Hi, I'm Cody Sanchez.
Welcome back to the Big Deal Podcast.
When I first started out in finance, I was like maybe a lot of you guys.
I was working nonstop.
I kind of made some pretty good money, but I was spending too much of it.
It's really expensive just to live once you get out of college.
You're like wait a second, I'm making all this money, but then I've got rent, then I've got a car, then I've got to eat.
What I realized is that most people make really big mistakes early on in their career.
And I did that too.
So I thought I'd tell you what they were and how I would change them now.
If I was going to make myself rich, have a ton of fun and make myself really set up for my 30s, my first rule would be move fast but take more detours.
So my senior year of college.
I took the second half of the year and I spent most of it down in Mexico.
I was a human trafficking journalist along the US-Mexico border and I would cover something called Las Desaparecidas the disappeared women in Juarez, which is right across the border from El Paso.
And I saw things that I'll never be able to unsee.
I saw bodies swinging from overpasses because at that time it was the Sinaloan and the Sonoran cartel and they were going at each other.
One of the biggest prison breaks that ever happened in northern Mexico was there when I was there.
I would go to the morgue to check how many people were women.
It was mostly women who were murdered.
And I would try to figure out who they were and write stories about them.
Maybe the part that I've never told is like, I had adventures.
You know, I remember we were covering one of the cartels and we went to this club in Juarez which was kind of dangerous, which is like half the fun of being young is doing stupid young, dangerous things.
And I remember being in the club and you knew which cartels were in there, by some of the things that they wore, the colors that they wore and the outfits.
But I remember having a little love story with a guy who was trying to get out of a cartel while he was there and dancing to this music it's called Banda and having this moment where I find out that one of the cartels is going to have a big violent event.
And so we were journalists, so we went and covered it.
Why do you want this?
Because I eventually got into finance and I became obsessed with one guy whose name was Jim Rogers.
He was the former partner to George Soros.
I know not everybody loves him, but he was super, super rich.
And at the time that he was with George, they had the top performing hedge fund of all time.
But I remember when I was going on my adventures, I read about his.
And what's fascinating is one of the reasons that he's as big as he is today and as successful is.
He stopped working with George Soros, he gave it all up and he moved to travel around the world.
But I remember reading his stories and he was saying I didn't have to be that much smarter than anybody else.
I didn't have to work that much harder than anybody else because I was doing things that nobody else could think of.
That led to money.
His adventures are actually one of the main reasons why he became so successful.
He learned how to see opportunity in emerging markets and think like oh, if I invest, if I bring US dollars to this location, my dollar goes 2 to 3x farther.
And so if I buy a house or I buy properties or I buy investments, I'm immediately in the money on them, basically.
And so he would do this all over the world.
And I think today, like half the problem with being young is we have these soulless, terrible jobs where we don't do anything interesting and then people say it'll be fine.
You'll eventually be able to afford a house and have a life you want and it'll be okay.
But we sit on TikTok and Instagram all day because it's so much better than the life that we live, because we no longer do adventures.
We just sit in a fucking corporate cubicle all day under fluorescent lights and i don't think you need to do that.
My first job after being a journalist and covering those war atrocities and waras.
After that i went to a company to work in investments and i kind of hated it.
I made a ton of money.
So you know, first multiple six figures, then i made, you know, seven figures and i was like pretty miserable still, which sounds like a world-class problem, like first-class problem, but that was the truth.
And then i realized that i wanted to go back to adventuring And so I decided that I wanted to build up a business in Latin America.
And so I kind of spoke OK Spanish.
I got with this company called First Trust, and they didn't have a Latin American business division.
And I was like, listen, I do finance stuff in the US.
You don't have anybody doing finance stuff in Latin America.
What if we pair the two?
Let me go and build this business for you.
Pay me the same amount that you're paying me to do America things and I'll go do Latin America things and I built a business that was a billion dollars in assets under management.
There was this one moment where I sat in the office in Santiago, Chile.
It was one of my biggest investors there.
My Spanish again, okay, not great, but we bonded because guess what was behind him?
He also had a copy of Jim's book that was George Soros' partner.
His name is Jim Rogers.
The reason that this guy ended up giving me my first tens of millions of dollars in investment was because he had been inspired by the same book.
And this one man led to a meeting where just about everybody I needed to know in Santiago Chile, and build my almost billion dollars in asset center management business I was connected to through him.
Santiago, Chile is actually like all the wealth is super concentrated.
So one man, a mutual love of adventure, something a little interesting led to a giant business.
Those people today who tell you that you can't have fun and you can't adventure while you're working are totally fucking full of it.
You know, I hiked the mountains of Patagonia by myself one called Torres del Paine.
It's beautiful and I remember at that time I was like kind of going through heartbreak.
I don't know if that ever has happened to you guys, but you know my heart was broken.
I was having a really hard time.
I went on a solo trip down to the edge of the world and And I'm by myself
It's one of the last days of the season before it gets really, really cold there.
And I'm in this converted hotel that looks like an apocalyptic bunker.
It was so cool.
There happened to be flamingos, which is amazing in Patagonia.
They have these flamingos that fly over these glacial lakes.
It's almost eerie.
It feels like another world.
And so I go on this hike by myself.
Everybody else is couples.
And I'm sitting by myself in the evening.
We're getting ready to go hike the main mountain, Torre del Paine.
And we're hiking and I'm thinking about things.
And I have this moment where I'm really in my head and I think everything is about me.
And as we're crossing a bridge, I put my hand on one side of the bridge and the bridge breaks.
This is a true story.
And I'm carrying a backpack because we're hiking, and I got a bunch of shit in it and food and water and whatever, and I've got my hiking poles.
And I fall off of the side of the bridge.
And the bridge has like, you know how bridges have like the pole that holds the handle?
Well thankfully that pole hadn't broken, just the handle had.
So I wrap my leg, my knee basically catches on the side of the pole and I'm hanging off the side of the bridge.
That's like shaking.
And I remember thinking in that very moment, what if this was the end?
What if everything ended at that moment?
And in that moment, I had the weirdest thought, which is I've lived a pretty fucking cool life.
So even if I fall off into this glacial lake all the way down there and I crash on those rocks and it's a total disaster, that's pretty cool.
I built a billion dollar business in Latin America.
I'd loved somebody.
I'd lost somebody.
I'd had adventures around the world.
Cool.
I don't want to die.
That sounds awful.
But if I have to, cool.
And so I wish somebody else would have told me when I was younger it is okay to go do wild and crazy fucking things and you do not have to spend your entire life working.
In fact, you can intertwine the two.
The second lesson I have is I do not want you to stop and ask yourself, is this all that life is?
And I'm rather obsessed with this other guy by the name of Jim Simons.
Apparently I got a thing for Jim's.
So Jim is the founder of Renaissance Technologies like arguably one of the best investors in the world.
His flagship fund.
It's called Medallion.
They basically built these algorithms that made 66 average annual returns every single year, making it like one of the world's most profitable funds ever.
What's fascinating about him though is, before he became a multi-multi-billionaire, he took many detours beforehand.
And he talks about how he survived a mudslide going through Latin America, how at one point he was surrounded by a group of teenagers and an angry mob that wanted to kill them.
I think the thing that people don't tell you today is I wonder how many builders are adrenaline junkies seeking adventurers?
I don't think you want your life to be planned out and easy.
You want excitement and surprise and problems big enough to be worthy of conquering them.
And Jim Simon keeps asking himself this question all the time, which is, is this it?
Is this how the rest of my life will be?
And he had it all.
When he decided that he was going to go create his own business, he was at MIT, the university.
He had tenure, so super hard to fire, make a lot of money, really hard to get.
He had a Harvard University degree.
He had mathematical academic respect, but his life seemed to be too much planned.
And so he went on a new adventure.
And, you know, I basically made millions off of the fact that I wanted to do adventure and business.
So that's what you maybe could consider doing too.
The third lesson is called Find the Unripe Bananas.
I'll tell you a couple different stories, but the main idea is this.
Where is their money hidden in plain sight?
So there was a business owner who created a banana empire by buying overly ripe bananas they were all going to throw out.
His name was Sam Zamuri, famously known as Sam the Banana Man.
Sam basically noticed that big fruit companies were discarding ripe bananas that were too mature to ship across long distances before spoiling.
They would just throw them away.
So he bought these ripe bananas at a discount, and then he said, what if we were just faster?
Like how could we get them as fast as possible to only the closest cities, like New Orleans, for instance?
And then he sold them right before they spoiled for way less and turning a solid profit.
So by the time he was 21, he had made over 100000, which is worth like today, that would be millions and millions of dollars and founded his own company, basically.
And he later took over United Fruit Company, which was one of the most powerful corporations of its time.
So he started with a few ripe bananas, then he built his own company, then he takes over one of the biggest companies in the space and then he buys more of the other companies in his space.
He was big on mergers and acquisitions.
And I like this finding the unripe bananas idea because it's the same with another company called Misfit Foods, where the founder basically went to an apple orchard, saw them having bruised apples or apples that fell on the ground that still looked totally fine and said why are you throwing those away?
What if instead, I bought all of the beaten up weird looking fruit?
That was still good and I sold it at a discount in like surprise boxes.
And he turned that into a business well worth over nine figures.
I think this idea of adventure leads to opportunity is the underlying of all of this.
Would you have found the apples, the bananas, you know, the opportunity if you were behind a seat?
No.
And so my last lesson for you is like do not ever let anyone tell you what you're capable of or that you have to do it.
Their path, choose your own.
You know, when i left goldman sachs, my own family said replacing goldman sachs so gs with cs cody sanchez was a huge mistake.
When i started division latin america, a colleague said you must be a secretary, you're too young to head the region.
Another one asked me who i had sex with in order to get the job that I had at that time.
And the answer was none of those motherfuckers, that's for sure.
Anyway, when I got on social media, one of my partners said, literally, I saved this text.
You guys, I can prove it to you.
You're dumbing down the firm.
I hope you got more likes today.
Joke's on you, Dan, because now my, it's bigger than yours?
No, just kidding, but my bank account is bigger than his.
And then, when I left to start my own media company, a colleague at the company at that time said well, don't lose my number for when that cute little blog fails.
And I think it kind of meant well, but I torched that number immediately just on principle alone.
When I started a venture capital fund, they said, you're not in Silicon Valley, that'll never work.
They said, Austin, Texas, that's not where the deals are.
And now we have one of the top performing venture capital funds in all of the 2022 vintage, which means for that year.
It's called Contrarian Thinking Capital, if you guys wanna see it.
And then when I started buying businesses, the internet trolls said, they're going to make no money.
You probably don't even own them.
I bet you've never even been in a laundromat.
You can't win with these people.
When I started our academy to teach people how to sell, buy and grow businesses, a bunch of ex-Wall Streeters that I used to work with said this will never work.
Normal people can't buy businesses.
When I launched my book, if you guys have seen Main Street Millionaire, they said, just another internet guru.
I bet it sucks and it won't sell any copies.
And then it became a New York Times bestseller.
When I launched BizScout, which is our business and buying and selling marketplace, they said it's just a knockoff of some of the others.
It'll never get big.
So the moral of the story is not that I've done all of these cool things.
It's that every single thing I've ever done and every single thing you ever do.
People will tell you why you can't do it.
And why will they do that?
Because like, if you achieve that, then what's their excuse?
Because if you do a big thing, then how come they failed?
Because you become a mirror to a person they don't really like, which is themselves.
You know, I've never had somebody who was doing more than me, who was more successful than I.
Am shit on me on the internet ever, and you won't either.
So ignore the haters because the truth is you have to trust you, not any other who.
You know, your biggest mistakes will not be a how or a what, but a who.
If I could go back and do anything differently, it would be one.
I got married too young and with reservations.
I wouldn't do that again.
And two, I felt like that was the path I had to follow because everybody else did.
And so, more than anything else, I think what you should probably try to go do is get into some more fucking trouble.
You know, the other day somebody asked me what they should do to create content like I do and how to go viral on the internet.
And I like thought about it for a second.
And I was like my first viral piece of content, you guys, was about a laundromat I bought.
That was kinda like a piece of shit, but how I made money on it anyways.
And the reason that that went viral is like, I was doing it.
I wasn't like let me sit and think about 10 things young people should do today in order to become successful.
As said by me, not a successful person.
It wasn't any of that.
It was literally I'm doing this thing.
I don't know.
I think it's cool.
It's hard to hide obsession.
And so my response to this person was, If you wanna be cool, you gotta do cool shit.
When you go do cool shit, your life is the content.
You don't have to come up with ideas.
You live it every single day.
So do you really need to go watch another Get Ready With Me video from somebody?
Do we really need to talk to somebody else on the internet who hasn't done a thing that they said they did? uh go get some experience get some scars and scabs bring back some stories and then the content writes itself you know you can talk about war because i was in a cartel war as a journalist you can talk about going to mexico and building a business there and i remember walking in the presidential palace and trying to figure out how to sell them investments fun side story there that was hysterical at the time i was like down a walkway this is a mexico city and if you've ever been to the presidential palace there it's It's stunning.
It's in the middle of, it's called the Zocalo.
And I'm walking down the thing.
I'm trying to.
I think I'm going to meet with one of the heads of the treasury department there and trying to get them to let us invest some of their money.
And I'm bringing one of my super, super midwestern, uh principles of the company.
So he's the one that invests the money.
I was the one building out the business and selling the investments.
And if you look on the wall as we're walking past, there's all these photos of former mexican presidents and this poor guy.
When i was like, oh my gosh, he's like man.
Uh, they don't really look like mexicans, do they?
I was like jesus, because they're very spanish looking, as opposed to indiana, which is another way to say like more indigenous looking.
And I remember in that moment thinking this guy who is like I don't know, he must have been 65 years old.
He has traveled so lightly upon the world.
He has not had adventures.
He doesn't know what it's like really on the ground in some place like Mexico.
And so he makes a silly comment because he had never really seen.
Even though he had all the money in the world, he had probably locked himself up in fancy resorts in Cabo and all inclusives and never really seen anything.
You know, and those little stories, like the time that I almost got kicked out of the Mexican Stock Exchange and I had an entire business there that was reliant on me being able to have my investments on the Mexican Stock Exchange.
If they would have kicked us out, I would have I would have been out of a job and out of money.
And so I remember it happened because BlackRock, they bought my biggest client, one of the , those are one of the pensions down there.
And so BlackRock bought my biggest client, who is called Bonamex.
I have this amazing friend of mine Rodrigo, down there.
We did a bunch of business together and I lost a 100 million client because they literally bought that entire business and then replaced my first trust investments with their iShares, BlackRock investments and got rid of my entire business overnight.
And so these adventures led to a place where today, when something goes wrong in business, when something doesn't work out, when we've got a new opportunity, I can go.
That's cool.
Because you know what the thing is about problems?
When you find problems, that's where all the profit is.
And so young people today, if you're listening and if young Cody was listening, I would say go and adventure some more.
Make some big, huge mistakes.
Trust you instead of another who.
Never settle for a life where you get to say, is this it?
And don't believe that you have to do some traditional career path in order to make a ton of money.
If I'm nothing else, I could be an example for you of why that is not necessary.
All right, guys, if you liked this episode, let me know.
It's kind of just me talking to you more from the heart.
Like I wish somebody had talked to me when I was young and trying to figure things out, or even if I was older and before I figured it out.
If you liked this episode, you might want to go back to another one I did, called Why Top 1 of Earners Don't Stay in Their Hometowns.
And the reason why is because it might push you to go shake up life a little bit and then you can grab it.
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We help thousands of business owners a year figure out how to scale to the next level.
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