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Kind: captions Language: en [Music] hey guys it’s ezra from grand rapids i was listening to the pod the other day and i remember you guys saying that getting rich quick is the best way to get rich so i’m just wondering what’s the fastest way you’ve had your life changed by money or what’s the fastest way you’ve seen someone else’s life get changed by money thanks all right we were asked what’s the this is a one question friday we are asked what’s the fastest that either of us shawn and sam have jumped in wealth and how it felt and or the same question but for some of the people we know you want to go first uh no you go i think you you might have a good story here i’ll talk about a friend first so i was with a friend that sold his company for close to a billion dollars and i was with him i was with him when um the money hit the bank we were at their apartment and immediately like he’s like all right i think it i think it happened we went to the atm he previously had like uh 300 000 in his bank which is uh not a little amount so he wasn’t like destitute at all but he was 28 and we went to the atm and there was 90 million dollars in the bank account and immediately afterwards we went to mcdonald’s and we got a number one each we each got a big mac and we went back to his apartment and watched tv and like we’re like that’s pretty cool isn’t it and uh it was really cool like it was pretty crazy the crazy part is not just the 90 million but if you do the math of 90 million conservatively if you look at historical average 90 million at let’s just run up to 100 100 million at 30 becomes 240 which becomes 450 which becomes 860 which becomes 1.1 at 70. 1.1 billion so you can see this it’s not just that they have 90 million dollars it’s like well you’re it’s a sure fire away more likely than not that you’re gonna be a billionaire at some point while you’re alive that was crazy so uh that that’s one story do you have one i got a couple so um we’ve told this one on the pod before people are sort of familiar but i’ll do a fast version of it which is million dollar homepage so alex ii who is a friend and i think you’re friends with him as well he um i think he was 21 years old and he was like just i want to be a millionaire i want a million dollars how do i like do this and he kind of asked himself this question which was like how do i make a million dollars in like the next like month or two you know which is um not the question most people ask nobody will teach you or recommend that you ask this question but he asked it and guess what the brain is a a question answering machine and so you ask that question the brain if you believe that everything is possible we’ll start to come up with ideas and one of the ideas he came up with this is back in uh i don’t know when million-dollar maybe like uh 2007 or 2006. yeah something like that so basically 2005. he creates a million-dollar homepage and he’s basically like uh you know just like i don’t know he’s 19 20 21 years old something like that he’s like okay i’m gonna make a website that’s a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels each pixel is just like a little square and he’s like cool every pixel is a dollar and he kind of made it like at the top it says be a part of it of internet history and the set website’s still up you can go to million dollar homepage.com and you can kind of you can see all the pixels and so basically he was like if i sell each of these squares for one dollar i will make a million dollars and sure enough he did uh january 11th uh the final tally was 1 million 37 thousand and 100 by the end of it and so he literally made a million dollars and i asked him i was like you know how did you get like you know he basically he built something that was like designed to go viral so it was almost so stupid and so like uh either some people shared it because they thought it was fun funny and cool and other people thought it was dumb dumb and dumber and so like you know either way it evoked a reaction out of everybody and so you can go there right now you could see all the pictures that pixels that sold and basically companies would buy it because they thought oh if this is gonna get a bunch of traffic um then cool i might get a bunch of clicks if i put my billboard here a bunch of people have tried to replicate this since but he made a million dollars in i think two months uh time period and um and then he went on to do something and then he blew it over the course he blew all the money in the course of the next year just kind of having party bought it off bought a condo uh you know like he did what a 21 year old would do and he was like oh i for sure i’m just gonna dude i did it so easy the first time i’m just gonna keep making hits i don’t have to worry about saving this i can just blow it and then i think it was 10 years of like not having another hit trying thing after thing after thing after thing until he built calm and then calm took several years before calm became a thing and now calm is a i don’t know two billion dollar company or something like that um in the meditation space so kind of an amazing story on his part i um what i did starting at age 20 or i forget which age i was like two years before my exit i use personal capital or and as well which is like mint.com it’s just like but different and you can manually add stuff and i manually added enough money that it said my net worth was 16 or 17 million dollars and so i had that on there and i just started like seeing that number because of course money you can buy stuff but in a lot of cases it’s really just like this like number on a spreadsheet where like you know it’s just like a digital thing like you could put three zeros behind it and like it kind of starts feeling real for a minute and that’s what i did and so i put that my net worth was like 17 million dollars like uh two years or a year and a half before my exit and then when i got paid i remember thinking like this feels cool but then like 20 minutes later i was like it kind of i was i’m kind of used to this now already like i see that number already and so i would say i’m still getting used to uh you’re you’re a manifesto i am you what do what i think what do we say we’re the manifest cowboys baby i manifest stuff that’s what i do i’m not a business person i’m a manifesto you know that’s pretty good on the spot yeah that’s what i do no small boy stuff i love that yeah i’m not a businessman i’m a i’m a guy who dreams and tries to achieve it it just so happens that it’s in the form of business but that’s what i did and it made a difference and i actually noticed it here but here’s my i wrote this down so i felt a big difference when i had twenty thousand dollars the next big difference that i felt my life was when i hit a hundred thousand dollars this is all liquid net worth the next big difference was when i hit 500 000 and then the next one was 10 million and i think that maybe maybe like the 40 or 50 range will be the next one and then maybe like the 100 range will be the next one that’s what i think but i remember feeling like between like uh 500 000 and like 10 million i kind of almost felt the same right right right yeah similarly first jump was 25k we won it in prize money for our startup like at a business plan competition and it was like oh sweet we can work on this for the whole year and just this will be here this is the money we need to live on and we need to so three of us lived on 25k for a year and a half or something like that it was amazing and uh that was a huge jump because it was freedom for a year and a half to not think about money to just try to build something cool i’ll also share something that’s similar so forget getting super rich quick which i think is a good exercise to do um like what would i do if i really wanted to like 5x 10x if i wanted to make a million dollars in three months what would i do and if i wanted to do that how would i do it uh worthwhile exercise the other one is like baby goals so i heard kevin hart on some podcast and they were like kevin man you you’re now like the biggest movie star in the world like you know you’re up there bro you have your huge comedy specials movies you got it all like did you think that you could do this he’s like he’s like well i never really thought about it to be honest like i just he’s like i didn’t think like this huge goal because that would almost like it just seemed too too uh different from where i was it wasn’t really even yet useful if i thought about it i could say it but like it didn’t matter because i was so far from it he’s like so i just did baby goals like just here’s a little baby girl let me get to this point and another baby goal another baby goal and i actually think that baby goals are a lot more useful and a lot less talked about than like having the big hairy audacious you know dream and goal you need both they’re both useful at different times but i would say most people would should would probably be better off doubling down on a baby goal let me give you an example when i was 21 we were working on our business our startup and we had a business plan and we had a an llc and we had all the like important sounding things that we thought it takes business cards we had a logo we had business cards people logo we had a website we had a blog we had investor we had like everything we thought it takes to to do this and um so nine months go by and we’re like this was the sushi restaurant chain nine months go by and we’re like we’ve been doing our planning and then we’ve been doing our like getting the chef on board and then we’re trying to find a location and then we’re trying to figure out how much does it cost to build it out all the things you kind of gotta do to launch this thing and i remember one day just sitting there with my buddy trevor and we were just like god like i feel like we’re just like acting business we’re playing playing startup yeah you’re playing house it’s like you know oh come over let’s play house let’s play doctor it’s like we’re playing business because we got this like and literally it was it’s embarrassing we had a binder of a business plan that was like 300 pages and we used to brag about how well thought through our business was like we’ve thought through every detail what are mine what the uniforms will be what yeah binders full full of plans in this case and we had like here’s how here’s how we’re gonna do employee promotions because we think that the way that companies work is like all this [ ] that didn’t matter and like again 21 years old too dumb to know that that wasn’t what was important uh until we got we took it to a meeting and we got sort of laughed at where the guy was like oh like this is your business plan and we’re like yeah it’s a and we thunk this binder onto the desk and he’s like i’m not reading this and we were like oh yeah that’s okay but just we wanted to show you we’ve thought it through he goes that means you’re thinking about the wrong things and we’re like oh so kind of we’re getting we get this feeling like maybe we’re doing this wrong this is about nine months in maybe we’re doing this wrong so we’re just sitting there when they were like all right why don’t we just like for the weekend let’s just make a business and like let’s just try to make a thousand dollars like can we make a thousand dollars in a weekend 48 hours as a challenge to ourselves can we get to a thousand dollars and i swear i learned more about like actually building a business in that 48 hour thousand dollar challenge that i did the entire year of like working on the business because we were like okay how would we do this what’s a product that we think people want uh we don’t you know we’re instead of like being married to our current idea it’s like well what’s a simple product that like people want and my buddy was like oh we used to live in boulder and he was like trevor was like you know you ever seen like every time we walk around campus all the sorority girls and like frat guys they all have these wristbands on like the livestrong band but they have this like stack of wristbands and he’s like there’s this new one that’s like a really thick one it’s like triple the size and it’s like i don’t know that seems to be in he’s like what if we made those like that seems like that’s pretty simple like to to sell those and we’re like oh yeah you could just like customize it you could put like you know the hustle on it or you could put like milk road on or you could put like your brand name or your your frat name or whatever on it that’d be cool i think we could sell like a bunch of those and so we’re like okay uh what should we call it and like everything that we had been super thought through and thoughtful about we just like did in five seconds like what’s a good name what’s a good name for these like fat like wristband things oh let’s call it the fat band and then we create the fatband.com bought it on godaddy for in five seconds uh logo here let me just use impact the like thick font okay impact that’s the that’s the logo boom done um product okay let’s not try to have the best product like is there just something on ali we had heard of alibaba and i was like is there something on alibaba or aliexpress that we could just get these like made i didn’t even know the word drop shipping but we figured out that same concept ourselves we’re like oh dude you just buy these for you know 17 cents and then if you include shipping it’s only this much if we sold each one for a dollar fifty like that would work we could do it we’d only need to sell whatever it was like we only need to sell 700 bands in order to make a thousand dollars and hey that’s actually we could even be profitable if we did it it’s like all right well how do we sell this thing we only have you know like 24 hours left and so we just started like posting on our own facebook pages and calling like anybody who we could think of to be like hey would you do you want this for your sorority do you want this for your your group and like we found one girl who he used to date who like basically she bought she was like oh my parents are having an anniversary party and there’s like 200 people coming i’ll take like 250 of them and we like made a sale and we’re like yeah just like read out your credit card i don’t even know how we took the payment like we didn’t even have anything to take payment we just like took the payment somewhere that paypaled us or something and dude that feeling of getting to a thousand dollars like you could see the smile on my face i still feel that how good that felt that weekend and that was when i first oh this is what it feels like to do something real everything else we’ve been doing is fake and like i was so obvious to me and it changed the way we did our main business too and like that thing paid for like you know a little bit of side hustle money as we went this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here’s a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better so i’ve built maybe seven or eight different businesses whether that just be like a real estate thing or the hustle or a court or just whatever i think almost all of them i got to a hundred thousand in sales before i filed an llc and the reason i do that is momentum and like people are like ben’s laughing and people are like oh it’s illegal first i don’t think that’s illegal you can use your social security number and like get a lot of the stuff like you can like enter your social security number and second i have no idea it actually might be illegal but like i don’t care because i’m willing to like sacrifice those things and get in trouble for the sake of momentum because momentum is like the lifeblood like when you’re going because once you start getting sales it gets addicting and you like taste you taste it and it works out amazing listen to this so there’s this um so i tweeted out that i want to dress better and this guy who’s got like a fashion instagram thing uh what’s it called like well-built style or something like that he d on me and he’s like hey like look at my instagram like i think it fits what you want and i go yeah this actually is great he goes tell you what i’m gonna make you a presentation on all the things that you buy just send me a pinterest board of the people who you admire and like your personality and i’ll study your instagram and study your twitter to understand your body and your personality things like that and i’m going to send you a p uh a powerpoint with like image like it looks for you and then just a link to buy like all these clothes i said all right great what’s in it for you he goes if you like it pay me 300 and so he spent like a week doing this and he sent it to me i was like this is sick man i would have paid way more than 300 by the way and i just he goes he goes well that’s awesome here’s my email just paypal me 300 bucks and i did it and this is a beautiful perfect example of a person who just they just did it they did it the right way and it just worked and like then you do that maybe 10 more times and then eventually you quit you create a questionnaire on your website and then you like do a pay half up front and then you do this and then you do that and then you hire a couple more people like it turns into [ ] really fast we don’t plan like well how many people would buy this you really just think like well how big do i want it to be and like would a million people buy this over the course of three years yeah maybe that sounds about right all right that’s cool let’s do it and that’s typically how it works for me and uh i think that’s how it should work for most people in most cases not all the time some guys are starting big companies like car companies and [ __ ] like that and that doesn’t require planning but for most people most of the time this works the the question was about getting rich quick and i think my takeaways are there is a benefit to actually thinking through how would i do it if i wanted to like let me not just be like pretend to be morally opposed to the idea of getting my outcome faster right i think it’s fine getting rescued gets a bad rap but like i think we all would love to get to our dream outcomes faster if possible might as well ask the question could i get there really fast and what does the brain come up with you’re not obligated to do it second thing is instead of focusing on getting rich quick i would say get revenue quick especially if you’re kind of like early in your entrepreneurial career because getting any revenue quick will like make the whole thing real you’ll stop playing startup and you’ll actually be in the game you’ll feel what’s real it’ll force you to focus on the only the stuff that matters and you won’t end up like me with a 300 page binder full of business plans like it’s almost like a caricature how dumb that was but it’s like i took it to the extreme end of like the wrong way to build a business is like to super over plan and never like go to market and actually try your thing um and you know the fat band thing that i did was by far the best thing i did early on in my my kind of entrepreneurial thing didn’t get rich off of it but in a way i did because i actually learned about how to do a business for real which is what ended up helping me become wealthy but you know that skill ended up helping me become wealthy that experience did it was like enough money to get like a bloomin onion and maybe a steak dinner at outback steakhouse so i consider that a success right that’s all you want now we were big on that fondue place has you ever been to a fondue place i feel like you’re like lactose intolerant you’re probably i could i could see that you’re lactose intolerant yeah dude are you there you see i look like the embodiment of a glass of milk like it looks like i just eat potatoes milk and corn all day like when you’re talking about that fashion guy he was like you know i i think you got potential you you’re a tall tall drink of water and it’s like a tall glass of milk i get it straight from the udder every morning yeah i mean look at me i’m like a melting bar of chocolate like a melting piece of fudge you’re a tall drink of milk yeah yeah if corn were a human it would look like me uh yeah you ever thought about if a corn on the cob had legs yeah yeah all right that’s the sign that we’re done see ya you