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For the past 10 years, I've been keeping this little notebook with a scratch pad that I call You see that? Money wisdom. Reminders to self.
For the past 10 years, I've been keeping this little notebook with a scratch pad that I call You see that? Money wisdom. Reminders to self.
And these were basically just anytime I heard something, I read something, or I learned something that was wise about wealth, I would write it down.
And I put all the notes here and I'm today I'm going to read you a bunch of the things that are in this notebook.
And you know, I feel like I could do that because in most places, you can't really talk about money.
Money's sort of this tacky, taboo thing.
You're not supposed Everybody has to pretend they don't care about money.
But we all do, which is weird.
Um but you know, they you just have to treat it like this the silent fart in the room.
You got to pretend pretend you didn't care about it. Pretend it's not there. Uh but it's there.
And uh this channel, luckily, is different.
This is a channel where we come we talk about business, we talk about money, we talk about mindset, we talk about a bunch of different things that are interesting to us.
And really, the only people who click on this channel are people that care about those things.
And so, it's like when you go to the gym, you can flex and talk about your pecs because the other people there care about that sort of stuff.
And uh so, you know, it's it's understood.
So, this is the money wisdom channel.
I think in the next 15 minutes, I don't think this will be long, I'll be able to go through a bunch of the nuggets, I call golden nuggets, that I had written down in this.
So, the first one, I'll start with this.
The rich aren't just lucky.
So, pretend we took all the money that existed and we redistributed it out.
Everybody got the same, you know, let's say $100,000 to start with.
10 years later, I think that most of the rich people would be rich again.
Because wealth building is a skill and it can be learned.
And uh for most people, you want to learn this skill, but you don't know really know where to start.
And I'll give the uh I write down these sort of three shifts, these big big small shifts that you can make.
What is a big small shift?
So, I'll I'll give you a quick story.
Um a man wants to learn golf.
So, he goes out and he buys a you know, a set of golf clubs and he goes to the driving range, starts hitting some balls.
And you know, it's going left, it's going right, some are going to the center.
He can't really control it.
Doesn't know how to Doesn't know how to do it. He just started.
And um so he's like, "Okay, I need to build this skill, but uh I don't know how, you know, I'm I don't know what I'm doing, to be honest."
And so he sees like, you know, in the in the right next to him in the driving range, there's a coach teaching a kid.
So he walks over, he tells the coach, "Hey, I'd love to learn."
Coach says, "Happy to work with you.
First lesson's tomorrow morning."
Okay, so he shows up again tomorrow morning.
You know, this coach teaches him a few things.
Now, the coach, you know, he's sort of a you know, he's maybe 24 years old.
He's he himself just graduated from college.
You know, he's not the best in the world, he's just the guy standing next to him. Um but still it helps.
He's hitting it a bit better, but not much.
The ball's still going left and right.
And you know, the man thinks to himself, "Yeah, this coach sucks.
I I don't want this crappy This guy's a kids coach. I need a real coach."
And so he says, "You know what?
I'm going to hire the best. Who is the best coach?"
He goes and finds a professional golfer to be his coach.
And this coach gives him some instructions.
Within a few minutes, he's hitting the ball straight. It's going great.
Um and so he says, "All right, I'm ready to go play.
Tomorrow I'm playing a full 18 holes of golf. Let's do this."
Shows up the next day and he's ready to hit the ball straight again, but today things are going different.
Today it's slicing left, it's slicing right, and he's getting frustrated.
And the worst part, the thing that's frustrating him the most is that the coach is not saying anything.
He sort of expects the coach to jump in and and fix it, but he coach is just watching.
So finally he turns around, he says, "Hey, coach, are you going to are you going to do something or you're just going to stand there? All right?
Like I look at me, I'm way off.
I got to do I got to change something."
And the coach just smiles.
Coach says, "You know, you think you're way off, but you're really only 2 mm off."
He said, "Coach, no offense, I know you're the expert here, but pretty sure I'm off by more than 2 mm.
The ball's gone 100 yd into the lake here."
And the coach says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that.
The outcome might be far off, but all you you're only off by 2 mm.
You You just need a 2 mm shift.
You see, because when your golf club hits the ball, if it's 2 mm angled in the wrong direction, it will completely change the trajectory of where a ball is going, right?
A small shift in the angle here is going to take us in a completely different direction.
And so, he just shows them a couple tweaks.
Watch where you're where you're hitting the ball.
Look at the face of the of the club.
So, he makes the adjustment, takes a swing, nails it.
And um you know, I heard this story first from Tony Robbins and um I don't know if I don't know if it's real or fake or whatever, but I love the idea because it really rang true to me.
Most things in life, even if you're far off in your outcome, you're actually just only a small shift in your approach away because that's what changes your trajectory.
And so, here's the small 2 mm shifts that I think most people need to make.
Um this is after all the money wisdom I collected, they all kind of bucketed into these three shifts that you can make.
Shift number one, hard work to smart work.
Uh growing up, we're all pretty much told hard work is the key to success.
Our teachers tell us this, our parents tell us this, but we got to ask, is this really true?
Because I look outside, I see the lawn guy mowing the lawn and working in the the summer heat. He's working hard.
Or you go into any restaurant, go to the back of the kitchen. Look at the line cooks.
Those guys are working hard.
They're working crazy hours. It's hot out there. It's difficult.
They're on their feet all day.
They work, you know, Saturdays and Sundays cuz the restaurant doesn't stop. They work hard.
And you know, you start to think about it like, well, if hard work equals success, then why doesn't my janitor driving a Bentley, right?
Because what you work on and who you work with is what matters.
It matters a lot more than how hard you work.
So, again, what you work on, thing you actually choose to do, and who you work with will make a far bigger impact in your trajectory than just hard work.
In fact, there is hard work does help, but it's maybe the fifth or sixth most important factor, in my opinion.
Uh I do think there's sort of a minimum, like you need to work hard enough, but beyond hard enough, there's not really like a maximum you should be chasing.
The goal is not to work as hard as you possibly can.
Okay, so what should you actually work on, right?
I said that's the most important thing.
Well, Naval Ravikant says it best.
He says you want to find the thing that feels like play to you and work to others.
And you should keep dabbling until you find that because at first you might say, well, what feels like play to me is watching Netflix.
Okay, cool, that feels like play to you, but it doesn't look like work to others.
And so you have to find the thing that is play to you, work to others.
For me, for example, it's business stuff. So, I am a nerd.
I love reading about, learning about business.
I like to go, you know, if a stock is if if a company's going to go public, I'll go read the S-1.
I want to read all about the inner workings of the business.
To most people, they see this 100-page PDF and it's like you're digging through this find the balance sheet or the the P&L statement. For for what?
You do You're Is your boss telling you to do this?
No, I actually enjoy doing that.
But to others, it would seem like work.
And so that's a kind of a sweet spot you want to identify and really lean into those types of moments. Or this podcast.
Some people get really nervous about public speaking or it seems like a lot of work or wow, you got to you got to come up with something, you know, an hour worth of stuff to say every 2 days about business and don't you feel a lot of pressure? No.
No, this feels like play to me.
And so if it feels like work to others, but it feels like play to you, those are the the that's the sweet spot.
That's what you're looking for.
For some people, that's programming.
Programming could be you know, a joy to some people and it's a pain to others.
For some people, it's writing.
Like I love writing, other people hate writing.
They think writing is this they still have trauma from school.
They they can't stand writing.
Um you know, for my trainer, it's exercise.
After he trains me and, you know, four other people, he's in been in the gym for 6 hours straight, where does he go when he's done?
To the gym cuz he wants to get his workout in. It's crazy.
Like they you know, for him, exercise and being in the gym feels like play, whereas to others it would feel exhausting, it feel like work.
Hell, Marie Kondo loves cleaning. She made that her thing. She loves cleaning.
Uh but that feels like work to to me and many others.
So, you got to find that thing. Uh why does this matter?
Because when it feels like play, you'll do it a lot.
Not just 9:00 to 5:00, you'll do it from 5:00 to 9:00, too.
You'll just do it all the time.
Any available moment you have, your brain will go in that direction cuz it's something you enjoy doing so much.
And because you enjoy doing it, you'll keep doing it.
You can do it for a long period of time even if you're not getting immediate results, right?
things that we will do if we get immediate results.
It's the things you're willing to do even without immediate results that lead to these big wins in the end.
And um you know, you know what they call the guy who practices all the time and never gives up, right?
So, somebody who does it all the time and can do it for for a long period of time? The best.
That's what they call the guy. They call him the best.
And the best always gets paid.
In any field, the best plumber gets paid, the best nanny gets paid, the best whatever you are gets paid.
And so, you want to find the thing that feels like play to you because it will help you become the best. Shift number two.
So, we've gone from hard work to smart work.
And that's finding the thing that feels like play to you and work to others.
Now, shift number two is you want to go from being far away from money to hanging out with money.
So, let's pretend you want to get a six-pack.
To get a six-pack, to get abs, you need to start thinking and acting like somebody who already has a six-pack, right?
Like they make certain choices about how they eat.
They make certain choices about with like, you know, if you travel with somebody who's fit, they got in their bag some protein powder, resistance bands.
They'll pick a hotel based on the gym.
They make decisions you don't make because they have a certain set of priorities and habits that you don't have.
So, you got to sort of think like a fit person to act like a fit person, then you become a fit person. Same goes for wealth.
You got to think like a wealthy person, act like a wealthy person, and then you become a wealthy person.
Most people get this wrong.
They laugh about this like, "Oh, so I should just like a rich guy is buying, you know, Ferrari, so I should go buy a Ferrari? Not really.
You want to find their habits, not their extravagances, right? Not their indulgences.
You want to find their habits.
You want to hang around with them so that you understand what their habits are.
The the small things they do on a day-to-day basis that make them who they are, and you need to start doing them.
So, you need to shift your way of thinking to match the type of person that you want to become.
All right, so how do you how do you start thinking like a wealthy person?
Well, you got to hang out with them.
But how do you hang out with them, right?
Like um you know, you they they may not be around you.
You know, what if you don't know anybody? So, there's three ways. The first is peers.
So, you want to find, you know, five people with the same dream as you. Right?
Do you know five people who have the same dream as you, who are taking it as seriously as you or more seriously?
You want to find those people, you need to create a group chat, you need to create a weekly dinner.
Hell, move into a house together. Do whatever it takes.
When I wanted to get good at poker, I literally lived with a bunch of other people who were trying to get good at poker.
And all day we're all playing poker, we're all talking poker.
Over our meals, we're thinking about poker, we're asking each other for questions, we're getting inspired by somebody else's success, we're getting bitter about that guy's success, but it makes us work harder.
You want to immerse yourself in an immersive environment where you're going to get better.
And so, get as close to it as you can.
Living together is the best.
If you can't do living together, get dinners together.
If you can't do dinners together, get in a group chat together. Do whatever it takes.
Um the second one is mentors.
So, you got your peers, now you want your mentors.
This is somebody who's already done it. You can learn from them.
The trick here is really simple.
What most people do wrong is they go and ask for you to be their mentor.
Here's what you actually want to do.
You want to find somebody who's already done it.
You want to ask them a specific question.
Hey, I'm dealing with this situation right now.
I needed to I need to decide between A and B.
Here's what I'm thinking.
Um could you give me any you know, advice on the this decision between A and B?
How would you think about this?
Then whatever they say, you go take massive action on it. And then you follow up.
You say, "Hey, you told me that thing.
Here's how Here's what happened."
You know, it either really worked or really didn't work.
"Here's what I'm doing next. You repeat it.
You do that three times with somebody, they're kind of informally your mentor anyways.
You never need to ask them to sort of like, you know, be in a relationship with you.
It'll just happen naturally by being somebody who asks asks specific questions.
So, don't ask them for their time.
Ask them for their specific advice.
Then actually take action on it.
And then the key, follow up.
If you repeat that, you'll have mentors. Okay.
The next way you hang out with money, you got to change your information diet.
So, if you're already listening to this podcast or watching this video on YouTube, congratulations, you're already doing it.
But, you need to ask people who have achieved what you want, what do you listen to? What do you follow? What do you read?
What are your favorite YouTube channels?
You know, my greatest teachers are people I've never met.
It's just people that I follow from Twitter and books and podcasts and YouTube.
They've made the biggest impact on me.
You don't You don't need to actually physically necessarily hang out with everybody for them to make an impact.
But like, let's say you listen to this podcast.
We release two, maybe three episodes a week.
Each episode's about an hour.
So, you're hearing us for two or three hours a week.
That's more than most people talk to their mom.
That's more than most people talk to their friends.
That's more than most people talk to anybody.
So, you bringing this conversation into your world is changing the type of conversations that you're having.
You start to change your conversations, it'll change your thinking.
Change your thinking, it'll change your actions.
Change your actions, you change your results. That's how it goes.
So, these are the three ways that you can hang out start to hang out with wealth.
There's one other one that I didn't mention here, which is when you hang out with wealth, literally you get around people who have done what you did, it gives your imagination more food.
So, when you like I remember the first time I went to some really rich person's house, and I'm like, wow, he's got a chef and he's got like oh, this guy just came over just did that for them? Oh, interesting.
Oh, they're saying that they travel once a month to go do this thing and this charity thing that they do.
That sounds really fulfilling.
They're You know, those stories sounded awesome.
It taught me like how to how to figure out what to even want and what's possible, what's achievable.
Cuz when you see it, it's a lot more realistic than just thinking about it or hearing about it.
Like, you know, beliefs are good, but an experience is always better.
And so, just hanging out with people who already have wealth gives you a sort of these all these like subconscious cues.
It makes things feel more realistic.
It gives you different things that you dream about.
Maybe you don't care about a car.
Like for me, I never cared about cars, but maybe I wanted a like I I always thought I wanted courtside seats at an NBA game.
Then I saw a rich person with a chef and I was like, "Screw the game, I want a chef.
That seems awesome, right?
Healthy, tasty food that's being made by somebody else. Saves you time?
That's that's unbelievable."
So, that's you know, that's the one other thing about hanging out with money.
All right, shift number three.
Going from small swings to fat pitches.
I love saying fat pitches.
All right, so common mistake most people make.
They take small swings like they take the first good offer that comes their way, the first good job, or the first good deal.
Um they start too many projects at once.
Um I've definitely been guilty of that before.
Uh they chase shiny objects.
So, oh, I'm doing this thing. Oh, there's a new thing. Go over there.
Um you can do anything, but you just can't do everything.
This is a hard lesson to learn in life.
You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
You know, um and the beauty of this is you don't have to do everything.
So, Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the world, one of the best investors in the world, he missed the whole internet wave.
Like, the last 20 years basically been dominated by the tech industry. He missed it. That's all right.
He still ended up doing great. Why?
Because he understands Coke and Geico.
His fat pitch was companies like that that were in his zone of competence, things he understood that he was able to act on.
And you you can get rich anyway, right?
The beauty of it is you only got to get rich one way.
You don't have to get everything right.
You just got to get one thing right to be rich.
Um Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball hitters ever.
He was famous for waiting for the fat pitch.
He would sort of map out the strike zone.
He said, "All right, all these are strikes, but you notice that, you know, when it's dead center, I hit 400.
But if I try to hit on the edge of the strike zone, I'm only hitting 230.
And so, what made the difference between Ted, the greatest hitter ever, and, you know, the average or even above average hitter, was that they would swing at the two, you know, the the the pitches where they would average 230.
Whereas, he would only swing at the pitches where he'd average 400, right?
That was his attempt to to wait for the fat pitch and only focus on hitting those.
And Warren Buffett takes this even further for investing.
So, he says, "Unlike baseball, there's no called strikes in investing.
You can literally sit there and pass on 50 opportunities straight, just waiting for your fat pitch."
And you know, somebody asked him, you know, "What does a fat pitch look like?"
Here's what Here's what Warren had to say about that.
He says, "If you look at the stock exchange, it's high, you know, for the last 12 months will be, you know, maybe 150% higher than the low.
The low is, you know, the low part of the stock market."
He says, "All you have to do is sit there and wait until there's something really attractive that you understand.
And you can forget about everything else.
That's a wonderful game to play in.
There's almost nothing where the game is stacked in your favor like the stock market.
But the problem is, people start listening to everybody on TV or whatever, talking or they may read the paper, whatever, and they take this advantage that you can wait for something you really like, that you really understand, and pounce.
And they turn it into a disadvantage.
There's no easier game than stocks, but you just have to be sure you don't play it too often.
And that's the mistake that people make. They play too often.
They They swing too many times.
They don't wait for the fat pitch.
And that's why their returns go down.
You know, the first 10 years of your career, you probably don't even know what a fat pitch looks like, even if it was to hit you in the face.
So, my advice for most people is the first 10 years, just go work with the smartest, highest energy, most resourceful people you can find.
Go into emerging markets or exciting fields, and just try to do exciting work work with exciting people.
Because doing that is what's going to train your gut to actually notice fat pitches.
If you're doing that, you're reflecting consistently. You're looking back.
You're you're "All right, what did I learn the last year?
What Looking back, what should I have actually been focused on last year?"
You'll start to learn, oh wow, there was all these like opportunities that were coming my way that I actually didn't recognize to be as good of an opportunity as they were.
Um and so you got to do spend those first 10 years like that to hone your gut, and then after that you'll be able to notice those fat pitches.
Some common things about like what is a fat pitch? What does that mean?
So like a platform shift, like when the iPhone first came out, there's an App Store.
All of a sudden there was this new computer in everyone's pocket and nobody had built apps yet.
That was a fat pitch waiting to happen.
Anybody who jumped on that, like Instagram back then, they were able to do very well.
Law changes, uh so anytime there's a rule or regulatory change that creates opportunity.
Uh if there's a new tech you know, technological breakthrough, like AI right now.
Um you know, what what people are doing building on top of chat GPT or GPT-4, um that's a fat pitch. Um market panics.
So anytime the market just panics and sells everything, well everything's on sale.
That's a good opportunity to buy great companies.
Another one is working at a generational company really early on.
So if you saw Facebook in 2004 to 2008, you could go in and be like, "Look, it doesn't even matter that this is uh you know, how much I'm going to make off this.
You just want to be on that rocket ship."
And so there's one of these, you know, one or two of these every decade, and being a part of them is you know, that's a fat pitch.
The other one is when somebody owns something, but they don't realize what it's worth.
You know, they they they have an asset, but they don't really understand it fully or they don't have the right lens, but you do.
You know what you could do with it.
This happens in real estate all the time.
Somebody's sitting on a building, uh it's only rented out for this much.
So they sell it at a fair price for what it's worth, but another guy comes in and says, "I know that I can get a new permit to zone this for multi-family, and I can build more units on top."
And so he's selling it at what he thinks is a fair price, but to me it's actually a steal because I have asymmetric information.
Um and that word asymmetric matters.
Asymmetric information is when you know things that others don't.
Asymmetric uh upside is when let's say you in- invest in a startup and a startup you know you invest $100 the most they can lose is your $100 but startups when they win they could be 100x or 1000x returns.
That's asymmetric upside.
You can win a lot more than you can lose.
And so you want to look for opportunities where you have either asymmetric information or asymmetric upside as a general rule of thumb for how you how you invest.
Now of course the likelihood of success matters right like every startup's not going to 100x or 1000x so you want to find those where the probability of them working and the upside make it worth doing.
Okay uh the other part about fat pitches you got to swing hard.
Most people take weak half swings.
Uh they make a couple of calls or they uh you know they they they send you one email but they don't follow up.
Or you even give them an opportunity they don't follow through.
Um you know don't just sit there and just look or just bunt right you got to really swing.
And so winners follow up.
Winners double down on what's working.
Winners uh get on the next flight out to go meet you in person.
And uh the way I say it is intensity is the strategy.
Most people want the magic strategy the magic formula.
But unfortunately the hard thing to understand is actually intensity is the strategy.
Most of the time the strategy is pretty obvious it's pretty cut and clear.
It's the intensity you take to it that makes a big difference.
And so uh once you find a good strategy you want to execute it just violently versus trying to wait for the the perfect magic formula perfect magic solution uh perfect strategy that that doesn't exist.
Um here's an example of a hard swing.
So there's a guy Taylor Offer I don't know why he comes to mind but this first one that came to mind.
Uh Taylor he's the founder of a clothing company called Feet now but back then he had a merch business I think he was trying to sell socks or something.
And it was going okay but he wanted to double down.
So do do do do turns up the intensity.
He's like uh I'm selling merch I need distribution.
What if I had the distribution of some of the most famous Vine and YouTube stars that existed.
And the top Vine and YouTube stars at the time were guys like Logan Paul and and King Bach and stuff like that.
He says, "How do I get them to work with me? Right?
I don't even know these guys.
How do I get them to work with me?"
So, he's watching their videos and he notices that all the doors in the background of their videos, like the the apartment doors, had the same handle.
And he's like, "Three of the Viners have the same They must live in the same building."
So, he hunts down, he finds the building, moves across the country, moves into the building, and he knows that they all like to work out.
So, he starts just working out twice a day.
He's like, "This increases my odds of crossing paths with them."
And they do cross paths, he tells them what he's doing, they get to know each other, eventually they become friends, they partner with him, he becomes the first guy to do merch with Logan Paul, said sells millions of dollars of merch, you know, right off the bat.
He basically leapfrogged where he would have been with lower intensity, without being willing to double down.
Um And and so, I love that story cuz it's just a it's a it's an example of of all the things I mentioned, right?
Um working smarter, not harder, uh of moving towards the people you want, being near the people you want versus being far away, and when you see a fat pitch, double down, swing hard at that thing.
Um So, if you remember one thing from this section, it's intensity is a strategy.
Winners don't usually have a better strategy.
It's that they do the obvious things with more intensity than you do.
And the reality is, you don't even know what max intensity looks like until you see it.
You need to go work with people who are real winners just to see, "Oh, that's how they attack when they see an opportunity or they have a problem, how they how they go and approach things."
You got to kind of sell what I say I always say is like, you think the knob of the volume goes only up to 10, and then you meet somebody and they actually the volume there's turned up to 15.
And you're like, "Oh now I know what level 15 looks like."
And you have to see it once, and then it'll just imprint in your brain.
And so, those are the three shifts.
Find what feels like play to you and looks like work to others.
Find a way to hang out with people who either have what you want or are chasing it as hard as you are.
And then take a simple strategy and turn up the intensity.
You know, this book probably has 50 other nuggets like that, but that's all for today.
If you like this on YouTube, leave a comment. I love to read them.
I'll respond to all of them, every single one from this video. And yeah, that's it.
That's all for the the wealth the wealth wisdom or the money wisdom masterclass for today. Thanks.