Transcription
The seven skills I'm going to share in this video are all you need to make your first million dollars online. In fact, these seven skills are what allowed me to go from zero to my first million and ultimately selling my last company for $110 million.
If you're fed up of being broke and want to learn how to build wealth the way the new rich do it today, then make sure you watch this entire video. I'm not just going to show you the seven skills; I'm going to teach you exactly what you need to learn in each skill, how to actually learn this skill without wasting thousands of dollars on some fake guru course, and how to combine them to be unstoppable.
See, what we're actually doing here is we're not just learning seven skills; we are building a million-dollar skill stack. And a skill stack is what will separate you from the average person. You see, if you want to be average, live an average life, make an average salary, you can learn one or two skills. You can be great at sales; you can be great at coding. But if you want to live a truly exceptional life, you need to develop a certain set of skills that you can combine together to be your million-dollar skill stack.
If you combine the right skills, it creates leverage on your life, and it kind of compounds your earning potential. So let's just say you took some random skills and learned them all; it might be like adding 10 + 10 + 10 = 30, right? But if you actually have the right skills and you combine them, it's more like 10 * 10 * 10 = 1,000. So by combining the seven skills I'm going to show you in this video, it's not just going to level up your earning potential; it'll literally multiply by thousands of times relative to the average person.
The very first skill you need to learn if you want to succeed in today's economy is sales and persuasion. Now, when you think about it, basically everything in life is sales. I mean, I don't care if you're trying to win a specific business deal, or you're trying to convince your friends where to go out to eat, or you're arguing with your wife—it's all kind of sales when you look at it. Although admittedly, when you're arguing with your wife, sometimes it feels a bit more like hostage negotiation. Either way, it's sales and persuasion. And specifically, the art you need to learn on sales and persuasion is the art of verbal sales. This is the ability to, in real time, direct and steer a conversation towards a desired outcome. It's not enough to just be able to run a sales script where you walk through each bullet point step by step and try to sell someone. Now, real conversations are like sparring; they're a bit of a battle. You jab; you right hook. Learning how to actually balance the dynamics of a conversation in real time and again, just steer it to the direction that you want it to go, will change your entire life. And if you had to learn one skill, this is where you should start, but I hope you don't stop here.
Now, to actually learn it, there's a book that I highly, highly recommend. I have read probably like 50 books on sales and persuasion at this point. The number one book I have read is *Never Split the Difference*. This book is by a guy named Chris Voss, and he was formerly a hostage negotiator. This book teaches you how to remain calm, how to persuade, and how to win the conversation in the most high-stakes environments in the world. And I love this book because he walks through different examples of real-life hostage negotiations and shows you the exact tactics he used to negotiate in that situation and the lessons that you can apply to your situation. This book is what really taught me the skills to actually close the deal to sell my company for $110 million. It's an incredible book, and it's where everyone should start if they want to learn sales and persuasion.
Now, for each of these skills, I'm also going to give you an activity on what to do, on how to actually practice and learn this skill. So, in addition to reading the book, what you also want to do is start going out and making sales calls. Me, I would say 50 calls a minimum per day is what you want to aim for. And what you want to do at the end of every day is look through and say, okay, what worked in those sales calls? When did people resonate? When did they tune out? When did they get mad? When did they get happy? And how can I apply the lessons I'm learning from this book to future conversations? If you just do this for one month where you just make sales calls, take notes, review what worked and what didn't work, go back to the book, apply the lessons, you will change your life. There's so much to be gained by just dedicating one month to practicing this. But to take it to the next level, we need to learn this next skill, and that skill is called copywriting, and I would also include digital marketing.
You see, copywriting today is the closest thing to a superpower in today's internet-powered world. If you can write good copy, you can make money, period. And copy, copywriting, is essentially the art of taking the sales and persuasion techniques that you learned in the first skill but putting them on paper, or at least writing them down. Sometimes you might be delivering them verbally or in a video script like this, but it all goes back to copywriting fundamentals. And at the core of all copywriting is basically a three-step formula: First, it's about writing a hook—a hook that engages someone, makes them want to learn more. Once you hook them, then you try to persuade them, and this is storytelling and different sorts of, maybe if it's a sales benefits and things like this, you're persuading them to a certain mindset, to a certain view. And then, finally, call to action—getting them to actually take action that you want them to take, whether it's buying your product, signing up for a free webinar, whatever it is, your, you're using this hook, persuasion, call to action formula. And if you have ever watched an ad, you've ever seen a billboard, you have been hit by copywriting. Literally trillions of dollars are spent every year on advertising, and it all starts with this skill of copywriting. And I mean everything—newspaper ads, Super Bowl ads, or even TikTok shorts.
Now, the way to learn this first is to pick up a book, and the book I'd recommend—I didn't even plan this—but I actually have it on my desk because I've been rereading it lately; it's *Copywriting Secrets* by Jim Edwards. I have read a lot of books on copywriting, but this book, in particular, it's very straightforward and teaches you exactly how to write copy in a way that's highly effective, and it was written recently, so all the tactics and things that are in the book work beautifully in today's environment.
Now, alongside reading the book, you also have to do your learning activity, and there are two activities I would recommend in particular. First is what's called building a swipe file. Basically, in the old days of ad agencies when they were doing lots of copywriting, everybody had a swipe file, and a swipe file was just a folder of great ads that other people had written that you could flip through for inspiration. You do not have to reinvent the wheel when you're copywriting. So build up just screenshots or captures of other copy that you find on the web, on TikTok, on Instagram that really hooks you, and start to study, hey, why did this work? Why am I so captivated by this? And start to unpack the lessons behind the attention. And then, to take it a step further, you need to start actually testing on your copywriting skills. The best way to do that is to test on social media. You can film little short videos and post them to Instagram or TikTok where you open with the hook and then try to add some persuasion. You can write tweets and tweet threads on Twitter. These are ways where you can very cheaply—basically free—test the art of copywriting and see, can you actually write effective copy? Over time, you'll be able to test and see what works and what doesn't work, and you will find this skill.
And now, if you literally just took these two skills and combined them, you would already be ahead of 99% of people, but we're going to keep taking it to more levels. So the next skill you need to learn is what I call product thinking. You see, if you want to learn how to actually make money, you ultimately need to build something that people want. And to build things that people actually want to buy, you are basically left with two approaches: First, be born Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs just had this unbelievable knack for saying, "I think people would want this." He didn't do any testing; he launched it on stage, and people bought it. But if you're like me and you're a mere mortal, being born Steve Jobs is probably not a practical idea. So the second way to do it is to learn what's called product thinking. And product thinking is really just the art of talking to potential customers in whatever your market you're in and learning to get them to teach you what they want to buy. You don't have to come up with great ideas; you don't have to be some Steve Jobs-esque person. You're just asking them the right questions, guiding them along a conversation to where they literally spell out all the problems that are costing them money and the solutions that would make them more money. And if you can master this, now you can sell it, you can market it, and you know what people want to buy.
So the book I would recommend for this—it's the number one book that I was told to read when I was building my startup by my mentors—was *The Lean Startup* by Eric Ries. *The Lean Startup* is a framework that walks you through how to actually find potential customers, interview them in a very specific set of steps, and not guide them in a way that you're just trying to force your product on them, but literally get them to teach you what they want, and then you build it, and they will buy it. It's like so straightforward, but it's a powerful, powerful process. And the activity along this to actually make sure you're learning it is to go out and do 20 interviews minimum with people that are potential customers for what you want to build. And if you're not building something or you don't have a company yet, go interview your friends. Just ask them like, "Hey, what's going on in your life? What are the top problems? If you could wave a magic wand, how would you solve them?" You'll get lots of great questions from this book. Go interview your friends and learn how to figure out how to build solutions for their problems, and you will be unstoppable.
Now, the next skill is one that may intimidate you at first, but you cannot ignore in today's world, and that's basic programming. But before you click away, hear me out. Listen, I don't want you to learn how to actually program. I don't want you to be building your software unless you really like to program. But in today's world, where everything is digital, to ignore the fact that literally everything we do is digital and is powered by computers and code behind that is to ignore the greatest wealth opportunity of our generation. And so you don't need to program, but you do need to be able to hire programmers, to partner with programmers, and to understand how they think so that you can build solutions that actually make you well. It's the same reason why Elon Musk knows a ridiculous amount about car batteries and rocket chips. He's not actually building Tesla cars, and he's not building rocketships, but he knows the fundamentals enough to hire people that do that and to communicate with them. So what I really want you to do is to learn how to understand the basic concepts of programming. How do if-then loops work? What is an if-then loop? These sorts of basic things that actually make the computers do what you want them to do. And where you should ultimately get on this skill is not quite able to program, but to write what's called pseudocode. Pseudocode is basically where you can describe what a program should do, but it's not actually code. You can just sort of whiteboard, "Here's how this program might work," hand that to a programmer, and they go implement it and build it. And then when they come back, you can have conversations in pseudocode. This is the kind of stuff that I was doing all the time when I was building my startup. I talked to the engineers, and they knew I'm not a great programmer; I haven't programmed in like a decade. I could still talk to them, and together we could build concepts that actually deliver.
Now, because programming is changing so rapidly, I can't recommend a specific book. What I would do is go on YouTube and search "basics of programming." On there, you're going to find so many amazing tutorials that you don't really need to go anything beyond that since you're not actually trying to become a programmer. And the activity that you want to do alongside this is you want to learn to write what's called "Hello, world" programs. Now, "Hello, world" is one of these like very beginner exercises they give when you're learning programming. All you're going to do is write a script that has the computer produce the words "Hello, world." And by doing this, it's not like you can now go build programs, but you have learned enough to get the computer to do probably the most simple thing possible. And so it's a very common tutorial; you'll find tons of people teaching you how to write "Hello, world" programs. And I would probably learn how to do this in HTML, CSS, and then maybe JavaScript. JavaScript is a language that runs a lot of the web, and by building a "Hello, world" program in JavaScript and again, HTML, CSS, you're learning how to build web apps, even though you're not going to program, but it's enough to be dangerous.
Now, hopefully, you can start to see how these skills stack together. This is building your perfect skill stack to succeed in today's economy. And the next skill that we want to add is the ability to actually get customers. You see, there's sort of this adage, "Build it, and they will come." That is a load of crap. "Build it, and they will come" does not work in today's economy. And if you just rely on customers coming to you, you're not in control of your destiny. And the entire philosophy for me around building wealth is to do it in a systematic and predictable way. So we cannot rely on inbound marketing and inbound sales to just come our way; we need to go find the customers. And the best way to do that is through what's called cold outbound. Cold means that you are reaching out to people and getting in touch with people who have never heard of you. They've never heard of your business; they've never heard of you, your product; they may not even know your solution exists or that they need it. And this is generally done through a sequence of cold emails and cold calls.
Now, the good news is for you, because I've designed this skill stack in a way that builds on top of itself, you already know how to write cold emails because you've studied copywriting, and you know how to do cold calls because you've studied sales and persuasion. So this is really about just combining those skills and putting them together. And there are basic principles in how you combine them. For example, do you call or email first? How long after your call do you email? Do you email twice and then call? Do you leave a voicemail or not? All of these things are solved problems already; you don't have to reinvent the playbook. You can just go and copy the playbook that has already worked for other people. And the best playbook I have found for cold outbound is a book called *The Sales Development Playbook* by Trish Bertuzzi. It's literally just a step-by-step, copy-and-paste way to do cold outbound that you can take, plug directly into your business, and start getting customers. And of course, there's an activity to pair along with it. So the activity here is to go back to those 50 calls a day, but build it into a cold outreach sequence. So you're doing 50 calls followed up with emails, maybe LinkedIn messages, voicemails. You'll build an actual playbook on your outbound sequence to get in touch with customers very systematically.
Now, the sixth skill is one that I almost didn't include in this video, but I think it's too important to ignore, but I do want to give some caveats. You see, it's AI. And if I'm being honest, I think AI is so overrated today. People are acting like AI is going to take over the world; it's going to do our jobs; it'll film these videos, write my scripts. Listen, I've tried it; it doesn't make my life a lot easier. But it doesn't work. AI is not going to be this job replacement, at least for work that matters. But there are two use cases for AI that, for me, have been an absolute game-changer and completely changed my workflow, and I fundamentally believe that if you're not taking advantage of these two specific use cases, you actually are being left behind in the workforce.
So the first workflow is actually just writing a first draft of any project. You see, anything you want to do in life, the hardest part is always getting going. You need the momentum, the energy, the excitement, and sometimes you're just not there. But by using AI, you can completely shortcut that entire process. So anytime I'm sitting down and I want to write a video script, or I can't think of a thumbnail idea, or really anything, I go to ChatGPT, and I say, "Hey, here's what I'm working on. Can you give me a first draft? Can you give me an outline? Can you give me an overview? Can you give me some inspiration?" And by just sending it to ChatGPT, frankly, a lot of times I might discard 99% of what it sends back, but it gives me something to edit. I can look at it and say, "Hm, I like what you're trying to do here, but I don't actually like the output. Now let me go in and edit." And it turns out as humans, we are way better editors than we are first drafters. So if you're just editing something that someone's already prepared, it's way faster. But what I've also learned is that sometimes I don't need to be the editor. You see, what I've learned is ChatGPT is very good at being a refiner of that first draft. So what I used to do is I would have ChatGPT do a first draft, and then I'd take it away and do all the editing myself. But these days, what I actually do is I say, "Hey, ChatGPT, do my first draft," and then I look at it and I say, "Hm, what actually is not right with this?" Like, let's say I'm asking it to write a YouTube intro. I might look at it and say, "YouTube intro is too corny. Can you give me three versions that are a little less corny?" And then I'll look at it and say, "Feel like it needs some factual things, something to actually add some substance here. Can you give me three different versions and include a statistical fact that would be relevant to my audience and give me the link so I know it's a real fact?" And then I'll look at that. I certainly don't do my intros or any of my scripts through ChatGPT, but it just allows me to refine and clarify my thinking. Often times by contrasting maybe some of the more generic stuff that ChatGPT recommends and say, "No, I've been in business; that doesn't actually work. Here's what does work." And so it's a very useful tool for me to just sort of bounce ideas off of it.
And like programming, I would say this skill is way too dynamic; things are changing every week. So what I would do is I would just go on YouTube and search "beginners ChatGPT guide." If you just search this, you will find tons of tutorials. Look at the ones that were probably made in the last, I don't know, two to six months because it's just so dynamic that you don't want to watch a tutorial from like a year and a half ago; it's just not going to be relevant to you. And then the activity is to start actually using ChatGPT. The way I use ChatGPT now is whenever there's something on my mind that I'm like, "Oh, I need to think about, or I need to go do," I'll usually pop into ChatGPT and see if it can help me first. So, as an example, I'm going to Morocco in about a week and a half, and we're going to be going for 14 days, and Morocco is a beautiful...
Country, but there's so many cities I couldn't figure out like which city should I go to, how should I get to each city, what's the ideal order, what city do I fly into and fly out of? So I just said, you know what, I'm going to ask Chad GPT to do that. Give me an itinerary based on these requirements, show me each city that I should go to and give me the transit time between each city, so I understand kind of the overall transit time for the city. And then from there I said, okay, uh, give me two other versions of this; try to show me something, one with more adventure and one with more city life, and it gave me those versions. And ultimately, between like chat GPT and a little bit of research, I was able to plan my 14-day itinerary with chat GPT. So just like these small little examples where you're using the tools for your everyday daily life really make you comfortable with the tools and get you in the mindset of leveraging your new AI assistant to actually get things done.
The final skill you need to learn to make your first million dollars online is design fundamentals. It is well understood that in today's age attention span is shrinking year-over-year; you often only get a second or two to make a first impression, and your first impression is often your last impression. And whether we like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover. So if you want to actually successfully sell anything, what you're selling needs to be appealing to the eye and stick to basic design principles. And when I say basic design principles, I mean it: need to be in proportion, you need to be using color theory and basic typography, things that actually make your product or your service look professional. I cannot tell you how many times an entrepreneur sends me their investor deck, and I look at it and immediately think, this looks like crap; it looks like a basic text template, there's no design, there's no effort put into it. And as an investor, I have to assume if you put this kind of effort into your investor deck, you probably put this kind of effort into building your product, and it's not something I'm interested in. So if you want to be taken seriously, learn design fundamentals now.
Like so many other skills, design fundamentals also does change pretty rapidly, and I think there's no need to pay to learn them. You can go on YouTube and search things like fundamentals of design and start to understand how to use proportion, how to use white space, how to use color theory, how to use typography. There are amazing tutorials people make, and then the activity to follow along with that is to actually go and design some things. Go either into Photoshop, or you can use a tool like Canva and build different templates; maybe build some banner ads, build a YouTube banner, build a background for your computer, and look at it and say, does this look professional? Does this look like the things that I'm admiring? You can literally compare your work to other work that you find online or in professional places and really look at, you know, what's missing from my work. Probably my favorite place to actually see the latest design trends and what designers think is good design is a website called Dribbble, with 3 Bs; it's dribbble.com. If you go there, you can go to the popular shots, and these are basically—it's a community of artists upvoting other designs. So anything that is popular on the website, you know, has been vetted by other designers to say, hey, even by the standards of designers, this design is world-class. And if you look at that, you can see certain design trends, and you can start to see what great work looks like. You can also hire designers there if you want to one day outsource this skill, but it's really important early on that you at least understand what looks good and what doesn't, and you start to develop your design eye.
So those are the seven skills, but please, please don't click away, because the way you combine them is actually what makes you unstoppable. You see, with seven skills like this, it is highly unlikely that you can actually get to be a 10 out of 10 in all categories; you just don't have enough time, and frankly, if you spend all that time getting to a 10 out of 10 in all skills, you will just be studying all the time and not actually building any real wealth. So what you want to do is get what I would call a bare minimum, maybe like a 4 out of 10 or a 5 out of 10; you're basically trying to become a jack of all trades in these seven skills, and this becomes your foundation that you can build your skill set on. From here, what you do is you want to figure out what are your one or two skills in the seven skill set that are going to become your superpowers, where you're going to be a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. You can kind of think of it like a city where you have your sort of foundational level buildings, and then you are going to have one or two skyscrapers that really define the skyline; in this case, the skyline is your skill set. So figure out what are the one or two skills that you want to learn in deeply, deeply invest in them. By taking these one or two skills, combining them, and having a solid foundation, you then become uniquely suited to do things that only you can do, and now your earning potential isn't, you know, what do we pay a good salesperson, or how much should a good programmer make? You are in a category basically of one of one, and so you can charge what you want, you can build products and actually make real money. And in fact, if you want to start learning these skills right now, I just filmed a video on six persuasion secrets that made me $21 million; I'll put the link right over here, click that, and I'll see you there.