How to Catch Up In Life (Using Logic)

If you're ambitious, but not sure what to do, I'm going to share six principles, really just actions that have helped me get to where I want. These are the same six things that allowed me to go from having only a thousand bucks to my name and sleeping on a gym floor to now having a portfolio of companies that last year did north of 250 million a year. And the reason I'm making this video is because I'm on a mission to get the next generation of men and women to make their first hundred thousand dollars, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think that if you can participate in the economy, you will believe in capitalism, and I think that will set up the next generation for much bigger and better things. So, let's just start with principle number one, which is build capacity. And so, what to do when you're not sure what to do is you build capacity. So, for example, if you don't know what you're going to do tomorrow, you should go and bed on time today. Uh when you're not sure what you're going to do, still it might as well be rested, that's building capacity. Um you can get in shape when you don't have dates lined up. Like, you don't have one lined up, but it can help you when the opportunity strikes. Uh you can save money when you're not sure where you're going to invest because at least you'll have the money so that when the investment comes, you'll have the opportunity to take action. It's just the thing about opportunities is that they present themselves to everyone, and only people with capacity can both recognize and capitalize on them. So, don't be in the bleachers when the fat pitch comes. You want to be at the plate, you want to have already practiced your swing, and you want to be ready to go. And I'll give you a case study that actually can drive this point home. So, there was a study they did at Princeton grad school. It was called like the good good Samaritan study, where they had seminary students who saw themselves as moral people, right? They were studying to become priests. And they asked them to uh write a paper on being a good Samaritan, and then to present it. All right? And so, what was interesting about this is that in the study, they separated them into three groups. And so, on the way to give the presentation, there was this very narrow hallway into the auditorium. And in the narrow hallway, they put someone who had fallen and clearly needed help. Group one was people who were 10 minutes late. Uh group two was people who were on time. And group three was people who were early. All right? Now, guess what correlation, how people rated themselves in their essay, had to do with the likelihood that they would stop and help the person. You're right. zero. All right? You know what did have the highest correlation with the likelihood that they stopped and helped the person? How late they were. And so, and let me tell you how big of a difference it was. The difference between the people who were 10 minutes early and 10 minutes late was a 6x difference in who stopped to actually help the person. And the reason I see this is so important is that right now, there are opportunities that come to you right now that you cannot even recognize because you do not have capacity to do anything about it. And so, here are some of the ways that I recommend building capacity starting with number two, money. So, if you don't know what to invest in, save money. Money buys time and time buys optionality. And so, let's go tactical. So, how do I go about actually saving money? So, I'm going to walk through each category very quickly. So, food, that means you just don't eat out for anything. It's very straightforward. If you're hungry, you deal with it, right? You only buy from discount grocery stores. It's not that hard. Clothing, whatever you have right now is all you need for the next 2 years, zero exceptions, right? Reuse what you have, trade, or at the very worst, you can go to Goodwill. All right? From a housing perspective, live as cheaply as you can, ideally with your own family, or worst case with another family that's also trying to save money. Um, and if you're like younger and you're like, "None of us have families." and that's fine. Then, all six of you bunk up in one place, split bedrooms if you have to. Um, and that's what ultimately in the early part of my career, it was like three or four hundred bucks a month for me to just keep the lights on. Not hard when you're splitting one bedroom in a six-bedroom house. Now, all of this stuff, we have the last cost, which is time cost. So, think about your time like a financial asset. Stop doom scrolling and wasting the two to four-hour window you have outside of work, so your 5:00 to 9:00 a.m. and then your 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Those 8 hours a day, those are the hours where you're going to have to get ahead because you have to you have to basically live for today to pay for today, but you have to plan and prepare for tomorrow, which is what those other 8 hours are for. Number three on this stack here is add skills and practice them. The second part is just as important as the first. So, now you've got some money, right? It should be saved up. Where do you spend that money? So, I recommend spending all excess cash on acquiring skills until you have so much that you can't possibly spend on any more skills. So, increase your capacity to earn, which increases the value of your highest cash-producing asset, you know that is you, right? And what's relevant to today is that skills are inflation-proof. Whether we're trading in Bitcoin or seashells in the future, if you've got value to give, people will exchange for it. So, if you're ever worried about all this technology, what am I going to do? The only thing and the only logical step you can do is double down on skills and make yourself more valuable. Now, understand that learning will never hurt you. All right, it's always additive. And even in things that are bad, and listen, I paid for all that stuff that I just said, and not all of it was good. The thing is is that I believe that winners win no matter what. And so, how can you have something that's bad and then you think that you get better from it? Well, if I learn all the things not to do, then I learned. And if it changes my behavior in a way that makes me more likely to succeed, then I got better. And so, if you if you look at the world that way, then everything serves you rather than you serving it. And so, I'll give you a basic analogy from a skills perspective, from a stacking angle. I like this example cuz a lot of people know who he is. So, Jay-Z's a rapper, right? And now he's a businessman. I mean, a businessman. Little little little If you know, you know. Anyways, um in the beginning, maybe he had rhythm, right? Maybe that's what he was naturally born with or inclined with, right? And then he learned how to rap. And then he learned how to write lyrics. And then he learned how to market. Or rather, he probably learned how to sell first. And then he learned how to market. And with each of these, he became more and more successful. And then he learned how to get other artists and market them. So, he learned how to make a label. And then, he learned how to get Beyoncé. Okay. >> [laughter] >> But you can see here how with each of these skills, that person who has all of these skills Someone who just has rhythm, not that valuable. Someone who can just rap, a little bit more valuable than someone who has rhythm. Someone who can rap and write lyrics, more valuable. Someone who can do that and then sell, they can sell their way into, you know, getting shows, they can sell people on the street. All of a sudden, they can sell their CDs. They can sell CDs, Jesus. They can sell And so, he has this, which makes all of these other things more valuable. And then, he learned how to promote, which made all of these other skills more valuable. Because now, he's not just selling out one or two, you know, small venues, he can promote and go national. But then, there's still a limit to the amount that he can do here. So, that's when he starts recruiting other people to his labels, to his brands. And this is what continues to stack skills. I'll give you a financial example of this. Maybe in the beginning, you're somebody who's really good at math. Okay, being good at math is not that valuable of a skill. Then, all of a sudden, you're like, "Okay, well, I'll learn how to do bookkeeping." All right, well, that's more valuable than just math, but you need math in order to have bookkeeping. And then, you learn how accounting works. Okay? And then, you learn how taxes work. And all of a sudden, you can start saving a business money. Now, do you need to know uh math in order to do taxes? Yes. Do you know how to understand how accounting works in order to do taxes? Yes. Right? All of these things stack. Now, let's say that you start learning about insurance. And then, you start learning about M&A. Right? All of these things, you still need to know math, but these, when taken together, become significantly more valuable as a person. About your second grade math teacher as an idiot as soon as you learn calculus, you needed arithmetic in order to learn calculus. And so, wherever you're at in this journey right now, it's not like, "Oh my god, I can't Why can't I do this?" It's like, you still have to move through the steps. Now, how fast do you do that depends on how quickly you change your behavior. And so, hopefully, this video at least nudges you in that direction to start changing what you do. So, the fourth example of kind of building capacity before you know what to do is to build an audience without a product. Right? So, what does that mean? So, you don't need a product to start, you need attention because attention gives you leverage. And so, if you have a group of people who know, like, and trust you, even when you don't have a product, you're basically building potential energy, right? If you were the number one most followed person on the planet, the day you start whatever you start, it's going to be a smashing, probably hundred million dollars success. Literally, if you were the most person known person on the planet and you charged any amount of money for anything, you could then make basically you'd pretty much be set for life. All right? And so, from the building of a quote audience, is you just talk about the things that you're doing cuz right now you're like, well, I don't have any proof. Of course you don't have proof, you haven't done anything yet. But what you can do is do work and document the work you do. And so, what you want to do is like either you have epic proof or epic effort. In the fitness world, there's people who are like, okay, I'm I'm six months out for my first fitness competition. Doesn't matter where you start, if you do something epic, document all the volume of work you do along the way and people will follow you. Now, a version of this, like the next step here, would be build a wait list. So, this is kind of step five. So, in other words, before you build the thing, build the list of people who want the thing. So, a person who pays with their time now is more likely to pay with their money later. And this is what an audience does, you provide value them with your time, they pay back with their time, they say they're willing to wait for the thing. All of these things are indicators that they're likely or more likely to make a purchase with you. So, number six is you can build capacity by building your network potential by meeting people. So, think about two people, one person who stays in and watches Netflix or somebody who goes out to a coffee shop or someone who goes to the gym. In either of those scenarios, your luck surface area expands. You're more likely for sure in each of those scenarios. And if you do this every single day, you continue to expand that luck exposure. And so, if you want to be successful in something, in anything, spend time with the people who are already doing it because the fastest way to change your life is to change the people who around you who affect your life. And so, being willing to move to where the opportunity is is one of the biggest kind of hacks out there. I think Chamath talked about this in a video, but like if you want to be in finance, you got to be in New York, right? If you want to be in film, it's like you probably got to be in Hollywood. If you want to be in politics, you got to be in DC. Now, if you don't want to be in those kind of like more traditional paths, there's a lot more places that you could be, but the idea is like there are hubs, and if you want to get into a space, the best way to do it is get to the hub. And so, if you're not sure what to do right now, you should know exactly what to do, which is that you build capacity and you wait for the pitches that you can swing at to come. And so, maybe you're getting ball after ball after ball, but what do you do to make sure that when the fat pitch comes, you're ready? It's like you practice your swing. You start doing your sprints so that like you can actually get around the bases faster, right? You start working on coordination drills. You start working on your hip and your power. You start going to the gym, right? All of these things will be things that when that pitch comes, you'll maximize the likelihood that you smash it out of the park. But so many of you are waiting for this fat pitch to then begin and getting lapped by people who already were prepared. And so, the key word here, in order to build capacity, you build by preparing.