Transcription
Getting rich is a game, and to win the game, you have to understand the rules. The rich know the rules; the poor don't even realize they're playing.
At any given moment, you're either playing or getting played. You're either a producer or a consumer, a buyer or a seller. But thankfully, once you understand these rules, you get to decide which team you want to be on. I grew up on the wrong team. We lived paycheck to paycheck and had mountains of debt, and I grew up poor as a result of that. Once I was in high school, I started studying millionaires, trying to understand the game of money because I wanted to get rich. I wanted to live the good life and take care of my family. I didn't want them to stress about money anymore.
Today, I've made over $10 million at 27 years old, and the first big shift I had was when I learned about this game and discovered that it's rigged against me. That's when I started to relentlessly study these rules, and not long after that, I started winning.
I first knew I wanted to get rich when I watched my mom grinding every single day, working 8-hour shifts just to barely make ends meet. She worked harder than anybody I knew, but we were still broke. And that's when it hit me: having a job will never make you rich. There's nothing wrong with having a job to make some money, but it'll never set you free. If someone else controls your paycheck, they control your life, because at any given moment your boss can decide if you stop getting paid. Which means you're always going to be one step away from losing everything, especially if you make the biggest mistake of them all: getting in debt.
If you're broke, avoid debt at all costs, because debt is the modern-day version of slavery. The average 18-year-old American starts their life drowning in debt. They get tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, they get a car payment that they can't even afford, and they get a credit card to pay for just about everything else. And just like that, they're trapped for life. Debt is the greatest dream killer in America because it's impossible to invest in yourself when every penny you make goes straight back into paying the system. And trust me, I would know. Just a couple of years ago, I had over $30,000 in debt, so every dollar that my business made went straight back into paying off my credit cards and my car note that I didn't even really want.
But I didn't get out of debt by saving my way there. If you're watching this video and you're in debt, here's what I want you to do: cut up your credit cards and start focusing on making more money, because you will never save your way to getting rich. Look, man, you can clip coupons, skip lattes, and drive a cheap car for your whole life and still never get rich. My secret is that I always focused on earning more and not penny-pinching my way to my first million. Once I made this shift, it happened way faster. For you to save your way to a million, it's going to take you 40 or 50 years, which means by the time you get there, a million is not even going to be worth the same, and you'll almost be too old to truly enjoy it.
Think of it like basketball: if you're always playing defense, you're never going to score any points. I got rich once I started focusing on making more and not always trying to cut back. In fact, for me, it's been easier to earn more than it's been to spend less.
So if you want to make more money, the first thing that you've got to realize is that your time is priceless. This idea that time is money is one of the biggest lies you were ever sold. The truth is, time is not money. The biggest difference between the rich and the poor is how they look at time. Most people spend their entire lives trading time for money, whereas rich people use money to buy back their time. They do this by building businesses, investing in assets, and creating systems that generate them money even while they're sleeping. Once I found out that this was a reality, I dedicated my entire life to figuring it out for myself, and these days my businesses generate thousands of dollars a day whether I decide to work or not. I realized from a very early age that if my income stops when I stop working, I'll be trapped for the rest of my life. Just remember, you can always make more money, but you can never get more time.
And these days, money is everywhere. Most people live their lives in scarcity, thinking there's not a lot of money out there. You want to know the truth? Every single day, the United States is printing $540 million of new money. That's hundreds of billions of dollars going into circulation every year. All you've got to do is figure out how to get a piece of it. We are living in one of the greatest wealth booms in history. People from all over the world are becoming multi-millionaires from their laptops. So if you want to be one of them, you have two choices: you can keep chasing money, trading your time for money just like everyone else, or you can position yourself where the money is flowing.
The rich don't chase trends; they get ahead of them. They're always trying to figure out where the world is moving next, and because of it, they profit heavily. Just look at history: the people who went all in on the internet back in the 2000s became billionaires. The kids who positioned themselves in crypto before Bitcoin hit its all-time high made generational wealth. In the beginning, they looked like idiots; in the end, they were geniuses. And not to gas myself up or anything, but this has been the reason why I've been successful in my life. I started my first dropshipping store before pretty much anybody I know, back in 2017. I started this YouTube channel that same year, and I started buying crypto all the way back when Bitcoin was less than $20,000. I've been doing this a long time, and I've always tried to see where the world is heading next, and because of it, I've made some pretty good money.
And if you look around today, the next big plays are obvious: AI, e-commerce, personal branding. These are the industries that the richest people in the world are putting all their attention on. Therefore, you don't have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to position yourself where all the smart people are going. And to truly capitalize on this, you've got to start learning more. The one thing that all the world's multi-millionaires have in common is that they are students of the game and constantly learning new information that is making them sharper at their crafts. Because at the end of the day, your bank account is just a reflection of the knowledge you have in your head. Knowledge is power. This is a lesson that my mom has been ingraining in me since I was a little kid. And since I was 16 or 17 years old, I have been on this journey of consuming as much information as I possibly can, but not the traditional information—information specific to the things that I wanted to master in my life. I studied business, sales, marketing, human psychology, persuasion, and most importantly, money. And you know what I found out? Success leaves clues. The secrets that the rich have been using for generations are right in front of you in books, interviews, and of course, YouTube videos. But the biggest mistake that you're making is just getting the knowledge; you have to turn that knowledge into dollars by learning a skill, because skills pay the bills.
The fastest way to make your first couple thousand without having a job is not by starting a business; it's by selling a high-value skill. And I know you probably heard this before, but you're still not doing it. Sales, car detailing, window washing, gutter cleaning, video editing—the options are endless, but you're still not doing any of them. Your goal should be to stack up your first $10,000 as fast as humanly possible, and the best way to do this is by selling a skill. That first $10,000 is way more important than your first million. In my case, it took me 4 years to get to that $10,000 mark, but just 6 months after, I scaled my business past $100,000 a month. Once you hit that first $10,000, it gives you the startup capital you need to start something real, and is that inflection point where everything begins to take off in your life—at least it was for me. And without a doubt, the best way to get there is to go all in on one thing. The worst mistake you could ever make is trying to focus on too many things at once. You don't have to diversify; you just have to become a master at one thing. To make my first million, I focused on just one thing at a time. I started selling my skill of video editing, and then I used the money from that to go all in on my Shopify store. Yeah, I mean, whatever your thing is, you need to go all in.
I know you see all these billionaires with multiple streams of income, but that's not what you need right now, and you're not even on that level. Those guys, they understand something secret; they understand a trick called leverage. And if you ever want to get to the big leagues one day, this is something that you need to learn about as soon as possible. What is leverage? Leverage is how the rich get richer without working harder, and there are three types of leverage that you need to understand if you want to make it to the big leagues one day. The first one is called people leverage. No truly successful person is self-made; they all hire employees and staff to delegate and outsource the tasks that they don't want to do so that their business can scale without them. The second type is called media leverage. With media, you can create content that reaches millions of people on autopilot every single month, just like this YouTube channel. I'm bringing in thousands of dollars and hundreds of customers to my companies every month from videos that I created years ago. That is the power of content, and that is the power of leverage. And the third and final concept is code leverage. With code, you can replace thousands of humans' effort, and you can make tools that separate your company from all the other companies in the world. And from combining the three of these types of leverage, I was able to build my software company to a point where I was able to sell it for a couple million dollars last year. That, my friends, is the power of leverage.
But if you ever want to make it to this level one day, you need to learn how to be aggressively patient. Some people go hard for a couple of months, don't see results, and quit. Other people never get started because they're constantly waiting for the perfect moment. The truth is, success takes longer than you think but happens faster than you ever would expect if you stay consistent for long enough. Eventually, you're going to have a moment where everything clicks. And once it does, you will find out one of the greatest secrets of money that the rich will never tell you, and it's that rich people look at money as a tool. To the rich, money is just a tool—a tool to build businesses, invest in assets, and give back to the world. Nothing more, nothing less. Poor people, on the other hand, live and die by money; it controls their entire life, while the rich control it. They use it like a hammer or a wrench—something that helps them build the life they want, something that helps them unlock the ultimate luxury of life: freedom. Money won't buy happiness, but it'll buy you something much better: freedom. And once you taste real freedom, you'll realize that every risk, every sacrifice, and every late night was worth it. Because there are only two ways to live this life: wake up every day and do what you want, or wake up every day and do what you have to. The choice is yours; all you have to do is follow the rules.