Make Money from NOTHING

how do you get rich when you have nothing here are 10 rules of money that have made me a shitload of money and hopefully will make you a shitload of money too starting with number one you don't have to be smart to get rich I used to believe that you had to be smart and you had to be like from an Ivy League school or of some like crazy background in order to get rich and that is kind of how I viewed it for a long time until I had a really interesting experience it was

back in 2016 and I was trying to make money with my first business and I went to this Meetup event and I remember I was making like no money so like I felt like I was like the odd man out there I'm like I'm just trying to learn from everybody like I don't have any ego in this like whatever I can learn I will learn I remember this guy went on stage this is so mean but like like kind of an idiot and he got up on stage and he was like I haven't been able

to break past like $400,000 a month in that moment my entire world shifted I literally left the room and I called my dad and I was like Dad I will never ever work a job again because I am smarter than that guy there is no reason why I can't make the same money as him and it was like the best thing that could have ever happened to me because what I realized is that making money is a game and you have to know how to play that game and it's not that he was smarter than

me and it's not even that he worked harder than me but he understood the rules of the game a way that I didn't you don't need Superior intelligence to win the game some of the richest people that I know are in fact not that smart at all getting rich you don't have to be a genius you need to work hard be patient and you need to have common sense probably the three most important things that you could do when it comes to making money but when I first started making money I couldn't even use proper

grammar and that's really what led me to realize like being rich is not about having a high IQ it's about making smart choices and sticking with them long enough to watch them pan out you got to be a little dumb you know what I've realized about smart people is that super super smart people usually miss out on opportunities because they see too much of the risks when you're really smart you only see all the risks that could occur and so you actually pass up a lot of opportunities not being intelligent is actually to your Advantage

when it comes to making money because you'll take opportunities that others won't and so it's not about how smart you are it is about how smart you work so the question is are you willing to work hard can you make sound decisions can you wait if you can do those three things I promise you you can make money the next rule of money is that saving money will not make you money but it will give you the security to take risks when I first started making money with my company gym launch I was excited I

was making money but it was overshadowed by the fact that I had debt and I had no savings and so for me the first thing I did when I made money is I paid off all my debt the second thing I did I put together what I call is like an oh fund which is like if everything goes to I know that I have enough money to pay my bills pay for my living pay my expenses and start from scratch if needed the moment that I took my money that I had made for my business

and I put it into that fund it was like it unlocked a new layer of creativity for me because then I said okay now everything that comes in I can use to build because I know that I don't need to worry about my bills I can take care of the business now and so what I did with that money I took $4 million and I put it into starting another company and then I took the other money that was coming in and I put $3 million into starting a software company called Allen which was a

software that we used within the company I do not think I would have been able to do any of those Investments if I had felt like it was either the investment or me paying for my apartment saving money you're not going to save your way into becoming a billionaire what I look at it as is is will this money give you the security and peace of mind so that you can focus all of your attention on to just making money and what it did for me created a space for me to take risks and making

more money does require you to take risks just like you start a business and you have to invest some some amount of money time resources if you want to keep growing a business you're going to have to keep doing that and what I recognized is that for me I had to create that space for myself by making sure that I knew that no matter what no matter what happened I would be taken care of of so it's not about living below your means it's about creating the means to take risks so savings won't make you

wealthy but they will give you the security to step out and take opportunities that might the next rule of making money is that you make no money for a significant period of time and then you make all of the money at once the way that you get rich is you put in a ton of work without seeing the result of it the first 2 years of me building my business I didn't just not make money I lost lost money and then one day I made a ton of money and people were like wow you got

so lucky but it's not that you get lucky it's that it's called the Dunning Krueger effect which is essentially people overestimate their ability to do something if you didn't overestimate it you wouldn't start doing it in the first place you quickly realize that it's hard and you suck at it but then if you stick with it knowing that you suck and it is hard eventually you get better and then one day you've stacked enough skills that you see the benefit or the reward for all the work you've put in this is what every person goes

through when they are trying something new to make money to build a business whatever it might be so for example when I was starting my first business I started and I was like this is going to be easy I know what I'm doing all this stuff and and then you realize oh my God I actually suck but I didn't stop I can't lose if I don't stop but I know I will lose if I stop and then one day 2 years in when I'm thinking nothing can get worse and we're definitely going to go into

bankruptcy it all clicks we went from zero to $7 million in six months and from zero to $27 million in two and a half years and that is called the Dunning Krueger effect because during that period of time when I felt terrible that is when I accumulated all the skills to make money that nobody and nothing can ever take from me and if you are trying to make money I want you to know that you can't skip that you cannot skip the hard that it takes to get to the other side learning never goes to

waste skills only compound but you have to stick it out long enough to watch them compound and that's how you make money it's not like you have to accumulate one skill to make money you've got to accumulate 20 this is the nature of exponential growth you work really hard and get very small results for a period of time and then everything accelerates and it all happens all at once did you know that Howard Schultz didn't make any money from Starbucks for 17 years he at one point had to borrow money from the guy who made

the boxes for the shoes to pay payroll nobody wants to talk about fact that it's actually hard if you want to build something sustainable the more money you want to make the more periods of times that you're going to have to go through where you don't see the fruits of your labor the reason a lot of people don't make a lot of money is because they don't know how to delay gratification the reason I know that I will make a billion dollars is because I know that I can delay gratification I can build something that

will for sure make a billion dollars because I know how to wait a lot of people want to make it now and the reason that they won't make more money is because they're so fixated on making it sooner but if you can get through that period of eating you will make more money than everyone else the next rule is that money always chases the best when you're good you chase money when you're excellent money chases you I remember when I was first trying to make money as a personal trainer I didn't know how to get

clients and I saw people that I was working with and I just saw that they had unending clients and I was like how is it that they have so many clients and I don't and I had a mentor at the time and he said something to me that really stuck with me focus on being the best and forget the rest he was like Lea focus on being the best trainer that exists so I was like how can I build up evidence that I'm the best because I was like I need to get these stories that

I can use to show people that if you work with me these are the results I produce so I was like okay I'm going to sign up for a fitness competition because I think that if I want to be the best trainer I have to show people I didn't just lose weight I then competed in a fitness competition from doing those things and becoming so good I couldn't even take on the amount of people that came to me when you do your best people notice and when people notice money and success will find you but

it starts with being the best it doesn't start with trying to accumulate money it starts with trying to be excellent because money is attracted to value and excellence in any field creates value that people are willing to pay a lot of money for if you are a celebrity personal trainer that has gotten let's just say Kim Kardashian into tip top shape and you've shown a transformation where she's lost 30 lb and gotten a sixpack and ripped versus a personal trainer that works at the YMCA and doesn't have any testimonials from clients which one provides more

value this one which one gets more money this one because they have demonstrated Excellence first you have to become the best then you have to make people aware that you're the best and once you do that money will come to you like for me I make a lot of money because I love business and so money is a a consequence of me liking business and by consequence I create a lot of value which then creates me a lot of money but I don't ever think about making the money first I think about creating value in

my business and then the money comes if you ask yourself how to be excellent the money comes as a consequence of it find a game that you can be number one at and I only know that I can be number one at something when I'm obsessed with it and so ask yourself like what could I be number one on and play that game cuz if you do that the money will follow the next rule is that learn how to make money while you're awake before you try to make money while you sleep when I first

started my business gym launch I had a guy come to me and he was like Lila I see that you're making money and like that's amazing he's like but you need to learn how to make money while you sleep and I was like make money while I sleep that sounds great because I'm out there I'm busting my ass every day what's the secret so this guy's like yeah let me tell you about real estate and actually I have this little business where you know I will essentially buy this real estate for you and then you're

just going to get passive money that it generates each month from the renters I was like sure let's do it we buy this rinkadink house I was all excited I was like this is it maybe instead of having like a real business we're going to get into like real estate we're going to be Real Estate Investors oh man was I wrong we buy this house this house is the bane of my existence this house was more work than I could have ever imagined cuz they didn't tell me I'm going to have to manage tenants I

was liable for all these things that were happening with the home I didn't know that property management companies could drop your account and then you had to be the one to manage the property all things that I didn't know that house took me almost a year to get rid of and it cost me $20,000 just like building a business takes skills so does picking the right opportunities to invest in investing itself is a skill so if you want to make money while you sleep that is a skill of its own that you also have to

learn and I can tell you as somebody who has made not hundreds but tens on tens of Investments because like I don't do tiny Investments I typically do sizable ones that is a skill on its own there are more transferable skills from learning how to actively make money into passively making money then there are passively into actively lots of people who know how to build a business and actively make money can learn eventually how to invest and usually it goes in that order going from investing and only knowing how to invest into trying to actively

make money it's a harder transition to make and so what I Tred to do in that time is I try to skip steps which activity you know investing versus actively making money do you have more skills already that set you up for success and for me at that point time I had already more skills in learning how to actively make money than I did in how to invest that money and most people are there they've had a job maybe they have like somewhat of a business and then they say Okay I want to go learn

how to invest completely different skill you would probably have a shorter time to value of like learning how to make money if you just said I'm going to learn how to actively make money in a more meaningful way and so what I recognized I was trying to skip steps in that situation because there's nothing passive about learning skills you will learn active skills to make passive income even passive income requires skills there's no way to make money or compound your money that doesn't require some level of skill you can't have money work for you until

you know how to work for money if you want to learn how to make passive income you first have to learn how to make active income Warren Buffett said this before you can let money work for you you have to put in the work yourself Active Learning and effort come first passive rewards come later and that was said by the greatest investor of all time everybody that I know that has made it to the level where they are passively creating income and they're doing it in a really meaningful way they have first killed it at

actively making income and what I realized for myself was I am a decade into business and I am just now learning and getting proficient at investing money and if you invest money properly it does make you money in your sleep but nobody talks to you about how much effort goes into selecting deals negotiating deals it is also so active you are actively learning how to do deals and negotiate and then getting money later the next rule is that if money is the only goal you will never have enough when I sold my first company 3

years ago I remember the moment where the big check hit my bank account that has always been the goal at least with my first company it was like make a ton of money I remember in that moment I felt nothing I didn't even feel like super excited if anything I felt relief cuz I was done with the process and the process had been painful I didn't feel like like a different person I didn't feel like better and what I realized is that if money is the goal you just never have enough money is only a

tool that you can use to then get other things once I realized that the next thought I had is what am I going to do with this money what am I going to use it to build and that is why I started acquisition. comom literally the day after I sold my business is because I said I can use this to create this next thing that I Envision in my head it wasn't like money itself made me happy the only reason that that money now was meaning to me is because I was able to take it

to invest in my next dream and now I've been able to use that money to make my dream come to life and that's meaningful to me and that's a worthy goal money itself it only is a means to an end and so the question is what's the end for you see time is a tool that used to make money and so what proceeds making money is learning how to manage time because if you cannot use your time to create money then you won't have money but most think it stops there and that's it doesn't stop

there because then now that you have money the question is how do you manage money money is a great servant but is not a great Master because as long as it's your master you will never have enough of it it is simply a tool that you use to reach your end goal if you accumulate millions and millions and millions of dollars and it just sits in your bank account what's that money doing for your life does anything about your life change do you feel happier do you accomplish your dreams if you don't use money to

create something else you might as well not have it because it will have no effect on your life the only reason to make money is to do something something with it what are you going to build with the money you make how are you going to use it to make your life and other people's lives better you have to be romantic about the process not the outcome I want to build an amazing business a consequence of that is that I make money that money is useful in building an amazing business and so money is like

a hammer it's only as useful as what you build with it in building my business and accumulating all this money I did not get happier having more money I got happier through the process of who I became to create value that created money if money is your end goal and money is why you do things you will make less than everybody else because money is a very empty reason as to why to do things and so ask yourself why do I want the money what do I want to do with it you should spend money

on yourself because if you're constantly suffering trying to make other people's lives better what's the point on the other side it's what do I want to build with the money what do you want to have happen with the money that you accumulate and those are questions to ask yourself because once you get a certain amount of money you'll stop if it's only about the money the next rule is that if you have no money you should have no shame many people stay poor because they are too ashamed to do the work that it takes to

become rich I remember when I was a personal trainer and I went to college and then I got this internship I had to be a hike guide twice a day I remember there was this guy and he was pretty out of shape and he just wanted to go alone I was the one to go with him to protect him on this hike we're on this hike and then he looks at me and he says you know what I'm just really grateful that you know we have people like you in this world and I was like

people like me he's like yeah people that are willing to do the work that you're doing like I could never do what you're doing in that moment I thought to myself dude I'm willing to do this work because one day I will be richer than you because I am willing to do this type of work what I realize those who are willing to do the work it's not sexy work but it is work and it will move you along and it will make you money and it will progress you those people will also expose themselves

to more opportunities than anybody else there's a very famous saying by Pericles poverty is not a Grace but not striving to overcome it is don't be afraid to put in the work to do the odd jobs if you're not rich there is nothing beneath you when it comes to making money and it comes to doing what You' got to do or to create a stepping stone to the next thing if you were born poor that is not your fault but now you are an adult who has a responsibility to work themselves out of it and

so whatever opportunities come your way do not be ashamed to take them because in taking opportunities like the one I took I was able to get a job anywhere else because I had the name of that Resort on my resume people who are willing to feel embarrassed to feel like they're doing work beneath them creat so much more opportunity for themselves than those who aren't and if you're not where you want to be there's nothing below your pay rate there's no shame in being broke and there's no shame in doing grunt work but there is

shame in not trying to change your circumstances the next rule of making money is that counting other people's money won't make you more here's a question does counting some someone else's reps in the gym make you more buff no so then why would counting somebody else's money make you more Rich counting other people's money only steals more attention from you for making your own money when you're in the process of wanting to make money constantly worrying about how much money somebody else is making it might be that you feel like you're going to be paying

someone too much money about 4 years ago when we first started acquisition. we had a deal come to us and it was a really good deal everything fit and as we're going through the deal process in the beginning I knew I was like I'm going to do deals where I get kind of the short end of the stick because we haven't done this before we didn't have reputation doing it yet and so I was okay with that and I just didn't really think about it but I brought on a different executive and that executive came

on and we were in the middle of a deal process with this company my executive came to me and he said Lea we can't do this deal like this if we sell for the Target that we have he's going to make $500 million and I was like why is that bad he was like that's not fair he's like if if we do an exit he gets $500 million and we' put in all this work and we've done all these things and we only get x amount like that's just not fair I start thinking damn maybe

I'm just settling at the same time I'm thinking like maybe there's something I'm missing here but I looked on paper and I was like well the deal aligns with all the targets that we have despite that we said you know what this doesn't make sense for us we're going to need this instead of this in order for this deal to get done it ended up not working out and I have watched that company over the last 4 years essentially 10x in value they've been incredibly successful they have an amazing brand and reputation and they have

gone on to be this like very very valuable company and I really thought about it and I was like man it was the wrong decision because if the deal works for you why do you care how much the other person's going to make it's a poor State of Mind people who don't have money are constantly focused on how much everyone else has and what I didn't realize is that that person that was that bug in my ear I actually have a net worth that is quite literally a million times more than that person's of course

I'm not counting other people's money because that is not how wealthy people think because they know that focusing on someone else's Pockets does not fill their own and they also know that there's a lot of benefits to people around you and other people having a lot of money and that it's not some scarce resource that you need to have more of than every single person around you if you're trying to make more money and if you want to become wealthy stop looking at other people's money if you are scrolling social media and there are people

who piss you off because they make more money than you unfuck follow them and if every deal you make you feel like you always need to have the upper hand and you need to be making more money than this other person you will not have the best deals because the best deals are when each person feels like they got the better end of the deal nobody that I know that is truly wealthy does that they're happy when other people make a lot of money what I do see is that when people are less wealthy they

spend all this time negotiating with other people that doesn't make you more money it just makes other people less and then eventually it makes you less because you could could have been spending all that time and energy into just making more money the grass is greener where you water it not where you watch it the next rule is that you don't need to change your beliefs to make more money but you do have to change your behavior I used to think that the reason I didn't make enough money was because I didn't have positive beliefs

about it and I see a lot of people buying into this which is like you think that your poor beliefs prevent you from accumulating wealth when the reality is that it's actually your poor behavior when I first was thinking I need to make more money I heard all these people talking about like you have to manifest the money and you've got to see it before you get it I read this book I remember and I'm not going to say what book it was cuz I'm talking the book specifically said I need to act as though

money is in abundance and I need to act as if I'm already rich in order to get more money and so I was like well I guess rich people give away money and so I started donating money and so I remember I was leaving the grocery store and I had just bought my food and I walk out and I see this homeless guy and he's like could you spare like any food I was like yes and I gave him all my groceries few days went by week went by I'm giving away my groceries to hobos

I'm donating money and I was like nothing's changing like you know these books are saying that if I if I believe and I act like somebody is Rich like this money is going to come to me and then I met my now husband and I started talking to him about how I was trying to make more money and he was like well what are you doing and I was like well I took a job where I'm making less money and so now I'm reading this book about how to make more money how to attract it

into my life life I remember he said this line to me that just like really stuck he said money doesn't discriminate who puts in the work to make it and I remember he said like you don't have to believe certain beliefs to make more money he's like you just got to work and then I really like stepped back and I was like what am I doing what if I didn't try and change the way I think and I just change what I'm doing every day and that was when I realized I should need put in

the work if I really want to make more money what do I need to do and I was like I need to take some risks because I am in a place now where the opportunity that I am in is one that is very limited in terms of its upside potential of making money and so that is when I was like I need to take a risk in terms of starting a business and that is what really propelled me into saying like all of this trying to manifest the money in my mind I'm going to try

and go make money with my hands the road to success you get there by working hard you don't get there with intention you get there by doing it and one of the key pieces in making more money is going from staying in your head to getting busy with your hands and a lot of people never make that switch they think by reading all these books and all this out there that for some reason your brain and your feelings are preventing you from making money I promise you that if you go out there and you do

the same things as a person who made a million dollars you will make a million dollars even if you don't believe you're worthy of it and that's what took me seeing it to understand it I didn't believe in myself and I didn't believe that it was possible for me to make that kind of money I didn't believe it was possible possible for me to make hundreds of millions of dollars never believed it once never thought it was possible ahead of time and here I am I just took action like somebody who could that's it that

is why this rule is so important because you can't manifest your way to a million bucks you have to go work for it money usually comes to the people who are too busy working to look for it go change your actions and your thoughts and beliefs will follow you don't need to read more books you don't need to change your mindset you need to take action there's a quote that I always remember by Tony Robins stay in your head you're dead nothing good comes from staying in our heads get out of your mind and get

into life and start taking action like somebody who could make money and it wasn't until I got out of this cycle of staying in my head and trying to change my beliefs in order to take action that I realized that that was actually what was keeping me stuck thinking that I needed to change my beliefs was preventing me from making money the last point is that the amount of money you make is directly correlated with the difficulty of the problem that you solve so Elon Musk was actually the first person I ever heard say this

it was a quote to the degree of if you want to make more money provide more value by solving harder problems the mission of Tesla to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy because we see what happens if we don't have sustainable energy and Elon is extremely passionate about that the mission of SpaceX is to make life multiplanetary all of the missions of every company that Elon Musk has all solve a very big problem and by consequence of that he makes a lot of money and so how does that translate to you I'll give you

an example I knew a guy and he had a software company and that software company did well and it was a software company that basically did SMS chat and so it facilitated a chat between a prospect and a company that wanted to acquire that Prospect and it just wasn't like growing like somebody would want it to and to me I'm looking at I'm like well it's a good tool at the same time there's like 30 other tools that solve that problem he wants to do a deal with me because we were one of the biggest

customers of this platform and so when he comes out there he actually presents me with something completely out of nowhere he says I've actually started a different company I just wanted to bring it to you cuz I started this new protein bar and I was like oh a protein bar very interesting and I'm thinking to myself this is probably going to fail because there's so many protein bars out there little did I know I took one bite of that protein bar and I was like I never want to eat another protein bar again it didn't

taste like a protein bar and it didn't have whey protein in it and I was like holy this is going to blow up why the problem that it was solving is a problem that no other protein bars in the market had solved which is that all of them gave you a stomach ache tasted like and had a lot of calories his was the lowest calories I'd ever seen didn't taste like protein didn't give me a stomach ache this company the tech company that he had actually ended up just floating along and then he sold it

off for like a couple million dollars this company blew the up and gave him a multi9 figure payday because he solved a harder problem you are directly paid in proportion to the difficulty of the problem that you solve I was a personal trainer and the most that I maxed out at was making six figures a year and that's because I taught people how to eat right and exercise so I'm helping them solve the problem but I'm not like fully solving it if you take it a next step further let's look at something like OIC how

much more money does the creator of OIC make than personal trainer Lila you just give somebody a medicine and then they aren't hungry and therefore they lose weight it's the same problem but we're removing the amount of pain they have to incur to have it solved that is why somebody who creates OIC is going to make more money than somebody who creates a workout program the amount of pain someone has to endure to get the solution again value is created when you create a better solution or you remove more pain from the solution and so

in this instance why what I realized was like oh my gosh I might have solved the problem but they have to incur so much pain in order for it to be solved it's not that valuable a lot of people stay stuck making less money because what they don't recognize is that they're solving either problems that don't create a lot of value or they're solving problems no differently than somebody else time over time again my personal wealth has gone up in accordance with the difficulty of problems that I am able to solve first I started one-on-one

teaching people how to lose weight I went from doing that to selling customers into gyms for gym owners and then I went from that to teaching gym owners how to get customers and then I went from that to teaching gym owners how to build sellable gyms and then I went from that to teaching business owners how to build sellable businesses then I went from that to teaching CEOs and found Founders how to build eight or nine figure Enterprises and each time what you notice is that I solved a harder problem and each time I took

a jump in solving a more complex problem or providing more value I made exponentially more money and it's just been solving harder problems or providing more value than anybody else by removing more pain from the solution I also wouldn't have been able to solve the really big problem if I hadn't first solved the very small problem at the beginning you can't expect that day one you're going to go from like zero to a billionaire it's just so rare that that happens because the skills that you accumulate in solving the small problem allow you to stack

those skills to then eventually solve the bigger problem if you solve harder problems you make more money but you can't skip steps the only reason I can make the money I make now is because I have put a decade of eating in and just time over time skill stacking solving harder and harder problems wealth comes from solving problems s that others are either unwilling or unable to solve for themselves