How to Make $1,000,000 After You Graduate (5 steps)

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
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 too. 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. 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. 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 that 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, what do you actually go do to make that happen? I was learning about mitosis, and I was learning about 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 gotta 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 going to 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. There are things that are going to make this way easier to understand. So just go to YouTube and type MyFirstMillion on YouTube and you will find this video. And 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, 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 blow-off 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, right? 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 searched 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 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 gotta 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, right? So 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 gotta 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 100 others. My current portfolio of companies that I own and operate will do close to $100 million this year in revenue. And that's where I'm at now. And when I was in my 20s, 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'm also a quote unquote thought leader. And I have to put Dr. Evil up here because it's pretty embarrassing to even try to say. But the truth is, have a podcast that's pretty popular, 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 gonna 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 Keister 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 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 everybody had great jobs lined up after school. And so he just asked why. And he asked why 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 because you want to join the MBA. In the same way, going and getting a job at a business in order to learn how to run a business, 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 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 my job 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, something bad's going to happen to you. But the worst thing that could happen to you is 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 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.