Transcription
So, money doesn't bring you happiness. It's never made me happy. I don't measure happy. What do you measure? I measure accomplishments. I measure targets. I measure, you know, who—who I'm helping; things that I can actually physically measure, you know. The reality is, most of us don't dream big. You got the mindset. Are you looking? Are you paying attention? You can do it, bro. You got to give something up. It's not you have to add something; you always have to give something up. Really, I have—I've never been able to go from here to there and not give up something. They got me here.
If you're going to go from zero to a millionaire, when you get to a millionaire, if you want to go to the next level, you want to go to 10 million, you will have to give up the million in your life. That's why I said I got to hold myself accountable to the goal, if I'm not to keep reselling myself on this goal. People want to create wealth for themselves. It's not just money; it's people. Not how much money I have. I mean, we all know about the wealthy person that has no friends; he's on a yacht by himself, and that's not wealth, right? It's just a bunch of money and material collections. To me, there's no way to create real wealth by just going inside. You've got to go—I got to add people.
How do you get people to know who you are? I say almost yes to almost everything. Why do you say yes to everybody? Because—because it connects me to another person. I need people to get to know who I am. I'm going to become somebody. I want to contribute more. I don't think about—I want to be more happy. I'm not thinking about the joy. I'm not thinking about contentment. I'm not thinking about—I'm thinking about action. I want the action. I want the grind. I want the possibility. I want legacy. I'm trying to figure out how to extend 100 years. How could Grant Cardone still be relevant in 2123? Do I want more happiness, dude? I want more time, is what I want. And I want more health, with time and health bringing more happiness, as long as I had people around me that I want to be around; foreign people that don't do stuff I don't like; people that talk about doing something and don't—I don't like being around people that can't pay bills and can't throw in and can't contribute, because I know they can.
Most of the people watching right now, and everything you have budgeted for in your life, you can pay for; it's the things you didn't budget for, the big dream, but everything else you got covered. Everything people pay attention to: house note, car note, electric bill, water bill—basics—everything gets covered. What if you just added a whole bunch of other stuff to the list? What if we were all brought up to say, "Hey, we're going to cover all this stuff"? People will be even more productive. We'll just say the top three ways. The best way is to multiply money, then get rid of it. You got to get rid of it first. You got to make it—I mean, I got to collect it. I got to collect some, then I got to figure out, okay, this pays for this—basic living. Everything above that, don't spend any more money like the rest of it. If this is four grand and I make seven, the entire three has got to go into investments every month, every single month. At some point, you got to quit being a saver; you've got to start being an investor. This is what we should have been taught in school, man. This is what we should have been taught as kids, like, "How do I do money?" You do it with time, okay? You don't do it with a job. You're not gonna get—you're not going to get 823,000 a year at a job. There's no job that's going to hire you and pay you 823 without you having to go back to college and spend time and invest money. Just doesn't work like that.
What do you think people in the middle class are doing that they should shift in their mindset in order to start getting out of that? Well, you don't borrow money to go to college. Why would you trade five or six or seven years of income? Time is money. So I wouldn't go to college. I would never buy a home. I would never put debt—I don't know how—if I bought a home, I wouldn't put debt on it. And these are nevers for me on the come-up. I'm gonna come up, yeah, on the comments. Once you have the cash, dude, once you're in—you're—you're wealthy and you want to go buy homes and if you would buy yachts and stuff, go do whatever you want to do, but—but on the come-up, uh, you would never spend your income; you would never spend primary income on improving the quality of your life; you would only invest. And that's what I'm trying to teach my kids. Like, some friends—I let her pay all the bills. I've been doing this since she was probably six. You pay the bill. We don't give them an allowance. I don't think any kid should be given an allowance. Interesting. Why not? They want money; they become an employee of the company. They work for the company. We give them a series of things to do. We pay them once a year, okay? We give them a big check at the beginning of the year. That money goes into Cardone Capital, wow. And they live off the distributions. Come on. Sometimes they'll get a bonus for doing extra stuff, but they don't get the money. They never get the money; it's invested. And they get—that money is invested; they get the distributions. They will create wealth over the next 10 years, but it'll be their own. Will it? It's not something I gave.
If you can only teach your kids three lessons about money, yeah, what would those lessons be? [Music] People. Number one: meet people. No one's a stranger. The money's a people game. Two: once you get it, don't lose it. And number three, um, invest in things where you can never lose your capital. Now, the person watching this, she's a waitress, and she's got two kids at home. She's like, "I'm never gonna make 800." It's because you already gave up on the idea, like you know—you never—you never said that's the target, and you keep thinking you got to wait tables, and you quit already. How many—how many people are in debt in America? Forty percent of people that make a million dollars a year still are living paycheck to paycheck. Forty. Forty. But that—that's not because of inflation; that's because they spent money they shouldn't have spent. They thought they were entitled to because they're millionaires. They live above their means. They live above their investments, not their means. How can we shift the relationship to money that we have so we can have a better experience emotionally and spiritually about money? Anything you're hiding, you're going to have problems with. The secret keeps you sick. First thing I look at every day is my money. I have a great relationship with my money. [Music] Already is impossible from where you came from. And all this—from where I came from, I should be dead. I should have been dead 25 years old or in jail, messed up forever, you know. Instead, I became this guy, and I'm grateful. And I had—I don't know that I had any breaks. I know when people say, "Oh, you had luck," I'm like, "You grinded, right?" I've been grinding. [Music] And I'm proud of the grind, but I wanted to turn into something more than money, so I'm going to feel good about a lot of places I go, a lot of people I meet, because I made more contributions than I did—I gave more than I took. Thank you. [Music]