How to Use Leverage to Build Real Wealth (Instead of Working Forever) - Robert Kiyosaki

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You could work hard every single day for the next 40 years and still never get rich because working harder was never actually how real wealth gets built. I went to school and what they pounded [00:00:11] Speaker 2: in me was the poor person. You got to get a job, you got to get a job, you got to work for money, you got to save money, and you got to invest in the stock market and all this stuff. That's why people are poor. The idea of having a job and waiting for your 401k to save you, I think you're going to be sadly disappointed. I was taught to use debt to get rich. Most people use debt to get [00:00:32] Speaker 1: poor. The median homeowner in America is worth $396, $200, while the median renter is worth just $10,400, according to the Federal Reserve. And that nearly 40 to 1 gap has almost nothing to do with how hard either of them works. Saving money is not smart. It used to be smart. It has not been smart [00:00:53] Speaker 2: for 50 years. People who only work hard have limited leverage. If you're working hard physically and not getting ahead financially, then you're probably someone else's leverage. Let that land. If you have savings sitting in a bank account, someone else is using your money as their leverage. The bank takes your deposits and lend them out at a profit, not to you, to the rich. Because the real secret, [00:01:21] Speaker 1: the wealthy understand, isn't about doing more. It's about leverage. Getting your money, your time, and even other people's resources to build wealth for you while you sleep. One of the most important [00:01:31] Speaker 2: things you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. The rich don't work for money. So we learn to use debt to create assets. And assets keep putting money [00:01:46] Speaker 3: in our pocket. I cannot do my job on my own. I cannot go in the rugby field by myself. And when I go into the field of business, I don't go by myself. Bookkeeper, accountants, attorneys, bankers, [00:01:58] Speaker 1: and whoever else. And that's how we play the game. In 1985, Robert Kiyosaki was 38 years old, and he was homeless. The business he had built licensing t-shirts for rock brands had just collapsed and taken everything down with it. And for a stretch, he and his wife, Kim, were sleeping in the back of an old brown Toyota with no income and no obvious way out. He had already lived a big life by then. He had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam. He had been a top salesman at Xerox. He had started companies that boomed and then went bust, but broke and sleeping in the car at 38, he made a decision that changed everything. Instead of running back to a safe job to feel secure again, he went all in on the one idea his mentor had drilled into him years before, that the rich don't work for money, they buy assets that work for them. So Kiyosaki started buying small real estate, using the bank's money instead of his own, letting tenants pay his loans while each property put cash in his pocket every month. He bought one, then used what it threw off to help buy the next, and then the next after that. And by 1989, he and Kim were real estate millionaires. By the time he was 47, the income from his assets covered his entire life and he never needed a job again. He did not work his way there. He didn't just get lucky. He used leverage, other people's money, and other people's time to build a machine that paid him whether he showed up or not. Then he wrote the whole thing down in a little book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Now I know what you're thinking and it's the same hesitation that often keeps people stuck where they're at. You're thinking leverage sounds like something for people who already have tons of money and that borrowing and debt are dangerous. So the safe move is to just keep your head down, try to save your way to security. And I know what it feels to feel that way. But remember that all progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth right now. Saving a loan has never made a single person wealthy because when you only save, your time and your paycheck are the only two things doing any work. And both of those run out. One at the end of the month and one at the end of your career. Robert Kiyosaki built his entire life's teaching on this one uncomfortable idea that the rich don't get rich by being the hardest worker in the building. They get rich by owning the systems and the assets that all the hard workers run. So leverage isn't reckless and it isn't only for the already wealthy. It's a skill like any other skill. And you can start learning it today right where you're standing with what you already have. So let me show you exactly how to do it step by step. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily one video at a time. Know your assets from liabilities. So we need to completely rewire how you see an asset and a liability because this single definition changes everything that comes after it. Robert Kiyosaki keeps it brutally simple and maybe almost too simple. An asset is anything that puts money into your pocket. A liability is anything that takes money out of your pocket. That's the whole thing. The reason this matters so much is that you've probably been taught your entire life to call things assets that are actually draining you every single month. The fancy car, the closet full of stuff, even the big house that you live in, all take money out of your pocket through payments and taxes and insurance and endless upkeep, which by Kiyosaki's math makes them liabilities, no matter what the salesperson or the bank calls them. The wealthy become almost obsessed with buying real assets instead. Things like rental properties that pay you every single month, a small business that runs without you having to stand there, shares that pay you dividends, or something that you create one time that earns for years afterwards. So your job starting this week is to look at every dollar that leaves your hands and ask just that one honest question. Is this putting money into my pocket or pulling it out? Then build your whole life around owning more and more of the first kind. That's the edge of the puzzle right there. You get that one border locked in quickly and every other piece starts to find its place. Use other people's money. Other people's money is the second form of leverage and learning to tell good debt from bad debt is where real wealth actually begins for regular people. Almost everything you've ever heard treats all debt as the enemy to be feared. But Kiyosaki splits it into two very different things. Bad debt is money that you borrow to buy stuff that loses value and drains you. Like credit cards, a loan on a car that's worth less every year. Good debt is money you borrow to buy an asset that earns you more than the loan costs you to hold. So the math that makes this whole thing click, say you have $100,000 saved up, you could buy one rental property in cash and earn a steady return on it, maybe around nine or 10% a year, which is fine. Or you could take that very same $100,000 and use it as five separate down payments, control five properties with the bank's money instead of one of your own and have five sets of tenants each paying down a loan for you while you collect the cash flow on all five at once. That move can roughly double your return on the same starting money. And it puts five times as much property to work building your equity. And it gets better because of something Kiyosaki calls the velocity of money. Once those five properties are throwing off cash every month, you don't just sit on that money, you take it and you use it as a down payment on the next asset. And then the cash from that one helps you buy the one after it. So the same original dollars keep moving and keep multiplying instead of falling asleep in a savings account. That's how a small start snowballs into something serious over time. You don't have to start with real estate at all. You just have to stop seeing every kind of debt as the enemy and start asking the only question that actually matters, which is whether the thing you're borrowing for pays you back more than it costs you to hold it. Answer that one question honestly in every purchase and you'll already be thinking like the wealthy. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in description below to go grab it and I'll see you there. Use other people's time. Other people's time is the next form of leverage and this is the one you can start using right now no matter how little money is in your bank account today. You get the exact same 24 hours in a day as every billionaire who has ever lived. So the only way to ever get more done is to stop being the single person doing all of it. Kiyosaki calls this buying back your time. And one of my favorite ways to do it is what I call eliminate, automate, delegate. First, you eliminate the work that doesn't move the needle at all, the busy work that kind of just fills your day. Then you automate whatever software AI can handle for you on repeat without complaining. And then you delegate the rest. And that can start with just one person for a few hours a week taking a small task off your plate. The hours that you free up are not just for sitting on the couch. They are for the high value work that actually builds and buys your assets. The wealthy almost never trade their own hours directly for money for very long because they understand deep in their bones that time is the one resource they can never earn back once it's gone. So start small, start today, end up one single task this week that someone else can do just fine and pour those remaining hours into building something that pays you forever. Own systems, not a job. So systems are the next form of leverage. And this is the line that separates owning a real business from owning the hardest job that you'll ever have. A whole lot of people who proudly call themselves entrepreneurs have actually just bought themselves a job with no boss and no time off because the second they stop working, every dollar of income stops coming in with them. A true owner builds a system instead. So a set of steps and tools and people that keep producing whether the owner is in the room or somewhere on their beach. This is exactly what Kiyosaki did with his real estate. He had no interest in spending his days fixing toilets and chasing down rents. So he put property managers and simple systems in place and the buildings kept paying him every single month whether he showed up there or not. You can build your own version of this with the work that you already do for money right now. So write down exactly how you do the things that earn your money. Turn it into a simple repeatable process that anyone could follow and then slowly hand off those steps to people to software to AI one at a time until the business can run a day then a week then a whole month without you having to get in there and do anything. The beauty of a system is that it keeps the value even when you step away and it's the thing that you can eventually sell or hand down because it works without you always being attached to it. A job can't be sold, a system can be. Being leads to doing here. The day you start thinking like an owner of a system instead of a worker stuck inside one, every decision you make begins to change for the better from what you spend your evenings on to what you choose to learn next. Pick the right side. The wealthy understand which side of the money game they're actually standing on, and the good news is you can choose to switch sides starting today. Kiyosaki drew a famous simple Mac he called the cash flow quadrant. He gave the four spots simple letters. E is for employee, S is for self-employed person, B is for the business owner, and I is for the investor. On the left side, you have the E and the S and both of them trade their time directly for money. So the moment they stop, the income stops coming in with them. On the right side, you have the B who runs systems and the I who puts money to side. The income keeps flowing in even while they're asleep on vacation or sick in bed. Kiyosaki said the entire game of getting wealthy is just slowly moving yourself from the left two letters over to the right two and almost nobody ever realizes there's a right side to move to. Almost everyone is taught to spend their entire life on the time for money side and to call that arrangement security when it's really the opposite. The wealthy deliberately build themselves a bridge over to the other side piece by piece. So you don't have to quit your job tomorrow morning to do this. I don't think you should. You keep your steady income for now and you use your nights and your weekends to start one small business or buy one small asset that earns a little without your hands on it constantly. Then you grow that. Every single step you take towards the ownership side is a real step towards a life where your money finally stops depending on your alarm clock going off in the morning. Make money while you sleep. So the final piece that ties this whole thing together and it's the art of making your money make money while you sleep. So Kiyosaki describes his entire strategy using the game of monopoly of all things. So you buy a few small greenhouses and you let them sit there and produce and then once they've grown you trade them up for one big red hotel and in real life that meant that he and his wife started by buying small properties that produce cash flow living modestly while those built up and then rolling the gains into bigger and bigger assets over the years. And the principle works far far beyond real estate. You take the money your assets produce and instead of blowing it on more shiny liabilities the second that it arrives you reinvest it into the next asset and then the next one after that so that each asset you own goes out and buys you the following one. That's the loop the wealthy run their entire lives on and they even use the tax rules to keep far more of it than a regular worker ever could. They run their money through businesses and real estate which lets them legally write off expenses and use things like depreciation to shield a chunk of their income from taxes so the very same dollar that gets taxed heavily for an employee gets taxed lightly for an owner. Stack that small advantage up year after year and it turns into a pretty enormous head start. Their assets pay for their nice things so they never once have to trade away their freedom just to fund their lifestyle. I think your purpose comes from your pain. From whatever moment or being broke or stuck or overlooked you swore you'd never feel again and that purpose is exactly what keeps you reinvesting hopefully on the days when splurging would feel so much easier. If you have the ability to build this kind of life then you have the responsibility to do it. If you can then you must. Start your leverage this week. So here is the whole thing. Let's do it in one breath. Stop measuring your life by how hard you work and start measuring it by how much you own that works for you. Buy assets not liabilities. Use good debt other people's time and real systems to multiply far beyond anything one person could ever do alone. Move steadily towards the ownership side of the game and reinvest your way up the board one greenhouse at a time. You don't need all of it on day one. You just need to start running one of these forms of leverage this week and then add the next one when you're ready. The paper airplane here was never supposed to break the sound barrier and yet it's happening anyway. That's what my logo is all about. The impossible getting done every day because doing the impossible is exactly what you were built for. You don't need to be born rich and you don't need to wait until every perfect condition is there. You need to start learning about leverage today and the best time to start is now. How about right now? And congratulations you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the fastest way to start a business from zero. You do not need a million dollar tech idea to build massive wealth and finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already [00:15:06] Speaker 4: makes real money. Ironically the businesses that don't crash are the ones built on trash. They solve real problems. They get paid and they last. Something that most people overlook. The less exciting the business the less competition there is and the more reliable the demand is. Right so it's it's a foolproof [00:15:21] Speaker 5: business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession proof. It is not seasonal and it's something with reoccurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not [00:15:33] Speaker 1: ready to be an owner until you invent the next big app you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea. The boring [00:15:45] Speaker 4: version already works. You're not just running the boring businesses you are building a modern empire. [00:15:52] Speaker 1: Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time. But he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture store, and a paint business. He realized early on that buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and [00:16:22] Speaker 6: go straight to collecting the profits. Somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years or maybe for 50 years and we've seen how what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at 350 or whatever it may be and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them and we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to go to even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars. [00:16:52] Speaker 1: Now right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell and you can buy their profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The 10 trillion dollar generational wealth transfer. A massive 90 percent of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually wants. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90 percent chance of failing. Now if that's what you want to do awesome go for it but you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now it's a massive shift happening in the global economy. About 10 000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated 10 trillion dollars in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money every single week. And when these owners retire their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now. More than 58 percent of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want to take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of five businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an SOWS business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new software company like I'm doing with Brandlytics. Man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics is awesome. It might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns. But you can buy boring business instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least five years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad economies and recessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the local competition just by answering the phone on time and having a clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy to understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away, unless again, you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it makes money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the root, implement some basic inventory software to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales just by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down three unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOWS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. You're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cashflow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing. Because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy business, they will actually act as a bank for you. So they will hand over the keys to the business and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank for this part. You avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller. So you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, if the seller would not finance the whole thing, you can use government-backed bank loans. The SBA 7A loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you save from your day job. When Nina and I walk around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You can take over a million dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from its own revenue. You just sit at the top and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You will be surprised by how many say yes. The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession proof companies that print money in good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes. Even when the economy crashes, people still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878,000. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean the floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're renting out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off the box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss. But when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and a million dollars in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable, recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can hire a few contractors to handle the repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of business. Also, explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield high returns. Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that the employees will quit or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train and introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts a business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero. And if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movie Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed and then get out of the way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business, you get instant infrastructure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team and existing cash flow. Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your job is to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoe box. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software and selling the business as 20% more profitable. You set up a simple digital marketing campaign that the old owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building the future. This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So your action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find three areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift. You are fully capable of running an empire. So stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do. And the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. I analyze 50 billionaires. Here's what they have in common. You will never become a billionaire or even a millionaire by following the advice of the middle class. Most people think that extreme wealth comes from luck or inheritance or being in the right place at the right time. But the truth is it comes from having the guts to concentrate your bets when everyone else is diversifying to protect their ignorance. If you keep spreading your focus, your energy, and your money across a dozen different safe options because you are afraid of losing, you will guarantee that you end up with a life of mediocrity and never reach the massive potential that you were built for. In 2008, Elon Musk was facing the worst year of his life. He had made $180 million from selling PayPal. A fortune that would set most people up for life on a private island. But Musk isn't most people. He had poured almost all of that money into two companies that looked like they were about to die. Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX had three failed rocket launches in a row. Tesla was running out of cash and couldn't make payroll. Musk had about $40 million left. He had a choice. He could put all the money into one company to save it, but that would mean the other would definitely die. Or he could split the money between them to try to keep both alive, but risk running out of cash for both and losing absolutely everything. Most people would have walked away. They would have kept the $40 million and lived like a king. Musk chose the hardest path. He split the money. He went all-in on both. He literally had to borrow money from money. friends to pay his rent because he had zero liquid cash left. On Christmas Eve 2008, at the very last hour, a financing round came through for Tesla. Days later, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract. He risked $180 million to get to zero just to have a shot at changing the world. Today, he's the richest man on the planet. So right now you're probably telling yourself, but Evan, I don't have $180 million like Elon Musk. And that's not the point. It's not about the amount of money. It's about the habit of your mind. You're playing small with the $1,000 the same way you'd play small with $10 million. If you cannot bet on yourself when you have nothing to lose, you will never bet on yourself when you have everything to lose. So today we're going to break down the actual blueprint. I analyze 50 billionaires to find out what they actually have in common. And it's not what you think. The trap of diversification. The first thing you need to understand is that billionaires do not get rich by diversifying. You have been told your whole life, don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is great advice if your goal is to preserve wealth. It's terrible advice if your goal is to create wealth and build an empire. Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, calls diversification protection against ignorance. He says it makes very little sense for anyone who knows what they are doing. If you know how to analyze a business, if you know your market, if you know your value, why would you put your money into your 20th best idea instead of your top idea? When you look at the portfolios of the ultra wealthy, you see extreme concentration. They find one thing they believe in. Usually a company they built themselves or an investment they know inside and out, and they push all their chips into the middle of the table. Bill Gates didn't diversify into real estate and gold when he was starting Microsoft. He was 100% Microsoft. Jeff Bezos wasn't buying stocks in other retailers in 1999. He was 100% Amazon. And the data backs us up. There's a study by Acadian Asset Management that looked at concentrated portfolio managers versus diversified ones. They found that the managers who had the courage to bet big on their best ideas, their top five to 10 stocks, significantly outperformed the ones who spread their bets thin. The managers who concentrated their portfolios generated higher returns because they were betting on their conviction, not their fear. You are hurting your own growth by trying to do too many things at once. You have a side hustle and a main job and you're thinking about crypto and you're trying to start a YouTube channel and you're learning Spanish. You are diversifying your energy because you are afraid that if you pick just one thing, it might fail. But by doing five things at 20% effort, you are guaranteeing that all five of them fail. You need to find your wonderful business. Buffett says if you can find just three wonderful businesses in your life, you will get very rich. You don't need 50. You need one. You need to become an expert in one area. You need to know more about your specific niche than anyone else in the room. When you have that level of knowledge, you don't need to diversify to protect yourself. Your knowledge is your protection. So stop trying to be okay at everything and give yourself permission to be a genius at one thing. Put your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket very closely like Andrew Carnegie used to say. The power of disagreeableness. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to stop caring what other people think. I don't mean you should be a jerk. I mean, you must possess a psychological trait known as low agreeableness. Researchers from the socioeconomic panel in Germany analyzed the personality traits of millionaires and billionaires. They used the big five personality model. They found a consistent pattern. Wealthy people score very high on conscientiousness. They are disciplined and they're organized. They score high in openness. They like new ideas, but they score significantly lower than the average person on a good idea. This means they are not afraid of conflict. They are not afraid to swim against the tide. They do not need social harmony to feel good about themselves. When you are building something massive, people are going to tell you that you are crazy. They are going to tell you that it cannot be done. They are going to tell you that you are wrong. If you have high agreeableness, you will listen to them. You will try to fit in. You will compromise your vision to make everyone feel comfortable. cara-. They are non-conformists. Look at Steve Jobs. He was famous for his reality distortion field. He would demand things that his engineers said were impossible. He wasn't trying to be their friend. He wasn't trying to be agreeable. He was trying to change the world. He didn't care if people thought that he was difficult. He cared about the vision. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to fight for your idea when no one else sees it. You have to be the one who says yes. You have to be the one who says yes when the whole world says no. This is why so many billionaires are entrepreneurs. You cannot climb the corporate ladder if you are highly disagreeable. The corporate world rewards people who follow the rules and play nice. The entrepreneurial world rewards people who break the rules and create new realities. So, you can ask yourself today, where are you compromising your dream just to avoid an awkward conversation? Where are you saying okay when you want to scream no? Stop trying to please everyone. You are not pizza. You are a leader. Lead. The obsession with speed. Speed is the ultimate weapon. If you look at the daily habits of billionaires, they do not waste time. They understand that time is the only asset that they can never buy back. There is a concept called return on time investment or ROTI. Billionaires are obsessed with this. They aggressively use leverage other people's money, other people's times, systems, and technology to make sure that their personal time is spent only on the highest value tasks. When I analyze successful people on my channel, I see this pattern over and over. They don't just work hard. They work fast. Tom Bilyeu, friend of the channel, has a strict routine. He gets up, he works out to build discipline, he meditates to clear his mind, and then he attacks his most important tasks immediately. He doesn't check email first. He doesn't scroll social media. He calls it thinkitating, using his brain power to solve complex problems before the world can distract him. Most people are moving too slow. You have an idea for a business, you spend six months researching a logo, you want to start a podcast, and you spend three weeks looking for the perfect microphone to buy, right? You're using preparation as an excuse to hide. If you wait until you feel ready, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life. Billionaires act on information immediately. When Elon Musk faced that crisis in 2008, he didn't take a month off to think about it. He was on the phone, flying around the world, negotiating deals, moving money, literally working 20 hours a day to save his companies. The speed of his decisions saved him. You need to shorten the gap between the idea and the execution. If you have an idea right now, do something about it. In the next 10 minutes, send the email, buy the domain, post a video, call the client, stop overthinking. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, not to make you rich. Safety is slow. Wealth is fast. The billionaire mindset is about shrinking timelines. If you think a goal will take you 10 years, ask yourself, how can I achieve this in six months? Even if you fail, you will be further ahead than if you stuck to the 10 year plan. So a lot of you are waiting for permission. You're waiting for someone to tell you that you are good enough. You're waiting for the perfect time. There is no perfect time. The perfect time was yesterday. The second best time is right now. The ability to handle crisis. You will never reach the top without facing a moment that threatens to destroy everything that you have built. This is the existential crisis phase. Every single billionaire that I've studied has gone through a moment where it looked like it was all over. We talked about Elon Musk in 2008, but look at Jeff Bezos and a dot-com crash of 2001. Amazon lost 90% of its value. 90%. Imagine looking at your net worth and seeing a drop by 90%. Most CEOs panicked. They folded. They went bankrupt. Bezos didn't panic. He focused on the math. He focused on one single metric, the cash conversion cycle. He realized that if he could get cash from customers before he had to pay his suppliers, he could fund his own growth without needing banks or investors. He turned Amazon into a cash generating machine during the worst crash in the history of the internet. He didn't just survive the crisis. He used the crisis to become stronger. This is what Nassim Taleb calls being anti-fragile. It's not just about resilience, which is bouncing back to where you were. It's about getting better because of the stress. When you are building your business, you are going to get hit. You are going to lose a big client. Your star employee is going to quit on you. The economy is going to tank. Pandemic is going to shut down the world. If you crumble when things get hard, you are not ready for this level of success. Yet, billionaires look at crisis as a puzzle to be solved, not a sign that they need to stop. They maintain an internal locus of control. They believe that no matter how bad the external situation is, they have the power to fix it. They don't blame the economy. They don't blame the government. They don't blame their team. They take extreme ownership. So when bad things happen to you, do you play the victim or do you become the architect of your own rescue? Your pain is your training ground. The struggles that you are facing right now are not there to stop you. They are there to prepare you for the weight of the success you are asking for. If you can't handle the pressure of a $10,000 problem, life will never trust you with a $10 million problem. So embrace the crisis. It is the fire that forges the steel. They solve the biggest problems. Perhaps the most important thing billionaires have in common is the scale of the problems that they solve. So you are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems that you solve. If you solve a small problem for a few people, you make a little bit of money. If you solve a massive problem for millions of people, you become a billionaire. So look at the billionaires that we've talked about. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem of fossil fuels with Tesla and the problem of human extinction with SpaceX. Pretty big problems. Bill Gates solved the problem of putting a computer on every desk in every home. Jeff Bezos solved the problem of getting anything that you want delivered to your door in two days. These are not small problems. Most entrepreneurs aim too low. They start a business just to make money. They want to just pay their bills. They want a nice car. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it won't make you a billionaire. You have to fall in love with the problem. And to go to the next level, you have to expand your vision. You have to ask, how can I help more people? How can I serve deeper? You need to find your one word. You need to find the core value that drives you because when things get hard, and they will get hard, money will not be enough motivation to keep you going. You need a mission. If you're just chasing paper, you will burn out. If you're chasing a purpose, you will be unstoppable. So the billionaires I know, the ones I studied, they're not sitting around counting their money. They are working harder than you and me. Why? Because they're obsessed with the problem they are solving. They are built to serve. So if you want to join their ranks, stop asking, how can I make a billion dollars? And start asking, how can I help a billion people? The money is just a byproduct of the value that you create. Focus on the value. Focus on the service. Focus on the impact. You have Michael Jordan level talent at something. You have a genius inside of you that is waiting to be unlocked. But you are keeping it small because you don't believe in yourself enough to tackle the big problems. The world is waiting for you to step up. The world has huge problems that need your specific genius to solve. So don't deprive us of your contribution because you're afraid to fail. Go bigger. If you want to learn the 96 ways to improve your life, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. You keep telling yourself you just need more time, more money, more luck. But billionaires started with the same fear you have right now. The difference is they acted when everything looked like it would collapse.