Transcription
So I went from working in a supermarket to having seven figures in my 20s, and I realized it's actually pretty simple to get ahead of most people. In the next 7 months, it's not about being smart, talented, or born rich. All it takes is being hyper-aware and implementing these five rules, starting with the 95/5 rule.
So most of what we think success looks like is the social media version of it, right? It's the seeing the fancy trips, the luxurious events, or all the pizazz. But the truth is, the success that you want is found in the things that you've been avoiding. A great example of this is with Kobe Bryant. So one day at the Olympic Village, Kobe had a scheduled workout with his gym trainer later on in the day, but he showed up at the gym at 4:00 a.m. to do an intense warm-up before the actual training. Meaning, for the next 45 minutes, Kobe practiced the most basic footwork, the most basic drills, with 110% effort. Later on, when someone approached him and asked him, "Hey, you're the best player in the world, why are you doing such basic drills?" Kobe replied, "Why do you think I'm the best player in the world? Because I never get bored with the basics." You see, the point is, most things that are worth having require you to be extremely consistent for an extraordinary period of time. 95% of success happens in the shadows, and the 5% that you see is in the spotlight. If you want to be able to get ahead or change your life, the key is to identify the basics and do them for a long period of time. But just because they're considered basics doesn't mean that it's easy. The basics are hard because they are usually boring and not fun, but at the same time, that doesn't make them any less important. So if you're a writer, commit to writing every single day. You'll write faster, and you'll be better. If you're in sales, commit to calling 50 people a day, even if you face 49 rejections; you still made one extra sale. And don't overcomplicate any of this, right? I can't even begin to tell you the amount of times that I created the most elaborate, most complex action plan that I thought was going to improve everything by 102x, only to never actually end up looking at it after a month. The more complicated your plan is, the harder it is for you to stick with it.
The next rule is to use your discomfort as motivation. And this is something that I learned from Tony Robbins: people do not change until they realize that the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. For example, right after college, I landed what seemed—what I thought was—the perfect opportunity. I had a cushy job on Wall Street with great benefits and a great salary, and my parents were super proud. And I felt like I was doing everything right. But then, six months in—around six months in—I found myself walking in a circle outside of my office building, trying to delay the moment that I actually had to walk into work. The breaking point came when I had a one-on-one with my manager, and he was mapping out my growth trajectory for the next 5 years—what I was going to achieve, blah blah blah—and while he was smiling the entire time, I felt like I was just suffocating. After that, I decided to map out my plan to quit and start my own business. And on the day that I actually put in my two-weeks' notice, my boss offered me about a 30% raise to stay, and I just politely said no. Within the first seven months of starting my own business, those were some of the hardest months of my life. I barely got any sleep; I made silly mistakes that cost me a lot of money. But even then, I kept on going because, even on my worst days, the fear of failing at my startup or my business was nowhere near as heavy as the fear of looking back at 40 years and wondering, "What if?" The point is, if you think the price of success is too high, wait till later on when you get the bill for regret. In my case, I could have stayed at my cushy job; it was comfortable. But I didn't want to be on my deathbed when I'm 93 and a half, looking back at my life and having this regret that I wish I did something different. Instead, I want to be able to look back at my life and be proud of what I created. So if you want to get ahead in life and avoid a life of regret, I want you to think about where you'll be a year from now if you just kept on putting what you need to do off. You'll be in the same exact spot, with the same amount of money, the same daily routine, making the same excuses, while other people are making progress to where they want to be. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, that's a good thing. I want you to use that discomfort as fuel because the reality is, time will pass either way, but the question is, where will you be when it does?
Next is you need to be hyper-aware of the "pigmalion effect," which, in simple terms, basically says people perform up to their expectations. Like, I have a founder friend who told me the reason that she didn't start her business until she was 48 was because she came from a tiny Minnesota town of like 2-3,000 people. I still remember she would spend years looking at successful people from big cities, telling herself that that could never be me, making excuses about how you needed to be in New York or in California in order to make it. But then, at a networking event—I think she was in Chicago—she met someone who built a seven-figure software business who came from an even smaller town than hers. And that's when she realized that she's the one who's been holding herself back. The moment she stopped looking for proof that she couldn't succeed in Minnesota and started looking for proof that she could, everything changed. I think it was just in 2024 or 2023; her jewelry business just crossed $1 million in sales. The point is, whether you think you can or can't, you're right. Our brains are really good at finding information that fits our narratives and beliefs that we tell ourselves and really good at ignoring information that goes against it. For example, if you are convinced that someone is out to get you, you're going to act differently around them. Instead of being open and warm and kind, you might be cold and maybe even a little bit hostile. And do you think that when that person experiences that treatment from you, are they more likely to be friendly or equally as cold? You see, your initial belief about that person, whether it was true or not, created this tense and cold relationship that you were hoping to avoid, which then proves your original suspicion. And this is called confirmation bias, and this applies to everything—every aspect of life, how you think about the world, how you think about wealth, and more importantly, how you think about yourself. So if you believe that the world is full of opportunity and potential for success, your brain will work just as hard to prove that right. So start using your thoughts to focus on things that move you forward instead of things that hold you back.
Next is the one-in, two-out rule. Like, for example, when I started taking personal finance seriously, for some reason I was very, very stubborn. I tried to save as much as I could, and I thought that as long as I did everything myself, that was the smartest way to save money. Like, I'd sit for days watching tutorials on how to build a website or design a logo or even file my own taxes because I had convinced myself that the time I spent was worth it because I was saving money. But then, one day, while being annoyed at how ugly my website or my logo looked—I don't remember which one—that I spent weeks designing, I had an epiphany. I was saving money at the expense—at the cost—of my most valuable resource: time. In the book *The Almanac*, the author says that everyone should set an hourly rate, meaning you should calculate what an hour of your time is actually worth and refuse to do tasks that can be outsourced for less than your hourly rate. Now, traditionally, outsourcing meant hiring someone or hiring people, but today you can use AI. For example, instead of hiring an assistant to go through my inbox and respond to emails, I can use ChatGPT to write my emails for me. The point is, getting ahead in life isn't always about working harder; sometimes it's about working on the right things. So instead of wasting your time on tasks that aren't worth it, start spending it on things that can actually move the needle. So how do you do this? First, you need to calculate your hourly rate. Let's say you earn about $100,000 a year; you want to divide that by the number of hours you approximately work in a year. Let's just say 2,000, which is roughly about 40 hours a week, meaning your hourly rate is $50. Then you want to evaluate all the tasks that you spend time on. For example, if you spend 5 hours making PowerPoint slides, that is going to cost you $250. Now ask yourself, "Can you hire someone or use AI to do this thing for less than that amount?" If yes, then outsource it or use AI, and instead reinvest those 5 hours that you were going to spend anyway and instead spend it on more valuable activities, like developing your business strategy or working on more impactful projects. Just an example of some AI tools that I really like: I like using Tanya for my notes, my tasks, and transcribing my meetings; I like using Grammarly to fix my grammar; and then also Claude in order to help me come up with some ideas. There are a ton of different AI tools available for free; just spend a couple of hours researching and how you can implement that to replace tasks that you want to outsource.
The next way to get ahead is to move from a position of low accountability to high accountability. Back when I worked on Wall Street, I remember chatting with some like temp intern people who were doing basic data entry work, and I learned that most of the guys there absolutely hated their job. They vented about how they barely got paid and how their job was mindless. And at the time, I didn't really think much about it because everyone vents about their job. But in retrospect, I realized that they were right. The unfortunate reality is, you'll never get ahead or be super successful or super wealthy by doing data entry or any of those entry-level jobs because most entry-level jobs are low-accountability positions. It's tasks that most people can do, and that's why it's entry-level. So while your employer might value your work, the stakes are pretty low; they don't need you—meaning, if you're not available to work, they can easily find someone else to do the job. On the other hand, a high-accountability position is when you are able to provide something that will have an actual impact on the person who is relying on you, and that impact has to be something that that person cannot do themselves and something that very few other people can do. The point is, employers value people who can solve complex problems, which often requires you to have a broad set of skills. A study found that hybrid roles—meaning those that required skills from different domains, multiple domains—are expected to grow more than twice the rate of the general job market, and these hybrid roles pay more, too. For example, marketing managers who know SQL earn 41% more than marketing managers who don't. So if you want to move from low accountability to high accountability, it starts with applying the T-shaped skills model, and it's actually pretty easy to understand. So just imagine the letter T. The vertical bar of the T represents your entry-level skills; it's the thing that you started with, and you are really good at—like, for example, data entry. If you just have this vertical bar, then you're at a dead end; there's not that much room to grow; you're just in an Excel file all day. And that's where the horizontal bar comes in, which represents your knowledge, your skills across multiple areas or domains. It's things that you can do to make the data entry skills more valuable. Maybe you want to take a Tableau course, and you learn how to visualize the data in a way to tell compelling stories, or you take a digital marketing course, and now you collect data, but you also can analyze it to drive marketing strategies. Just like in Tekken or Street Fighter, the broader your skills are, the more unique combos you can do to your opponents, and the more likely you are to win. Which leads me to something that you've got to start accepting: it's that even though you might be trying your hardest to get ahead and do better, sometimes it might feel like you're not doing enough, and that might be because you think everyone is doing better than you, but that's wrong. Click here to find out why you're not actually behind and why you think everyone has more money than you.