Getting Rich is a Game. Here’s How to Win.

All right, so Getting Rich is ultimately a game. And in this video, I'd like to share my approach for how to win that game. We're going to be talking about the rules of the game, the strategy behind how to win, the three core actions and skills you can take within the game, the two types of economic entity that are allowed to play the game, the four levels to the game and how the game changes as you go through these different levels, the three S's that hold people back from playing the game very well, and finally,

we're going to end with some actionable recommendations for things you can do if you would like to speedrun the game of getting rich. All right, so let's kick things off by talking about the rules of the game. Rule number one is that the government or central bank is allowed to print cash and no one else is. Now, if you are anything like me and you are not the government or the central bank, that brings us on to rule number two, which is for you to make money, someone else must give it to you. And crucially,

also rule number three, that they must give that money to you voluntarily. Again, unless you are the government, in which case you can compel people to give you money, but unless you are the government, you're not allowed to force anyone to give you money. They have to give it to you because they want to give it to you. They have to give it to you voluntarily. Now, what these rules lead to is a specific strategy for winning the game of making money. And to understand the strategy, we need to ask ourselves, what will cause you

to give someone else money voluntarily? Why is it that when you go to Starbucks, you are willing to give them $3 in return for a coffee? Why is it that when you when you go into the Apple store, you are willing to give them $1,000 for an iPhone? The reason is because you want the item in question or whatever the thing is, you want that thing more than you want to hold on to your money. You want the thing more than you want to hold on to your money. The reason I bought an iPhone is

because I care more about having the iPhone than I do about having the extra thousand dollars in my bank. The reason I buy the coffee from Starbucks is because in that moment I want a cup of coffee more than I want the $3 that it costs me. Therefore, our ultimate strategy for making money basically comes down to create value i.e. do or make something that someone else wants. And secondly, we got to exchange that value for the money. The game of making money is fundamentally a game of value creation and value exchange. And before we

talk about any of the rest of the stuff in this video, like the three core skills, the core actions, the different levels, all of the different action points, we need to understand that core reality that it's really about value creation and value exchange. Now, there is a trap that a lot of people fall into at this point around what actually counts as value. Now, here it's worth understanding that there are a few different types of value. There is firstly human value, which is the intrinsic value of a human being. You know, you're a good person,

your family loves you, you have intrinsic worth and value as a human being. Fantastic. There is also societal value. What is the value to society of a particular thing? Nurses and firefighters and garbage collectors and doctors and teachers have high societal value. And then finally we come to the concept of market value which is how valuable is a particular thing on the free market. Now unfortunately when it comes to the game of you as an individual wanting to get rich human value and societal value are completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is market value.

People are going to turn off this video at this point. I agree it's unfair. I don't like it anymore than you do. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, apparently came up with this thing called the diamond water paradox. So if you imagine something like water, water has enormous societal value. Its value to individuals and to society is insanely high. Compare that to diamonds. Diamonds have no societal value. And yet diamonds cost a lot of money and the people who sell diamonds make a lot of money. Whereas water is dirt cheap and the people who

sell water don't make a lot of money unless they're selling it literally by the zillions of gallons. And the reason he drew that parallel is because he recognized that the value to society of a given good is not the same as its value to the market. The value to the market is depending basically on supply and demand and how much people with money want the thing which unfortunately is quite decorated from the societal value of a thing. Now the reason I'm talking about these things as it relates to money is because money is one of

those weird social constructs that people feel very emotional about in a lot of different fields and a lot of different hierarchies and a lot of different like societies. There is almost this idea that the more money you make, the more your value is as a human. The more it's sort of like your your intrinsic value as a human being in the capitalist world that we live in is annoyingly correlated to this idea of how much money you're making. And it's it's weird and we don't like to talk about it, but status hierarchies are essentially based

around this sort of thing. When you meet someone and you ask them, "What do you do for work?" It's because there is a part of your brain that wants to that's basically is trying to understand how much money they're making and trying to sort of assess your place in the value status hierarchy relative to the other person and stuff. When it comes to money, we conflate this value thing so much that I think it's worth shining a light on and recognizing that in the specific game of getting rich, i.e. in the specific game of increasing

the number of zeros in your bank account, the only value that matters fundamentally is market value. I agree it's unfair. I agree the system should change. I think it's really unfair that nurses and firefighters and teachers don't get paid more money. And I'm all for campaigning for systemic change. Uh but this video is not about changing the system. This video is about okay, as an individual, you and me, born into the system of capitalism that we live in, how do we understand the game that's being played? And then how do we increase our odds of

winning that game uh to whatever degree we want to win, to whatever degree we'd like to become rich so that probably we can have freedom and flexibility to kind of do what we want and like not have a boss and you know all all of the stuff that people want when they get rich. All right. So this core strategy of creating value and then exchanging value for money leads us to the next part of understanding the game which is the three core actions. Now in our economic system every single economic unit i.e. individuals and businesses

are really just doing these three fundamental actions. Action number one is doing the work. For example, a software engineer is doing the work of writing software. A doctor is doing the work of treating patients. A teacher is doing the work of teaching kids. Apple, the company, is doing the work of building iPhones stuff. Starbucks, the company, is doing the work of making coffee and creating vibes. And this is what we previously referred to as value creation. It is doing the work to create the value. Next up, we have action number two. And action number two

is selling the work. It is the value exchange. It is exchanging the work for money. So, Apple, the company, is doing the work of making iPhones and selling the work on their website and in Apple stores. If you are a software engineer working for Google, you're doing the work of writing software and you are selling the work to Google as your employer. Google is the one giving you money in exchange for you doing the work for them. If you're a doctor, you're doing the work of treating patients, but you're crucially selling the work to your

employer, which is probably a hospital. The hospital itself is then making money from insurance companies and the government, but you as an individual doctor are fundamentally selling your work to your employer. And then the third core action is administering and maintaining the work. So, as a doctor, you are doing the work of treating patients. You're selling the work to your employer, the hospital, and you're administering or maintaining your ability to do the work by keeping your professional qualifications up to date, and filing your taxes and not getting struck off the medical register. For example, if

you are Apple, you are doing the work of building iPhones. You're selling it to customers, and you're administering and maintaining the work with your massive HR, legal, finance, admin departments that are sort of maintaining the abilities to do actions one and two. And the whole point that I'm going to be making in this video, which is that when it comes to the game of making money, it's really, really helpful to understand that these three things are basically the only actions that are ever being done in the game of making money. And so, if you would

like to make more money, it is worth understanding that these are the three actions and improving your skills at doing the three actions. And then we're going to talk about exactly how to do that in just a sec. We are now going to talk about the four levels of the game. We have level 1, 2, 3, and four. And before level one, we have what I'm going to call the tutorial. Now, in this game of getting rich while making money, the tutorial level is basically age 0 to 16 or 18 or 21 or like 24

or whenever you end full-time education. And what the tutorial is doing is preparing you for level one. And level one is when you are an employee. Most of us begin our working economic lives at level one as an employee. There is nothing wrong with this. It's the way the system is set up. And the entire schooling and education system is basically designed to help us be good employees. So you know how we talked about every single economic entity is fundamentally just doing these three core actions. As an employee, you are doing these three core actions.

You're doing the work, you're selling the work, and you are administering the work. You're just spending different amounts of time doing these different actions. So let's say you're an employee, you are working as a software engineer, and you're working at Google. You are doing the work of writing code. you are selling the work to Google, your employer, and you're administering and maintaining the work by doing your performance evaluations, finding filing your taxes on time, and making sure you are taking the right certification and whatever coding language you need to do, all of all of that

fun stuff. Now, I'm going to argue that as an employee, you're basically spending 95% of your time doing the work. You're spending like maybe 5% of your time administering the work, and you're spending less than 1% of your time actually selling the work. The only time you sell your work as an employee is when you are applying for a job. That's when you're trying to sell yourself and land a new client, i.e. your employer and when you're doing performance evaluations and when you're trying to negotiate for a raise. That's the only selling you really have

to do in your particular role. Unless of course you work in a sales role, in which case your entire job is selling, but like we'll put that aside. So, you're spending the vast majority of your time doing the work, i.e. writing code and attending meetings and like doing, you know, doing all the stuff. Now, as a little spoiler, the more we progress through the four different levels of the game of making money, we're going to be changing the percentage of time we're spending on these three different core actions. But fundamentally, the core actions are going

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QR code. So, thank you so much for Grammarly for sponsoring the video. And let's get back to it. And we need to talk about the two types of economic entity, i.e. the two sorts of characters you could potentially play in this game of capitalism, in this game of making money. Character number one or economic entity number one is the individual, which is what most of us are. And then economic entity or character number two is the business. And it is very much worth appreciating the differences between an individual and a business. Fundamentally, an individual and

a business still do the same things. An individual does the work, sells the work, and administers the work. A business does the work, sells the work, administers the work. But the rules of the game are very different for the individual and for the business. Firstly, an individual gets paid through a salary plus or minus a bonus. Whereas a business gets paid through profits and dividends. Secondly, as an individual, you are not allowed in most countries to sell yourself. And even if you were allowed, you probably shouldn't sell yourself. Whereas in almost every country on earth,

you can in fact sell yourself. If you are a business, you could sell a business for lots of money. This is in fact how all these like tech founder type people get rich because they sell their business and now they have all this money that's come all in one go. You cannot sell yourself as an individual nor would you want to. As an individual you are normally taxed before you pay your expenses. You have a salary that salary is taxed at its source by your employer and then you have to pay all your expenses. Whereas

as a business you are only taxed after your expenses. Businesses also in general have way more tax breaks than individuals do. Which is why pretty much anyone who ever hires a tax accounting expert or anything, they'll encourage them to set up a holding company or a business or a business entity under which to hold some of their money or some of their assets because you can just save quite a lot of money on taxes compared to an individual. So, it's kind of unfair because when you're playing the game of capitalism, the game of getting rich

as a business, you are afforded way more tax breaks than most individuals are. As an individual, generally when you have a job, you are allowed to negotiate your salary once or twice a year at most. Whereas if you're a business, you can change your prices literally whenever you want. As an individual, you generally have an exclusivity contract with a single client, i.e. your employer or boss. Whereas as a business, you can and should have multiple clients and customers. If you, for example, work for Google, you have an exclusivity contract with your one client, i.e. Google.

If you are Google, you have zillions and zillions of customers all around the world. An individual is selling their services, i.e. their time and skills to a single person, whereas a business is generally selling it to way more than one person. Generally as an individual you are not allowed to hire people to do the work for you. Your employer would generally look down upon that. But as a business of course you can and should hire people to do the work for you. That is again one of the key differences between an individual and a business.

In fact this is one of the key tests that for example in the UK determines whether someone is a contractor i.e. they are self-employed and have their own business or they are an employee of your own business which is would they be allowed to hire someone to outsource the job for them. If the answer is no they wouldn't be allowed to do that then they are more likely to be classed as an employee. If the answer is yes, of course they can outsource this to whoever they want to, then they're way more likely to be

a business, i.e. a contractor. One of the other core differences between an individual and a business is that in general, an individual is selling time, whereas a business is selling outcomes. As an individual, if you say to your boss or your employer, hey, I've done everything I need to do within half an hour in the morning. I'm now going to chill out the rest of the day. Most employers would have an issue with that because mostly they care about you putting in the time. We can argue about that all we like. it's probably not effective,

but an employer for the most part cares about you putting in the time. Whereas, if you're a business and let's say you're a web design agency, the client doesn't care how many hours you spent designing the website. They actually want it done sooner rather than later. And so, what they care about is the outcome of the website being done. When you buy an iPhone from Apple, you could not care less how long it takes them to put the iPhone together. You are there to buy the iPhone. You are there to buy the outcome. But if

you're an employee working at the Apple store, good luck trying to get off early because you've completed all your work because the work is infinite and and fundamentally what Apple are paying you for is your time, not the outcomes that you are delivering. As an individual employee, let's say you generate excess value for your employer. Generally, you as the individual will not be capturing the excess value that you create. That will be going to profits to the business. Whereas, if you're a business and you happen to own the business, you capture that excess value in

the form of profits and then those profits can go to you, the owner, if you really want them to. It's not all doom and gloom. However, as an individual playing the game of capitalism, you do have some legal protections in the law depending on which country you're in. For example, let's say your employer wants to fire you. They generally have to give you some form of severance or some form of notice or some form of like redundancy. Also, in the UK, for example, if you've been with your employer for more than 2 years, they can't

just fire you for no reason. They have to have a reason to. Either that or your role becomes redundant and then you get entitled to some amount of money. But basically, you get some amount of legal protections. But these vary massively depending on which country you're in. I think in the US there's actually a lot fewer of these than there are in European countries. As an individual employee, you can also get different sort of perks. Again, this depends on where you are and what your job is, but for example, in the US, most most jobs

come with health insurance, whereas if you're a business in the US, you have to pay for your own health insurance. So, it comes out of pocket versus just being given to you by your employer. The other big benefit of being an individual and playing the game of capitalism is that you are unlikely to lose money. It is very unlikely that if you have a job, unless you just spend loads of money, that you will go into debt and suddenly have to owe a lot of money. Whereas if you're a business, you actually do have the

potential that you'll be losing money in a given year. Now, all of this is to say that when we are trying to understand how to win the game of getting rich, we need to understand that there are fundamentally major differences between playing the game as an individual and playing the game as a business. And I would argue that in many ways the easier way to get rich by far is to play the game as a business. Can you get rich in level one? Can you get rich as an individual trading fundamentally trading your time for

money? Well, sort of. It depends on what you're doing. So, if we go back to our three core actions, for example, let's say you are working as a engineer for Apple. Apple the business does the work of creating products, sells the work to customers through the Apple store and through Apple.com and administers the work with a massive HR, legal, finance, admin department, etc. But you, as the individual engineer, you are a component of them doing the work. You are the one creating the product. If you were working in sales as a sales associate in the

Apple store, you would be a component in helping Apple sell the work. If you happen to be working in the HR, legal, finance, or admin department of Apple, you are one of the components helping them to administer the work. As one of those components, you're still doing the work of HR. You're still selling the work to Apple, your employer, and you're still administering the work of like keeping up your HR qualifications and filing your taxes and stuff, but fundamentally, you are a component of Apple's machine, helping them do one of the three things. In a

business, component one is generally called product or operations. Component number two of selling the work is generally called the department of sales and or marketing. And then component number three of administering and maintaining the work is generally called legal, finance, HR, admin, IT or some combination of those sorts of things just to map this onto like a standard business org chart. But the point is that generally when you're an employee, you are generally working in one of these three different functions. So coming back to our question of can you get rich? Can you win the

game of getting rich by being an individual employee working within the context of a business? The answer is yes, you can. but only if you are creating so much market value for the business that it is worth it for them to pay you quite a lot of money. I have a friend for example who is a trader at an investment bank and a couple of years ago he had a really good year and he made that investment bank like $10 million from trading for them that year. $10 million. That's the amount of value he literally

added to the topline revenue of that particular bank. And that year his salary plus bonus was around $1 million. So he created $10 million of value for the bank and he captured $1 million of that value. $1 million a year is still obviously quite a lot of money to be earning. So if for example you are working in tech or in finance or in like high ticket sales or you're like a doctor in the US, those sorts of career paths are the kinds of careers where even as an employee, even only playing on level one

of the game of capitalism, you can still make tons of money because crucially you are driving loads of market value for your employer and therefore they are very willing to pay you quite a lot of money. If you were able to drive that market value for your own business, obviously you would keep way more of the money, but for example, it's very hard to be a neurosurgeon without actually being an employee within a larger organization because it requires all of these different other people, all these support functions, all of these different all the different setup

etc. So the answer is yes, you can get rich as an employee. You can make a bunch of money, you can save a bunch of money, you can then invest that money into things like stocks or things like buying a house and then you can build passive income over time and you can build your portfolio. It is possible but only in a few specific industries. And if you are in one of those industries, you probably already know it. Maybe you even chose the industry based on its ability to make you loads and loads of money

as an employee. But if you look at the stats around, you know, the majority of like self-made millionaires and deca millionaires, almost all of them got there through starting their own businesses. Very few of them got there from having a job. All right, so let's move on to level two. But before we do that, I have a gym session, so I will be right back. All righty, we are back. I'm a little bit sweatier than usual, but that's okay. We're going to keep on going with this somewhat rambly video. Um, one thing I forgot to

mention before we talk about level two is that as a level one employee, the only reason your employer is hiring you is because your existence makes them more money than you cost. And if that ever stops being the case, if it ever stops being the case that you add less value than what your salary costs, then good luck staying employed because there is literally zero incentive for the system to continue to employ you if that is the case. And people are realizing this, like everyone who's lost their jobs because of AI or where teams are

downsizing because of AI. You know, Fiverr recently released a big memo. Dolingo has stopped hiring contractors because they've just been using AI instead. If the business that's employing you can do the thing by spending $20 a month on ChatGpt Pro or even $200 a month on Chat GPT Platinum or or whatever it's called, there's just literally no reason for them to keep you as a individual employed when the computer can do the job for you. And we are going to be coming back to this AI thing in a little bit. But let's now move on

to level two of the game here. Now level two on this game of making money is when you become selfmployed. Now at the point where you become self-employed, you are still fundamentally doing these three actions. In fact, you continue doing these three actions throughout every single level because that's the whole point of these three core actions being the three core actions of every economic unit is you're still fundamentally just doing these things. It's just that the proportions of how much time you're spending doing these things kind of changes and the kind of skills you need

also sort of change. So broadly directionally, when you're self-employed, you're spending instead of spending 95% of the time doing the work like you do as an employee, you're only spending maybe 40% of the time doing the work, but you're spending like at least half of your time trying to sell the work. And you get a little bit more admin because now you have to file company accounts and you have to do your bookkeeping and things like that. But it's not too bad when you're self-employed. The amount of admin like it's not it's not as bad

as when you actually have teams and manage people and stuff. Then you have a load more admin. But really 10% of your time doing admin, but at least half of your time and quite a lot of your brain space is spent on selling the work. And this is the key difference between an employee and someone who is self-employed. An employee generally does not have to worry too much about selling the work. All they have to do is focus on doing the work. And the only time where as an employee you have to worry about selling

the work is when you get laid off and you have to get a new job or when you're negotiating for a raise, which happens like very little of the time. But when you become self-employed, the biggest problem in your life, having been self-employed and knowing a lot of self-employed people, by far the biggest problem in your life is how will I get enough clients? How do I get more people to want to buy my stuff? It is the problem of leads. It's the problem of sales. And this is the cost of becoming a business entity.

You get the benefits of being a business. You get profits. You get dividends. You get tax breaks because now you can put your expenses through the business. You can change your prices whenever you want. You could have multiple clients and customers. You could hire people if you really wanted to. You've got way more time freedom now because like you know fundamentally your customers care about outcomes. They don't care about time. And you have all this freedom being self-employed, being a freelancer or being a soloreneur. I'm putting all of those things in track. Let's write those

down. You get all of the benefits of being a business. And fundamentally why businesses make tons of more money than employees do on average is because as a business you have to worry about selling the goddamn stuff. This is the bit that is scary. This is why people are scared about going from employee to self-employed. No one is scared about like doing the same work because let's say you get employed as a web designer for some web design agency. You're still you're doing the work of web design. You could go freelance and become self-employed and

you're still doing the work of web design. It's just that now you have to freaking try and get clients. You have to try and sell your services to other people and you have to convince them to give you their money so that you can do the work and then administer the work. So this bit over here, this is the thorny pot. And one of the key points that I want to say throughout this video really is selling the work is way harder than doing the work and way harder than administering the work. For the most

part, selling the work is why business is hard. The amount of stress in your life when you're self-employed drastically increases if you don't have enough clients. If you have loads of clients, you if you've got people lining up to do business with you, then being self-employed is chill. It's like a great life. You can choose your clients. You can choose your hours. You can say no to clients. You can like work whenever you feel like it. You can pick your kids up from the school. You can like work from the beach. You can do whatever

you want if you have enough clients. But if you don't have enough clients, oh man, good luck because you're going to be up at night. You're going to be working on the weekends. You're going to be hustling. You're going to be trying your best to try and get more people to want to buy your stuff. The other key difference of course with being self-employed is that now you are not just responsible for one of the components of you know the three core actions. You're not just responsible for doing the work or selling the work or

administering the work. You are now responsible for all three things in the context of your business. As a freelance web designer, you're responsible for doing the work of web designing. You're responsible for selling the work to try and make money from the web design. And you're responsible for doing all the admin, the accounts, the bookkeeping, the contracts, the invoices, the chasing up for accounts receivable and you know all of all of the stuff. But like I said, the reason this is hard and the reason this is stressful and the reason it's scary is because of

this bit. It's selling the work that makes this hard. Then you come to level three at some point. And level three, you graduate to level three when you hire someone because now you are a business owner operator. And really the only difference between a business owner operator and someone who's self-employed is that I the way I'm defining it is that a business owner operator hires at least one other person. So at the point where you have at least one other person, now you can get someone to be responsible for doing the work or selling the

work or administering the work, but now you're responsible for managing and dealing with that person. And I'm saying owner operator because yes, you own this business and you're yeah, it's great. You get the profits, but you are also fundamentally operating the business. You haven't yet reached level four where you're fundamentally just an investor. At some point, your business grows while you're operating it and while you're owning it. And eventually, you'll be able to hire an operator to run the business for you. This is the founder who eventually hires a CEO to run the business for

them. And then the founder or the owner of the business, if they want, they can just be chilling on a beach or on a yacht and they can be making loads of money because the business is printing cash and they're able to make money from the profits of the business, but that business is being operated by someone else who's being paid a salary. But if we think back to level three, like again, the three fundamental actions are still the same thing. They're still doing the work, they're still selling the work, and they're still kind of

administering the work. It's just that when you are a business owner operator, you spend basically very little of your time actually doing the work. You're spending a good amount of your time administering the work and you're still spending quite a lot of time and or mental energy trying to sell the work. So, it's still setting the work that's the hard and stressful part. Except now you have to do much more admin to try and deal with the team that you're managing and keeping them appropriately compensated and helping them feel good about their job and giving

them clear vi vision and mission and values and alignment and doing the performance reviews and you know all of the stuff associated with managing people. So, getting rich as a game, we have talked about the rules of the game. We have talked about the two types of economic entity, the individual and the business. We have talked about the three core actions doing the work, selling the work and administering the work that fundamentally every single economic entity has to do. And we've talked about the four levels. Now, this is how the game changes as you progress

through the four levels. At level one, you're operating as an individual. But from level two, level three, and level four, you start operating as a business owner. So, what's basically happening over time is how do I draw this as a diagram? I think I can draw it like this. So, that's like one bit. Then there's another bit which is like There we go. That looks cute. Okay. So, as you go along the levels, as you go from level one through to level four, the amount of money you're making from active income reduces, but the amount

of money you're making from passive income increases. Now, active income, I'm defining as when you're having to do work in return for the money. When you're trading your time for money, you're having to do the thing, right? As an employee, you have to keep on doing the thing. If you stop doing the thing, you stop getting paid. But as an investor, you really don't have to do anything at all. You are making money. like Warren Buffett is making money because of what he owns rather than because of what he does. This passive income is income

from ownership. When you own assets and you own businesses in this capitalist world that we live in, the people who own the assets are the people that are getting rich through passive income. The people that are working within the businesses are having to do stuff and they're getting paid a salary for doing the stuff, but it's active. Like if you stop working, you stop making the money. The other thing that increases as you go through the four different levels of this game is you get increasingly more and more leverage. As an employee, you are fundamentally

trading your time for money. If you stop working, the money stops rolling. That's just how it works. When you become self-employed, you stop trading your time for money. Technically, you start trading outcomes for money. So, you could have multiple clients and they could want multiple websites. And if you could just be really efficient or use AI to build those websites, the clients will still be happy hopefully. And then so, so now you've got more leverage. you're able to decouple your earning power from the amount of time you're spending on the thing. As a business owner/operator,

you get more leverage because now you're able to hire people to do some of the things that you don't want to do, but you are still in the driver's seat. You are still the one operating the business. So all of the stress of operating the business lands on you. And then as an investor, you might still own the business, but because you've hired an operator or a CEO or a COO or whatever to run the business for you, again, you've unlocked more leverage. And the more leverage you have, the more money you are able to

make in this game of getting rich. And also the more leverage you have, the more you're able to make that income passively rather than actively. So if there is one message in this video, it's that if you want to win the game of getting rich. If you would like to make a lot of money, it's worth understanding where you are on the four different levels. And it's probably worth having as a goal that you want to be leveling up over time. You don't have to do this all in one go. You can absolutely start small.

If you're an employee right now, you could start a side hustle and you could sort of dip your toes into what it's like to be self-employed. Or you could take a sabbatical for a year from work if you have enough savings and you know they're willing to give you a job a year from now and you can try the self-employed experiment. Maybe you've got a job where they're giving you stock options. So now actually while working as an employee, you're able to own a little piece of the company that you're working for, which is kind

of cool. Maybe you're an employee or self-employed or a business owner or an investor and now you're able to put aside some of the money you're earning and you're able to invest in other companies. So now you have a tiny percentage ownership in other companies and so you're able to start earning passive income a little bit through your ownership of other companies. But like if there was one most likely most common way to get rich, it's where you start your own business. Because as we've talked about, playing the game as an economic entity of a

business gives you quite a lot of perks compared to being an individual. And the only thing you have to sacrifice is basically stability/security and sales. The two S's. The primary reason why so many people are employees is because of stability/security. You know what? Actually, I'm going to add a third S to it. I'm going to say stress is the third S. So, let's call it the three S's. When I speak to people who want to get rich and they're employees and they haven't yet started their business and I ask you know why haven't you started

your business yet usually they say I don't want to give up the stability of being an employee or the security of having a job or they say oh starting a business would be very stressful I don't want to deal with that or the people who are very enlightened and know what they're talking about are like ah I just really don't want to deal with sales it's like usually these three s's that cause people who want to get rich but have not yet started a business if you don't want to get rich and you're very happy

being an employee and being fulfilled and having free time to be able to go home from work to be able to clock off to not have to think about getting enough sales at night. Amazing. More power to you. But you're not trying to play the game of getting rich, right? So, I'm speaking here at this point to the people that want to play the game of getting rich and would like to win, i.e. would like to get rich in that game. If that's not your goal, amazing. You're winning at life. You're happy. You're content building

a balanced life. Arguably, getting rich shouldn't even be a goal. But, you know, I know it is for a lot of people. Uh, I know it certainly was for me until I bought my freedom and then I realized that actually freedom is not all that it's cracked up to be. So, but that's that's a conversation for another time. Like it's a it's a classic thing, right? Like you know, everyone who's rich will tell you that like uh you know it's it's not all that it's cracked up to be. It's like yeah, it gets rid of

your money problems, but like it doesn't solve for fulfillment and happiness and meaning and stuff. And then people who are not yet rich would be like well screw you. I I want to learn that lesson for myself. So, if you have the goal of getting rich, which you probably do if you're at this point in the video, and you haven't yet started a business, it's probably because you think having a job is more stable, or you think having a business is very stressful, or you're afraid of sales, or some combination of all of these three

things. Now, I've got a hot take when it comes to these three S's, but before we go there, there is one final thing I need to say around this individual versus business thing. Let's say you are an employee or you're you're on the employee path and you're afraid of starting your own business. I get it. The thing is in many ways you already own a business. You are already the business owner of the business titled you incorporated. It's just that you're not playing the game of getting rich very well probably unless you're in one of

these like ridiculously high paying careers. Because when you are playing the game as an employee, you're still you're still you're doing all the things that a business does. You're doing the work. you're selling the work and you're administering the work. It's just that you have taken out an exclusivity deal with one client. An employee is a business owner who is simply selling their time to a single client. Someone who's self-employed is a business owner who's selling their time and or services to multiple clients. That is fundamentally the difference. Having a single client where your paycheck

is relying on a single person, a single employer, a single boss or manager thinking that you're worthwhile and wanting to keep you around. Is that really stability and security? I don't know. I think it certainly used to be. The social contract that we used to have in society was that get a job, get a well-paying job, work for a big corporate, um, work your way up the corporate ladder for like 50 years, get the company car, get health insurance, get a good pension. Your employer will look after you while you're working and then the state,

the government, your pension, welfare will look after you, social security will look after you once you retire. That was the social contract. And this worked in like the 20th century. The whole like just get a job, stay with an employer. There was loyalty on all sides. I'm not sure that is the world that we are we are living in anymore. I'm not sure having a job where you're reliant on a single employer who is looking for any reason to cut costs in a in an age of AI. I'm not sure that's really the recipe for

stability and security. Is it not more of a recipe for stability and security to be able to have multiple clients to be diversified? Everyone talks about investments being diversified. It's not good to have all of your eggs in one basket. But in a world where you're working for an employer with no plans to acquire an ownership stake in the company or like you know build up your passive income side hustle nest eggs or stuff in a world where you're working for one employer versus multiple clients I don't know I I personally feel if I was

giving advice to my friends who want to get rich but who are still in a job and the reason is security and stability I would say feels like a scary place to be. I would feel more scared if my income was reliant on a single employer than if if I had multiple clients and multiple customers that I was able to sell my stuff to over the internet. Just saying. I don't know. Your your opinion might might be different on this, but that's that's kind of my hot take on this. My other hot take on this

is that I think these three S's are remarkably related. And this is the most important one. Let's say you're like an incredible, I don't know, investment banker and you've done an amazing job for your bank and you know that like if you don't like Goldman Sachs that Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and freaking HSBC will just give you a job because they just love you so much because because you're so good. You've got quite a lot of stability and security in that sense because you know you have the ability to land another job very easily.

You know you can sell yourself if you need to. Therefore, your stress is low because now you can say f you to your boss if the conditions become kind of annoying or if you're not getting what you want and like you have way more leverage when you know that you're in demand. When the laws of supply and demand are in your favor, i.e. there's more demand for you than there is supply. Just you, you have leverage and now you're able to have a low stress life. You're able to feel stable and secure and you know

you can land another job if you need one. But what if, let's say, you've been working as a uh entry-level content writer for some random bank, shall we say, and now that bank is replacing all of their content writers with AI, and there's all these content writers on the market who are like in their 20s who are looking for jobs. Are the laws of supply and demand still in your favor? No, not really, because no one cares about hiring content writers anymore because AI can basically do all the thing, unless you're like particularly special or

particularly unique or you want to put it a price or whatever. But now the laws of supply and demand are against you, which means it is harder for you to sell yourself, which means you're way more stressed and you have a lot less stability and security. My hot take as from this entire video is that if you are trying to get rich, basically this is the most important thing. You have to be able to sell either sell yourself or sell a product or sell a service. Because if we think back to these three things, these

three core actions in the in the capitalist world and the hardest thing is selling the work. Selling the work like the person who can bring more money into the business. That will always be a role that is like if you go to a business and you and you say to them, hey, if you hire me, I will literally make you way more money than I cost. That is a very easy thing for them to say yes to. If you're a freelancer and you go to a business or a client and you say, "Hey, if you

hire me for 10 grand, I'll bring in 100 grand, guaranteed, of course, they're going to hire you. That just makes perfect sense." If you go to a big company and you say, "Hey, I can increase your conversion rate on your website by x amount." And that will make you more money. It helps them sell the work. They recognize that that's the hardest part. And you'll always be with work. You'll always have a job. And that's why I think that if you want to win this game of getting rich, you've got to recognize that this setup

where as an employee, you spend less than 1% of your time trying to do sales, uh, unless you work in sales. U, but you probably don't, right? Like most employees don't work in sales kind of almost by definition because there's like zillions of other roles and sales is like very few of them. You're spending almost no time trying to sell sell stuff. Um, but if you get to level two self-employed business owner or investor or if you get laid off and you need to find another job, your your skill of being able to sell yourself

or to sell something is like literally the most important thing. So why like I I think this is where the disconnect is. The disconnect is that sales is the most important part of getting rich in this capitalist world. And yet as an employee, you're probably not the one who's directly bringing in money for your business. And so with all this said, the advice I would give to someone who wants to hear my my advice and is still watching in this video is firstly get close to the money. Whatever your job is, if you agree with

me that that's like the most important thing, like being able to bring money in because that's like the hardest part. Then figuring out how to get closer to the sales side of the business that you're working in is very very important and very very useful. This kind of vibes with something that Naval Rabicon says, which is that if you can learn to build and learn to sell, you'll be unstoppable and you'll always have a job for life. But the building stuff is not the hard part. The selling stuff is the hard part. So learning to

sell is literally the most important thing. This is why a lot of people say build a personal brand. Your personal brand is your professional reputation. If in whatever industry you're in, you're able to build a strong professional reputation, you are way more likely to be able to sell yourself should you need a job in the future. This is why even though I don't like the word networking is particularly important because you're getting yourself known. You're getting yourself seen. You're hopefully adding value to other people. And the person who adds value to someone else, even if

they're not in your company, even if they're in different companies, that person gets known as someone who is helpful and people want to work with other people who are helpful. If you decide to go from employee to self-employed or business owner, and you've got a personal brand, you've got a professional reputation, you're respected amongst the people in your industry, it's way more likely you're going to be able to get clients because you already have people around who know, like, and trust you. This does not mean you have to write on LinkedIn. Writing on LinkedIn is

not the only way of building a personal brand or developing your professional reputation. If you care about getting rich and you're an employee, I would really strongly recommend starting a side hustle. Again, you don't have to. Obviously, you can do whatever you want. I'm just a guy on the internet, so what do I know? Um, but I think if I were giving my friends advice, I would say start a side hustle. Crucially, start a side hustle that makes money. Don't just do it as a hobby. The difference between a hobby and a business is that

a business makes money, but a hobby does not. What starting a side hustle does, whether it's baking cookies and trying to sell them at the local school fair or like setting up a lemonade stand, is that ultimately the point of the side hustle is to teach you to sell. Maybe the side hustle can grow to the point where it replaces your income. Fantastic. You're winning a life. That's kind of what it did for me. Like YouTube was a side hustle. It grew to the point where it replaced my income as a doctor and then some.

And then I was able to quit my day job so to focus on the YouTube thing before starting my YouTube channel. When I was in medical school, I started a side hustle trying to sell courses to help people get into med school. So, I'd be teaching courses up and down the country um like physical classroom courses to help like 17 and 18 year olds do well in their medical exams. And I was making a few thousand pounds every summer holiday from that from that side hustle. But what that did was teach me the skills of

how to sell stuff over the internet. And that was the thing that really helped when I started my next business off the back of my YouTube channel. Tip number four would be to invest and or negotiate for ownership. The people that win the game of getting rich are the people ultimately who are owners rather than people who are operators. So, if you're working in an industry where it is acceptable for you to get stock options like in tech or whatever, that's actually a totally legit way of like, you know, being an employee but having a

decent chunk of equity in the company that you're helping build so that you're building an asset that can hopefully get you leverage and income further down the line that's not correlated directly with your time. If you work in a small business, can you negotiate with the business owner being like, "Hey, can I take less of a salary and a little bit more profit share? I'd like a stake in the upside. Can I get some equity in the business?" That kind of thing. On top of that or if you're unable to do any of those things,

being able to, you know, save a good amount of money and invest it in things like the stock market. Yeah, it's not going to get you rich quickly, but it can get you rich slowly over a long period of time. That is where you are investing in ownership in other companies. So, for example, I own some Apple stock, tiny tiny tiny percentage of it, which means I can make passive income from the dividends that the Apple stock generates. I don't know if it's a dividend stock, but like whatever, or like I can sell it further

down the line, but basically investing in assets is a reasonable way of very slowly getting rich over time. But if you really want to speedrun the game of getting rich, it's it's really about moving from level one and moving more to levels two, level three, and level four. It's just that the issue is that school and basically society prepares us only for level one. And there's this whole idea that like oh my god, going self-employed is really scary and like what if you lose money and like it's so stressful and like oh managing people is

hard and yeah, all of those things are hard, but they're no harder than being dependent and relying on a single employer to be your only source of sustenance in this world to feed you and your family. And also, if you're in a country like the US where that single employer is your source of health insurance for you and your family, man, that would be scary AF. Ultimately, the reason people are scared to start a business if you want to get rich is because of some misguided thing around stability and security, some fear that starting a

business is going to be stressful. And I think all of those ultimately come down to a fear of selling yourself or just like not having the skills or recognizing that what that you as a commodity, you as you incorporated are not winning right now in the supply demand curve. And the nice thing about that is that that's under your control. You can do something about it. You can learn high income skills. You can increase your personal brand and or professional reputation. All of these things require work, right? You know, getting rich is not is not

something that happens without any work. It's something that is hard. It's something that takes a reasonable amount of time. But if you have the goal of making enough money that you're able to do what you want, you're able to not do things you don't want to do, you're able to, you know, stick it to your boss if your boss is being annoying, you're able to work with people you like, you're able to have like time freedom and location freedom, like that kind of lifestyle requires you to put in quite a lot of work. And so

that ultimately is the game of getting rich. This has been my take on how to win that game. And if you're interested and you haven't yet seen this video, this is titled How to Get Rich. And this is my little rant about the uncomfortable truth that more people need to hear around what it takes to really get rich. So, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video and I will hopefully see you in the next one.