No BS Advice to Get Rich Like the 1%

I crossed $100 million in net worth at age 31. I'm 35, significantly higher than that now, and I have the privilege of talking to lots of people who are at Billion Dollar Plus. In this video, I want to break down a handful of themes that I've seen repeated that can make you significantly more successful.

The rich buy time; the poor buy stuff. Ambitious people buy skills, and lazy people buy distractions. As much as these seem like four different groups, it's really like you have these pairings: rich people use money to buy time; ambitious people use time to buy skills. The reason it's ambitious people is that generational wealth isn't transferred through assets; it's not transferred through stuff; it's transferred through education. It's transferred through skills.

There's this Sanskrit proverb that I love: "If you have a good son, you don't need to accumulate wealth. If you have a bad son, there's no point in accumulating wealth." The idea that you're going to pass on your wealth to a child who doesn't have the skills makes it irrelevant because fundamentally, either it is a good son who has skills, and then if the son has skills, then whether you transfer the wealth or not makes the wealth itself irrelevant.

I find that there are so many things like this in wealth creation that you don't understand until you're on the other side of it because the answers that you're looking for are not in your newsfeed; they are not in the distraction. The vast majority of lazy people that I have encountered continue to distract themselves because the difficulty of looking at themselves in the mirror and saying, "I am inadequate," is too painful. Instead, they would rather watch fluff videos on the internet that make them feel good and tickle their ears rather than confront the reality that they are just not good enough.

They consume the stuff that's like, "I am worthy; I deserve these things," in other words, entitled to them. By the way, if you feel entitled to something, then when you get it, you are never grateful because you thought you deserved it to begin with. We know that gratitude, for example, is something that increases your subjective well-being in life, which is that you enjoy life more when you are grateful for what you get. This means that you have to, by very definition, expect nothing, which means you're entitled to nothing, which means that you deserve nothing.

In reality, you are worthy only of the things that you currently have because you have already gotten them. You have proven that you can work a minimum wage job, so you are worthy of the compensation of minimum wage. As much as this is painful, and I'm sure this will get clipped a hundred times to show me as some evil rich guy, I am willing to take that hate for the few people who will hear this message and decide to change the way they act.

You can be ambitious and distracted, which keeps you poor. When I started out at my peak, I had nine businesses because I heard seven income streams make you wealthy. But it doesn't; seven income streams just spread you seven ways. I had nine; I was like, "Well, seven is good; nine must be better." To give you context, I had a chiropractor agency, a dental agency, a gym turnaround business, and then I had, at the time, six locations. So, there's nine.

I had partners in each of these businesses, but I was still the one who was required to rainmake. I was the one who was required to sell customers into all nine. If you are required to work inside of the business, then you can only really do one job. When people hear that someone has seven income streams, it's because they own assets that generate that kind of income. But in order to gain the cash to then buy the assets that create the cash flow, it requires time and focus.

Let me make focus real for you. Focus is a very amorphous term. Focus is measured by the number of things you say no to, and inversely, you could measure it by how few things you say yes to. Meaning, the most focused person says only yes to one thing and says no to literally everything else.

The next thing that separates the rich from the poor is it's 100x, not 2x. This concept is one that I had dinner with a friend of mine who's a public CEO, and I asked him what he had done to grow the business, I think from a $200 million market cap to a $1.2 billion market cap in less than two years. All right, so that's absurd growth for a company. I was like, "So, you know, what are you doing primarily?" He said, "I'm shaking hands, I'm kissing babies, I'm going to events all the time." I was like, "Well, how many?" He's like, "Well, I'm going to do 66 events this quarter." I was like, "In person?" He was like, "Yeah." I was like, "They're coming to you?" And he's like, "No, I'm going to them."

I want to make this real. He has a wife; he has kids. Before anyone listens and says, "I can't believe he..." Well, cool, he makes trades. If anything, I would hope that people watch this and say, "I wouldn't make that trade," in which case, great. Also, don't complain about not having what somebody who has made that trade has.

One of the big misconceptions, by the way, this is a sales thing too, is that people want your outcome their way. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say, "Hey, I want to not change the way I'm eating; I want to not change the way I'm living, but I want to have a six-pack, and I want to be in shape. I want to continue to live this way, and I want to get the 10 chick or the 10 guy. I want to continue with my work-life schedule as I currently have, but I want to have hyper growth."

They are trades; they're price tags. When you go to the store, you either want the shoes and you're willing to pay the price, or you're not willing to pay the price. That's it. You can't pick the price for the shoes; you pay it or you don't.

My telephone back to myself is that I thought I worked a lot when I was younger, and I did spend a lot of time working, but I made so little progress because a lot of that time I wasn't actually creating output. I encourage people to do something called the 12x30. All right, so it's very simple, and it's actually not as unsustainable as people would think. You work 12 hours a day for 30 days straight, no weekends. By the last day, you realize: one, you aren't made of glass; two, how much more you could be working; three, how much faster you could be achieving your goals; four, how much you could be getting better every single day; five, you don't need to work like this forever, but if you need to do it for a season or for a reason sometime in the future, you've got that gear in you; and six, there are people who are working more than you who are beating you.

You get all of those lessons for the low price of getting more done in a month than you probably did last quarter. And so everyone, and of course you've got one side of people who are like, "I work more than this now," and of course they don't; they obviously don't. The thing is that people are like, "Well, I work like that, but I take a couple days off." Right? That's the point. You have to push through it.

Now, can you work 16x30? Sure, if you want to. You're welcome to work more than that. I've found that working six to six is kind of like what I do every day anyways. I'm on 12x100, you know, in terms of how I think about working. There are plenty of days that I work 15, 16-hour days because I get here at 5 or 6, and then sometimes we have an event, we have dinner, things like that afterwards, and it ends at 9:00.

That's where you have to be on, not just at the office, not just in front of your computer, but people actually demanding things of you on a regular basis all the time, being on camera. I'll tell you that there are levels to this. Working alone for a full day is not as exhausting as being on stage for a full day, being on camera for a full day because every second that you are not peak, you are losing. You can take a break while you're working alone; you can't take a break when you're on stage, when you're meeting customers, when you're making content.

Like, every minute that is not recorded is basically a minute wasted. There's a whole team here behind this camera, right, that is making this stuff for you, and I'm costing them every second I'm not showing up. I remember there was a period, a season of my life where I think I had like nine straight months of this, and it was not 12; it was 15, 16 because I had to wake up at 4:00 to get to the gym. I was at the gym, but I woke up at 4:00, and then I would get the class ready. I'd open the gym doors at 4:30, which started the classes at 5:00, and the last class at night would end at 8:00.

At 8:00, I would then do billing; I'd reach out to old customers; I would confirm lead appointments for the next day, all that sometimes until 10:00, 11:00 at night, and then I'd wake up again at 4:00. I don't know what the hours are there, but it's more than 12, and I did that for nine months straight. I used to describe it as the kind of tired a good night's sleep couldn't fix. It was tired; it was deeper than like one sleep. I needed weeks to basically come back to normal.

The thing is that I think it is valuable because you have to learn that you have that gear. I think that that gives you supreme confidence when you're entering any new endeavor because you know that you have acquired the trade of being relentless, that you do not relent, you do not let up, you do not stop until you get what you want. You know that you can push through being tired or being underslept or being overwhelmed because you realize that you didn't die and that you've done this before.

The difference between the newbie and the veteran is that the veteran looks on something and looks back on what they have done to get to that point and says, "I've seen this before; this is another one of those." That's why they don't have the anxiety; that's why they don't have the stress. That's when they get on stage, they crush it; that's when they're in a high-pressure situation, they still breathe normally; their heartbeat doesn't go up because they've done it before.

The only way that you can get to the point where you can say you've done it before is to do it now. I define work as volume times leverage. It's about how many times you do something and how much you get for each time you do it. In the beginning, you need to do a lot more of this, right? You do way more volume. Because of that volume, you gain skill, and then the leverage also increases.

You get 100x the volume, which then over time builds skill, which then gives you more for what you put in, and then over time that continues to increase your output. The thing is that this concept of 100x, not 2x, has applied to so many different areas of my life. When I paid a large brand for insight into how I could grow my personal brand, when I decided to get into this game, I was like, "Hey, I'm not growing that fast."

He said, "Oh, well, pull up your social media profiles." We pulled them up one by one, and he said, "Look what you're doing; look what I'm doing." He had genuinely been doing 10 times more volume than I was doing. He basically said, "You're not doing enough volume." I then said, "Okay, that was clear as day; I need to do more volume." The thing is, when we did more volume, we got better at doing it.

Now we continue to do the same volume as I did in the beginning, which is 10 times more than when I started. We get even more output. Then I had a different friend who talked to me, a billionaire guy. He was thinking about getting into content, and he said, "Hey, I'm really not growing that fast." I got to have the exact same conversation with him, but the thing is that this guy had done 100x, not 2x, before in his life.

It was just that he got to realize, like me, that it has been 100% domain-specific. When I showed him my Instagram and his, I showed him my TikTok and his, I showed him my YouTube and his, and I said, "Dude, I'm making 450 pieces a week; you're making seven." He was like, "Got it," like understood. He immediately got it because he had already learned that lesson in a different domain.

I want to zoom out for a second. Right now is a period of time where I'm working really hard; I'm working a lot. I'll give you context as to what a lot is for me. So this year, the first hundred days of the year, I didn't have a day off. My time was only spent working. So it's like, "Well, what's the difference between when you were quote working all the time when you're younger and working all the time now?"

What I get done in a day is significantly greater than what I got done, and the quality of that work is also higher. The thing is that you learn how to work; you get better at working the more you do it. A lot of people are like, "Man, I feel like I'm not that productive when I work; what should I do?" It's like, "Work more." You work more until you get better at working.

I remember when I was a legal intern at a company in France called ARA. I was a legal intern, and I was spending the whole summer there, which, by the way, they always try and use and abuse interns. I was like, "Man, I'm working so hard," and I talked to one of these legal partners. I only had one exchange with this particular legal partner, who's high up in the firm, and she said, "Oh, that's cute; you don't even know what work is. You don't even know how to work."

I just remember how dismissive what she said was, but I understood. I understand now especially what she meant was like, "You're spending a lot of time here, but you're not getting anything done." It takes time; it takes reps to get better at working itself. That measure of focus, the equal opposite of distraction, is just how long you can stick with it.

I can tell you that from a very visual perspective when I work, there are many times, like, you know when you work and you're like, "Man, I feel like I need a break." The thing is that that break period for people who aren't as good at working might be like the rest of the day. The better and better that I've gotten at working is that I can kind of whip my head back in and be like, "Confront, like, keep going."

I'm like, "All right, I'm going to keep going." Then you kind of realize that there's like a 5-minute, sometimes 15-minute period where your output slows a little bit, but then you catch the next draft, and then you're in again. It's being able to whip yourself back in, and that muscle of doing that takes practice.

The only opportunity that you get to flex that muscle to practice it is to work yourself to the point of fatigue, to the point where distraction or respite or rest would be beneficial, or you feel like it's what you crave right now, and then being able to be like, "No, I can power through this." The thing is, you can; you can power through it. It just takes practice, and practice takes repetition and being willing to be uncomfortable for an extended period of time.

It's kind of like when you're eating and you're dieting. There are moments where you get these cravings where you're like, "Man, I'm starving; I want something sweet." If you've ever dieted before, this is where repetitions help. It only lasts like 20 minutes. If you ever do this, by the way, dieting hack is just set a timer. When you're like, "Man, I really want something," wait 20, and if you still want it, which you rarely do because it usually lasts less than 20, sometimes it's just five, it'll just go away.

The same thing happens with focus, but we then just take off. We take off for our diet for the day; we order a pizza, right? We order ice cream, right? Or we take off working for the day, right? We just say, "I'm just going to watch Netflix for the rest of the time," or "I'm just going to go hang out with friends," or "I'm going to go out."

But I will say now that I have worked for 100 days straight, and that was in the earlier part of this year, I think this year I've probably taken three or four days off since the year started, and I still probably worked until like two on those days. But I still consider those like more or less days off. You're not going to die.

I think back retroactively or historically, like there were people who were forced to work for years on end or they would get killed. As gruesome as that may seem, I see that as hopeful in that they have already demonstrated that it's possible. You can work continuously for an extended period of time because fundamentally, you're just alive; you're moving.

You think super ancestors, it's like they didn't have computers; they just were around. You keep busy while you're awake, and so you might as well keep busy continuing to nudge things forward. I can't tell you the amount of times where now I'm like my mind checked out, and I was like, "No, my brain checked out a little bit, but I'm going to keep going."

Then three hours, four hours, six hours more pass, and I'm like, "Oh, I actually finished everything that I said I was going to do." It's just so much more work, and it's fewer days off and earlier mornings and longer nights. It's being able to do that for an extended period of time.

I know the whole idea of, "Work on the things you love, and you'll never work another day in your life," that's just, I just don't think it's true. There are so many things that I don't enjoy doing that I have to do. That's why, at least for me, my saying is always, "I will do what is required; how I feel about it is relatively irrelevant."

The things that have come from doing what is required have made doing the requirements something that I know will pay off. I kind of like feast on those morsels of past achievements as the fuel to continue doing things that may be uncomfortable or unpleasant in the moment. Most work isn't unpleasant; it's just work. It's like, "I have to get this done," right?

You like, "I get to get this done," sure, but like I'm just being real for me; it's usually not sunshine and rainbows. I work a lot, and I get, and I'm tired. You know, I slept nine hours last night, which was the first time I've slept nine hours in a while, and I feel amazing right now. But sometimes you got to work on six; sometimes you got to work on five.

Think about this hypothetical extreme: let's say that you played video games; that was all you did. When I say that's all you did, you didn't go out; you didn't talk to people; you didn't see anyone; you didn't eat; you didn't sleep. But you would be incredibly focused. Now, at that point, you say, "Well, in order for him to play more video games, he needs to sleep." So there are contingencies, right? You do need to eat or you'll die.

There are the fewest requirements necessary to maintain consistent focus on the one thing, and those things become requisites for focus rather than distraction. There are periods of time where you will need to rest; that rest, therefore, is productive because it increases your total output in the one thing that gets you the most leverage, that gets you closest to your goals in the shortest period of time.

This isn't a video of me saying, "You know, work until you die." Well, you will work until you die because we all will die, and we all probably will work at some point. But it is more a video of saying that every single thing that is not a requisite for you continuing to do the one thing that one, yes, are all distractions. They are all things that take away, and people have a hard time with this because they like to say, "You need to have balance."

But this is what poor people do not understand, and I am going to do my very best to kind of like pass down a message from the future to my past self about this. This goes for entrepreneurs specifically, which is you do not understand how much work it is. You think you understand how much work it is. I've had multiple times in my life where I've met someone who was way further ahead than me, and I saw them actually working five to ten times more than me, and I was like, "Wow."

There's a scene in Invictus, which is a movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. I love this moment. There's an exchange; I'm paraphrasing, but he says something to the extent of, "I've heard that you've been playing with an injury." Matt Damon just kind of says, "Well, no one ever plays at 100%." I just love that because to me, that kind of encompasses the champion mindset, which is that it's not about playing when circumstances are perfect; it's that playing creates perfect circumstances.

We have to learn to play when the chips are stacked against us. It's like having values; values are only valuable when they are tested. You can say you're loyal, but if you're in a hotel room and a girl is there and your wife isn't there, and there's no way that she finds out, that is the test of whether you're loyal. It's when there's stakes.

The test of whether you have work ethic is whether you can work when you're tired; it's whether you can work when you're distracted; it's whether you can work on things that you don't find pleasant. I see this with some of the young guys. There was a guy we hired, and then in three days he said, "I don't think this is for me." He got hired for a sales role; he was making outbound calls. I was like, "You don't think this is for you? You were here for three days; you didn't even get the ability to get good at the basic thing."

There's a level of intolerance for discomfort and some sort of expectation that it's going to be this amazing thing that you're going to love at all times, and it's just not. I'm okay being a different voice in the entrepreneur space that's not like, "You know, passion is what gets you through the hard times." I don't think so. Passion has not been the thing that has gotten me through my harder times; it has been desire.

It has been wanting to make something into a reality by dragging something from your mind into the world. Sometimes I feel like you're giving birth to this thing, which for every mother, which I obviously haven't given birth, it's like you give birth kicking and screaming. It's a painful experience, but then there's life that happens afterward. I see work as very much labor, and we even use the same word: it's labor; it's work; it's painful.

The pain is that you're halfway through, I would imagine, and you're like, "I still have to keep pushing because it's still not alive yet; it's still not out." I think learning to push through that, and this is the part that my friend was saying where he's like, "They don't get it; they don't get it. They think that I do one of these speaking events, and they see my Instagram, and they think, 'Oh, okay, well, why is my brain not growing like that?'"

He's like, "Well, I was in five different cities this week, and I just had to do FaceTime with my kids in order for them to see me." People are then like, "I wouldn't make that trade." Fine, but don't want what he has.

Let me draw this out for you in a nice little visual to show you how I see work, right? This volume that you need to do. You have excitement, right? So when you have this new idea, which we have them, and you're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing," right? The thing is that once you become neutral, and then you become worried and stressed, this is when work begins.

In the bodybuilding world, they'd be like, "Okay, once you have achieved failure, that is where your working reps begin." It's an old-school bodybuilding saying. I'm sure the science bros will be upset about it, but I think that it very much qualifies for how it relates to work in this world. Your motivation fades very quickly; it's that work begins once motivation stops.

If you measure it that way, then you will measure how much you work and how hard you work very differently. It reminds me of this Muhammad Ali quote where he says, "I hated every minute of training, but I would tell myself, 'Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"

I have this tweet that I said a minute ago that I really like, and so whenever I get to a low point where I think, "Why do I even bother?" I just try and remind myself, "This is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win." That period, that wall that you hit, that is the champion wall; that is where you leave everyone else behind because everyone only works until their point of excitement, and then they stop.

You have to find that next gear. The next point is that they cannot copy your proof. People want to gain reputations; they want to be known for certain things; they want to get status. But people can copy your promises; they can copy your services; they can copy your logo; they can copy your name, but they can't copy what you've done.

I have sometimes younger entrepreneurs who reach out, and they're like, "Hey, I want to build a big brand," and they're like, "I want to start making content." But I advise them to only make content if they're truly documenting and don't transition into teacher mode because the thing that will build your brand is the stuff you do.

We look at the business titans that are out there. You look at Elon, you look at Bezos, you look at maybe now Sam Altman, you look at Jensen Huang from Nvidia, and they now have these quote big business brands. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they are considered probably the leaders of the business world in terms of thought leadership.

But did they get there by building personal brands, or did they get there by building personal businesses? By building personal businesses, which I'm joking here, they just built big-ass businesses. By extension, people wanted to know who was the person behind this big business, and then they built their credibility before they built their likability.

Everyone wants to put the cart before the horse; everyone wants to eat the pudding before they have the proof. The proof comes before the pudding in the real world. In a world where anyone can say anything and get instant reach, trust is the thing that is the scarcity; that is the rare commodity.

The idea is if you want to build a really big brand, then you want to index super hard on trust. The way that people can trust you is that you do what you said you have done. The reason Mr. Beast's videos worked is because he used his videos as proof. He didn't say, "I am super knowledgeable." He said, "Look, I did something that no one else is willing to do."

His first video that went viral was him counting to a million or something crazy, right? He did something that other people were not willing to do, and he just happened to have documented that thing. If you're like, "Well, how do I get proof? I'm so young," it's like, "Well, you just do epic stuff, and then people will be like, 'Wow, he did epic stuff; this is interesting.'"

It still requires epic amounts of work in order to do that. The reason that there's such a misconception about overnight success is that it's just that there's a threshold over which you are good enough that you go viral. All right? So this is, call it like, here is the viral moment. The thing is that we, the person lived this whole life. What we in the public see is this moment.

What happened since? We have the perception of overnight success, and this is why it's so difficult for people to wrap their heads around because they want to model what they see, not what occurred. We have to model what they did, not what happened. This fundamentally is the inputs; this is what they put in for a long period of time. What we see here is the output; this is what's visible.

This is where it gets especially difficult for people trying to learn is that most people get rich, and then they get weird. What happens is people then try and copy what they do here, not what they did to get there. They copy the wrong stuff; they model the plateau, not the rise.

You don't get rich by flying on private jets; you get rich, then you can fly on private jets. A big thing that richer people do is that they will act with urgency. I would say that this is not even richer people; this is entrepreneurs specifically that I'm making this video for, is that they act with urgency.

You can tell in some ways how successful someone's going to be by how quickly they do things, the gap between thoughts and action. This is something I personally work on a lot, which is like how quickly between when I make a decision to do something does it actually occur? You can improve your potency as a person, how powerful you are, by decreasing the gap between thoughts and action.

If you think about the hypothetical extreme of this, the god figure, if you will, thoughts and reality are one and the same. He thinks planets and universes, and they appear. That would be the ultimate demonstration of power, in my opinion. We can approximate that; we can get as close to that as we can by shrinking the time it takes between when we think and when we decide, and then when we ultimately do.

When you don't have any more information to collect in order to make a decision, then you make the decision, and you make the decision by eliminating alternatives. Literally, the word "decide" comes from "decidere," which is Latin for "to cut off." The question is, what thing are you eliminating by making the decision that you're going to make?

A really easy tactical thing is whenever you say, "I'm going to get this done by the end of the week," ask yourself, "Can I get it done by the end of today?" That seems like a very small hack, but that increases your pace of progress by 7x. If you hear that, you're like, "Wow, 7x." It's like, "Yeah."

For that reason, there are people who are working 100 times faster than you. I think that this is a really good cultural thing, which is you can just say end of day, not end of week, and not end of month. End of week. In each of the instances, this is a 4x increase; this is a 7x increase, right? You can even go end of day, goes into end of hour.

Now, this is one that Lila talks about a lot, and she's a master operator. She heard this from a mentor; she said, "If it's a five-minute task and you have five minutes, do it now." The amount of times where I'm like, "Hey, we should do this thing," and then literally in 60 seconds, it's handled by Lila, like while I'm just walking around talking, just shooting ideas out there, is baffling.

Her speed of like, "That's a great idea; it's already been delegated out." She doesn't keep things on her plate. There's this big falseness that I think is propagated by a lot of the social media world because it feels good and gets lots of shares because it gives people permission to be lazy. It gives people permission to tell themselves that they're great just the way they are.

I wholeheartedly reject that entire notion. The idea that they sell you is that you're young; you've got time. I think that is false because all this does is extend how long it takes you to remember that, number one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed. I just looked at my newsfeed this morning, and there was a guy that I knew who's my age, and he just died of stomach cancer. Really sad; really nice guy, wife and three kids, into fitness, really in shape—just a freak thing that happened.

The assumption that you've got time assumes that you know you're going to live forever, that you know you're going to live to 100, and we know that that's not true. Let me put this in perspective: three out of 10,000 people live to 100. Everyone has this assumption in their mind that they're like, "Yeah, I'm at 50, so I'm going to make it to 100."

Well, you've got a three in 10,000 shot of doing that—very unlikely. More realistically, you'll die at the median, which is 74 for men in the US, which means that at 37, you're actually at the halfway point just in years. But if you adjust for the increase in speed of time, so the same reason that your kid at five years old thinks that something takes forever when you say it's going to happen next year, and when you're 40, something that happens next year feels like you blink your eyes and it's there.

When you're five, one year is 20% of your life; when you're 40, one year is 2.5% of your life. In a real way, it is nine times faster than it is for your five-year-old. It's my belief that as we get older, we don't become more patient; time just moves faster. If you adjust for that time speed, your midpoint isn't 37; it's closer to 21.

This is also why, in my opinion, when you think back on your life, you have so much meat in the first 20 years. So much stuff happens, all these material life events, and it's because in that time period, it was half of your life. After that, everything happens real fast.

What you have to realize is, one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed; two, nothing is going to be easy—just get over it. Every time you think, "Oh, this could look," just skip to, "Oh, that's not true; there's something I don't know about that." Just skip to it. The faster you can train that muscle that as soon as you have this FOMO, just slow down and realize that you don't know enough.

Three, it takes time to get good. There's no one who's good at anything that was immediately good at it. The people who were immediately good at it, I remember telling a professor, I was like, "You know, I've just naturally been good at languages." He was like, "When you were a kid, did you have multiple languages in your household?" I was like, "Well, yeah, I was bilingual."

He's like, "What are you even talking about? You literally started with that, so of course languages are easier for you." The thing is that the people who have things that come naturally to them, they just only came because they forgot the work that generalized to the new skill. Once you realize that it takes time, repetitions to get good, then you also realize that the sooner you start, the sooner you get, and don't stop until you do.

Let's assume you act with urgency, right? You've gotten that done; you've moved end of week to end of day; you've moved end of day to end of this hour; you've moved end of month to end of this week, and you've massively increased the speed that you execute. Well, then you start running face forward into the fact that things are going to get really hard, really fast.

I will tell you this one: hard is for now, not forever. The good thing about bad times is that they end, and the bad thing about good times is that they also end. Whenever you're going through a good season, it's also a good reminder that this too shall pass. What ends up happening is that when you're in the hard time, that can give you that necessary spite; it can give you the end of the tunnel that you can look forward to.

There are only three outcomes: you either quit, it gets easier, or you get harder. Think about that because no matter what, it always ends. But you only lose when you quit before you see it through because two out of the three outcomes get easier. Either it relents; the outside circumstance gets easier, like the hard thing moves, or you become harder, and then by extension, it no longer feels hard for you.

Let me make this real for you right now. Think about the problems that you were stressed about five years ago in your business. Think about the things that you were dealing with, what you were stressed about. Now think about you trying to solve those problems today. It's probably a joke to you now. You'll be like, "Well, yeah, obviously."

It's not that those things became less hard; you became better. Here's where this gets really interesting for me. It just means that nothing is inherently hard to begin with anyways; we are just always inadequate. For me, I remember when I had five employees, and I was like, "Man, it's so many people to manage," or, "Where am I going to get cash flow? How do I do that?"

Or, "How am I going to get new customers? How do I sell really expensive stuff? What if someone gets upset if I charge more? What if someone finds out I charged this much?" As though it's something wrong. All of these things are just irrelevant to me now, just so silly. Though for me at the time, they were difficult.

I can only imagine how inconsequential the problems that I deal with growing hopefully $3 billion companies right now within the portfolio compared to what Elon deals with having six multiple hundred billion dollar companies. I compare myself to that so I can always feel like I have a long way to go.

Let me give you one thing that will also give you a little bit of hope about these hard times: these hard times are also your best times, but only in reverse. Let me explain what I mean by that. Think about the times when you were younger and you were in love and you were poor, and you're like, "Man, those were the good old days."

The thing is that when you were in that moment, it was stressful. You didn't know how you were going to make ends meet, how you were going to make rent, where you were going to get food, whatever it is. You have these hard times, the hard times that you go through today. But these hard times become the good old days.

We only see the truth when we look back. You have to go through them to get the perspective, and it's something that I try and remember on a regular basis, that I'm going through the good old days. If they're the good old days in the future, they might as well be the good old days today.

Let me tell you a little bit about what it feels like throughout this entire process because if you are consistently growing, you are consistently in pain. That's why they're called growing pains, not growing joys. If you have stress from growth, remember the alternative is that you can have stress from stagnation, and you can have stress from decline, which fundamentally means that hardness and stress is a fact of life.

You will always have stress; you will always have problems. The largest problem of all, the largest stressor of all, is determining that having problems is a problem. Being stressed means there's something wrong with you, but being stressed just means you're alive. Having problems just means that you are actually doing something.

I'll tell you this story that I think can drive this home, and I think this is the path to fulfillment over comfort. Imagine you talk to the creator of the universe before birth and pick the person you get to become. You say, "I want to be the most courageous." The creator replies and says, "Well, then I will give you monsters to terrify you so that you can conquer them."

Then you say, "Well, I want to be patient." The creator replies, "Well, then I will make you work harder and longer so you can learn to wait." Then you say, "I want to be wise." The creator replies, "Then I will give you failures that will crush your spirit so you can learn the value of judgment."

You then say, "Sounds like a rough life; can you give me a good life?" The creator replies, "Just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer it took to make you."

A good life isn't a life that's easy; a good life is a life that makes you into a good person, and that, my son, is a hard life. I remember when I sold gym launch, there was a year that I more or less took off. I had all these kind of existential crises that I was going through because all I had been doing is just working and working and working.

Then I hadn't put my head up to look around and smell the roses, per se. The problem that I had was that when I was smelling the roses, I was miserable. I was very sad, and the sadness for me came from the thing that I had that was most reinforcing my life was the work that I was doing. That was the thing that I enjoyed the most, and so not having that actually created a huge loss for me.

Then I had to create, like, "What am I doing? Why am I here?" For me, that was when I created the hypothesis, or at least the thesis I have for my life, was that hard work is the goal. Nothing left in the tank, which I got from Jesse Itzler, which I love: emptying the tank every day is the point because for me, those are the days that when I look back are the days that I feel the most fulfilled.

In the moment, you feel tired; you feel exhausted; you feel like you're bored; you feel like you don't want to do another repetition; you don't want to do another two hours. But another two hours, another repetition, another edit is what is required—not what you want, but what is required. If you have a little bit left in the tank, you don't know if you have a little bit left in the tank until you empty it, until you physically can.

I think about that steel that we're trying to make, and the only difference is that we are both the steel and the blacksmith. The creator in this would just give you the fire, and either you can stand far enough away from it that it just keeps you warm, or you can go into it, and you can hammer out the impurities so that you can just become better and better and better and stronger.

If you're watching this and you would like to start a business but you're not sure where to start, I am a co-owner of a school, and we just started the school games. Right now, we're giving $100,000 away in cash or a Cybertruck to the person who builds the biggest community on school in 30 days. School is just a community platform that helps people start businesses, and right now, one out of two people who start a community, a paid community on school, make their first dollar online.

You're like, "Okay, well, that's cool." Right now, on average, the average paid community owner makes $1,360 per month. This is not going to be the thing that makes you a billionaire rich, but it can help you get started, which is why I invest in the company. I spent four years looking for something that could make the easiest kind of starter business for people to get going, especially starting online.

The reason that we have this success rate, the reason that we have this very high success rate, is that I meet every single week and onboard new people. Every Monday, I'm on a call, and I onboard, you know, right now I think it's about 300 people per call that are on there. I answer questions live with everyone on there, and a lot of times it's the same faces.

While the calls are relatively small, I'd encourage you to come on. On top of that, I have kind of like step-by-step instructions of exactly what you need to do that the best community owners have done. You can just model the behaviors; just do this stuff. I don't explain psychology and triggers and NLP; it's just like, "Do this stuff, and this is what yields this outcome."

Finally, we'll give you the entire platform that basically makes all the tech really easy. Right now, we've got people who are in foreign countries who don't speak English. I think there was a guy who won the game who's 15 years old. I'm telling you, it's not rocket science. We've really taken a lot of effort to make it as simple as humanly possible. You don't need any other software to make this work.

If that sounds at all interesting, the best part about all of this is that you can start absolutely free. We have the course; we have the calls; we have the platform; we also have the community of other people. You can start for free, get 14 days. You can click the link, which is right here, oops, other way around, school.com/games. Start for free, and hopefully, I'll see you on the other side.

A big part of why this is so hard is that so few people want to go into the fire, right? The fire could be entrepreneurship; the fire could be content creation; the fire could be starting a new product; the fire could be doing outreach and knocking on doors or quitting your job and starting another job in a completely different industry. That's the fire; it's the thing that other people aren't willing to do, and they tell you not to do it because it helps them justify the risk that they chose not to take.

It helps them feel better about the risks they aren't willing to make. I remember thinking about this at length when I was younger, and I thought about the word "exceptional." Buried in the word itself is the key point, which is that you cannot expect to be accepted. If you want to be exceptional, to become exceptional, by definition, you have to become the exception, which means you have to be unlike other people. You have to do what they don't agree with.

If they agreed with you, if everyone agrees with you, you can be sure that it's the wrong path. When I quit my job, every single person in my life told me it was a bad idea. I graduated three years from Vanderbilt; I had a nice W2 consulting job; I was set up to go to grad school to one of the Ivy Leagues. I aced my GMATs; I was set up; I'd done the path.

For me to quit and be like, "I'm going to be a personal trainer for minimum wage at a gym," that was not happy news for the vast majority of people that I knew. The thing is that I've had those conversations multiple times in my life. When I ended up leaving the gyms and started the turnaround business, every person was like, "You finally made this thing work; now we finally agree with you again."

It was right at the point where they accepted me that I was like, "You know what? I think I want to do this other thing, and I'm going to sell all these gyms for basically nothing in 90 days to then start new." They're like, "But you spent so long on this," and they see sunk cost fallacy.

The thing is, don't listen to the people who are closest to you; listen to the people who are closest to your goals. A lot of people like to think about how they have these mentors and these heroes, but the most important group is your reference group. Your reference group is who you compare yourself to. The thing is that people think they compare themselves to their mentors and their heroes, but they don't.

Who you compare yourself to is who influences your decisions. The voices you hear, the voices you listen to when you're about to make a big move, those voices are your actual reference group. If those voices are not close to your goal, you should not listen to them. If anything, sometimes the best advice in the world is to do the opposite of whatever it is that they did to get in their life. If you want what they have, don't listen to what they say.

Even when you're an entrepreneur, so let's fast forward a couple of years. There was a point where I started the outbound team. This sounds super tactical, but I'm going to zoom out for you. At Gym Launch, we were all paid ads for the most part. I had made content; I had a book; there were things that were out there, but still, 70% plus of my new customers came from paid ads.

I knew that if I wanted to sell the company, I would have to create a second acquisition channel that was very different from the primary one so that I could create more stability. You don't have one-itis, one point of failure within the business. I remember reading this book about how to set up outbound, and it said it will take a year. I said, "I'm really good at marketing; I'm really good at sales; it'll take me 12 weeks."

It took 12 months, like the book said. When I walked through that, what was interesting is it took 90 days for us to get our first sale. The whole time, I'm investing in this team; I'm investing in software; I'm investing in training and consulting to learn how to get all this stuff going just to get our first sale. But that's not very good for the amount of time and effort we put into it.

Then three months after that, we started getting a couple sales trickling in—still not a lot. I actually had almost like an intervention from my executive team that were like, "Hey, we think this is shiny object; they're using my words against me. We think this is a distraction; it's not yielding a result for us. I don't think we should cut our losses and move on."

I just kept thinking to myself, "This is what hard feels like. We have to just keep inching our way through because we have made sales, which means we could just need to get more efficient at it." Then we did another six months, and then we got to the point where it became 50% of revenue.

But here's the thing that you don't see. Whether you're starting a new acquisition channel like I was or you're starting paid ads, whatever, is that if I tell you in one year I could double your business, right? Let's say you have to pay me $100,000, right? In one year, I will double your business. Many people would probably be like, "Yeah, sign me up; I'll do it. Maybe I'll take a loan."

But even for the $100, like if I know I'm going to double my business in a year, I would do it. Okay, but then what happens is month one, they drop 5K, and then they lose 5K. Month two, they lose 5K again, and then they say, "Ah, ads aren't for me; outbound's not for me."

The thing is that the way it actually feels is that you lose 5K, you lose another 5K, and then all of a sudden one month you make 25K, and then the next month you make 50K, and you make all of this back and some, but it happens all at once. There's a saying on Wall Street that I like, which is, "It happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine."

They talk about that when it comes to market drops and market explosions. It's like, "We should be crashing; it hasn't adjusted yet." It happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine. You have to be willing to endure that period of time for a long time, understanding that you just want to make progress.

The thing that separates masters from beginners is that masters have more ways to win. You can measure your expertise in anything by the ways you can measure equaling the number of times and ways you can win. If you're an expert at making videos, then throughout the entire process of a really long project, you have many wins on the way.

You know all the little progress markers that occur to create some big outcome, and you approximate those little progress markers for the ultimate goal at the end. When you're a beginner, you only see the output, and all you see is, "I'm doing stuff, and nothing is happening." But you just aren't able to mark progress well.

If you want to increase your expertise, then you need to increase the number of ways you can measure so that you can increase the number of wins you have in a given time period. By the way, that is what makes you enjoy your work, and this is how the work itself becomes reinforcing.

In order to develop that expertise, you have to have education. People think that education is expensive, but the only thing more expensive than education is not being educated. I would say that in my life, I spent more money than I could possibly imagine simply trying to acquire skills and relationships that would make me better.

To give you an idea, I think the most expensive thing that I bought for this—this is not including me messing stuff up and just losing tons of money—but I actually wrote a check for $350,000 to have a dinner with a guy who was worth $7 billion, and I got exactly what I wanted from that dinner. It was incredibly valuable for me.

He kept saying no; I offered $100K, and then $200K, $250K, and $350K. When we offered $350K, he said, "Fine, I'll just have dinner with you." He didn't ask for the money, but I think he was just seeing that I was willing to spend the $350,000 for it. I've spent so much money for one hour, two hours, anything to gain context.

I heard this close, and you've heard if you've watched my channel, you've heard this before, but pick whatever number your income goal is, right? Let's say it's a million dollars a year, and let's say you're currently making $100,000 a year. If you value that million-dollar goal, the value of the million dollars per year, what's the price you put on that education?

The value of that education is the difference between where you're at and where you want to go. That's why if I want to become a deca-billionaire, then I should be willing to pay everything that I have in order to gain the skills, the experience, the knowledge in order to get there. If there's a way that you can spend $50,000 in order to learn a million-dollar-per-year skill set, then every year you don't do it, you lose $950,000 that you would have made if you had made that investment.

The key point here is that we use poor people language when we talk about education when we should be using investor language because it should be an investment in an asset, and the asset just happens to be you. You can't sell it, but you can invest in it, and you can grow it. If you think about investments, you'll never say an investment is expensive; there's just a cost and a return.

If someone says there's a $100 stock or a $1 stock, it could be expensive relative to the return, but if the return is supposed to be good, then no one says that that amount of money itself is expensive. It's just what the cost is for the return; it is the investment. If you think about education in that same way, it always has to be framed in terms of what you get for it, not how much it costs.

It's not about how much you make now; it's how much you're going to make and how much that's worth to you. For me, whatever my delta is, is what I'm willing to pour into that without hesitation. For the first probably, I mean, shoot, I lost everything at year whatever six of my entrepreneurial journey, and I put all of the extra money that I had right back into learning more stuff.

Even though I made profit, my biggest expense was me, but it wasn't on my living and my lifestyle; it was on my education and my network and my surroundings and the skills I wanted to learn, the courses, the workshops, the seminars, the coaching programs—all the things that I did. I'm a product of that world, despite the fact that I think that world overall has a lot of shady people. I still learned a lot, and you can learn just as much by learning what not to do and say, "I will never do that," or "treat someone the way that person treated me."

The best students never come out negative. I have always been the top performer in every single program, coaching, whatever I have ever done. The process that I use is, number one, do everything they tell you to to the T the first time, then take what works and toss the rest. You can learn something from everyone, but only take in that which makes you stronger, which is a quote that I have from Harry Potter, the Sword of Gryffindor.

I love it because it was enchanted to have this spell that would only take in things that made it stronger. It took in the basilisk venom, which allowed it to kill the horcruxes later on. I like to see myself as that sword, that I continue to invest; I continue to put things into the steel, but I only take in that which makes me stronger.

A lot of people have these negative experiences with coaches, consultants, vendors, whatever, and I just like to think to myself, "In what way will this make me better?" By instead asking that question rather than enumerating the many things they could have done better or the things they did wrong, simply saying, "There is something that I can learn from this, and there is something in this experience that will make me stronger."

That frame may have been one of the most valuable frames that I've had because I, like you, have spent plenty of money on things that have quote not worked, but I still learned enough from them, and oftentimes what not to do that allowed me to then see what to do. But before I ever did that, I had to do the first three steps of that, which was do everything they said to the T the first time.

If for whatever reason it did not work, I would then use my other skills to patch the difference so that I could find a way to make it work. By the way, if they have a success story, which they usually do because that's how they sold you, is that you find that person and figure out what they are doing that is lacking in the education that the person who's teaching taught.

Fundamentally, if you ever buy something where there is somebody who has been successful, then it means there are activities that yield success. The discrepancy, I'm going to show this to you visually because I think it's important. So let's say there's a bridge, right? You've got money, and here's you, okay? You've got this path that someone shows you how to do.

You paid money, and they give you these little bricks, right? They give you these little bricks that you paid money for, and maybe these bricks you had to pay different vendors different amounts of money for each one of these bricks, but you still haven't made money yet. The thing is that there's a gap here, and the reason that some people are successful with some people's programs or implementations and other people aren't is because the people who already bought that brick from somebody else before, that brick isn't missing.

If you see the education you have as these bricks on the road, then you wouldn't say that the foundation of a house is in some way a ripoff. You would just say it's not a complete house. Now, if they sold you the expectation that you would have a house, sure, you could be upset by them, but they still helped you build a foundation.

It's the same people who get upset saying, "Oh, I learned arithmetic from Mrs. Glass," but then when I found Mr. Hardwick and he taught me calculus, she only taught me. You wouldn't say that, but for some reason, people talk about the basics of business the same way when they become more advanced.

If someone taught you how to do outbound and do warm outreach so that you could sell your first customers, and someone else later teaches you how to run ads, well, you probably learned how to work the leads from the ads that work for you because you learned how to sell strangers. When you did the ads, it worked for you, and then somebody else who did that same exact implementation didn't have the bricks that you had, and they never got the dollars that came across.

Whenever something doesn't work, it doesn't make you any better by saying it's their fault. Fault also only matters in the eyes of the law, which you're not going to sue anybody anyway, so who gives a? The only thing that matters is whether the outcome happens or not, which is under your control because it means that you simply have a discrepancy between where you are and where you want to go.

A lot of people would then say, "Sure, Alex, it's easy for you to say you're a white guy." You're right; cool. So just don't watch the video; move on. But for everybody else, you've got connections; you've got money; you've got looks; you've got intellect or intelligence. These are all great, but you can beat all of these.

You can beat somebody who has all four if you have one thing, which is the desire to improve—the insatiable desire to improve. No matter where you start, if you have this, it's hard to beat someone who improves every second of every day without stopping, without giving up. I have met people who have connections, money, looks, and intelligence, and they do not beat people who have an insatiable desire to improve who do not stop.

If you think about it like this: if life were a race where at the end you die, you've got to finish first, right? There are people who may start at different parts of that race, but what is not measured is the speed that you can move. I don't know if you've seen these clips that have gone viral in the NFL where they have one of their wide receivers start like 20 yards behind a fan, and they have to race the length of the football field.

Then the wide receiver will usually catch up, talk to them, and then just speed right past them. It's far less about where you start because that's where a lot of losers will define themselves. They'll define themselves by what happened to them rather than what they made happen. Somebody else may be here, but it only matters if you think that there's fairness.

I don't believe fairness is something that exists in the universe, and so I don't hold it as an ideal that I proclaim must exist. There is simply a starting point and a rate of progress. The starting point you can't control, but the rate of progress you can. Control what you can control.

If education is a change in behavior, that's what you do. If you become educated, you do something different after you learn something. Then intelligence is the rate of learning, which means that you can, in a very real way, influence the rate of learning. The speed of learning you can influence how quickly you move along this race, independent of where you start.

You'll also note that the person here has no influence on what this person does. These two people are independent nodes. The only reason that this person gets upset is that they think it's not fair. If you just eliminate fairness from your vocabulary and think only in terms of what do I need to do, then it eliminates a lot of the distraction that keeps you poor.

If you recall from the very beginning, lazy people get distracted; they focus on distraction. One of the biggest distractions is, "It's not fair." It's not fair; I shouldn't have to; I should get; I should; I should; things shouldn't; it's all shoulds. I will tell you that should, in my worldview, should not exist because should creates expectations of an uncaring universe. It says that you demand something, and I promise you that the universe will win.

All you have to do is watch baby seals just get immediately eaten by orcas after a mother is laying there on the ice to be like, "Wow, life isn't fair." I'm sure that seal could be like, "It's not fair that my babies were literally eaten in front of me." Tough, right? Tough. They have mammal brains; we can see that they got some feelings, right?

If we go back to the Sword of Gryffindor, does demanding that it should be fair make you stronger? Does saying that that person started further ahead of you in any way benefit you? No, because your actions are entirely independent from them. The only thing that that does is actually delay your speed of taking action. It makes you dumber because if we define intelligence by the rate of learning, then it means it takes you longer to learn.

It makes you stupid, and I think that that's why people stay here for a very long time, and many of them never leave. So what are the things that bad entrepreneurs talk about with good entrepreneurs? One of the excuses they'll make is that they will make preference excuses; they will make trade-off excuses. They will say, "This is not worth the price," in which case, fine, but don't also want the thing.

For example, privacy is the price of fame; loneliness is the price of ambition; pleasure is the price of discipline; novelty is the price of loyalty; discretion is the price of trust. So many people want the benefits of these traits but can't afford the cost or the price. They're not willing to be discreet, but they want someone to trust them. They can't hold someone's secrets; they want someone to be loyal to them at home, but then they want the thrill of the new relationship.

They want the benefits of discipline and consistency, but they can't trade the pleasure in the moment. They want ambition, but they're not willing to pay the price of being lonely, of being the exception. They want fame, but then all of a sudden, they are startled when they realize that they have no privacy. Each of these things are trade-offs, and if you're not willing to make the trade, fine, but don't complain about it.

I think part of it is that we have a hard time understanding to what degree. Each of these ideals are not binary; it's not discretion; it's how much discretion you have. It's not novelty; it's how much novelty. It's not pleasure; it's how much pleasure. It's not loneliness; it's how lonely. It's not hard work; it's how hard do you have to work and how long do you have to work.

Most people, and I think this is where a lot of the complaints come, believe they're doing 10 out of 10 work, right? They're like, "I'm doing this; this is 10 out of 10 hard for me right now," but they're actually only doing one-tenth of the amount of work that it takes to get to this goal. They might be doing a 10 out of 10 work for a $100K goal, but they're doing a one out of 10 work for a $1 million goal.

A lot of that work comes down to being able to accurately assess reality and see what your actual discrepancies are and realize how much work you really have to do in order to get good at every one of those discrepancies. Most outcomes don't occur until you've met all of the conditions, like a pipeline.

Let's say you've got this pipeline here, and you've got these valves. These are the valves; you've got this that's coming here. Let's say once you get all the way through, the water comes out the other side. These valves have to open. You have to open this thing, open each of these valves. Let's say you've checked off three of the four boxes; the water's still going to be stuck here. You're still not going to get the water through.

The thing is that as much as you work and you're like, "But I did that, and I did that, and that didn't work, and that didn't work," it may have worked; it just might not have met every condition to get the outcome. If you think about life and outcomes that way, it gets a lot easier because it stops being emotional. You can simply say there's a condition that I haven't met, and I have to figure out what that condition is rather than proclaiming that the universe isn't fair or that you started further back and that's why your effort hasn't resulted in it.

Maybe this person only has to meet three of these, and you have to meet four. Okay, well then, I guess that means that you're going to be better than them. Why is that a bad thing? It means that you're going to develop more skills to achieve the same goal. Great! If the end of this life is that you are the steel, you are the thing that gets created, then you can't resent the hammer and the fire that makes you because you can't wish for strong character and an easy life because the price of each is the other.

So either people aren't succeeding because they don't understand that they have to make a trade that they're not willing to make, or the trade that they're currently making isn't sufficient. They either think that they deserve to get the Nike shoes just for being who they are and think it's not fair and think that the store owner should just give them the Nike shoes.

Look, all you have to do is look at the news; there's plenty of people who think that way. They go and try and take it, right? But that makes them a thief; that makes them significantly worse. It actually does more harm to them, in my opinion. But there are people who believe that that's the worst; that's the lowest level.

The next level above that is people who say, "No, I'm willing to pay for the Nikes, but I'll pay 30." It's like, "Yeah, but they're $300; that's the price." It's like, "Yeah, but I'll pay 30." They don't extend; they don't understand the extent of the trade-off, and then they complain that their $30 isn't good enough.

It shouldn't be so expensive; it is what it is. There's a saying that Leah and I say a lot internally: "It takes what it takes." If we want this thing, what often has to happen is you have to keep bidding. It's much more like an auction of a trade-off because the real world level three is that you see the Nikes, and then you bid 30, and then you realize it's not enough.

Rather than moan or put your thing down and walk away, you're like, "50." You're like, "100." You're like, "God." That is the pain, is being able to consistently reset the expectations again and again and again until eventually you make it all the way through, and you bid $300. You do get your Nikes, and then all of a sudden, everyone says, "Must be nice to be born so naturally good."

All you have to do, by the way, is watch some of my very first content pieces, and you think my very first content pieces are the podcasts that I made for my gyms 13 years ago. It's like, "Man, you're so naturally good on camera." Watch those videos; tell me if you think the same way. I had to take shots before the videos because I was so nervous about sounding stupid.

In the fourth version, I would say, like, the highest version of this—so let's break this down. The zero level of trade-offs is "should." You just say you should get it for nothing. The next level is "too much," so you say it's $30, but it's actually $300, and you say it should. The next level is bidding, so you bid. You say, "30, 50, 100," and you find out that you're insufficient, and you keep going up.

The final is source, which is where you determine the price. This is often, in my opinion, where you create your reality. It's continuing to hammer away at content, continuing to write drafts of the book before anyone else has seen it because you are the one that holds a standard higher than everyone else's.

No longer do you accept the approval of others as your litmus test. The market for sure in the beginning will tell you whether you're good or not, but Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, right? They would have asked for faster horses, not cars. They demand more from themselves than anyone else does, and by setting that standard here where everyone else is here, by actually meeting the standards of the market, you actually lower your own.

When you get to that level, the only person you're making trade-offs with is yourself. You're the one who's determining, "Is this good enough for me to put my name on?" rather than, "Is this good enough for them to say it's good?" For example, J.R.R. Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for a decade, and he didn't even submit the draft. One of his friends saw that he had been working on it for a decade and submitted it, grabbed it from his desk, and submitted it for him to a publisher.

Then it obviously became The Hobbit and everything came after that. His standards were so high that he still didn't even think it was ready, but it was still so good that they ended up releasing it. Many of you think that you are J.R.R. Tolkien, but most of you are not; it's actually just very bad.

Once you realize how high your standards really have to be in order to be excellent, you then have this daunting realization that you can only do a shot to four things in your whole life because of how long it really takes to get to there. It's like, "I want to be the best author in the world." That's not a desire of mine, to be clear, but if I wanted to be the best author in the world, then I know that that's going to take at least a decade of actually working hard every single day to get better.

Believing that for me, because I'm special, I should somehow be able to be my first book as an overnight success, and that is the thing that chains you to mediocrity. It's believing that it should be a different way rather than accepting reality as it is and then changing your actions as a consequence.

This is also why lazy people distract themselves because distraction makes you believe the lie that you can try a hundred things and then figure out which one works. In reality, any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick one to work on, and then that is you making it work. The vast majority of things, with enough iteration, can become success; it's just that people underestimate how many iterations they need to have.

It's 19 drafts, not two; it's 500 minutes of editing to make the video, not 50. It's making a thousand phone calls every week for two years, not two months. Most of the time, it's just that our level of understanding is here, and this is where a lot of people get stuck. A lot of people get stuck here; they say, "I should be better; this should be easier; I've already paid a little bit."

I said I was willing to pay 30; the Nike store owner won't give me the shoes. You basically are the same as this person; you just have a price attached to "I should." "I should; it should be; I deserve; I am worth." It takes what it takes; it costs what it costs. You've got to be willing to make the trade, and if you're not willing to make the trade, fine, just don't complain.

If you want to become that exception, you want to make those trade-offs, you're willing to invest in skills and invest your time and do the repetitions and gain leverage to increase your output, and are willing to move things from monthly to weekly, weekly to daily, daily to hourly, and continue to pull forward your reality at a faster and faster pace, then I think you'll love this video about how to get ahead of the 99% of people.