we want to avoid pain so that we can live today, I think conflates reality, because when you look back on your life, a lot of times those are the things that define you. And so we should be seeking those out, not running away from them. So if you're not sure who you compare yourself to versus who you spend time with, when you're about to make a big decision, the people who come up in your mind, who you're weighing their opinions on your decision, those are your reference group people. The people whose opinion you care about. And so if all your friends, for example, are billionaires, and they all sacrificed their 20s, got rid of their friends, got rid of their material belongings, spent all their time working for free so that they could learned this big skill set and then doubled down in their late 20s and then made it big by the time they were in their 30s and 40s. Those people, if that was your reference group, if you're thinking about leaving home, what do you think that reference group's gonna say? For sure. And because of that, you're out the door. And so whenever you have these frictional moments where you are like, I think I should do this, but whoever that person is, whoever that voice is, if they don't have what you want, don't listen to what they say. Only listen to other people's opinions about your life if their dreams for you are bigger than yours. If they're not, disregard. Invest, then spend the rest. So the idea is that you invest first and then spend what's left over. And so an interesting thing is that Switzerland has the highest per capita millionaires in the world without having the highest GDP or even GDP per capita. And so how are they able to do that? That means that they have different rules around money, which is what this video is about. And so if we adopt those rules, we can get those outcomes, which means these are just decisions that we get to make. And the easiest way to do that is you take what you need off the top and then you spend the rest on what you want. And so it comes down to saying that you need your future, you need your future self to be bigger than your current self today. And so you invest first and then you spend the rest. And so the way that I like to think about this is point 16. This is how we operationalize this, which is automate investing and then create friction around spending. And so you want to take the money off before you see it. If your job, for example, has a way that they can automatically skim off your paycheck and put it into some sort of investment stuff, do it. If they don't have that, have one of these apps that does segmentation or has multiple bank accounts that you can say this automatically goes here, this automatically goes here, and I don't touch this. And if you want to get real crazy, the advanced version of this is that as you make more money, You keep what you're living, the spend the rest part, instead of making it a percentage, make it a fixed amount. And then as you make more, you're just investing more and more and more into the future. Now you're like, well, how do I invest in the future if I'm just starting out? The future is you. But you're making sure that when you're investing that money, you know whether you're buying declarative knowledge or you're buying procedural knowledge. You're learning about stuff that you need to learn or you're learning how to do it. And the longer you do this, the easier it gets. For the record, I have zero Lamborghinis, zero Rolexes, zero jets, while also being able to buy multiple of these every single month. And so the idea is you start to become addicted to getting good. And once you get that first little reward of seeing an investment that you made in yourself start paying off, you see your income go up, you start making more money., you're like, oh my God, this game is awesome. And so that flow of investment that comes to you is one of the best games that you want to win for yourself. You want to just keep seeing, keep making cash flow PRs, keep making that investment account PR and hit records in that account. And if you get addicted to that game, if you can just do that from everything in this video, you've already won. And so you want to automate deposits and manualize withdrawals. So everything that is automatic in terms like your rent, you want to write it as a check if you, or drop it off as cash. If you have payments that you make like a car payment, as much as you're like, wait, this is going to cost time, the value that you get back for knowing exactly where you spend your money is going to make you more money than the 1 hour a month that you have to pay your bills. That is a promise. And so that may also mean if you Make it difficult to buy. Well, then maybe you delete some of the apps on your phone. Maybe you don't save your credit cards on the sites that you tend to spend money on. You want to make it as hard as you can to spend money and make it as easy as possible to stack it. Number 17, it's easier to make $1 million than it is to make $100,000. And let me explain. If I told you to go down the block, you would go at a certain speed. If I said, go as fast as you possibly can, at some point you'd run and then you'd improve your form and you'd get better footwear and then you'd change your clothes, but at some point you wouldn't be able to run any harder or any faster to get there. But if I said, I need you to go 5 blocks, you might be like, huh, okay. Now some people will then try to walk or run that, but the smart cookie then says, huh, I could take a car and I would go a hell of a lot faster. And if I'm speeding in my car, I'll probably get to the 5th block before the other guy gets to the end of the 1st block. And so the magic of thinking bigger is that you change your solution set, meaning you use different tools to accomplish the objective. The reason $100,000 per year is the hardest amount of money to make is because it assumes for most people that they will trade their time in terms of hourly wages or salary in traditional work in order to get it. And so they have to spend all of their time in order to make the $100,000. But if I said make a million or even $10 million before the world explodes, you would know that you would have to use a different way of solving that problem. And so the reason it's easier to make a million dollars or $10 million is because you can do it in less time with more skill. If you start solving for the skills required to make $1 million or $10 million. You don't want to love money. You want to learn to love making money. So there's 2 misconceptions and then 1 truth around this. The first misconception is money is the root of all evil. And then that obviously is a quote from the Bible, 1 Timothy 6:10. The 201 version, someone says, no, it's not money that's the root of all evil. It's the love of money that's the root of all evil. But that's just the 201 version. The actual translation, there's 5 translations for it, and 4 of the 5 are, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Meaning, if you desire money more than anything else, then you will commit the other sins in order to attain it. And so the idea is that it's only a pathway that has a high likelihood of causing you to do things that are unethical or immoral. And so there's this huge, terrible paradigm in society that money is somehow good or bad. It is just potential energy. It's just bottled time. And that bottled time can build bombs. That bottled time can build hospitals. It can build wells and build schools. It can make YouTube videos that educate. And so the idea that you're afraid to make money means that you're afraid of having power. And maybe you should be afraid of having power because maybe you'd misuse it. But if you do want to help the world, then all it's going to do is amplify your ability to do that. And if you have that mission on your heart or in your mind, then it's your duty to remove everything else in your fucking way to go get it. The more money you make other people, the more money you make. And so the amount of money that you will be able to make in your career comes down to 3 variables. Number 1 is the value that you're able to create in total for all of the people you create it for, times your ability to negotiate how much of that value you're able to get, times number 3, which is the amount of other people who can also create that value. And you have to have all three because, for example, if you develop a skill of sales and you can create millions of dollars in value for a company and you're really good at negotiating, then in theory you'd get millions and millions of dollars from that company. But if somebody else is willing to work for a few hundred thousand dollars a year in order to make that value, then your position disappears. And so that gives us the blueprint for making money is that not only You wanna be able to create that value. You wanna be able to create a value in a way that no one else can. And the way that you do that is not by, in my opinion, learning some incredibly secret unique skill. What makes skills unique is the skill set. It's the stack of skills together that create the uniqueness. If someone else has to try and recreate something I could do, they would have to have lived my life. And so your life and the time you spend becomes your competitive advantage. It becomes your asset. It becomes the moat that other people can't chip into. They'd have to go through being a competitive fitness person and then go through owning lots of gyms and then go through doing turnarounds across the country and then go through doing a licensing business and then go through making a supplement business and then go through launching a meal prep business and then also starting a software company and then going through an exit for both, and then starting a private equity— they'd have to do so much stuff. There are so many skills that are required. Your time is your weapon if you invest it wisely. And the one thing that I would leave you with is that money loves speed, wealth loves time, poverty loves indecision. If this stuff was valuable for you, and hopefully it helps you avoid losing all your money twice like I did, I have a video on leverage and wealth creation that you can check out. It's, I think, the number one video on this channel, and it's one of the fastest ways to compound wealth. If you're poor and you're just getting started or just want to start a business, I have brutally honest advice to my younger self that a lot of people seem to have really found value in.
