If you click this video, it's probably not the first video you've ever clicked like this.
Maybe one like this, or this, or this.
There are a ton of videos on YouTube that are promising you how you can get rich quick.
And I get it because everybody wants that.
I wanted it to. Let me guess.
It didn't work. You did not in fact get rich quickly.
And that's not your fault because most advice on the internet either comes from people who themselves never got rich or it's too vague, it's too general, it's just things like work hard, find your passion, things like that.
And as bad of a reputation as get rich quick has, the truth is it is actually possible to get rich quickly, right?
You can get rich slow, you can get rich quick, you can get rich.
But most of the people who are doing these videos, they've actually never done it themselves.
A few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk at Berkeley and the talk I chose to give was called How to Make a Million Dollars After You Graduate.
And I gave that talk because that's what I wanted when I was a college kid.
Like I didn't know any better.
I just thought, well, what am I doing all this studying for?
Why am I working so hard?
Because I wanted to get a job that would be successful, that would give me money and then I would be financially free and that's what I wanted.
I wasn't really ashamed to admit it.
Now, the problem was the whole time in college, nobody was explaining to me like, what do you actually go do to make that happen?
Right. I was learning about mitosis and I was learning about, you know, the history of the world wars.
And nobody was telling me I'm here at school to learn how to be successful.
Nobody was telling me how to actually do that.
And so this talk that I gave at Berkeley has at the beginning, it does have some of those core principles, the things that you got to know in order to make this happen.
And at the end, I have specific ideas.
I call them my white belt businesses.
So the specific ideas that I would go do if I wanted to make this process faster, it took me about 10 years, but I think I could have done it in about four if I knew what I was doing.
So this is it. I'm doing it.
This is my Get Rich Quick video.
Enjoy. If you're listening to this on audio, I'm just gonna tell you right now, you're going to want to go watch this on YouTube because there's slides and they're good slides.
There's slides with beautiful pictures on them and there are things that are going to make this way easier to understand.
So just go to YouTube and type my first million on YouTube and you will find this video.
While you're there, just subscribe.
Just do the good thing.
This is not going to be like one of those videos where the thumbnail and the title sound really good, sound really promising.
And then you watch and 40 minutes in you're like, dude, what is the message?
That's my promise to you.
I'm actually going to tell you a bunch of really core principles with my real story and then some specifics of how you can actually implement this.
All right. So let's jump in.
The premise of this talk is how to make your first million.
I says after Berkeley because I did this at Berkeley, it's how to make your first million in your 20s.
So how to make it in a few years rather than working for 40 years, saving up and then hitting this goal when you're 60, 65, ready for retirement.
And most people who talk to you online or in person will tell you just follow your passion.
But I don't know about you.
I personally, I liked the idea, but I did not know what my passion actually was.
If you told me what your passion when I was in school, I don't know.
I would have said recess because there was not something that I was so passionate about that.
I just thought, oh, wow, this is it.
This is my true calling.
Maybe there's some people out there that are that lucky, but I wasn't one of them.
And so that advice didn't really work for me.
So I'm not going to tell you to follow your passion.
Instead, I'm going to do what somebody did for me when I was younger.
So this is me in college.
I went to Duke University and I thought I was going to be a doctor.
I was pre -med. I spent my whole college career taking physics and biology and chemistry classes.
And finally, my last semester, when I was done with all those requirements, I had taken the MCATs, I was ready to go to med school.
I finally took the easy class.
I took the blowoff class, the class that my roommate always was taking, rocks for jocks type of classes, and it was called getting rich.
I just took it for an easy A, but instead it actually was the most important class I took my entire college career.
Because at the time I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to be happy.
I wanted to be rich.
I wanted to have abs, but my plan was just, there was no plan.
It was really just a goal.
And a goal without a plan is just a wish.
And so I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea how to actually get there.
And then I met this guy.
This guy came into my class and he changed my life.
This is not actually a picture of him.
This is just a picture when I search cool men's haircut, but that guy had a really cool haircut and he walked in and he blew my mind.
And so here's my promise to you.
My pinky is out for you here.
I'm going to tell you how I did it, how I made a million dollars when I was in my twenties, how you can do it and specific ideas that I would be doing if I was you today to go make it happen again.
Because even if you don't follow my exact path, I know better now.
I know how I could have got there easier and with less pain and faster.
And I'm going to tell you what those three three ideas are.
Okay. Along the way between you today and this picture of you at the end, lying on a hammock under an umbrella at a beach somewhere, there are sort of five key checkpoints, five things that you got to do in order to make that dream happen to get to paradise.
But before I give you any advice, rule number one, never ask directions from somebody who's never been to that destination before or never trust a bald barber for a haircut.
I want to fast my credentials here so that you know that I'm legit.
So if you give me a minute to brag, I don't like to brag, but I got a brag here because you should not be listening to business advice or money advice from anybody who has not achieved it themselves.
Here's my basic resume.
I've started over 10 companies.
Three of them have sold.
I've invested in over a hundred others.
My current portfolio of companies that I own and operate will do close to a hundred million dollars this year in revenue.
And that's where I'm at now.
And when I was in my twenties, I started off completely clueless.
And so I went from clueless to that and I think you can too.
It took me about 15 years.
I think you could do it faster if you knew better.
One of my companies, Bebo got acquired by Amazon.
I started a newsletter company called the milk road that got bought after about a year.
I have also a quote unquote thought leader and I have to put Dr.
Evil up here because it's you know, pretty embarrassing to even, even try to say, but the truth is have a podcast that's pretty popular.
I have a Twitter that's pretty popular.
Justin Bieber follows me.
He did not respond to my DM.
So that's a little bit of a soft spot for me.
You get the idea. Okay.
I'm legit. Do I have permission to continue?
Are we good? So this is me back in 2010.
I'm sitting in that classroom and I am painfully average.
I have average grades.
I have an average social life.
It's not even so bad that I'm like, oh, wow, this is going to make for a really great comeback story.
Nobody was rooting for me because I was just in the middle and I was stuck and I was not bad enough where I felt even really a lot of motivation to change it.
I just thought that's who I am.
I'm kind of a middle of the pack sort of guy.
So that was me, Mr.
Mediocre. And what changed?
I met a girl, not my wife.
It was a woman named Lisa Keester and she changed my life, my plan without even knowing it.
I took her class and in walks Mr.
Cool haircut and Mr.
Cool haircut asked a question.
He's supposed to be giving a talk, but he says instead of giving a talk, let me just ask a simple question.
Who here wants to be an entrepreneur someday?
Who here wants to be wealthy and be a successful entrepreneur?
Everybody's hands went up, right?
So everybody had the entrepreneur side down.
And then he said, cool, you guys are all seniors, right?
We said, yes. He said, awesome.
So you're graduating in just a couple of months.
Yes. Who here is already working on their business idea?
One hand went up and he said, okay, well, who knows that they're going to go start a startup when they graduate?
And two hands went up.
He said, wow. So out of a class of 100 % of people who wanted to go be an entrepreneur, almost none of you are actually going to go be an entrepreneur.
What's up with that?
And he said, well, what are you planning to do?
And person said, well, yeah, I do want to start a company someday, but I got a great job at UBS.
I got a great job at McKinsey and they had, everybody had great jobs lined up after school.
And so he just asked why.
And he asked why like we were crazy.
This quote from Andrew Wilkinson to me explains it well, he said, go into business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history.
Cause you want to join the NBA in the same way, going and getting a job, um, out of business in order to learn how to run a business, uh, that doesn't really work.
That's not actually what happens.
And instead what will happen to you is what Nassim Taleb calls the third grade addiction.
So the three, three most harmful addictions in the world are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
And for most of us, we will be trapped by that salary monster.
As soon as you get on that path of having the job and you have the salary, it is very, very hard to get off that.
And so that is the first trap for anybody who wants to get rich is that most of you will talk yourself into why you need to have a job.
I did this too, by the way, I went and got a job for about two months and quit by, you know, quit my job for after two months, even though it was a six figure job straight out of college.
It was a good job and it wasn't like the job was boring or terrible in any way, but I just realized like, this is not getting me closer to the thing I actually want.
And so the safe path, which was taking the job was actually kind of dangerous because it was dangerous to my dream.
Right. I think we all think of danger as danger to you.
Like, Oh, it's going to, you're something bad is going to happen to you.
Uh, but the worst thing that could happen to you is that actually you choose a path and you spend all your time and energy working on something that's not your dream.
And so if I had a dream of being a successful entrepreneur, which is what I did, then the salary monster was the very first thing to avoid.
And so, uh, you need to slay the salary monster.
Most of you will fall into the someday trap where you say that someday you will go start that company and someday you will make it happen.
But someday never comes.
All right. Let's take a quick break.
Cause I got to tell you about a friend of the pod who's got their own podcast.
If you know Steph Smith, she is a legend.
She's been on MFM many times and she's got her own podcast called the a 16 C podcast.
And it's all about technology.
If you think about it, technology has evolved like crazy.
I mean, I grew up in the nineties.
I had CDs phones had cords.
You couldn't use the internet if your mom was on the phone.
And now there's like 3d printers and there's rockets that can go up into space, AI.
There's so much crazy stuff going on.
And you got to have a place that helps you stay ahead of the curve.
And that's what the a 16 Z podcast is trying to do.
It's a podcast from the VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
And it's trying to give you an inside look at the trends that are shaping our future.
They've had guests like Mark Cuban and Neal Stephenson on, and they talk about topics like deep fakes or the science behind GLP ones or autonomous drones.
No small boy stuff at all.
Steph is the host. She's awesome.
I think you'll enjoy the podcast.
So check it out. It is the async CZ podcast.
And I like this tagline to say it's like eavesdropping on the future.
That's pretty cool.
That's a good tagline.
So check it out the a 16 Z podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
My friend Trevor has his great analogy that I want to offer to you here.
And it's the story of two tigers.
And there's two tigers that were, you know, born together, same mom separated at birth.
And one tiger was taken by these wonderful tiger loving people and cared for and raised at a zoo.
He was loved every day.
They brushed his hair.
They fed him everything that he loved and they taught him new tricks.
They just cared for him in every way they could.
They took care of him.
That is the zoo tiger.
And the other tiger was neglected.
He was left alone in the jungle to survive on his own.
He had to, if he wanted to eat, he had to hunt.
If he wanted to drink, he had to find water and he had to survive against all predators and prey.
And so they became these two tigers, the zoo tiger and the jungle tiger.
And let me ask you a quick question.
So after 10 years of being raised this way, if the jungle tiger was put in the zoo, what would happen?
He would be bored. He would be bored out of his mind.
He would be like, what am I supposed to do all day?
I just sit here. I just sit here and look pretty.
His entire way of life would be almost neutered and he would be put in a zoo and he would be bored out of his mind.
And this is the most entrepreneurs if they ever get a corporate job, they sort of sit there at their desk and they wonder what am I supposed to be doing here?
I don't understand.
What does this job title mean?
And the opposite is also interesting.
So if you take the zoo tiger, you put him in the jungle after 10 years, what happens to him?
He dies. He has no idea how to actually survive in the real world because he has been coddled and cared for and lived in this structured box his entire life.
And that is the problem with the someday trap, which is if you spend your life in these jobs, even good jobs, even challenging jobs, you are being raised as a zoo tiger.
And every year that you are in the zoo, you are less likely to be able to survive in the jungle.
It's not impossible, but man, your conditioning is really wiring you for that.
And so you get to choose early on if you are going to be a zoo tiger and a jungle tiger.
And you should know that the jungle tiger's path is often much more uncertain, much more uncomfortable, and he's going to get dirty and rough and get some cuts and bumps and bruises.
But in the end, it's what he wants to be able to survive on his own.
Okay. So that is the zoo, tiger, jungle, jungle, tiger story.
And I say that all of this to say that step one of being successful is it not about intelligence.
It's not about experience.
It's not about strategy at all.
It is about courage.
And that courage is the rate limiting step for 99 % of smart people.
And so if you consider yourself a smart person, instead of trying to pour more water into the bucket of intelligence or information and read the next article, or learn the next strategy.
In fact, you should actually look at your courage bucket and make sure that it is full and that you are ready to go.
Because if you don't do that, none of the other stuff will work.
Okay, let's move on.
Oh yeah. This is a little slide I had here.
Courage is like toilet paper during a hurricane.
It is in scarce supply.
It is not on the shelves.
Okay. Now you've done step one.
You've decided to go do it.
You've decided to do it now, not someday.
So what is the second thing that you got to do?
Well, the next thing that's going to happen is you're going to fail, and you're going to fail miserably.
I know very few people who just decided to be an entrepreneur and then went and did it.
But you have to decide if you're going to be okay with that kind of failure.
And I love this Bill Burr quote.
I want to read it to you here.
Bill Burr, the famous comedian said, he knew he should go after comedy because he realized that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing.
You know what's worse?
Sleeping in a king bed next to a wife that you're not really in love with.
But for some reason you married and you've got a couple of kids and you've got a job that you hate, and you're laying there fantasizing about chasing your dream and sleeping on a futon, there is no risk when you go after a dream.
There is no risk when you go after a dream.
There's a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe.
I love this Bill Burr quote and I agree with it wholly.
Now let me tell you practically speaking, strategically speaking, how I did this.
So I decided when I graduated from college that I was going to spend a year strategically broke.
And I chose this phrase instead of saying unemployed or saying I'm traveling.
I said I am being strategically broke.
And I said that because it got people to ask me questions, intelligent questions like what does that mean?
Why are you doing that?
And I had to have a real answer for it.
And so I decided I'm not going to med school and I calculated what I call the freedom number.
And the freedom number is a very important number.
A lot of people will calculate their desired net worth.
They will calculate their dream amount of money that they want to have.
That is a sort of a maximum number you want to have, but you actually want to calculate the minimum number.
And the minimum number I call the freedom number, which is the minimum salary you need to have maximum freedom.
Okay. So what is the minimum amount you need to earn that would give you the most of your time every day to go do whatever it is that you want to do?
For me, for example, I calculated that I needed roughly, I think it was like 15 grand to live on for the year.
And I said, if I have 15 grand, then I can pay all my bills and I could just spend all my time doing whatever I want.
And so 15 grand became my target.
And this is when all my friends were targeting six figure salaries or whatever they wanted to get as much as they could.
And they were willing to go work banking jobs, 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week, trying to get that extra 10 K or 20 K salary, whereas I was going the opposite way.
I was like, can I tutor kids?
Can I like coach basketball at a school like this?
And that's what I did.
I literally, I tutored stats, even though I was a C plus stats student.
And I taught basketball at a school for autistic children.
And that's what I did.
That was my job. When I was graduated from a prestigious school, I decided to spend a year doing that because that paid me my 15 K that I needed in the minimum amount of time.
It only took me like, you know, whatever, four hours a week or five hours a week of time to do that.
And then I had 80 hours a week free to do whatever I wanted.
And so I wanted my freedom number to be hit.
And to do this, you're going to live a little scrappy.
This is actual pictures from my apartment at the time.
So this is, you know, our art is like a towel on the wall.
This ugly Craigslist couch.
Uh, we slept on air mattresses.
You notice that the air mattresses next to the couch because we put three people in a two bedroom apartment, like, you know, just the basic things.
This was our kitchen.
You know, I don't know why we nailed the garbage bag to the wall, but like we did whatever we needed to do.
We just didn't spend money on anything that was going to, because it was decreasing our freedom if we spent money on other stuff.
And, um, we used that time to start our first business and this is us on CNN pitching our first business with Sabi sushi.
And, um, it worked right away.
We had a brilliant idea.
We were brilliant co -founders and we had a huge success right away.
Oh wait, that's not at all what happened.
Actually, it was a terrible idea.
We decided to start a sushi franchise, even though restaurants are terrible business.
And we knew nothing about the food business.
I started it not with two brilliant co -founders, but with my two buddies who were equally clueless as me.
And, um, it did not work immediately.
It was not a huge success.
It failed badly. And this failure was very painful because reality punched us in the mouth.
We had told everybody.
We knew that we were doing this.
Everyone we graduated with our teachers, our parents, our friends, a family, all of them.
And we made no money.
In fact, we lost money doing this.
We burned about $25 ,000 of prize money that we had won to do this.
We made no money during or after.
And now we had a new label instead of being entrepreneurs.
We were labeled as failures.
And this is where I want to offer you a chance to play a game because this is the second fork in the road.
The first fork in the road was, are you even going to get started?
Right? That was the salary monster.
Well, the second fork in the road is, are you going to quit after the first failure, which is almost inevitable.
And so if there was a game where I had a piece of paper and on this piece of paper, I had, let's say there was 10 circles and under the 10 circles, one of the 10 circles had a prize and the other nine were you lose, try again.
So, uh, I let you play the game.
You pick a number, think of that number in your head right now, whatever number you thought of.
It's not that you lost.
Okay, cool. Uh, so you lose round one and that makes sense.
You only had a one in 10 chance of, uh, of winning, which is by the way, similar to the odds of a successful business when you start a new business.
Now, the trick here is that even though the game is rigged against you, meaning I have a nine out of 10 chance of winning, you have a one out of 10 chance of winning.
You do have one tool at your disposal, which is that you get to play the game as many times as you want.
Well, the funny thing about that is that if you get to play a game like this, even with a one out of 10 chance to win, if you got to play that 10 times, your odds of success now go up to about 65%.
So now you're an odds on favorite to win.
You're going to win two out of every three times you actually try that.
And so this is the game of entrepreneurship.
The game of entrepreneurship is you have to have the courage to start and then you have to have the endurance to try 10 times.
Okay. So these are my first two lessons to you.
Number one, start now.
Number two, play the game 10 times.
It took me 10 years to be successful.
And that was about 10 attempts.
So I think technically it was about eight or nine years total.
But 10 or 11 attempts in those eight or nine years, that's about normal.
It takes about a year to try anything in earnest.
And I was willing to try 10 times.
And this is the same is true for all of my cohort of friends.
So of all of my friends, we were in San Francisco together.
We were in our early twenties.
And we all wanted to be successful.
A couple of them got it in their first, second, or third try.
But most of us, it took about 10 tries.
But the amazing thing is that after 10 years, almost everybody is successful.
You know, the great quote from Naval is that startups fail, but founders don't.
And you got to remember that the startup itself might fail, but you won't fail.
If you play the game 10 times.
Now, the third thing you need to do is answer this thought experiment.
If you know that you're going to lose many times, for sure on the first and probably the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time that you're going to try this, can you win even when you lose at Berkeley?
I had people come up to the whiteboard and write down an answer.
How do you win when you lose?
And somebody said, well, maybe you win because you learned some lessons.
Okay, that's great.
You won when you lost.
How else? Maybe you met some great people along the way.
You earn some connections.
Great. That's another way to win when you lose.
What else can you do?
And so the one that I want to draw your attention to is the skills that you will build while you fail.
And so even though the startups you're doing might fail, in fact, probably will fail, even though you believe in your heart, there's no chances of going to fail.
This is totally going to work.
The one thing that you can control that will certainly succeed is if you build your skill stack and there are three master skills, you must build along the way.
The first skill is learning to build.
The second skill is learning to sell.
And the third skill is learning to get lucky.
Let's walk through them.
Learning to build. Okay, you are going to have to choose one way to build one way to make things.
It doesn't have to be building with your hands.
It can be, it can be engineering, robotics, things like that.
So Elon Musk type stuff, rockets, cars, that type of thing.
You can learn to build that stuff and you will suck out of the beginning.
But if you're going to do this for a few years, you'll be pretty damn good by year two, three, four.
You will know what you're doing.
You'll be able to build at least prototypes and maybe even your V1 of things yourself.
So you can build things with your hands.
You could build things with code so you can learn to program.
You can build things as a designer.
You can also learn how to build or make content.
So this podcast, YouTube channel, you need to learn how to make something.
And so that is the first thing you're going to learn.
Pick a path of what thing you're going to learn to make and then practice that nonstop.
And so you should pick the thing that you love the most.
Don't try to strategize this.
Just pick the one you're drawn to.
Pick the one that you think would be really cool if you could do it.
That you think you would have the energy to do even when you're tired after work.
And that's the one you want to pick.
And that's the one you want to start doing.
And you're going to do it hundreds and hundreds of times.
So I'm obsessed with being transparent about money, particularly with ultra high net worth people.
The reason being is that there's not a lot of information on this demographic.
And so because I own Hampton, which is a community for founders, I have access to thousands of young and incredibly high net worth people.
We have people worth hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton.
And so every year we do this thing called the Hampton Wealth Report, where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs.
And we ask them all types of information about their personal finances.
We ask them about how they're investing their money, what their portfolio looks like.
We ask them about their monthly spend habits.
We ask them how they've set up their estate, how much money they're going to charity, how much money they keep in cash, how much money they're paying themselves from their businesses.
Basically, every question that you want to ask a rich person, we do it for you, and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people.
So if you want to check out the report, it's called the Hampton Wealth Report.
Just go to joinhampton .com, click our menu, and you're going to see a section called reports.
And you're going to see it all right there.
It's very easy. So again, it's called the Hampton Wealth Report, go to joinhampton .com, click the menu and then click the report button.
And let me know what you think.
The second thing is learning to sell.
Learning to sell is how you get the thing you made into people's hands.
This is learning Facebook ads.
This is learning Google ads.
This is learning how to do content marketing where you write blog posts and then the blog posts teach somebody something and then at the end you say, here's my product.
You learn newsletter writing and how to sell that way.
You learn copywriting skills so that you learn what words get people to actually and so you need to learn the core set of sales skills.
Whether this is in -person selling, whether this is phone selling, whether this is cold emailing, whether this is digital marketing, one of those, one of those paths you got to learn to pick and figure out how to do.
And so the startups that you build along the way, somebody's going to need to make the stuff, somebody's going to need to sell the stuff that should be you at the beginning.
And even though you suck at it and that's why your startup is going to fail, you're going to build one inch at a time those skills so that you're actually good at it.
So that when you actually have a good idea, you will be able to execute on it.
And the third thing is learning how to get lucky.
There are four types of luck.
If you've never heard this before, I'll do the fast version.
The first type of luck is blind luck.
It's just a lucky break.
So you're standing still and lightning strikes you.
This happens, but you can't count on it.
There's nothing you can do to influence it.
The second one is motion luck.
This is Fortune Favors the Bold.
You do so much stuff that you just get lucky more than the guy who sits still.
I think we all know this in our gut.
The person who's doing more things, giving themselves more surface area, more of a chance of getting lucky, even if they're doing, you know, not the best things or not the most effective things or efficient things, just simply doing more things than less will increase your luck.
The third is spotting luck.
So this is, you know, the prepared mind.
This is when a guy spends his whole career analyzing stocks.
And then one day he reads a report that everybody else ignores, but he knows, wow, this is a winner.
This is about to be a hundred X return for me because he knows what he's looking for.
And the way you get spotting luck is again, by doing so much stuff that when something is actually an outlier, you will be able to recognize it.
Because you've seen a hundred mundane things.
This is like in dating, you've gone on a hundred bad dates that actually prepares you so that when you meet that remarkable person, you actually recognize, wow, this is an amazing person.
Do not let this, do not blow this chance.
Do not let them go.
Do not just take the first note, really go after it.
And so that's the third one.
And the fourth one, which is your reputational luck, it's where luck is like a magnet.
The classic example here is that you are the world's best deep sea diver.
You are known for it.
You are renowned for your ability to dive deep into the ocean.
Well, when somebody discovers a sunken treasure all the way across the world, their first phone call will be to you because of your reputation.
And this is why, you know, making content online is so valuable because if you get a reputation for being the guy or gal who knows about X, then people start calling you, they start thinking about you and other people's luck becomes your luck.
And so the three core skills you want to learn, learn how to make things, learn how to sell things and learn how to get lucky.
It is actually a skill that you can develop and you can intentionally do things to increase your level of luck.
A very simple one. The fourth of the five things that you need to do is move.
And people don't like to say this because it sounds harsh.
It's a lifestyle choice.
Shouldn't you be able to live and let live and just do whatever you want to do?
Yes, sure. But if you want to increase your odds of success, move because every city has a whisper.
Every city has something to it that is its promise.
If you want to be an actor, go to Hollywood.
If you want to be in finance, go to New York.
If you want to be in tech, go to Silicon Valley.
And the reason you do these things is because every city has a certain energy and has a certain set of people in them that will conspire to your success.
You will be able to get a crew and being around a crew of people who are chasing the same dream as you is very powerful.
Proximity is power.
Just simply being near people who live the life that you want to live is the fastest way to become that person.
And the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to give you three specific ideas that you can actually do, three specific paths that you could pick now that you know the core principles, right?
So the core principles, just to review again, number one, you got to start now.
Number two, you got to be willing to play the game 10 times.
Number three, you're going to build your skill stack along the way, along those failures, build, learn to make something, learn to sell something and learn to get lucky.
And now number four and five are going to be around the specific ideas that I think you can pursue.
I call these white belt businesses.
It's basically a business that anybody can do with very little business experience.
They're pretty safe.
They don't require a lot of capital or experience.
There's no big barrier to entry.
They're not the best businesses, but they are great starter businesses.
It's like, when a kid starts a lemonade stand, it's just an easy starter business to get into.
So here's three white belt businesses that I think anybody could start.
The first one is a marketing agency.
So you want to learn that skill of how to sell?
Well, a marketing agency is going to be a forcing function to do that.
Now, the problem is most people don't know anything about a marketing agency.
They don't know anything about marketing themselves.
So they don't feel qualified to do this.
And so here's how you go about doing this.
You're going to pick a version of marketing that you like.
Maybe it's making video commercials and you're going to learn video production and actually create little YouTube videos that are going to be commercials for products.
Maybe it's Google ads and you're going to help local businesses get discovered with Google ads.
Maybe it's Facebook ads.
You're going to learn how to sell e -commerce products through Facebook.
Maybe it's TikTok ads or TikTok videos, because that's the new field.
Whatever it is that you're drawn to, whatever you're interested in, you pick one of those.
Now you're going to go to a friend or family who has a crummy business.
You want something low stakes and you're going to go to this friend or family who's got this crummy business, Aunt Patty, who's selling her little Chachkis out of her basement.
And you're going to go to Aunt Patty and you're going to say, Aunt Patty, I love you Chachkis, best Chachkis I've seen.
Can I help you sell these?
And you're going to take a very starter budget, maybe $100 a month at the start.
And you're going to figure out how you would sell that online.
So if it's Google ads, you're going to do Google ads.
You're going to study every free course on YouTube for Google ads.
You're going to join every Facebook group about Google ads.
You're going to be on LinkedIn and you're going to subscribe to everybody who's a thought leader on Google ads.
And then you are going to run your own Google ads all at the same time.
You're going to do learning and doing at the same time.
You're going to learn with your own time being free and you're going to have kind of crappy results, but you're going to work your way up.
And so, you know, very simple thing you could do here is you can go to, you can go to really any business because the good news is most businesses suck at marketing.
So you can go to a senior living facility nearby and you could say, wow, this is a senior living facility that is a service that people definitely need.
And they get a bunch of their customers through Google, but they don't know how to run Google ads and you can go offer to do it for them.
Now, the beautiful thing about a senior living facility is maybe they're charging three grand a month for one bed in their facility.
Well, three grand a means that one customer is worth 36 grand a year and, you know, in a year's timeframe.
And so even if it takes you $500 or a thousand dollars to acquire a customer, that's still super profitable for them.
And so you want to find any business that you can, like a local plumber or a daycare or a senior living facility or whatever it is.
And you want to go offer to run their ads for free or audit their ad account for free or give them advice for free.
And then you're going to use that as your bootstrapping mechanism to learn.
And once you do that three, four times, then you want to go to every other senior living facility in other areas and say, Hey, I did this for this company.
I can do the same for you.
And over time you start charging more for what you're doing.
And your goal is to, you know, eventually get to 10 customers that are paying you five grand a month for your marketing services.
And now you're doing 50 grand a month of recurring revenue.
You've built a million dollar business.
If you have a 50 grand a month recurring revenue business off of literally just hustle and commitment to learning how to market through one channel, because most people, especially a busy business owner, do not know how to do this.
Okay. Idea number two, if you don't want to start a marketing agency, here's idea number two.
This is the real estate path.
Now real estate is great because you know, a lot of people become millionaires through real estate or own real estate.
I personally know more dumb millionaires in real estate than any other industry.
They take that as an insult, as a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as a good thing.
Meaning you don't have to be a genius for it to work.
And I like games like that.
I don't want a gig to go into a game where you have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg in order to win.
And so real estate is one of those things.
And I'll give you an example of how to actually do this because most people think real estate, I have no experience and I got no money.
How am I going to go buy a building?
Well, let me tell you what my friend will call him, Alex, in this case, what he did.
And I think you could do this too.
He drew a five mile radius around where he lived and he contacted every real estate developer that he could find in that radius.
And all he said was, hey, I'm Alex.
I'm a young kid that lives nearby.
I'm super interested in real estate.
I see that you're really successful.
I love that property that you have over here.
You're somebody that I think has achieved something I would love to achieve.
I would love it if someday I could just take you out to lunch and learn a little bit from you.
Maybe somebody earlier in your career helped you and this could be your opportunity to do the same for me.
And that last line is really, really key because he's not really offering much besides I'll take you to lunch.
Well, guess what? This rich real estate developer doesn't need your lunch, but he does pull on their heartstrings a little bit.
And so he got lunch meetings with everybody and he goes to lunch with them and he asked them a bunch of questions about how they do what they do, how they got into it, what makes it successful, what makes them different than everybody else, et cetera, et cetera.
And for the person that whoever you vibe the most with, who he respected and seem like they were interested in him and they liked his energy, he would make an ask and he would say, listen, I know this is unorthodox, but actually I would love to come help you out in your business and I'd love to come
help you out for free because right now I've got a ton of time on my hands and I could go get any job I want, but I don't want any job.
I actually want to learn from somebody like you and I want to learn this business.
And I know that to learn this business, I'm going to have to work really hard and learn the ins and outs and I can't think of a better place to do this than with you.
Would you be open to be working with you for, let's just say three to six months.
I'll work completely for free.
I'll work harder than anybody you have in your office.
I guarantee you I will add as much value as I can.
And my goal up front, I'll tell you this, is that a year from now I actually want to go into this business myself and I actually want to go and try to buy my first property.
And I hope that at that time, you might be one of my investors, but no strings attached.
I just want to focus on the main thing, which is learning this business inside and out by helping you out.
And he makes that pitch and this is exactly what he did.
And so he did a one -year apprentice with a real estate developer that lived locally.
He learned everything he needed to know about the business.
And at the end of that year, he located his own first property.
He bought it using the money from that guy who trusted him and basically was willing to back him because he knew him at that stage.
And this is a path that anybody could take.
Anybody can do this.
You can look up the people around you.
You could take them to lunch.
You can make this pitch and you can work hard for one year.
And in one year from now, you can already own your first property.
And to be a millionaire in real estate really only takes a single property, one fourplex or one eightplex that you buy could be enough to do it.
And so that is the second path that I would advise anybody who wants to get rich quickly is to go under the wing of a successful real estate developer if real estate is something that interests you.
The last path, the last idea that I think is, you know, if I was going back and trying to do it again as fast as I could and as high likelihood of success as I could would be this.
It would be to buy a business.
Now, this is only for, I'll say, the top 5 % of either brainpower or experience.
So this is either somebody who's actually gone and worked in the real world for five, six years.
Maybe they're an MBA student.
Maybe you've managed something.
You've been a manager already at a business or you're just that high IQ and that driven.
And you know who you are.
You know, if you're a cut above the rest and if you really are that person, then this path is really, really interesting.
I didn't even know about this when I was in my early twenties, but now I know a lot about it.
It's called entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is that you buy a business that is already working.
It has been working for years and you buy it using other people's money.
A simple example, we did an episode with Sarah Moore.
She graduated from college.
She wanted to buy a business instead of start one because she didn't have a great idea.
And so she searched again locally for any business that she could find that was already doing about a million dollars of profit a year.
And she wanted to go buy that business using an SBA loan and some seller financing.
You can go watch this episode to go learn what those terms mean.
And she was able to buy of all things a egg carton business, like literally the styrofoam container of eggs using zero dollars of her own money.
And she was able to own the business outright herself.
And she, uh, and this business does millions and millions of dollars a year of profit and she built her own path this way.
And so this is the fastest way to get to it because you're buying a business that's already gone through the startup, you know, learning curve and the bumps and bruises to get going and to get to work and you're buying something that's already, already has cashflow.
And then you're just going to run it better because maybe you built that skill of learning how to sell and you know, digital marketing and the current business owner doesn't, they're just a retire, a retiring, you know, dad somewhere that never, never ran a Google ad in their life.
And you know that if you started doing that, you could grow the business 20, 30 % and so that's what you're looking for when you go this path.
So in summary, the five steps to get rich, quick, the real, the real steps, things that you could actually do.
Number one, you have to have the courage to start and start now.
Number two, don't quit on the first failure.
You're going to need to try 10 times.
Number three, learn to build, learn to sell and learn to get lucky.
That is your core skill stack.
Number four, proximity is power.
Move around other people who are as motivated, hungry, and ambitious as you.
It will just like osmosis, it will just, you will learn and get better faster just by doing that.
And the fifth thing, it'd be impatient with action, patient with results.
The impatient action you should go take is one of those three businesses, a marketing agency.
Go and be an apprentice for a real estate developer and then become a real estate developer yourself or third, go buy a business that is already working using SBA money.
And now you, day one, have a business that is profitable, that you run and you own and you operate yourself.
So that is it. I hope that was helpful for you.
And if it was, leave a comment in the description below.
Hey, Sean here, a quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for a hundred million dollars.
And somebody asked him, they said, have, what's the secret, man?
How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years and then you just use modern technology to take out steps, just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want.
And that is what my partner, Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has managing your money and being able to do your financial operations.
And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades.
No more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done.
No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car, just to send a transfer.
They made it fast. They made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business.
You don't have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now.
And it's used by also 200 ,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you want to be like me, head to mercury .com, open an account in minutes.
And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
