money attracts money so what if you don't have money what do you do you become money I have two books out it's about damn time and your first million behind me I've talked about your first million a lot but I haven't talked to you a lot about it's about damn time this is the first book that came out in 2020 tells my story of how I went from going from homeless to launching a $30 million Venture fund and investing in more than 200 companies tells you all about it and chapter one of it's about damn
time is called becoming money and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what that means today and how you can become money before we do that before I dive in I want to show you two things and before I show you those two things I want to tell you that until I was 35 years old I did not make more than $20,000 in one year and $20,000 was a good year I have been on food St food stamps and I have been homeless and I'm 43 today as I record this and until
it was 35 I didn't make more than 20,000 so I want to show you two things before we get started first is this see if I I'll move this aside and the second is this I wanted to show you those two things because of the Stark difference and what my life looked like 10 years ago and what it looks like today now I'm not balling out of control I have a net worth in the millions talked about this very publicly but like a lot of your faves uh I wor my money back into my companies
so I actually live kind of you know modestly uh and and at the same time so much has changed and there's so much value that goes out that I'm able to provide so much impact I'm able to have because 10 years ago I decided to become money when I didn't have it now the reason money attracts money there's a few reasons one is leverage if you have the ability to invest in Opportunities where that have potential to generate returns you have leverage you have access to better opportunities when you have money you have a different
type of risk tolerance now people like Mark cubin who are billionaires they're very risk averse but they can make these bold bets every once in a while when they want to and those pay off there's also a compounding effect which is like my favorite part of it the compounding effect of your money and of what it attracts and then there's a perception that comes along with having money so you you ever see when someone goes to a restaurant and they're very wealthy or well- known they'll get uhad sit ahead of the group they'll get right
on in and maybe their meal will be CED by the by the restaurant itself because they're happy that person's in the room or you see that when there's the Grammys or the Oscars or the emys people report getting thousands and thousands of dollars worth of free gear and merch just because these different brands want those in the hands of those famous people there's this there is this perception that comes with having money and having clout that get you more money so the more you have the more you tend to to attract and so how do
you become money you become the asset in my book it's about damn time I talk about this what I perceived as becoming money had different factors to it and the main factor was something that I needed it to be something that I could control something that did not cost more money and something that I could do even if I was broke homeless hungry because I I very often was and that is taking in information I believe that when Beyonce is saying ladies let's get inform formation in her song I believe she is also saying let's
get information I want to talk to her one day about that information changes everything you can call it educ as well but information it comes from a lot of different places and it's something that you can control I have become money several times one way was as I said going from being homeless to running a $30 million Venture fund and investing in more than 200 companies in a decade I've also used this idea of becoming money multiple times since very sometimes quietly sometimes not when I had to build something from scratch so I have a
fractional recruiting company called higher Runner that I bootstrapped to begin with and I became money what did I do I got the information I studied I did a lot of the things that you need to do for a company handson by myself for weeks and weeks and weeks and then brought on other people because I needed to become money because I did not have a lot of money to throw at it same thing with hot water which I actually had a little bit more money I had a few had maybe $60,000 that I could put
towards it but at the same time I did with $60,000 what most people would do with 20 times that amount because I used it to become money right I I became the asset the reason I was able to get my very first investor from Susan kimberland in 2015 is because I had spent years becoming money I said to myself they can't take anything that I learn away from me so I'm going to learn every single day even if I'm hungry and so when I met this angel investor named Susan and she had money but she
didn't have all the information she wanted I was able to help her with that information about investing in companies and she was able to help me with the money that I needed and so we were able to exchange and I exchanged my information for money I became money and then I attracted more so information is power if you feel incure if you feel like you have a lack of resources if you relentlessly acquire knowledge you Empower yourself now Relentless learning let's talk about that one thing you can do to start learning or continue learning is
to pick up it's about damn time this came out in 2020 right at the beginning of the lockdown and pick up your first million people ask me which one should I read first my suggestion is to read the first one first it'll give you a lot of context it's a fun read actually um it you know I was a little bit more humorous in it than I was in your first million where I button things up just slightly but they both contain so much information in in maybe 12 hours of listen time and a few
days or weeks of reading if you want to learn I would start there but what you're really doing think about where you are right now you're watching me where most likely on YouTube Instagram inside of my course you're watching me most likely on a on a platform that is it's accessible to you whether it's free or it's a few dollars per day inside of arland's all access Instagram Etc you're watching this so you're you're becoming money right now by watching this you are becoming money I bet you didn't know you were going to make some
money by watching this video right now right so this Relentless learning that you have control over my brother Rook he reached one million views on YouTube and when he posted his plaque that you get when you reach a million when he posted that on social he said I didn't graduate high school but I got a million subscribers and I have said views before but I meant subscribers and when he was in school we were four years apart and when he was in school he would get sent to remedial classes and he would be told by
his teachers that he was not very smart while at home I watched the boy take apart an entire computer and put it back together again so that it would run faster at the age of 12 13 14 he also taught himself how to record mix and master music he taught himself by watching videos by watching other people by doing so it wasn't it didn't look traditional to him you know to us it didn't look traditional he didn't go to a certain school he didn't even graduate high school but now he runs a media Empire in
Dallas Texas real life Street stars and everybody goes to him for advice for learnings for for information he became money so it's a Relentless drive to learn that you have the ability to do you may already be that type of person so I'm already preaching to the choir but if you're not that kind of person or you feel like the reason I I mentioned his remedial status in school is because he wasn't going to go and crack open a book and read a long book right but what he would do and what he has done
is he'll download the audio and he'll listen to the audio and he'll take it in and then he has that knowledge downloaded into his brain and then he goes out and he executes so don't let the way things used to be for you dictate what you do today if you I used to say all the time like in my 20s and 30s and 20s and early 30s I would say I don't like reading I don't like reading books it's incredible that I used to say that but I really used to say that to myself and
to other people I don't like reading when I realized actually about 10 or 15 years ago it's not well maybe 10 years ago it's not that I don't like reading it's that I didn't like reading fiction fiction for me was hard for me for the most part with some exceptions to imagine I wanted to see it as a movie but when I read non-fiction especially biographies about people that I admire I can eat that up and I and now I have this bookshelf behind me that you don't even see all of it it's probably two
or three times the size that you see and I'm in a lot of these books I wrote two books I'm in a lot of these books either talked about or literally writing in or wrote the forward to here's an example so Brad Feld is a a famous investor in the investing space he literally wrote the book on Venture investing he has de he has raised and spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars if not more than a billion and he also does really well when it comes to returns he makes good bets so he
wrote a bunch of books and when he wrote these books I didn't have a mentor but I was becoming money so I would read his books and I would read them more than once and one of those books that I read was this one startup communities I read it throughout my journey and you have to imagine 10 years ago or so when I first reached out to Bradfield and I was staying at a hotel it was like a comfort in in parland Texas and I was sharing a room with my mom we were always hungry
we were always worried about getting kicked out we were always late paying we figured it out on a day-to-day basis and then sometimes we couldn't so we'd get a rental car and we would just drive around from state to state not knowing where we're going to stay and that was the state of play where I was when I first reached out to Brad Feld and when I read this book and many others of his was around that time a little earlier and a little later than that fast forward a few years in the 2020s this
new book that's a sequel to communities is the startup Community Way comes out by Brad Feld if you turn to page 55 you will see that I have a section in it let see if we can see that try to get it Focus I know it's kind of hard I know it's hard to see but if you if you go to a store or a library and you find this book or you want to buy this book because it's an incredible book I have several Pages like two and a half pages in this book that
I wrote I'm trying to get it to focus but it's not gonna okay so I'm I'm essentially homeless while I'm reading the first book and then this the sequel to it comes out and I'm in the book writing for the book I was they reached out to me and said because of the work you've done we want you in this book what did I do say it out loud with me or put it in the comments if you're you're watching this right now put in the comments you became money and also put in the comments
I can become money too because you can so when I tell you these things when I when I post these videos on on YouTube and elsewhere I'm not saying it from a place of like this is something that' be nice for you to do or I think this will work or chat GPT told me so I'm telling you from a place of I do this all day long my whole life has been about going from nothing to something Ingenuity grit determination some sort of deep ins like inspiration within my heart that I have to find
within and also what you heard in that story was that I used these books as my mentors every week dozens and dozens of people reach out with this very specific ask of me and they say will you be my mentor and I don't have the ability to be everyone's Mentor because there's not enough time in the world but what I've done is I opened up arland's all access so if you go to the link in the description or in the bio depending on where you're watching this or if you're in the school right now hi
that is how I mentor and you you'll see from the people in there I'm in there every single day hours and hours a day pouring in to that community and then everyone else is doing the same and it's amazing I wish I had that type of thing 10 years ago when I was just flailing looking around for some sort of buoy some sort of thing to hold on to in this choppy Waters so that is a way it's not just about who can I reach out to and ask them to help me oneon-one it's about
what mentorship program can I create through a mixture of watching YouTube videos buying books and or reading them at the store like I did because I couldn't afford to buy them and joining things and being putting myself in those rooms you get a lot of confidence when you have knowledge I used to have debilitating stage fight debilitating stage fight where I could not get in front of 30 people to tell them about a t-shirt without like breaking into the sweats and I talk about that a lot and it's about damn time and I teach you
how to overcome your stage fright if you have it which 50% of the population has and one of the things I teach you one of the things I learned was that the more information I had remember information helped me become money the more information I had the more confident I was to speak on stages because one of the fears that I had was what if I don't know the answer to what they ask me or what if I get lost and the more information you have about the topic you're talking about through learning researching and
doing the more confident you are so if you see me live if you've ever seen me live you might say I have some confidence on stage I feel like I do and that's because I know what I'm talking about and if I don't know what I'm talking about I have the confidence now to say that I I really don't know the answer to that there's a lot of power in that so when you're becoming money and you're getting the information every single day you're stacking that like you would stack cash you become more and more
confident another thing that happens is you may have heard people say if you want to be interesting you need to be interested what that means is like if you apply it to so on social media it's easy way to apply it if you have a Tik Tok account Instagram account other types of accounts even YouTube but mostly like the the ones that have a feed some of their algorithms reward you for not just being someone who puts out content but being someone who likes other people's content watches other people's content and shares other people's content
and and that really is because just being someone on the site who's trying to get get get watch what I have and go do the thing I want you to do is very one-sided and is not very helpful to the ecosystem but if you can become interested and you can plug in and you can feedback give feedback and give back that's really what an ecosystem a healthy one should be like so some of these ALG ithms are rewarding that so you might even if you have like a stagnant just a side note if you have
a stagnant page or a stagnant account it may be because you're not feeding enough into the ecosystem for that platform to know that you're serious that you're giving so when you are interested you become even more interesting to other people because you quite literally are putting yourself in front of more people by commenting on other people's stuff asking other people questions if it's in real life or it's there are different ways to apply it so when the more interesting you become the more you become a main attraction and the more you become a main attraction
and the more attention you have on what you're saying the more you can get your word out your message out your brand out that is a major part of becoming money you go from being insecure to highly sought after let's take it back to my speaking I was had stage fright some people wanted me to speak you know that was one of the things that was happening people were reaching out and I was like oh I'm so worried about it but it wasn't like crazy numbers of people it was a few people so I I
made a decision and I'll talk about it I talk about it more and it's about damn time I tell this crazy story about how went from making zero to $10,000 real fast but you check it out in the book but one of the things I realized was more information I have the more confident I am the more confident I am the more I speak up the more I speak up the more I'm sought after which is why I have two books that each each gave me mid six figures I have the cover of Fast Company
magazine and the digital cover of Black Enterprise Magazine and those aren't all of them I'm in these books by some of my career Heroes if you think about this and you apply it to yourself where could you be in 10 years where could you be in five years in three years and in one year and arland's all access I'm taking people on a 12month journey because I know what can be accomplished in one good year people some people want overnight show me how show me the seven steps the seven uh lazy steps to making money
some people want that and I've obvious taught a little bit of that but if you want like sustainable real high dollar amounts there's a process so what I'm going to do and what I have been doing is I'm taking 10 years of me finally figuring it out how to make money how to generate Revenue how to raise and turning that into one year working with me side by side and a few of my few hundred friends and arland's all access again you can go to the link in the bio to learn more and we're doing
this every single week we're having this conversation another thing I love about becoming money and using information to do so is that learning is accessible obviously if we're talking about not having money for people who don't have any learning you can learn a lot for free it's accessible if you have some money it's even more accessible like it's leveraged access then you will one day soon if you're not already will become the mentor you will become the person who can give back you will become the one the way that you do this is that you
act look I'm going to show you in just a minute a break down what side by side breakdown I'm going to show it on the screen of what a person was0 with $100,000 and what person with a million dollars what they can do starting right this moment right this moment can do but if you do not take action it doesn't matter what I teach you and what I tell you you have to take action because I took action and I know what comes from that has it been easy hell no has it been like linear
like oh this is just smooth saling no way it's been I call it a heartbeat it's a heart think about what a heartbeat looks like on a chart on echogram it's ups and it's down it's ups and it's down but what you want in this entrepreneurial career journey of yours of just making money so you can have a a Freer life that's really what it comes down to right that's why we're watching these videos what it comes down to and what you want to happen is that you want those ups and downs because they're normal
and they're healthy and if you don't have the Downs you're not taking enough risk so you're going to be stagnant but you want every time you go up and then come down and then go up and then come down you want the down point on the chart to be higher than the last down point on the chart so you yes are going up and down but you're going higher ultimately that's what you want to do that's what you want to do by becoming money leveraging all of this information all of the things that you'll do
the things you'll learn the things that you'll do if you feel adversity the anecdote antidote to that is resourcefulness you have that power let me show you what I mean when I when I talk about this chart now just to summarize if you're still with me say in the comments I'm still with you I'm here I'm learning tell me give me a little feedback because I know this one I have been watching so closely who's been watching my videos especially on YouTube which is like the main platform I'm using I've been watching so closely what
you've been commenting what you've been watching like in the back end I can see where people dropped off where they came back where there was a spike what has resonated with you what type of person is getting the most out of these videos Etc and what I'm hearing from you time and time again is that if you watch these videos and you you're you're proving my point by being here right now you're in it like you you press play you may have it going on in the background but you're in it you're listening you're pressing
play you have your notebooks you have my books around you you're you're taking notes you're you're planning and plotting and strategizing and it's staying with you days and days and weeks after you watch and some of you come back and watch it twice three times four times just to catch things that you might have missed or because I taught you earlier sometimes you got to go back read that book again go back and watch that video again at a different time in your life because it hits different so I know you're here and I know
you're in this and I have a vested interest in you doing well 99% of the people who watch my videos 99% 99 out of 100 people are not going to ever buy anything for me they're not going to go to my your first million live event they're missing out they're not going to join arland's all access they're not going to buy a pen from me but they're going to get so much information they're not even going to get my book but they're going to get so much information and some of them will apply that and
some of them will go on to do great things and you come up to me all the time and you tell me that or you reach out to me you tell me that all the time that that's happening and then that one% that one out of a hundred will do something about it and will join arland's all access my events my books whatever so to me I'm talking to all 100 of you I care about what happens to all 100 in that group right hopefully a few thousand people will see this like they've been watching
my other videos but my point is I'm talking to the 100% of you and I I have a vested interest in you winning because there needs to be more of us who have access to capital resources power and beverage there have to be more of us becoming money means transforming yourself into a valuable asset by relentlessly acquiring knowledge building connections and taking persistent action that's what my book says you attract opportunities resources but also position yourself as someone others seek out for guidance making you a magnet for success and wealth go read my book if
you haven't already that's what it says