How to Get Rich (without luck, talent or a trust fund)

0:00:02 This little black book right here is very important to me.
0:00:05 It has all of the rules of money, and they’re very simple.
0:00:10 They’re not that complicated to learn, but once you do, you can actually start to stack cash.
0:00:13 I was in my 20s, and I really didn’t understand how to make money.
0:00:14 I was trying hard.
0:00:16 I was working hard, but I really wasn’t getting anywhere.
0:00:20 And once I learned the rules of money, I started to understand, oh, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
0:00:24 So the next 15 minutes, I’m going to tell you exactly what these four rules of money are.
0:00:31 What I did to go from broke to ended up making my first million at age 30 and then being worth $30 million a few years later.
0:00:31 And I was an idiot.
0:00:34 I was running around with a fork, and I was sticking it into different outlets.
0:00:37 I was learning my lessons the hard way.
0:00:43 And I want to save you a lot of years and a lot of pain by just telling you what I did and what actually works.
0:00:48 So if you’re somebody who today, you don’t love where you’re at financially, maybe you’re not financially free, and you want to get to that magic number.
0:00:51 You want to get a million dollars liquid in your bank account.
0:00:52 Well, this is the video for you.
0:00:54 I’m going to tell you the four money rules.
0:01:05 Rule number one, you need one money-making skill.
0:01:07 A money-making skill is a very specific term here.
0:01:10 So when it comes to building wealth, there’s really only four money-making skills.
0:01:12 You need to pick one of these.
0:01:13 The first one is selling.
0:01:15 So this is persuading people, marketing, closing deals.
0:01:19 The second one is making, which is products, apps, websites, videos, books.
0:01:20 The next one is designing.
0:01:24 So having a really great taste, understanding form and function like a Steve Jobs type.
0:01:26 And the fourth is hunting.
0:01:28 So selling, making, designing, hunting.
0:01:30 Hunting is spotting opportunities.
0:01:34 It’s finding great real estate deals or angel investing or figuring out the right stock to buy.
0:01:38 You need to pick one of these skills and master it.
0:01:39 Pick the one that’s of most interest to you.
0:01:41 Now, mastering it is the hard part.
0:01:43 So you’re going to need to do it every day.
0:01:47 And the way to do that is, let’s say you want to learn sales, right?
0:01:50 Selling is the master skill, the money-making skill you’re trying to learn.
0:01:53 You need to go to a place where selling is what they do.
0:01:55 It is how they make their money.
0:01:57 And when you get there, you’re going to get a job.
0:01:58 And you might start at the bottom of the totem pole.
0:02:00 And what you’re going to do is you’re going to look around.
0:02:02 You’re going to ask, who’s the number one producer?
0:02:03 Who is the number one salesperson here?
0:02:07 Your job is to go sit next to them and then double their input.
0:02:10 So if they’re making a hundred calls a day, you’re going to make 200.
0:02:13 You’re not going to be as good at the calls as they are, but you’re going to double the input.
0:02:14 They knock on 50 doors.
0:02:14 You do a hundred.
0:02:15 You get the idea.
0:02:18 And you’re going to sit next to them and you’re going to study what they do.
0:02:20 You’re going to observe the difference between what they’re doing and what you’re doing.
0:02:23 And then you’re going to double it every single time.
0:02:24 That’s what you’re doing by day.
0:02:26 And at night, you’re reading books.
0:02:26 You’re watching videos.
0:02:28 You’re obsessing over the art of selling.
0:02:30 So your nine to five is where you get your practice reps.
0:02:32 And then your five to nine, 5 p.m.
0:02:33 to 9 p.m.
0:02:35 That’s where you get ideas on how to improve.
0:02:39 I got to be friends with Mr. Biso over the last few years, and he’s today the number
0:02:40 one YouTuber in the world.
0:02:42 Every video he puts out gets hundreds of millions of views.
0:02:46 And he showed me and he told me, he was like, dude, at the age of 12, I decided my skill
0:02:48 was going to be making YouTube videos in his case.
0:02:49 So he wanted to be a maker.
0:02:51 He wanted to make YouTube videos.
0:02:55 And every day he would open up a dictionary and he would flip to a different random word
0:02:56 or whatever word he got.
0:02:59 He had to force himself to think of 20 video ideas using that word.
0:03:03 Not all of them were good, but he would force that muscle of idea generation because for
0:03:06 YouTube videos, the idea, the concept is the number one thing.
0:03:09 And then he would go try to make that video and he would suck at it and he’d have a crappy
0:03:12 thumbnail and a crappy lighting, crappy audio.
0:03:15 And each day he would try to make one of those things better in between every video.
0:03:20 It took him like, I don’t know, a hundred plus videos before he even got to 10,000 subscribers
0:03:22 before he started making any money off this thing.
0:03:25 But he mastered the art of making videos.
0:03:26 Warren Buffett is another example.
0:03:27 He was a hunter.
0:03:29 Hunting was the money-making skill he chose.
0:03:33 And if you ever learn about Buffett, you’ll learn that Buffett used to take the entire Moody’s
0:03:33 manual.
0:03:35 So a 4,000 page book.
0:03:37 And I’m not talking about like a Harry Potter book.
0:03:39 This is a 4,000 pages of just corporate financials essentially.
0:03:41 And he would read it cover to cover.
0:03:45 And he was, all he was looking for was a single stock that he thought was mispriced, high
0:03:46 value, low price.
0:03:49 Over his career, he’s looked at, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of businesses.
0:03:54 And in his most recent shareholder letter, he said, all of my success, I can boil down to
0:03:55 making about 12 good investing decisions.
0:03:58 Just that out of hundreds of thousands of things he looked at.
0:04:00 He became a master hunter.
0:04:03 So you want to master one of those four money-making skills.
0:04:05 And that’s a path to millions.
0:04:07 If you master two of them, that’s a path to billions.
0:04:11 So if you look at Steve Jobs, he had designing and selling.
0:04:14 He was one of the greatest design minds, had great taste in design.
0:04:19 And then he also had the ability to tell great stories and be extremely persuasive and come
0:04:19 up with marketing campaigns.
0:04:22 Elon Musk, he has making and selling.
0:04:26 And that combo of sort of, I can build and I can sell is one of the most overpowered
0:04:30 combinations you can have because you don’t need to become the top 1% of anything that takes
0:04:32 a lifetime to become a true master.
0:04:37 What you need to do is become top 20% at two things that are not common.
0:04:42 So for example, an engineer who’s good at marketing, you find a lot of engineers and you don’t need
0:04:45 to become the best engineer, but you need to become an engineer who’s pretty good at engineering
0:04:46 and pretty good at marketing.
0:04:47 That’s rare enough.
0:04:49 And you are super, super valuable.
0:04:53 So your money-making skills are the foundation of your ability to make money.
0:04:55 Not just once, but anytime you wish, it’s like a money button.
0:04:57 You can then push at any given time.
0:05:00 So focus on skills before you focus on wealth.
0:05:00 All right.
0:05:02 Rule number two, don’t rent out your time, own equity.
0:05:06 What people get wrong is they take the skill they learned and then they get hired for it.
0:05:09 And then if they’re good at it, they get promoted for it and they get a raise for it.
0:05:11 It sounds like, well, I guess I’m moving in the right direction.
0:05:12 I’m getting rich.
0:05:14 Actually, you’re moving in the complete wrong direction.
0:05:18 As Nassim Talem says, the two most addictive things in the world are heroin and a monthly
0:05:19 salary.
0:05:24 You do not want to get hired to provide services where you’re trading your time for their dollars.
0:05:27 Renting out your time is not a path to get rich.
0:05:31 Even the people who rent their time out at a high price, a lawyer, $1,000 an hour, they
0:05:32 cap out.
0:05:36 You know, the rich lawyers, they’re all partners in the firm, meaning they own equity in the
0:05:39 firm, meaning they get a cut of other lawyers work, not their own.
0:05:41 So how do you own equity?
0:05:42 Well, two ways.
0:05:46 Either you’re going to invest, but you don’t have the cash to do that maybe, or you’re going
0:05:46 to start a business.
0:05:49 So then the question comes, what kind of business should you start?
0:05:52 How do you take that money-making skill and turn it into a business?
0:05:54 There’s three things, three words to know.
0:05:57 They all start with the letter C code, content, or capital.
0:06:00 So code is like making a website or an app.
0:06:00 I’ll give you an example.
0:06:02 My friend was a designer.
0:06:04 He used to make $200,000 a year as part of a design agency.
0:06:05 He was employed.
0:06:08 He was making a good living and he was designing websites for clients.
0:06:10 Client walks through the door, asks for something.
0:06:11 He would design it.
0:06:15 Well, he figured out he needed to turn his skill into a product or a business.
0:06:20 And so he quit his job and he started making Shopify themes.
0:06:24 So he would make a theme and he could take that same theme and he could sell it to 2000 different
0:06:25 customers.
0:06:28 And by the way, he didn’t have to go in hand, sell it to them.
0:06:32 He would be asleep and they would be coming to his site, finding a library of themes.
0:06:32 And they would buy one.
0:06:35 And now he pulls in $2 billion a year of cash flow.
0:06:38 He lives half the year in Bali, half the year in Japan.
0:06:41 He is living his dream life because he understood the rules of money.
0:06:47 How to first create a money-making skill, design, and then how to turn it into a business because
0:06:48 he doesn’t want to rent out his time.
0:06:48 He wants to own equity.
0:06:50 I’ll give you another example, content.
0:06:54 Let’s take someone who’s pretty big at content in the business world is a guy named Alex
0:06:54 Formozzi.
0:06:58 He took his master money-making skill, which is selling, and he turned it into videos, YouTube
0:07:00 videos, books, and courses.
0:07:02 His last book launch, he just did it about a month ago.
0:07:05 His last book launch sold 3 million copies.
0:07:09 And with all the add-on courses he added to it, he made $100 million in a single weekend.
0:07:14 $100 million as one guy because he understood that he didn’t need to sell his time in hourly
0:07:15 chunks of consulting.
0:07:17 He needed to turn it into a business.
0:07:18 The last example is capital.
0:07:19 So what does capital mean?
0:07:24 Well, this is really for the skill of hunting usually, but it can be used for any of these.
0:07:28 So this is where you want to take the money-making skill you have and you want to use it in the
0:07:29 art of investing.
0:07:30 My cousin did this.
0:07:33 So my cousin had a job making six figures, but he was sick of it.
0:07:34 He didn’t want to report to the office.
0:07:35 He didn’t like all the politics.
0:07:36 He didn’t like the boring meetings.
0:07:41 And so he quit his job and he decided, I’m going to learn the art of hunting multifamily
0:07:41 real estate.
0:07:42 So like apartment buildings.
0:07:46 He spent two years mastering that skill under somebody else who had been doing that for a
0:07:46 decade.
0:07:50 So he went and he learned and he looked, he identified the highest output person and he
0:07:54 doubled their inputs and then he left to do his own deals.
0:07:58 And in his first year doing his own deals, they bought about $40 million of real estate
0:08:03 using down payments or equity from other investors who were happy to give him a cut because he
0:08:03 was doing the hunting.
0:08:07 He was finding the killer deal, the deal that would perform above market that had a good margin
0:08:08 of safety.
0:08:12 He became a great hunter and he translated that into a business using this method of capital.
0:08:16 So takeaway here is if you only rent out your time, you’ll never get off the
0:08:17 treadmill.
0:08:18 Equity is the way.
0:08:21 All right, let’s take a quick break because I got to tell you a story.
0:08:24 Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team.
0:08:27 I was using a traditional bank and you know the type.
0:08:28 It’s got a janky interface.
0:08:32 It’s built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours.
0:08:34 And I hit send and it froze.
0:08:35 They flagged the transaction.
0:08:36 They locked my account.
0:08:40 They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch.
0:08:42 And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution.
0:08:45 After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.
0:08:48 And so now my payroll is two clicks.
0:08:49 I can wire money.
0:08:49 I can pay invoices.
0:08:52 I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard.
0:08:54 That’s why I use it for all of my companies.
0:08:57 And so do 200,000 other startup founders.
0:09:01 And so if you’re looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes.
0:09:03 Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
0:09:07 Bank services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank and Trust
0:09:08 members, FDIC.
0:09:10 All right, rule number three.
0:09:11 And this is the hardest rule of all of them.
0:09:12 Okay?
0:09:13 You ready for it?
0:09:14 Four letters.
0:09:15 Wait.
0:09:22 You can’t plant a seed in the soil and then the next day come dig it up and scream at it,
0:09:23 why aren’t you growing yet?
0:09:23 Right?
0:09:25 That’s not how a plant grows.
0:09:25 You need to water it.
0:09:26 You need to give it sunlight.
0:09:26 And you need to wait.
0:09:28 Let the thing actually grow.
0:09:30 Because if you’re doing what I’ve said, right?
0:09:33 You have developed one of the four money-making skills.
0:09:34 You have not just developed it.
0:09:36 You’ve spent two years really grinding and mastering.
0:09:39 Then you have turned that into a business that you own equity in.
0:09:41 Well, now getting rich is actually inevitable.
0:09:44 But inevitable is not the same thing as instantaneous.
0:09:47 So the bad news is, yes, it’s going to take trial and error.
0:09:49 It’s going to take a couple years for you to get it all figured out.
0:09:53 But the good news is you only need to get rich once in a lifetime.
0:09:57 Once you get rich once, as long as you’re not, you know, totally an idiot and you’re going
0:09:59 to blow it all, you can just let that compound from there.
0:10:03 So the secret here is you have to be willing to wait.
0:10:05 Now, waiting doesn’t mean just sitting around doing nothing.
0:10:08 The phrase I heard that I love best comes from Naval.
0:10:11 He said, be impatient with action and patient with results.
0:10:17 That combination, impatient with action, patient with results is a killer, unbeatable combination.
0:10:19 I would never want to compete with somebody who was like that.
0:10:21 And that’s a good test for if you should become that.
0:10:23 P.S.
0:10:26 Before I go to the next one, if you’re liking what’s in this video and you actually want
0:10:29 the notes from this, the team has actually written everything down.
0:10:31 So you don’t have to write it down yourself.
0:10:32 You can get it.
0:10:32 It’s in the description below.
0:10:33 All right.
0:10:33 Let me keep going.
0:10:35 The final rule.
0:10:35 Rule number four.
0:10:38 Proximity is power.
0:10:41 Even though I told you to wait, you know that good things take time.
0:10:43 You’re still going to hate waiting.
0:10:43 I hated it.
0:10:44 You’re going to hate it too.
0:10:46 The good news is you can actually speed up the result.
0:10:47 How?
0:10:49 You can make the plant grow a little faster.
0:10:51 And the way you do it is you move.
0:10:52 Literally, you move.
0:10:55 So if you want to be a tech founder, you need to move to San Francisco.
0:10:57 If you want to make movies, you go to LA.
0:11:01 Now, it’s not that you had to do it, but if you want to increase your odds and you want
0:11:02 to go faster, that’s what you would do.
0:11:07 Because proximity is power, meaning you want to be as close as you can to the white hot
0:11:08 center of action.
0:11:11 You want to go join the network of people who are doing what you do.
0:11:16 You want to be around people who have the same dream as you, who are in the same game as you.
0:11:18 Maybe they’re a little bit ahead and they can share what’s going on.
0:11:22 Maybe they’re right where you are and you can all grow together and learn from each other’s
0:11:25 mistakes so that you don’t have to learn every single mistake the hard way yourself.
0:11:27 And when I say move, I don’t just mean move to the city.
0:11:32 I mean, you move to a house with as many like-minded, smart, ambitious, interesting people as
0:11:32 you can.
0:11:37 When I moved to San Francisco, I moved into a house with six other tech founders who I
0:11:41 didn’t know, and they weren’t the best roommates and the bathrooms were stinky and all that good
0:11:41 stuff.
0:11:45 But the more important thing was I was around a group of really smart, ambitious people chasing
0:11:46 the same dream as me.
0:11:48 And those became great friends.
0:11:49 Those became connections.
0:11:51 Those became, you know, warm introductions to investors.
0:11:55 You don’t know exactly how it’s all going to play out, but you’re creating luck for yourself.
0:11:56 You learn faster.
0:11:57 It’s like osmosis.
0:12:01 Just being around them will make you think a little differently, work a little differently.
0:12:04 You know, if you hang out with a bunch of broke complainers, you’ll become one.
0:12:07 If you hang out with a bunch of killers, you will level up too.
0:12:10 There’s the cliche that’s been around for a long time.
0:12:12 You know, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
0:12:13 Well, it’s a cliche, but it’s true.
0:12:15 And it’s been around for a long time for a reason.
0:12:17 So if you want to change your life, change your zip code.
0:12:18 I’ll tell you a little story.
0:12:19 I was 24 years old.
0:12:21 I was living in Australia trying to start a startup.
0:12:22 I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
0:12:25 And I went to a local meetup for other founders.
0:12:27 I thought I should get around some other founders.
0:12:32 And at the meetup, one week they asked me, they said, hey, will you be the keynote speaker?
0:12:33 Will you give the talk this week on stage?
0:12:37 And I think I was supposed to be flattered, but no, I was horrified.
0:12:37 I was like, me?
0:12:39 24-year-old dumb shit me?
0:12:40 I haven’t done anything.
0:12:43 If I’m the smartest guy in this room, I’m in the wrong room.
0:12:45 So the next week, I literally packed my bags.
0:12:48 I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco with no plan.
0:12:49 I didn’t even have a place to stay.
0:12:56 But I knew that I needed to get around people who were smarter and the most ambitious, smart
0:12:58 group of people that I could who all had the same dream as me.
0:12:59 So let’s recap.
0:13:03 If you’ve done these four things, you’ve picked one of the four money-making skills, and you’ve
0:13:04 done your two years mastering it.
0:13:09 You then don’t rent out your time and fall down the career trap of getting hired and getting
0:13:09 raises.
0:13:12 You take that skill and you start a business based on code, content, or capital.
0:13:16 Then you wait, and you’re impatient with your action, but you’re very patient with your
0:13:16 results.
0:13:18 And lastly, proximity is power.
0:13:22 You speed up your development by moving to the White Hot Center and getting around like-minded
0:13:22 people.
0:13:23 Well, congratulations.
0:13:25 You have flipped the odds.
0:13:30 The best advice in the world is to take actions that would make it absolutely unreasonable for
0:13:30 you to fail.
0:13:33 Let’s take another example, weight loss, dieting, right?
0:13:36 I’ve been a type of person who’s tried many diets, failed many times.
0:13:38 And I think that’s pretty common.
0:13:41 I would say that dieting probably has a failure rate of 80 or 90%.
0:13:44 Let’s pretend with your diet, you just decided to do four things right.
0:13:46 You made four decisions.
0:13:50 So you ate clean, whole foods, high protein, you exercise daily, and you slept well.
0:13:54 If you actually did those things and you did the weight process where you let it, let it
0:14:00 unfold, it is now actually unreasonable for you to not lose weight, to get into great shape.
0:14:04 You have flipped the odds from 90% failure rate to 90% success rate.
0:14:08 And that’s what we’re going to do in the world of business and getting rich is we’ve all heard the
0:14:09 stats, right?
0:14:10 90% of new businesses fail.
0:14:11 Well, that’s true.
0:14:15 Startups, individual business ideas do fail, but founders don’t.
0:14:17 If you keep going and your rate of learning is high, you follow the four rules.
0:14:19 I just told you, you will not fail.
0:14:22 I’ll leave you with the Steve Martin story that always inspired me.
0:14:25 Steve Martin, the great comedian, he wanted to learn the banjo.
0:14:29 And when he was young, he started learning the banjo and he couldn’t tell the difference
0:14:30 between a C chord and G chord.
0:14:32 And his teacher was like, I’m not going to lie.
0:14:35 It’s not like you have a huge natural talent for the banjo.
0:14:39 And he was getting frustrated and impatient because he wanted to be great at something.
0:14:41 He wanted the result, but it wasn’t happening.
0:14:45 And it didn’t seem like he was naturally like on track to get there, but he made a little
0:14:46 mindset shift.
0:14:47 He said, you know what?
0:14:51 Instead of trying to be great at the banjo today, let me just make a decision.
0:14:54 He said, I’m going to play the banjo for 40 years because I can’t imagine that somebody
0:14:57 who’s been playing the banjo for 40 years still sucks at it.
0:15:02 And just by taking that long-term time horizon and understanding that he could flip his odds
0:15:06 of success from, I’m probably going to be one of those guys who tries it doesn’t happen
0:15:11 for him and I give up to, well, if I just stuck with this for 20, 40 years, I think I’d
0:15:11 be great at it.
0:15:14 And by the way, it never took 40 years within a decade.
0:15:19 Seymour actually won multiple Grammys for his songs where he’s playing the banjo.
0:15:23 He changed his mindset around the banjo and years later is actually winning Grammys for
0:15:23 it.
0:15:25 And so this is the formula.
0:15:26 This is the way.
0:15:28 I hope you take this.
0:15:29 I hope you’d be successful with this.
0:15:31 I have nothing but love for you.
0:15:32 I really rooted for you.
0:15:37 And so if this was helpful, leave me a comment below and maybe I’ll do a follow-up video.
0:15:40 It’s a little more detailed, but these are the high level, the four money rules.
0:15:42 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:15:54 All right, let’s take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot podcast
0:15:55 network, but we’re not the only ones.
0:15:57 There’s other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked them.
0:15:58 Maybe you should check them out.
0:16:01 One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew.
0:16:06 And whether you’re a marketer or a salesperson and you’re looking for the small changes you
0:16:09 could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make
0:16:10 a big difference.
0:16:12 That’s what that podcast is all about.
0:16:12 Check it out.
0:16:15 It’s called Nudge, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.