Transcription
This is Goldman Sachs, where the world's most powerful governments, corporations, and billionaires go to figure out what to do with their money. Almost nobody gets access to that advice. But I worked there, and what I learned from the inside changed how I build wealth forever. These are the lessons very few people ever get to learn.
Number one, your first $500K is for losing. So, I say lose somebody else's money. Like, one of the best pieces of advice I got at Goldman came from a mentor I had there, and it's probably going to piss you off, 'cuz I kind of felt that way at the time. He said, "Your first half a million dollars of an investing experience is for losing." He's like, "You will lose it. You'll buy at the top. You'll make bets that seem obvious but are catastrophically wrong in hindsight. So why would you lose your own money? Why not lose somebody else's first?"
What's cool is when you work at a big institution—Goldman, JP Morgan, BlackRock—you make mistakes on their dime. This is true for you at any company when you first start out. Like, the companies don't care as much because they budget it. It's called a risk budget. So they won't fire you over a learning curve mistake. That's just the cost of doing business at scale. But if you lose money, that might be your rent or your savings. And that's when panic decisions, they start to come and try to claw it back, which makes it worse.
The most dangerous advice circling the internet right now is just go be an entrepreneur tomorrow. But statistically, it's actually terrible advice for most people. 90% of startups fail. So if your first mistakes are inevitable—and they are—why not do it on somebody else's dime? Then go out on your own.
Goldman made me risk-averse. So before I make any major move now, I run it through what I call the OPX check. Three questions; you can steal them: Whose capital can I use instead of mine? Whose resources can I use instead of mine? Whose network can I use instead of mine? If the answer to all three is my own, I'm probably not thinking about it right.
So I use this term OPX. That stands for "other people's X," where X is whatever asset you need: money, contacts, infrastructure, credibility. Goldman never takes a position without limiting their own exposure first. This is how you do the same thing at any level. That's rule number one.
Number two, this is a hard one: Cut your bottom 20%.
So every year this place fires the bottom 20% of its people. And I used to think that was brutal, because it is, until I realized every single high performer in the world does the exact same thing. They're just quieter about it.
Like, I watched a guy—I'll call him Jack—see himself trending toward the bottom 20% performance at this company. And instead of fixing his numbers, he spent six months kind of brilliantly engineering the appearance of better numbers. Could you imagine the amount of energy and effort spent looking successful instead of actually becoming it? Like, it's such a waste.
So Goldman ended up firing him anyway with a bad recommendation, and a bad recommendation from this place is basically like a career bomb, and you never really walk away from it. So, like a decade later, I ran into Jack, and he is, you know, not living his best life. And it wasn't actually that he lacked talent at all; he was super smart. He just couldn't face the decision of what was happening and wasn't willing to do the hard work instead.
So what can you take from this? An annual audit of everything you're carrying: your clients, your habits, your circle. Cut the bottom 20% each year, every year. So the clients costing you energy while you're barely moving the needle, they're gone. The morning habits that are deciding what your years look like, gone if they don't help. The people in your circle quietly capping your ceiling? Well, get those out of the way.
Because every high performer has to cut to make room to grow, just like the flowers here have to be pruned every year. The only question is whether you're honest enough to actually name what your bottom 20% is, everybody.
The third one, I guess, is: Be honest, even when you're about to publicly fail.
The most expensive mistake I watched people make at Goldman was nothing to do with a bad trade. It was about what they chose to do the moment they realized they were falling behind. My colleague Jack's mistake was really not him failing, but him lying. You know, I've seen this pattern everywhere in life. Someone falls short, they know it, and they start spinning, building an elaborate story around the gap instead of just like, "Yeah, that is true. Now I'm going to close the gap."
So, you don't want to manage how it looks instead of fixing what it is. All that happens then is you construct a house of cards, and the house falls. People are actually going to have more respect for you when you say, "I'm failing at this. Here's why. Here's what I'm doing about it," than they ever would have for someone who gets caught in a lie. Because the truth is, you almost always get caught.
Goldman's culture was like intense, and I wasn't there for very long. But you knew where you stood, and you had a choice: Own it and course correct, or become a victim and start trying again. Literally every person who I've watched choose to lie instead of course correct, well, they never came back from it. The ones who owned their failures, some of them went on to do huge things because people remember they were honest under pressure. So, as my dad says, tell the truth even when it's going to cost you.
Number four is: What people think about you is actually your asset. You should treat it like one. "I don't care what people think" is one of the most expensive lies you can tell yourself. And I actually remember Goldman learning that the hard way during the financial crisis. They weren't the primary villain of the collapse. Actually, it was like Countrywide and predatory mortgage originators. They were writing these terrible loans at scale, not Goldman.
So why did Goldman get absolutely destroyed in the court of public opinion? Because they were really bad at one thing: They let other people write their narrative, and they let it be wrong, and it cost them billions in reputations and relationships and deals that probably never happened, and talent, you know, that went elsewhere.
Your version, yeah, maybe it's not billions at this point, but it's just as real. If people carry a story about you, deserved or not, that you're unreliable, difficult, someone who cuts corners, the introductions that could have changed your life, well, they don't even get made because nobody's going to announce that they're not going to do something big for you. So, the opportunity just goes to somebody else.
Your reputation is an asset. And like any asset, it either compounds or it's going to decay depending on how much attention you pay to it. Think hard about how you show up, what you say publicly, what story people tell you the moment you leave the room. What do people say about you? Because the story is being written whether you're involved or not. The only question is whether you actually wrote the thing or not.
Lesson number five is: Stop trying to get into easy doors. I went through somewhere between seven and 12 interviews to get into this place. Goldman, they make it brutally hard on purpose. But once you understand why, it changes how you go after any other opportunity in life.
Like, you had to fly to headquarters in person, prepare a full presentation, and deliver it live, then sit through the role plays where partners challenge your assumptions in real time. Like, "You said this was going to happen. I don't believe you. Back it up." And you either had an answer or you didn't. And, you know, back in the day, I beat out hundreds of candidates for that seat. And I was just a little starting role analyst.
But Goldman on your resume is kind of like a skeleton key. It can get you in just about anywhere later in life. People even bring that up about me now, despite all my other accomplishments. Like, the harder it is to get into something, the more valuable it is to be inside. And that's not an accident.
So I see too many people today trying to get into easy doors because they get you easy outcomes. If somebody right now is trying to apply for a job—if you're trying to apply for a job—the rooms that are actually hard to access are where your trajectory changes. So go do like 15 interviews for a place. Do a project. Do hard work. Don't listen to the up people on the internet that tell you not to do that.
Most people do not try hard enough to get where they are. They send a bunch of applications, do one interview, call that an attempt. And that is absolute lunacy. You have to outwork hundreds of people for a single seat. And I would do it again tomorrow. I did it back in the day because the more exclusive that door is, the more worth it to throw yourself at it repeatedly without embarrassment until you get it. 'Cause once you open, they can never take that back.
Number six, duration of work beats output of work, especially when you're young and building, you know, because you're behind.
When you walk into Goldman Sachs as a public school kid, like, you know me, I realized pretty quickly I was in a room full of people who'd been preparing for this their whole lives. And so, like, you know, they knew the vocabulary. They'd summered in places, and I didn't even know what "summering," you know, was as a verb. They use shorthand like, um, "lev fin," which means leverage finance. I didn't even know what leverage finance was. So, like, rich people build a language that keeps other people out, whether by design or not. And you have to learn to just play. And in order to play, you've got to get fluent if you actually want to win.
I couldn't out-cred or out-network them. Duration was the only lever I had. Another fancy word for saying, like, "Can I do this for a really long time?" And so, you know, when I was starting at Goldman, I was the first one in and the last one out every day for most of my first year, at least in our small little group.
And I remember there was a managing director in our group. His name was Jim. He was a former military, super hardcore, and barely talked to any of us. He was in at 6:30 in the morning. So, I made sure I was there before him, and I was there when he left. And eventually, he noticed and started giving me like shot after shot that nobody else got. And so, that meant I got more exposure, more opportunities because he saw I was willing to work. I was hungry.
So, I watched this play out the same way at my own company. Now, you know, we just promoted someone who is not the most credentialed person in the building, but he's always in earlier and out later than everyone else, and building cool, weird side projects. It's not like he's just wasting his time. And he makes more money than people who've been here longer because when you're young and behind, duration is probably your only lever. Like, you're not smarter than other people. Perhaps you're not more experienced, but you can work harder. And so the question is that door, maybe it's not open right now, but it will be when you do the things you have to to get noticed. That's what I found.
This last meeting really reminds me of number seven: Do not brown-nose mediocre people. It just makes you mediocre. I mean, you want to pick the right person to impress, and that is a skill that can change your life. Yet, most people are terrible at it.
Like, when I was at Goldman, we had multiple managers, and the contrast between two of them made this lesson like impossible for me to miss. So Jim, who I mentioned earlier, was serious, respected. And then there was, you know, this other guy. I'll be kind, and I won't say his name, but I remember—you can just picture this—he once opened a team meeting by showing us a video of himself as a kid kickboxing in a ring. Like, he had Rocky music playing, and I think he was trying to inspire us like during the financial crisis. I'm not really sure. I mean, I'm sitting there thinking, "What is happening right now?" And the way he walked was like "Weekend at Bernie's" every other day, but now I'm being mean. But, like, he is completely unserious in a place that rewards nothing but seriousness.
Now, one woman on our team figured out he was easy to work. Like, she brought him a birthday cake on his birthday, and the two of them weirdly ate it alone in his office. Like, super weird energy. However, she climbed up within our relative group pretty quickly under him. But none of the real leaders at Goldman took him or her seriously, and her path went nowhere because of that.
So, like, the real players there had zero interest in being flattered. And that is true everywhere. You cannot charm your way into their sphere. And the tell is really this: If you can BS your way into somebody's good graces, they're not worth being your champion. What it takes to get into the winner's sphere is exactly what makes them worth being in. Like, if you're awesome and exceptional, the real players, they come to you. And that's the whole point of the game. So don't feel like you have to brown-nose people that you don't even want to shake hands with. You know what I'm saying?
You know, I think you've got to make yourself so valuable that you write your own terms. So, that's number eight.
A colleague at Goldman actually taught me so much about how to create freedom for yourself. Her name was Gaye. She's a badass. She's actually on the internet, but she's more senior than I was. She was running an entire interior design business on the side with an HGTV show and a massive Instagram following, all while talking publicly about Goldman. And Goldman let her do all of it because she was really good at her job.
You know, compared to that, to someone who, you know, feels stifled, constrained, like the company has a stranglehold on what they are allowed to do. If you feel that constricted, you're probably not valuable enough yet. And that's like the honest, tough read.
You know, Goldman does the anti-sell in recruiting. Like, they're like, "If you're not willing to work harder than you've ever worked in your life, don't come here." And I respect that clarity. This is a little dramatic, but kind of true: I didn't see the sun for, I think, my entire first winter there. I was actually in Chicago. And that's just what it costs.
But if you're crushing it, nobody cares when you come or go. You do what you want. You come in when you want. You leave when you want because output, when you're a winner, is the only metric. So get that right. Freedom comes after it. I've seen that time and again.
Number nine, actually, the partnership model is the real wealth vehicle, and our entire generation is asleep on it. So, like this company, Goldman has been making its partners extraordinarily rich for 150 years, and almost none of it came from an IPO or one huge exit. The most profitable law firms in the world run the same way. So does, like, private equity, top insurance companies, investment managers, Wall Street broadly—they're all partnerships. And, like, stick with me here for a while.
Like, startup culture sold our entire generation on equity. Get in early, you know, get the equity, pray for the exit, and maybe you'll get rich. But most people actually don't. So the math on startup equity is bad for most people who play it. And I've done the opposite my whole career. Like, every major business I've built has been a partnership. And you can make extraordinary money in them, even as employees.
The Goldman Partners I watched, they didn't get rich from salary alone. They had bonuses and decades of personal investments, all compounding at once. I know a guy at BlackRock who makes $500 million in a single year. And that comes from compounding partnership economics over time and doing deals. So when you optimize for upside tied to performance, not equity in somebody else's company, you can make a lot more.
So I like to ask myself this question, and you can see it: If I do X, I make more. And that's the structure you want. And where the actual upside comes from when you're starting out is risking a little bit and betting on yourself. At least, that's what I think.
Number 10, start investing in off-market deals right now with whatever you have. Like, Goldman taught me that the real money to be made was never in the salary. It was always in the deals on the side. So, at Goldman, everybody always talked about where they were putting their own money, not inside of their job, but outside of it.
So, you know, a colleague might be like buying a duplex. A company might be raising a small round from people in the company. And, you know, you pull whatever you have, and early on that might not be much, but it was something. So my first couple of deals might have been a couple thousand bucks, but they were small, and those compounded into big.
I mean, some of my first outside investments, I think, were duplexes, real estate deals with people I actually knew. Then an outdoor advertising startup that was a couple hundred K. That made me—that was a lot back then. Then a fortune cookie advertising company, of all things, that also made us a couple hundred. And I put real money into like this random fortune cookie company. But I put it to people in my network that I trusted.
And every time I did one of those deals, I was like building that muscle, you know, like Goldman Partners at the top. They get rich by investing in deal after deal alongside their salary for decades. Nobody in our generation is investing aggressively enough, or they're like Robinhood-YOLOing it into crypto. And I think that's probably because the story most of us tell ourselves is that you need real money to start. You only need a thousand, five thousand, ten K, whatever you can set aside. And you just start putting it into the people around you.
Most people at work only talk about work, not about your outside investments. And I think that's the problem today. The deals you're walking past every day will shock you. Which is exactly why I built Main Street Millionaire Live. It's basically a three-day event in June where we show you how to actually act on that idea. Totally virtual, but you find off-market businesses. You know, how to fund a deal without draining all your savings, how to structure it so a seller picks you over private equity who maybe is writing a bigger check. And these are real deals, real numbers, and tickets are less than a couple cups of coffee. You can join from anywhere in the world virtually.
The people from last year's event, like, they aren't just talking about investing anymore. They're actually closing. So, actually, I'm going to throw a link in the description for this for you guys because working inside that building at Goldman was one of the most intense crash courses in wealth creation that existed for me. Most people never get access. Part of my goal is to give that all to you guys.
Now, I'm off to dinner to hopefully do another deal. But, I hope you've stolen the lessons today. Tell me which one your favorite one was. Maybe we'll do another video on it.