How to Make $1,000,000 After You Graduate (5 steps)

Shaan Puri

You click this video it's probably not the first video you've ever clicked like this maybe one like this or this or this there are a ton of videos on youtube that are promising you how you can get rich quick and I get it because everybody wants that I wanted it too let me guess it didn't work you did not in fact get rich quickly and that's not your fault because most advice on the internet either comes from people who themselves never got rich or it's too vague it's too general it's just things like work hard find your passion things like that and as bad of a reputation as get rich quick has the truth is it is actually possible to get rich quickly right you can get rich slow you can get rich quick you can get rich but most of the people who are doing these videos they've actually never done it themselves a few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk at berkeley and the talk I chose to give was called how to make a $1,000,000 after you graduate and I gave that talk because that's what I wanted when I was a college kid like I didn't know any better I just thought well I'm what am I doing all this studying for why am I working so hard because I wanted to get a job that would be successful that would give me money and that I would be financially free and that's what I wanted I wasn't really ashamed to admit it now the problem was the whole time in college nobody was explaining to me like what do you actually go do to make that happen right I was learning about mitosis and I was learning about you know the history of the world wars and nobody was telling me I'm here at school to learn how to be successful nobody was telling me how to actually do that and so this talk that I gave at berkeley has at the beginning it does have some of those core principles the things that you gotta know in order to make this happen and at the end I have specific ideas I call them my white belt businesses so the specific ideas that I would go do if I wanted to make this process faster it took me about 10 years but I think I could have done it in about 4 if I knew what I was doing so this is it I'm doing it this is my get rich quick video enjoy if you're listening to this on audio I'm just gonna tell you right now you're gonna wanna go watch this on youtube because they're slides and they're good slides they're slides with beautiful pictures on them and they're things that are gonna make this way easier to understand so just go to youtube and type my first million on youtube and you will find this this video and while you're there just subscribe just do the good thing this is not gonna be like one of those videos where the thumbnail and the title sound really good sound really promising and then you watch and 40 minutes in you're like dude what is the message that's my promise to you I'm actually gonna tell you a bunch of really core principles with my real story and then some some specifics of how you can actually implement this alright so let's jump in the premise of this talk is how to make your first million I it says after berkeley because I did this at berkeley it's it's how to make your first million in your twenties so how to make it in a few years rather than working for 40 years saving up and then hitting this goal when you're 60 65 ready for retirement and most people who talk to you online or in person will tell you just follow your passion but I don't know about you I personally I liked the idea but I did not know what my passion actually was if you told me what your passion when I was in school I don't know I would have said recess because there was not something that I was so passionate about that I just thought oh wow this is it this is my true calling maybe there's some people out there that are that lucky but I wasn't one of them and so that advice didn't really work for me hey let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today hubspot has put together a list of 200 ai business ideas these are business ideas that you could create using ai and it's a list of 200 they did a huge brainstorm so you could check it out if you just click the link below you can get access to these 200 ai ideas I'll give you an example of a couple of them one of them is you could build an ai dressing room so let's say you go to an ecommerce site and you wanna see what something would look like on you you can use ai to actually take a picture of you and show you what the clothes would look like on you or what the makeup would look like on your face it's pretty cool right or ai tools for real estate brokers maybe something that takes their listings and makes them more more fancy more more more beautiful and attract more buyers so check it out it's a brainstorm of 200 possible ai ideas brought to you by hubspot you can get it free in the link below so I'm not gonna tell you to follow your passion instead I'm gonna do what somebody did for me when I was younger so this is me in college I went to duke university and I thought I was gonna be a doctor I was pre med I spent my whole college career taking physics and biology and chemistry classes and finally my last semester when I was done with all those requirements I had taken the mcats I was ready to go to med school I finally took the easy class I took the blow off class the class that my roommate always was taking rocks for jocks type of classes and it was called getting rich I just took it for an easy a but in instead it actually was the most important class I took my entire college career you know because at the time I knew what I wanted right I wanted to be happy I wanted to be rich I wanted to have abs but you know my plan was just a there was no plan it was really just a goal and a goal without a plan is just a wish and so I knew what I wanted but I had no idea how to actually get there and then I met this guy this guy came into my class and he changed my life this is not actually a picture of him this is just a picture when I searched cool men's haircut but that guy had a really cool haircut and he walked in and he blew my mind and so here's my promise to you my pinky is out for you here I'm gonna tell you how I did it how I made a $1,000,000 when I was in my twenties how you can do it and specific ideas that I would be doing if I was you today to go make it happen again because even if you don't follow my exact path I know better now I know how I coulda got there easier and with less pain and faster and I'm gonna tell you what those 3 3 ideas are okay along the way between you today and this picture of you at the end lying on a hammock under an umbrella at a beach somewhere there are sort of 5 key checkpoints 5 things that you gotta do in order to make that that dream happen to get to paradise but you know before I give you any advice rule number 1 never ask directions from somebody who's never been to that destination before you know or never trust a bald barber for a haircut right so I wanna fast my credentials here so that you know that I'm legit so if you give me a minute to brag I I don't like to brag but I gotta brag here because you should not be listening to business advice or money advice from anybody who has not achieved it themselves here's my basic resume I've started over 10 companies 3 of them have sold I've invested in over a 100 others my current portfolio of companies that I own and operate will do close to a $100,000,000 this year in revenue and that's where I'm at now and when I was in my twenties I started off completely clueless and so I went from clueless to that and I think you can too it took me about 15 years I think you could do it faster if you knew better one of my companies bebo got acquired by amazon I started a newsletter company called the milk road that got bought after about a year I am also a quote unquote thought leader and I have to put doctor evil up here because it's you know pretty embarrassing to even even try to say but the truth is have a podcast that's pretty popular have a twitter that's pretty popular justin bieber follows me he did not respond to my dm so that's a little bit of a soft spot for me you get the idea okay I'm legit do I have permission to continue are we good so this is me back in 2010 I'm sitting in that classroom and I am painfully average I have average grades I have an average social life it's not even so bad that I'm like oh wow this is gonna make for a really great comeback story nobody was rooting for me because I was just in the middle and I was stuck and I was not bad enough where I felt even really a lot of motivation to change it I just thought that's who I am I'm kind of a middle of the pack sort of guy so that was me mister mediocre and what changed I met a girl not my wife it was a woman named lisa keaster and she changed my life my plan without even knowing it I took her class and in walks mister cool haircut and mister cool haircut asked a question he's supposed to be giving a talk but he says instead of giving a talk let me just ask a simple question who here wants to be an entrepreneur someday day who here wants to be wealthy and and be a successful entrepreneur everybody's hands went up right so everybody had the wantrepreneur side down and then he said cool you guys are all seniors right we said yes I said awesome so you're graduating in just a couple months yes who here is already working on their business idea one hand went up he said okay well who's who is who knows that they're gonna go start a startup when they graduate and two hands went up he said wow so out of a class of a 100% of people who wanted to go be an entrepreneur almost none of you are actually gonna go be an entrepreneur what's up with that and he said well what are you planning to do and person said well you know I I do wanna start a company someday but I I I got a great job at ubs and I got a great job at mckinsey and they had everybody had great jobs lined up after school and so he just asked why and he asked why like we were crazy this quote from andrew wilkinson to me explains it well he says going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you wanna join the nba in the same way going and getting a job at a business in order to learn how to run a business that doesn't really work that's not actually what happens and instead what will happen to you is what nassim taleb calls the 3rd great addiction so the 3 three most harmful addictions in the world are heroin carbohydrates and a monthly salary and for most of us we will be trapped by that salary monster as soon as you get on that path of having the job and you have the salary it is very very hard to get off that and so that is the first trap for anybody who wants to get rich is that most of you will talk yourself into why you need to have a job I did this too by the way I went and got a job for about 2 months and quit by you know quit quit my my job for after 2 months even though it was a 6 figure job straight out of college it was a good job and it wasn't like the job was boring or terrible in any way but I just realized like this is not getting me closer to the thing I actually want and so the safe path which was taking the job was actually kinda dangerous because it was dangerous to my dream right I think we all think of danger as danger to you like oh it's gonna you're something bad's gonna happen to you but the worst thing that can happen to you is act actually you choose a path and you spend all your time and energy working on something that's not your dream and so if I had a dream of being a successful entrepreneur which is what I did then the salary monster was the very first thing to avoid and so you need to slay the salary monster most of you will fall into the someday trap where you say that someday you will go start that company and someday you will make it happen but someday never comes my friend trevor has this great analogy that I I wanna offer to you here and it's the story of 2 tigers and there's 2 tigers that were you know born together same mom separated at birth and 1 tiger was taken by these wonderful tiger loving people and cared for and raised at a zoo he was loved every day they brushed his hair they fed him everything that he loved and they taught him new tricks they just cared for him in every way they could they they took care of him that is the zoo tiger and the other tiger was neglected he was left alone in the jungle to survive on his own he had to if he wanted to eat he had to hunt if he wanted to drink he had to find water and and he had to survive against all predators and prey and so they became these 2 tigers the zoo tiger and the jungle tiger and let me ask you a quick question so after 10 years of being raised this way if the jungle tiger was put in the zoo what would happen he would be bored he would be bored out of his mind he would be like what am I supposed to do all day I just sit here I just sit here and look pretty his entire way of life would be almost neutered and he would be put in a zoo and he would be bored out of his mind and this is most entrepreneurs if they ever get a corporate job they sort of sit there at their desk and they wonder what like what am I supposed to be doing here I don't understand what my what does this job title mean and the opposite is also interesting so if you take the zoo tiger you put him in the jungle after 10 years what happens to him he dies he has no idea how to actually survive in the real world because he has been coddled and cared for and and lived in this structured box his entire life and that is the problem with the someday trap which is if you spend your your life in in these jobs even good jobs even challenging jobs

Shaan Puri

you are being raised as

Shaan Puri

a zoo tiger and every year that you are in the zoo you are less likely to be able to survive in the jungle it's not impossible but man your conditioning is really wiring you for that and so you get to choose early on if you are going to be a zoo tiger and a jungle tiger and you should know that the jungle tiger's path is often much more uncertain much more uncomfortable and he's gonna get dirty and rough and get some cuts and bumps and bruises but in the end it's what he wants to be able to survive on his own okay so that is the zoo tidal jungle jungle tiger story and I say that all of this to say that step 1 of being successful is not about intelligence it's not about experience it's not about strategy at all it is about courage and that courage is the rate limiting step for 99% of smart people and so if you consider yourself a smart person instead of trying to pour more water into the bucket of intelligence or information and read the next article or learn the next strategy in fact you should actually look at your courage bucket and make sure that it is full and that you are ready to go because if you don't do that none of the other stuff will work okay let's move on oh yeah this is a a little slide I had here courage is like toilet paper during a hurricane it is in scarce supply it is not on the shelves okay now you've you've done step 1 you've decided to go do it you've decided to do it now not someday so what is the second thing that you gotta do well the next thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna fail and you're gonna fail miserably I know very few people who just decided to be an entrepreneur and then went and did it but you have to decide if you're gonna be okay with that kind of failure and I love this bill burr quote I wanna read it to you here bill burr the famous comedian said he he knew he should go after comedy because he realized that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing you know what's worse sleeping in a king bed next to a wife that you're not really in love with but for some reason you're married and you got a couple of kids and you got a job that you hate and you're laying there fantasizing about chasing your dream and sleeping on a futon there is no risk when you go after a dream there is no risk when you go after a dream there's a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe I love this bill burr quote and I agree with it wholly now let me tell you practically speaking strategically speaking how I did this so I decided when I graduated from college that I was gonna spend a year strategically broke and I chose this phrase instead of saying unemployed or saying I'm traveling I said I am being strategically broke and I said that because it got people to ask me questions intelligent questions like what does that mean why are you doing that and I had to have a real answer for it and so I decided I'm not going to med school and I calculated what I call the freedom number and the freedom number is a very important number a lot of people will calculate their desired net worth they will calculate their dream amount of money that they wanna have that is a sort of a maximum number you wanna have but you actually wanna calculate the minimum number and the minimum number I call the freedom number which is the minimum salary you need to have maximum freedom okay so what is the minimum amount you need to earn that would give you the most of your time every day to go do whatever it is that you wanna do you know for me for example I calculated that I needed roughly I think it was like $15 to live on for the year and I said if I have $15 then I can pay all my bills and I could just spend all my time doing whatever I want and so $15 became my target and this is when all my friends were targeting 6 figure salaries or whatever they wanted to get as much as they could and they were willing to go work banking jobs 80 hours a week 90 hours a week trying to get that extra 10 k or 20 k salary whereas I was going the opposite way I was like can I tutor kids can I like coach basketball at a school like it's and that's what I did I literally I tutored stats even though I was a c + stats student and I taught basketball at a school for autistic children and that's what I did that was my job when I was graduated from a prestigious school I decided to spend a year doing that because that paid me my 15 k that I needed in the minimum amount of time it only took me like you know whatever 4 hours a week or 5 hours a week of time to do that and then I had 80 hours a week free to do whatever I wanted and so I wanted my freedom number to be hit and to do this you're gonna live a little scrappy this is actual pictures from my apartment at the time so this is you know our art is like a towel on the wall there's an ugly craigslist couch we slept on air mattresses you notice that the air mattress is next to the couch because we put 3 people in a 2 bedroom apartment like you know just the basic things this was our kitchen you know I don't know why we nailed the garbage bag to the wall but like we did whatever we needed to do we just didn't spend money on anything that was gonna because it was decreasing our freedom if we spent money on other stuff and we used the time to start our first business and this is us on cnn pitching our first business with sabi sushi and it worked right away we had a brilliant idea we were brilliant cofounders and we had a huge success right away oh wait that's not at all what happened actually it was a terrible idea we decided to start a suji franchise even though restaurants are a terrible business and we knew nothing about the food business I started it not with 2 brilliant cofounders but with my 2 buddies who were equally clueless as me and it did not work immediately it was not a huge success it failed badly and this failure was very painful because reality punched us in the mouth we had told everybody we knew that we were doing this everyone we graduated with our teachers our parents our friends and family all of them and we made no money in fact we lost money doing this we burned about $25,000 of prize money that we had won to do this so we made no money during or after and now we had a new label instead of being entrepreneurs we were labeled as failures and this is where I wanna offer you a chance to play a game because this is the 2nd fork in the road the first fork in the road was are you even gonna get started right that was the salary monster well the 2nd fork in the road is are you gonna quit after the first failure which is almost inevitable and so if there was a game where I had a piece of paper and on this piece of paper I had let's say there was 10 circles and on and under the 10 circles one of the 10 circles had a prize and the other 9 were you lose try again so I let you play the game you pick a number think of that number in your head right now whatever number you thought of it's not that you lost okay cool so you lose round 1 and that makes sense you only had a 1 in 10 chance of of winning which is by the way similar to the odds of a successful business when you start a new business now the trick here is that even though the game is rigged against you may meaning I have a 9 out of 10 chance of winning you have a 1 out of 10 chance of winning you do have one tool at your disposal which is that you get to play the game as many times as you want well the funny thing about that is that if you get to play a game like this even with a 1 out of 10 chance to to win if you got to play that 10 times your odds of success now go up to about 65% so now you're an odds on favorite to win you're gonna win 2 out of every 3 times you actually try that and so this is the game of entrepreneurship the game of entrepreneurship is you have to have the courage to start and then you have to have the endurance to try 10 times okay so these are my first two lessons to you number 1 start now number 2 play the game 10 times it took me 10 years to be successful and and that was about 10 attempts so I think technically it was about 8 or 9 years total but 10 or 11 attempts in those 8 or 9 years that's about normal it takes about a year to try anything in in in earnest and I was willing to try 10 times and this is the same as true for all of my cohort of friends so of all of my friends we were in san francisco together we were in our early twenties and we all wanted to be successful a couple of them got it in their 1st 2nd or 3rd try but most of us it took about 10 tries but the amazing thing is that after 10 years almost everybody is successful you know the great quote from naval is that startups fail but founders don't and you gotta remember that the startup itself might fail but you won't fail if you play the game 10 times now the third thing you need to do is answer this thought experiment if you know that you're gonna lose many times for sure on the first and probably the first 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th time that you're gonna try this can you win even when you lose at berkeley I had people come up to the to the whiteboard and write down an answer how do you win when you lose and somebody said well maybe you win because you you learned some lessons okay that's great you won when you lost how else maybe you met some great people along the way you earned some connections great that's another way to win when you lose what else can you do and so the one that I wanna draw your attention to is the skills that you will build while you fail and so even though the startups you're doing might fail in fact probably will fail even though you believe in your heart there's no chance this is gonna fail this is totally gonna work the one thing that you can control that will certainly succeed is if you build your skill stack and there are 3 master skills you must build along the way the first skill is learning to build the second skill is learning to sell and the third skill is learning to get lucky let's walk through them learning to build okay you are gonna have to choose one way to build one way to make things it doesn't have to be building with your hands it can be it can be engineering robotics things like that so elon musk type stuff rockets cars that type of thing you can learn to build that stuff and you will suck it out of the beginning but if you're gonna do this for a few years you'll be pretty damn good by year 2 3 4 you will know what you're doing you'll be able to build at least prototypes and maybe even you know your v one of things yourself so you could build things with your hands you could build things with code so you can learn to program you could build things as a designer you could also learn how to build or make content so you know this podcast youtube channel you need to learn how to make something and so that is the first thing you're gonna learn pick a path of what thing you're gonna learn to make and then practice that nonstop and so you should pick the thing that you love the most don't don't try to strategize this just pick the one you're drawn to pick the one that you think would be really cool if you could do it that you think you would have the energy to do even when you're tired after work and that's the one you wanna pick and that's the one you wanna start doing and you're gonna do it 100 and 100 of times the second thing is learning to sell learning to sell is how you get the thing you made into people's hands this is learning facebook ads this is learning Google ads this is learning how to do content marketing where you write blog posts and then the blog post teach somebody something and then at the end you say here's my product you learn newsletter writing and how to how to sell that way you learn copywriting skills that you learn how what words get get people to actually click and so you need to learn the core set of sales skills whether this is in person selling whether this is phone selling whether this is cold emailing whether this is digital marketing one of those one of those paths you gotta learn to pick and and figure out how to do and so the startups that you build along the way somebody's gonna need to make the stuff somebody's gonna need to sell the stuff that should be you at the beginning and even though you suck at it and that's why your startup's gonna fail you're gonna build you know 1 inch at a time those skills so that you're actually good at it so then when you actually have a good idea you will be able to execute on it and the third thing is learning how to get lucky there are 4 types of luck if you've never heard this before I'll do the fast version the first type of luck is blind luck it's just you know a a lucky break so you know you're standing still and lightning strikes you this this happens but you can't count on it there's nothing you can do to influence it the second one is motion luck this is fortune favors the bold this is you do so much stuff that you just get lucky more than the guy who sits still I think we all know this in our gut the person who's doing more things giving themselves more surface area more of a chance of getting lucky even if they're doing you know not the best things or not the most effective things or efficient things just simply doing more things than less will increase your luck the third is spotting luck so this is you know the prepared mind this is when a guy spends his whole career analyzing stocks and then one day he see reads a report that everybody else ignores but he knows wow this is a winner this is about to be a 100 x return for me because he knows what he's looking for and the way you get spotting luck is again by doing so much stuff that when you when something is actually an outlier you will be able to recognize it because you've seen a 100 mundane things this is like in dating you've gone on a 100 bad dates that actually prepares you so that when you meet that remarkable person you actually recognize wow this is an amazing person do not let this do not blow this chance do not let them go do not just take the first no really go after it and so that's the third one and the fourth one which is your reputational luck it's where luck is like a magnet the classic example here is that you are the world's best deep sea diver you are known for it you are renowned for your ability to dive deep into the ocean well when somebody discovers a sunken treasure all the way across the world their first phone call will be to you because of your reputation and this is why you know making content online is so valuable because if you get a reputation for being the guy or gal who knows about x then people start calling you they start thinking about you and other people's luck becomes your luck and so the 3 core skills you wanna learn learn how to make things learn how to sell things and learn how to get lucky it is actually a skill that you can develop and you can intentionally do things to increase your level of luck

Shaan Puri

a very simple one

Shaan Puri

the 4th of the 5 things that you need to do is move and people don't like to say this because it sounds harsh it's a lifestyle choice shouldn't you be able to live and let live and just do whatever you wanna do yes sure but if you wanna increase your odds of success move because every city has a a whisper every city has something to it that is its promise if you wanna be an actor go to hollywood if you wanna be in finance go to new york if you wanna be in tech go to silicon valley and the reason you do these things is because every city has a certain energy and has a certain set of people in them that will conspire to your success you will be able to get a crew and being around a crew of people who are chasing the same dream as you is very powerful proximity is power just simply being near people who live the life that you wanna live is the fastest way to become that person and the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you 3 specific ideas that you can actually do 3 specific paths that you could pick now that you know the core principles right so the core principles just to review again number 1 you gotta start now number 2 you gotta be willing to play the game 10 times number 3 you're gonna build your skill stack along the way along those failures build learn to make something learn to sell something and learn to get lucky and now number 4 and 5 are gonna be around the specific ideas that that I think you can pursue I call these white belt businesses it's basically a business that anybody can do with very little business experience they're pretty safe they don't require a lot of capital or experience there's no big barrier to entry they're not the best businesses but they are they're they're great starter businesses it's like you know when a kid starts a lemonade stand it's just a easy starter business to get into so here's 3 white belt businesses that I think anybody could start the first one is a marketing agency so you wanna learn that skill of how to sell well a marketing agency is gonna be a forcing function to do that now the problem is most people don't know anything about a marketing agency they don't know anything about marketing themselves so they don't feel qualified to do this and so here's how you go about doing this you wanna pick a a version of marketing that you like maybe it's making video commercials and you're gonna learn video production and actually create little youtube videos that are gonna be commercials for products maybe it's Google ads and you're gonna help local businesses get discovered with Google ads maybe it's facebook ads you're gonna learn how to sell ecommerce products through facebook or maybe it's tiktok ads or tiktok videos because that's the new new field whatever it is that you're drawn to whatever you're interested in you pick one of those now you're gonna go to a friend or family who has a crummy business you want something low stakes and you're gonna go to this friend or family who's got this crummy business aunt patty who's you know selling her little tchotchkes out of her basement and you're gonna go to aunt patty and you're gonna say aunt patty I love your chachkies best chachkies I've seen can I help you sell these and you're gonna take a very starter budget maybe you know $100 a month at the start and you're gonna figure out how you do how you would sell that online so if it's Google ads you're gonna do Google ads you're gonna study every free course on youtube for Google ads you're gonna join every goo every facebook group about Google ads you're gonna be on linkedin and you're gonna subscribe to everybody who's a thought leader in Google ads and then you are gonna run your own Google ads all at the same time you're gonna do learning and doing at the same time you're gonna learn with your own time being free and you're gonna have kinda crappy results but you're gonna work your way up and so you know very simple thing you could do here is you can go to you can go to really any business because the good news is most businesses suck at marketing so you can go to a a senior living facility nearby and you could say wow this is a senior living facility that is a service that people definitely need and they get a bunch of their customers through Google but they don't know how to run Google ads and you can go offer to do it for them now the beautiful thing about a senior living facility is maybe they're charging $3 a month for 1 bed in their facility well $3 a month means that one customer is worth $36 a year in you know in a in a year's time frame and so even if it takes you $500 or $1,000 to acquire a customer that's still super profitable for them and so you wanna find any business that you can like a a local plumber or a day care or a senior living facility or whatever it is and you wanna go offer to run their ads for free or audit their ad account for free or give them advice for free and then you're gonna use that as your bootstrapping mechanism to learn and once you do that 4 3 4 times then you wanna go to every other senior living facility in other areas and say hey I did this for this company I could do the same for you and over time you start charging more for what you're doing and your goal is to you know eventually get to 10 customers that are paying you $5 a month for for your marketing services and now you're doing $50 a month of recurring revenue you've built a $1,000,000 business if you have a $50 a month recurring revenue business off of literally just hustle and commitment to learning how to market through one channel because most people especially a busy business owner do not know how to do this okay idea number 2 if you don't wanna start a marketing agency here's idea number 2 this is the real estate path now real estate is great because you know a lot of people become millionaires through real estate or own real estate I personally know more dumb millionaires in real estate than any other industry they take that as an insult as a backhanded compliment but I mean it is a good thing meaning you don't have to be a genius for it to work and I like games like that I I don't want a game to go into a game where you have to be the next mark zuckerberg in order to win and so real estate was one of those things and I'll give you an example of how to actually do this because most people think real estate I have no experience and I got no money how am I gonna go buy a building well let me tell you what my friend we'll call him alex in this case what he did and I think you could do this too he made he drew a 5 mile radius around where he lived and he contacted every real estate developer that he could find in that radius and he all he said was hey I'm alex I'm a young kid that lives nearby I was super interested in real estate I see that you're really successful I love that property that you have over here you're somebody that that I think has has achieved something I would love to achieve I would love it if someday I could just take you out to lunch and learn a little bit of a little bit from you maybe somebody earlier in your career helped you and this could be your opportunity to to do the same for me and that last line is really really key because he's he's not really offering much besides I'll take you to lunch well guess what this rich real estate developer doesn't need your lunch but he does pull out their heartstrings a little bit and so he got lunch meetings with everybody he goes to lunch with them and he asked them a bunch of questions about how they do what they do how they got into it what makes it successful what makes them different than everybody else etcetera etcetera and for the person that whoever he vibed the most with who he respected and seemed like they were interested in him and they liked his energy he would make an ask and he would say listen I know this is unorthodox but actually I would love to come help you out in your business and I'd love to come help you out for free because right now I've got a ton of time on my hands and I could go get any job I want but I don't want any job I actually wanna learn from somebody like you and I wanna learn this business and I know that to learn this business I'm gonna have to work really hard and learn the ins and outs and I can't think of a better place to do this than with you would you be open to me working with you for let's just say 3 to 6 months I'll work completely for free I'll work harder than anybody you have in your office I guarantee you I will add as much value as I can and my goal up front I'll tell you this is that you know a year from now I actually wanna go into this business myself and I actually wanna go and try to buy my first property and I hope that at that time you know you might be my one of my investors but you know no no strings attached I just wanna focus on the main thing which is learning this business inside and out by helping you out and he makes that pitch and this is exactly what he did and so he did a 1 year apprentice with a real estate developer that live locally he learned everything he needed to know about business and after at the end of that year he located his own first property he bought it using the money from that guy who trusted him and and basically was willing to back him because he knew him at that stage and this is a path that anybody could take anybody can do this you can look up the people around you you could take them to lunch you can make this pitch and you can work hard for 1 year and in 1 year 1 year from now you can already own your first property and to be a millionaire in real estate really only takes a single property you know one fourplex or one eightplex that you buy could be enough to do it and so that is the second path that I would advise anybody who wants to get rich quickly is to go under the wing of a successful real estate developer if real estate is something that interests you the last path the last idea that I think is you know if I was going back and trying to do it again as fast as I could and as high as high likelihood of success as I could would be this it would be to buy a business now this is only for I'll say the top 5% of either brainpower or experience so this is either somebody who's actually gone and worked in the in the real world for 5 6 years maybe they're an mba student maybe they've maybe you've managed some you've you've been a manager already at a business or you're just that high iq and that driven and you know who you are you know if you're a cut above the rest and if you really are that person then this path is really really interesting I didn't even know about this when I was in my early twenties but now I know a lot about it it's called entrepreneurship through acquisition which is that you buy a business that is already working it has been working for years and you buy it using other people's money a simple example we did an episode with sarah moore she graduated from college she wanted to buy a business instead of start 1 because she didn't have a great idea and so she searched again locally for any business that she could find that was already doing about $1,000,000 of profit a year and she wanted to go buy that business using an sba loan and some seller financing you can go watch this episode to go learn what those terms mean and she was able to buy of all things a egg carton business like literally the the styrofoam container of eggs using $0 of her own money and she was able to own the business outright herself and she and this business does 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars a year of profit and she built her own path this way and so this is the the fastest way to get to it because you're buying a business that's already gone through the start up you know learning curve and the bumps and bruises to get going and to get to work and you're buying something that's already already has cash flow and then you're just gonna run it better because maybe you built that skill of learning how to sell and you know digital marketing and the current business owner doesn't they're just a retire a retiring you know dad somewhere that never never ran a Google ad in their life and you know that if you started doing that you could grow the business 20 30% and so that's what you're looking for when you go this path so in summary the 5 steps to get rich quick the real the real steps things that you could actually do number 1 you have to have the courage to start and start now number 2 don't quit on the first failure you're gonna need to try 10 times number 3 learn to build learn to sell and learn to get lucky that is your core skill stack number 4 proximity is power move around other people who are as motivated hungry and ambitious as you it will just like osmosis it will just you will learn and get better faster just by doing that and the 5th thing be impatient with action patient with results the impatient action you should go take is one of those 3 businesses a marketing agency go and be an apprentice for a real estate developer and then become a real estate developer yourself or 3rd go buy a business that is already working using sba money and now you day 1 have a business that is profitable that you run and you own and you operate yourself so that is it I hope that was helpful for you and if it was leave a comment in the description below