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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This little black book right here is very important to me. It has all of the rules of money, and they're very simple, not that complicated to learn, but once you do, you can actually start to stack cash. I was in my 20s, and I really didn't understand how to make money. I was trying hard, I was working hard, but I really wasn't getting anywhere. And once I learned the rules of money, I started to understand, oh, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. So the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna tell you exactly what these four rules of money are. 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. And I was an idiot. I was running around with a fork and I was sticking it into different outlets. I was learning my lessons the hard way. And I wanna save you a lot of years and a lot of pain by just telling you what I did and what actually works. So if you're somebody who today, you don't love where you're at financially, maybe you're not financially free, and you wanna get to that magic number, you wanna get a million dollars liquid in your bank account, well, this is the video for you. I'm gonna tell you the four money rules.
Rule number one, you need one money making skill. A money making skill is a very specific term here. So when it comes to building wealth, there's really only four money making skills. You need to pick one of these. The first one is selling. So this is persuading people, marketing, closing deals. The second one is making, which is products, apps, websites, videos, books. The next one is designing. So if you're having really great taste, understanding form and function like a Steve Jobs type. And the fourth is hunting. So selling, making, designing, hunting. Hunting is spotting opportunities. It's finding great real estate deals or angel investing or figuring out the right stock to buy. You need to pick one of these skills and master it. Pick the one that's of most interest to you. Now mastering it is the hard part. So you're going to need to do it every day. And the way to do that is, let's say you want to learn sales, right? Selling is the master skill, the money-making skill you're trying to learn. You need to go to a place where selling is what they do. It is how they make their money. And when you get there, you're going to get a job and you might start at the bottom of the totem pole. And what you're going to do is you're going to look around and you're going to ask, who's the number one producer? Who is the number one salesperson here? Your job is to go sit next to them and then double their input. So if they're making 100 calls a day, you're going to make 200 You're not going to be as good at the calls as they are, but you're going to double the input. If they knock on 50 doors, you do 100 You get the idea. And you're going to sit next to them and you're going to study what they do. You're going to observe the difference between what they're doing and what you're doing. And then you're going to double it every single time. That's what you're doing by day. And at night, you're reading books, you're watching videos, you're obsessing over the art of selling. So you're nine to five is where you get your practice reps. And then you're five to nine, five p.m. to nine p.m. That's where you get ideas on how to improve. I got to be friends with Mr. Bees of the last few years. And he's today the number one YouTuber in the world. Every video he puts out gets hundreds of millions of views. And he showed me and he told me he was like, dude, at the age of 12, I decided my skill was going to be making YouTube videos in his case. So he wanted to be a maker. He wanted to make YouTube videos. And every day he would open up a dictionary and he would flip to a different random word or whatever word he got, he had to force himself to think of 20 video ideas using that word. Not all of them were good, but he would force that muscle of idea generation. Because for YouTube videos, the idea, the concept is the number one thing. And then he would go try to make that video and he would suck at it and he'd have a crappy thumbnail and a crappy lighting, crappy audio. Each day he would try to make one of those things better in between every video. It took him like, I don't know, 100 plus videos before he even got to 10,000 subscribers before he started making any money off this thing. But he mastered the art of making videos. Warren Buffett is another example. He was a hunter. Hunting was the money making skill he chose. And if you ever learn about Buffett, you'll learn that Buffett used to take the entire Moody's Manual, so a 4,000 page book. And I'm not talking about like a Harry Potter book. This is a 4,000 pages of just corporate financials essentially. And he would read it cover to cover. And all he was looking for was a single stock that he thought was mispriced, high value, low price. And over his career, he's looked at literally hundreds of thousands of businesses. And in his most recent shareholder letter, he said, all of my success, I can boil down to making about 12 good investing decisions. Just that out of hundreds of thousands of things he looked at. He became a master hunter. So you want to master one of those four money making skills. And that's a path to millions. If you master two of them, that's a path to billions. So if you look at Steve Jobs, he had designing and selling. He was one of the greatest design minds, had great taste in design. And then he also had the ability to tell great stories and be extremely persuasive and come up with marketing campaigns. Elon Musk, he has making and selling. And that combo of sort of I can build and I can sell is one of the most overpowered combinations you can have. Because you don't need to become the top 1% of anything. That takes a lifetime to become a true master. What you need to do is become top 20% at two things that are not common. So for example, an engineer who's good at marketing. You find a lot of engineers and you don't need to become the best engineer, but you need to become an engineer who's pretty good at engineering and pretty good at marketing. That's rare enough and you are super, super valuable. So your money-making skills are the foundation of your ability to make money, not just once, but anytime you wish. It's like a money button you can then push at any given time. So focus on skills before you focus on wealth. All right, rule number two, don't rent out your time, own equity. What people get wrong is they take the skill they learned and then they get hired for it. And then if they're good at it, they get promoted for it and they get a raise for it. It sounds like, well, I guess I'm moving in the right direction. I'm getting rich. Actually, you're moving in the complete wrong direction. As Naseem Talim says, the two most addictive things in the world are heroin and a monthly salary. You do not want to get hired to provide services where you're trading your time for their dollars. Renting out your time is not a path to get rich. Even the people who rent their time out at a high price, a lawyer, $1,000 an hour, they cap out. You know the rich lawyers? They're all partners in the firm, meaning they own equity in the firm, meaning they get a cut of other lawyers' work, not their own. So how do you own equity? Well, two ways. Either you're going to invest, but you don't have the cash to do that, maybe, or you're going to start a business. So the question comes, what kind of business should you start? How do you take that money-making skill and turn it into a business? There's three things, three words to know. They all start with the letter C, code, content, or capital. So code is like making a website or an app. I'll give you an example. My friend was a designer. He used to make $200,000 a year as part of a design agency. He was an employee. He was making a good living, and he was designing websites for clients. Client walks through the door, asks for something, he would design it. Well, he figured out he needed to turn his skill into a product or a business. And so he quit his job and he started making Shopify themes. So he would make a theme, and he could take that same theme, and he could sell it to 2,000 different customers. And by the way, he didn't have to go and hand sell it to them. He would be asleep, and they would be coming to his site, finding a library of themes, and they would buy one. And now he pulls in $2 million a year of cash flow. He lives half the year in Bali, half the year in Japan. And he is living his dream life, because he understood the rules of money. How to first create a money making skill, design, and then how to turn it into a business, because he doesn't want to rent out his time, he wants to own equity. I'll give you another example, content. Let's take someone who's pretty big at content in the business world, a guy named Alex Hormozi. He took his master money making skill, which is selling, and he turned it into videos, YouTube videos, books, and courses. His last book launch, he just did it about a month ago, his last book launch sold 3 million copies, and with all the add-on courses he added to it, he made $100 million in a single weekend, $100 million as one guy, because he understood that he didn't need to sell his time in hourly chunks of consulting, he needed to turn it into a business. The last example is capital. So what does capital mean? Well, this is really for the skill of hunting, usually, but it can be used for any of these. So this is where you wanna take the money making skill you have and you wanna use it in the art of investing. My cousin did this, so my cousin had a job making six figures, but he was sick of it. He didn't wanna report to the office, he didn't like all the politics, he didn't like the boring meetings, and so he quit his job and he decided, I'm going to learn the art of hunting multifamily real estate, so like apartment buildings. He spent two years mastering that skill under somebody else who had been doing that for a decade. So he went and he learned and he identified the highest output person and he doubled their inputs. And then he left to do his own deals. And in his first year doing his own deals, they bought about $40 million of real estate using down payments or equity from other investors who were happy to give him a cut because he was doing the hunting, he was finding the killer deal, the deal that would perform above market that had a good margin of safety. He became a great hunter and he translated that into a business using this method of capital. So takeaway here is if you only rent out your time, you'll never get off the treadmill. Equity is the way. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction, they locked my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. That was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. Now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies and so do 200,000 other startup founders. If you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes.