42 Brutal Truths I Wish I Knew In My 20s

here are 42 brutal truths that I wish I knew in my 20s at 25 I made my first million dollar in profit and by 28 I had over a $10 million liquid net worth I also got my pilot's license bought a plane fell in love moved into my Dreamhouse bought a boat and live a life that I never thought was possible however these are just the highlights I made a lot of mistakes and left a lot of money on the table along the way so to prevent me from making the same mistakes again and again

I created 42 principles that I now live my life by and today I'm going to share them with you number one the quality of my life is determined by the quality of my decisions everything you have or don't have everything you are or wish you were is because the decisions that you've made in the past 6 months one year 2 years 3 years and 5 years you have nobody to blame but yourself and while that's scary that also means if you start focusing on the decisions you're making today your life in the future can be

incredible number two the quality of my decisions is determined by my energy I can chock up almost every single thing in my life that I regret to making a decision when I had low energy when I was frustrated when I was emotionally unavailable when I was tired and I just snaap back I said something I agreed to something or I disagreed to something else just because I wanted to get it over with and little did I know that if I came at that problem with a full amount of energy fresh and brigh eyed then I

probably wouldn't have made that mistake which is why now I don't really make any big decisions unless I've had a good quality night's sleep which brings us to number three which is my energy is determined by my priorities my sleep and the food I eat you see a lot of people waste their decision-making power on Such trivial choices every single day what clothes should they wear where should they work what should they work on what food should they eat decisions that literally are going to have to happen every single day and then when the big

decisions come around they're so fatigued and so tired that they make a mistake or they just procrastinated all together in addition to it it's not just about the priorities though it's also about your physical energy what you have in your body and what I noticed is that the amount of sleep that I get and the quality of that sleep has a big determination on my energy and more importantly the food that I eat for the longest time I just thought I was eating healthy I tried to get organic food or natural food but it wasn't

until I made a conscious effort to pay attention to what food made me actually feel the best and look the best and then I got a allergy test I had a blood test I had a stool test I went and saw these doctors and I figured out a lot of the foods that I was eating day-to-day a lot of the foods that people tell me or were telling me we're really healthy were actually really bad for me and that's just because of who I am and how my body works and so once I started cutting

out all those things and just focused on foods that my body loves my energy levels have soared through the roof number four in order to test the quality of my decisions I ask myself does this Choice enlarge me or diminish me a lot of mistakes that people make in their 20s is they make decisions based on what makes them feel the happiest and the problem with that is that in our short-term dopamine filed Society whatever makes you feel the happiest is most likely a short-term benefit for a long-term loss so for example you watching a

movie in the middle of the day eating junk food not going to the gym you know scrolling on social media watching porn any of this stuff here is going to in the short term make you feel really really great but in the long term make you feel terrible but if you looked at those same questions through the lens of do these choices enlarge me or diminish me it makes it very obvious that scrolling on social media eating unhealthy food not going to the gym those all diminish you so instead of trying to use your happiness

as this internal Compass or guide ask yourself does this Choice enlarge me or diminish me number five the greatest joy in life comes from progress look I can say that I have bought a lot of toys I have planes I have boats I have cars I have motorcycles I live in this beautiful house but I can tell you personally that none of those things really bring me joy when I use those things maybe with other people like I talk about later they can help enable Joy or help create an environment where I find happiness but

in my own personal experience I am the happiest when I'm working towards something when I'm being challenged when I'm doing something new which is why a lot of people put money or objects or material things as the end results and then they get there and they realize that that thing brings them absolutely no happiness and a lot of people will then go into some kind of depressive state or at least that's what's happened to me right I made a million dollar in over a day and my goal was to get to a million dollars a

month for so long and it finally happened and nothing happened I realized that my life literally didn't change one iota Because by the time you're making a million dollar in a day or a million dollars in a month a million dollars doesn't change your life whatsoever and so instead I focused on creating challenges or tasks for me to do that I actually love doing that give me joy to do and I can work towards specific goals and when I do that that brings me more joy and happiness than any of these material things ever have

number six pain plus reflection equals progress we've all heard this saying no pain no gain and I feel like some people are like masochists and they just want to put themselves through repeated pain over and over and over again they're just like bulls or something like that but they don't realize that the other part of that equation is reflection you need to carve out time every single week to reflect on anything that caused you pain in the last week and identify was it good pain was it bad pain was it enlarging you was it diminishing

you and then continuously optimize your life based on this feedback loop so I reflect weekly I have time that I write in my journal I look at my calendar I look at my Tas I look at anything I did in my personal life and I try to figure out okay are these things things that I want to repeat is this pain that's bringing me towards progress or is this pain from regrets from mistakes that I'm making over and over again and then I just adjust my life accordingly number seven what you say to yourself matters

this is something that I struggle with for a very long time I used to have these goals of like I want to make a million dollar a month I want to make $10 million in a year I want to make all these things but what I didn't realize was that I was speaking into existence the very fact that I didn't have have those things and we're not going to get into the whole woo woo and like you know universe and vibrational frequency and stuff like that but I I was realizing that I was focused so

much on the lack of things that I just attracted more lack into my life in addition to that I realized that I would feel maybe angry or aggressive or upset if I had watched like a show about action or a war movie or I would feel certain types of way if I like was scrolling on social media too long it would affect that one you know minute 2 minutes 5 minutes I was on my phone would affect then how I interacted with the real world around me and so what I realized was that this music

that I listen to at my gym the reals I look at on on Instagram the videos I watch on YouTube the movies that I look at the people I surround myself with all of this is feeding my brain my brain doesn't know what's real what's not real what's in the moment what's not in the moment right it just processes all this data and so once I realized that I started to be way way more methodical about what I let enter my mind I mean if you even look at my Instagram account I only follow I

think a dozen people on there cuz I'm just so cautious of what somebody else can enter into my mind what someone can put on me and there's a great book out there called what to say when you're talking to yourself but a lot of people have negative selft talk when they're talking to them themselves every single day oh you should have worked harder you should have made this quote you should have done this and and they're just beating themselves up over and over and over again and and literally they know they're that they're putting themselves

in a state where they can almost never crawl out of it and instead you should be focused on abundance focus on already having the things that you quote unquote wish that you had and know that anything that enters your brain anything consciously or subconsciously that enters your brain matters number eight Simplicity is the key to any real progress this is actually a value in our company so I'm going to read it directly off of our company's Wiki so in a quest to get and be more it's very easy to add more but what I have

learned is that every single time it's better to have and do less in order to achieve more now I know that's kind of a word jumble there it's purposely like that but the point being that you know if you you want to if you want to achieve these amazing great things if you want to live this crazy amazing life you can't be encumbered you can't just have this business and that business and this offer and that offer and this relationship and that relationship and all these toys and gadgets and gizmos and these all just start

weighing you down more and more and more and you think oh I need more in order to get more but the people that I know that are operating a level that I want to operate at their life is incredibly simple they have the time Freedom they have location Freedom they have Financial Freedom and they're not encumbered by a lot of what modern days Society tells us is what we need and so I always try to focus whenever I'm looking at something I always ask myself if this were simple what would this look like and that's

typically the route that I go number nine constraints are what make life enjoyable almost anyone can do anything right we all have access to the same information and say for I don't know you trying to be like a professional basketball player or football player you could pretty much do anything you set your mind to and so what you want to do is you want to set constraints because that's what makes life enjoyable it makes my life more fun you want to set the rules of how you're going to live life so for example if I

say I wanted to make a million dollars I could do it right and you could do it you're watching this video right now but you're are you going to do it while sacrificing your relationships do it by sacrificing your health do it by sacrificing your integrity right you could do you could definitely do it right you could work 80 hours a day you could scam people you could do all this stuff or you could say I want to make a million dollars but I want to do it only working 15 hours a week and I

want to do it helping other people and you list all these things out and then it becomes like okay well this is more difficult to do but it's more fun that way so for example for me I end work every single day at 4:00 that's cuz I go to work or I go to the gym from 4:00 to 6 and so I no matter what whether I had a good day a bad day a productive day an unproductive day I end work by 4:00 and so when you're running a company at my size that means

that you have to be super specific with how you're spending your time and so I can't be spending my time on frivolous activities or activities I could delegate to somebody else I need to be spending the time only in the things that give me energy and have the biggest impact on my body line and so you have to figure out and ask yourself okay if I'm going to do this goal if I'm going to hit this goal here what constraints am I going to make around it to make it more fun and to also make

it more align with what I want my life to look like number 10 deal with reality don't hide from it I tell myself this every single day because it's very easy especially as you make more money you become more successful you can kind of like create this bubble around you to avoid facing things headon that have outcomes that you don't enjoy right it's something that you didn't want to to happen or you don't want to happen and it's happened anyway and so it's very easy for me to maybe not check that email not respond to

that client message not for example if you're watching this right now and you're not proud of your financial situation you could just not look at your bank account I used to do that when I didn't have any money I would never look at my bank account because I was embarrassed of what it was it would make me sad to look at my bank account but then I realized those all those choices were diminishing me and in the end you're going to have to face it you're going to have to face the music and so you

might as well face it head on you might as well practice radical transparency and just look at it straight in the eyes and one of the things I wrote down that I read every single day is if the decision is reversible make it fast to gain the most potential benefits so most of the decisions that you need to make the thing that you're afraid to make a decision on a lot of them are reversible it's very rare you'll ever find a totally irreversible decisions and so you delaying making that decision almost always has a negative

consequence on you right so if you were trying to I don't know let's say take a job you were thinking about taking this job and you're like oh well I want to start my business but I want to start this job and I could maybe make the money on this but I could maybe do this business thing over here well the whole time you're like oh should I take this or not you're not making any money you're not challenging yourself you're not growing and so if you got the job and you hated it you could

just leave you could just quit you go do something else or you could try to start your business on the side so that's a totally reversible decision but most of I won't say most of you but a lot of people in their 20s they will just delay and delay and delay and delay until they're like forced into making a decision now the other thing I wrote is that if it's irreversible take your time to protect your downside so the other part of this is that if you're about to make a decision for example who you're

going to spend the rest of your life with I think a lot of people just say oh you know I found this person they're great let me marry them within 6 or 12 months when in reality if you're in your 20s you barely know who you are in when you're 22 24 25 years old how the heck can you expect to know another person well enough to say I want to spend the rest of my life with them right and some people could say well divorce is reversible so you could do it that way but

you know that's not the way I look at marriage I wouldn't want to come into it thinking oh well this is a reversible decision I would see who I'm going to marry as an irreversible decision because I would want that person to be with me for the rest of my life otherwise why am I getting married in the first place so when you're coming at something that is irreversible then you want to make sure that you're taking your time so you can protect your downside from making mistake that could cost you a lot later on

number 11 time is our most valuable asset so we must protect it I told myself this for years and it's because I learned at a very early age that time is limited it's the only thing that we can't get more of you can always make more money but you can never get back your time so when we go back to that thing about constraints making your life more enjoyable I strongly recommend that you don't just sacrifice your entire life don't give away every single second that you have to the act of let's say making money

I know everyone's saying hustle and grind and 80h hour work weeks but I'm telling you I sit in rooms with people who have made hundreds of millions of dollars even billions of dollars and they all tell me the exact same thing they say slow down like don't go so fast enjoy the process because no matter what you're going to let's say have this huse exit for $ 600 million $800 million what are you going to do right after that you're going to go right back into working again cuz you cuz the joy in life comes

from progress so you're not going to sit around and and retire at 33 years old and and sail around the world that's going to be boring as hell so instead you're going to still want to work and so if you're just like sacrificing all this stuff in this short time period you're sacrificing all this time to get to this end outcome and then you get there and you realize it's not what you want you're just going to go back to doing exactly what you're doing before why not extend it over a longer time Horizon don't

worry so much about I have to make this money by this date and this age and instead just do what you love and eventually that money is going to going to flow with you and spend your time doing the things that you want to spend your time doing right because you'll never ever get that time back I know this is cheesy I know you guys all know this but it's so funny and I have to even remind myself every single day that's why I don't really do anything that I don't enjoy that doesn't enlarge me

I'd rather pay to avoid that thing that's why I have a house manager that's why I have an executive assistant that's why I have a whole company of people right uh that's why I pay for Ubers or I'll pay for Uber corer for example to go and get something across town and bring it over to me versus me getting the car driving over there coming back that's why I pay for my barber to come to here that's why I pay for my manicure and pedicure person to come to my house right it's it's all these

things because I want to protect my time so I'm at the point where I just want to pay to get as much time as I can and then I want to be really really selective with how I deploy and allocate that time number 12 I will never do anything that can be delegated to someone else now these are principles and so they seem somewhat extreme and obviously I do things that could be delegated to someone else for example you can delegate everything to someone somebody else but I definitely go way above and beyond what most

people would say oh no that's just let me just do that right all the things I just told you about a second ago having my barber coming to my house hiring a house manager I have somebody literally charge my electric toothbrush for me right and so I know people going to go in the comments and be like that's insane this guy doesn't realize I get the oh it's electric doesn't he know that like you don't you just have to charge it and put it on the thing but I don't even want to think about it

it's not even in my brain like I don't think about the all the things that most of you do on a personal like level like your scheduling taking out the trash picking up mail all these little things and I I know I know I sound insane I'm just telling you that if this is what you want if you really want to protect your time it's really your most valuable thing then why would you not delegate out all the things that are sucking up your time that have to get done that you just don't enjoy doing

and of course I've done this over the past 5 years it wasn't like one day I woke up and was like I'll never do anything ever again but over time you should be starting to delegate things out that you don't love doing so that you can focus your time and energy on the things that you absolutely love doing so for example today the only thing I might calendar is shooting this YouTube video that's all I have to do today right so that allows me to then fill the time up with things that I wouldn't want

to delegate to someone else like let's say playing paddle with my friends or spending quality time with my girlfriend because I I really love those things but then everything else outside of that I'm going to pay somebody else to do it for me number 13 every time you do something it could be for the very last time so treat it accordingly once pass your remaining supply of these moments will be one smaller than before this is a nice reminder because even as systemized and as delegated as my life is I still do stuff all the

time that I don't want to do right life happens like stuff happens just yesterday I had to do this like errands back and forth because something happened in my life and I remember thinking in my head like oh my God this is such a waste of my time I wish I could hire somebody else to do this for me and then I just realized like wow I could literally die on the way home from this from this ride or I could be riding on the way home and something insane could happen I could get in

a car accident and never feel my legs again and I could never drive a car after that right so it's it it reminds me that in every moment this could be the last time you ever do that one thing it's the last time you ever speak to your parents last time you ever speak to your kids last time you ever speak to your sa another that's why my girlfriend and I never go to bed upset at each other right because you don't know is the other person going to wake up in the morning and so

you have to keep that in mind at the Forefront of your mind for everything that you do and that way even if you're doing things that you don't enjoy you might as well think of it like well I could literally not be around tomorrow so at least I'm doing something versus being dead number 14 systemize and if possible eliminate or automate decision- making you want to make it as easy as possible to to do things that are good or things that enlarge you and make it as hard as possible to do things that are bad

or diminish you the truth is that most negative consequences come not because we don't know something is bad for us but because we rely on ourselves very unreliable people to make this decision frequently so for example at the end of every single day after you've had a long work day you go downstairs and you want to have dinner well you have Uber Eats on your phone or you have this like lean ground beef that you could cook and make a meal of and so every day you're forced with making a decision and you're like oh

well I could cook this all up but then I got to cook it I got to clean it you know or I'll just Uber Eats and I'll have Chipotle at my door in 10 minutes right and so you're relying on yourself to make the decision every single day and we're not very reliable people and as I talked about earlier your energy matters and so you're making this decision at the end of the day and that's also when you're get into junk food and ice cream and all that stuff because you just don't have any willpower

left so instead you want to automate or eliminate that decision-making so for example for me I have 14 out of the 16 meals that I eat every every single week are delivered to my door and so I don't even have to think about it I'm I'm not even considering it I go downstairs the meal's already cooked I throw it in my air fryer and it's ready in 3 minutes it's way faster than even if I try to Uber Eats it right and I also eliminate decision- making by we don't keep anything unhealthy in the house

because I'm I'm not perfect I make mistakes all the time and if there is a bag of Doritos in my house if there is ice cream in my house if there is chocolate in my house I will destroy that thing I will just literally it will be gone in a matter of seconds I will inhale the entire carton of ice cream I'm talking about the big ones too right and so I just eliminate it all together I keep it outside of my house so I never have to think about it I never have to make

the decision rely on me to make the decision cuz I know that's not going to end well number 15 identify the disease not just the symptoms you can immediately cut off or alleviate a symptom but it will always come back unless you find and eradicate the disease for example your sales team underperforming is a symptom having no quality control over what leads are qualified and can make it on the calendar is the disease watching too much TV is a symptom not having a meaningful challenge it is is a disease a great example is as I

talked about in the intro I just moved into my Dreamhouse Miami Beach and at my old condo my girlfriend and I used to watch TV almost every single day right I would end the day that way and we would watch like a show it was kind of how we spent time together and that was because I had systemized and automated my life so much that I had so much free time on my hands and since we moved into the new house we've been so busy because we're in this new neighborhood we're meeting our neighbors hosting

dinner parties we're going out and playing sports like or it's even just like the TV is in a different room all these different things that we haven't watched we've been here for three and a half weeks almost four weeks now we haven't watched one episode or one one show one any TV whatsoever and that's because we're so busy at this point doing other things and so instead of being like oh let me hide the remote oh let me schedule my TV time from 6:00 to 7:00 blah blah blah that's I trying to cut off the

the symptom but instead I went to the disease which was like well I'm just I'm just not doing enough things that challenge me outside of work and that's why when I have free time I just watch TV so once I did that now I no longer watch TV number 16 weigh second and third order consequences most of the things that hurt me are after a pleasant first order consequences so for example when I watch TV I feel good immediately if I were to do drugs I feel good immediately if I drink alcohol if I have

something really sugary all of that I do immediately these are typically what people desire when you're like oh I really craving ice cream I'm really craving you know a mday and watching TV these are all what's known as first order consequences and most things that are bad for you have really great first order consequences however most things that are good for you have an uncomfortable first order consequence so for example working out fixing problems in your business spending hours every single day just reflecting on your week and trying to optimize it that way those are

typically considered goals okay so what we want to do is we every time you're making a decision you think not just about the first order but the second and third order consequences another great example I see people doing in their 20s is they uh start renting a house or they get this crazy cool car or something like that because they're like oh I can just put 3% down or oh I can have 0% down oh oh the monthly payment is just is $3,000 or $2,000 or something like that but what they're not thinking about is

that you have to make that monthly payment every single month when business is good and when business is bad you got to pay the insurance on top of it you have to pay any maintenance that goes on top of it and another really big one that I recently learned when I sold my plane is that you have to factor in depreciation so when I when I bought a plane I wasn't thinking the second and third order consequences of okay when I sell this plane I have to factor in depreciation so I lost a little bit

when I sold the plane because of the depreciation I I didn't actually think about that when I bought the plane and so now when I bought my boat I thought about I factored I used chat gbt and I factored in okay what's the average appreciation if I own this boat for three plus years blah blah blah and I calculated every single thing in and I gave it the most conservative monthly payments of what it would be if everything went wrong and I could never you know use it and there was problems all the time what

would be my monthly payment I had to do on it and that number once I was comfortable with that that was when I bought the boat number 17 I am the designer not the worker of my life so in every single one of you there's two types of people there is the designer and this is the person that is the Visionary this is the person that says this is how I want my life to live by this is the person that's doing that reflecting this is the person that's thinking about that second and third order

consequences this is the person that's thinking about the quality of your decisions and how that affects you in the future how this is the person that's trying to prioritize your sleep and what you eat etc etc this is the designer of your life they're systemizing your decision-making process right but the problem is most people are living on the other part of their life which is the worker this is the person that just gets task done they just do whatever it needs to get done they wake up they go to work they do things in their

personal life and they're just so busy all the time that they don't take a second to actually live to actually ask themselves is this what I want my entire life to look like and so the more that you can make your life the designer the more you can get anything you want to out of life the problem is most people don't spend enough time deciding what do they actually want out their life so a fun fact is in September of last year I created something I called my life Manifesto and it was what I wanted

my three-year goal to be I'm actually if you see me looking to the left if you're watching on YouTube I'm literally reading off of my life Manifesto right now so at the very top I wrote down this is I don't know how many words I think it's like 5,000 words but I wrote down every single thing I wanted in my life I act like I already have it and it said for June 1st I'm sorry January 1st 2027 and so I write things like my life is simple and abundant I frequently identify the the things

that bring me happiness and ruthlessly cut everything else out I really am very special I like who I am and feel good about myself I prioritize my health and energy I'm healthy fit and full of energy let's see I do not drink or do drugs I have less than 10% body fats I frequently get compliments on my jewelry clothing and outfits my home is incredibly inviting and cozy but high class it's on the water in a gorgeous W neighborhood with a boat slip you know I have a 2020 part 38 which is what I bought

in my boats I have a portion 11 GTS I have a Triumph we hang out and share meals with fantastic people enrich our lives and enhance our fun our conversation are meaningful positive uplifting and educational so these are all things that I sent I sat down and I wrote out exactly what I wanted my life to look like in three years and I did that in September of last year and then I read this two times a day when I wake up and when I go to bed every single night and by simply writing it

down and reading it every single day once again I won't get too woo woo with you but I started attracting these things in my life so much so that in January 1st of 2027 is what I gave myself to to achieve all these goals remember I wrote this in September of 2023 it is now October of 2024 and I have I live about 85 to 90% of my life Manifesto already and you know these weren't small goals but I also was so afraid to set bigger goals cuz I never designed what I wanted my life

to look like before and so now I've designed my entire life and I'm living this dream life that I only once I literally dreamed of it by being the designer and so now I get way more fun simply deciding what do I want my life to look like I spend so much time thinking of that and so little time actually working it's kind of funny it's the exact opposite of what everyone else tells you to do but that's the way that I've been able to live my dream life that's the way I that's the way

I do live my dream life is by defining first what I want my dream life to be not what other people want my dream life to be number 18 things are neither good nor bad but thinking makes them s so this is actually a Shakespeare quote I believe but it's a nice reminder that things aren't good they're not inherently good you making a million dollars it's not good it's not bad some people might say it is good some people might say it is bad you getting a divorce you breaking up with your girlfriend or boyfriend

that's not good that's not bad you are prescribing meaning to all of this stuff here so if you can take a very unemotional approach to something it makes life way easier so if you can see everything as an opportunity everything is something that's good then your life is never going to have any issues right you're not going to have any problems because you're defining this thing as a problem in the first place and just to show you an extreme example some of you might have heard this story but I think two years ago I lost

legitimately Millions of dollars millions of dollars of after tax money I lost because I was a part of a like crypto I won't say Ponzi scheme but it was somewhat of a Ponzi scheme and it was like with this really reputable company and I I had a lot of money on there and they went bankrupt they went under they locked all and froze all the assets and I I won't see them again so I lost millions of dollars now in the moment in that in that first week that was probably some of the most supressed

i' ever been in my entire life cuz you got to think millions of dollars in after tax money multiply that by like 50% and that's how much money you had to make in profit in your business to be able to have millions of dollars in after tax money so it it had felt like I had wasted like years of my life because of this but then I realized like okay I'm just I'm just I'm viewing it as a negative thing I'm viewing it as a bad thing and so instead I just turned my mind around

I said you know what it's a good thing because better that I L I do this at the age of I don't know 28 or 29 when I have the ability to recover and make money again when I'm young I still have my health on it and when I can learn from my mistake and you'll see my final principles on here have to do with my investment strategy and so now I learned a bunch of mistakes that I did I I learned from that original thing so now I see it as a good thing and

I know it's insane right it's like how could you lose millions of dollars in seed is a good thing because I'm simply choosing to see it that way number 19 I value experiences over things and more specifically experiences with people I enjoy being with can learn from and who value the same experiences equally or more that's kind of a really fancy way of pretty much saying that I like to hang out with great people right I I'd rather spend money with great people investing into going on trips with them or them coming to my house

or or me going to go see them whatever else it is then I would to buy a new watch or new clothes or something like that but I don't just want to be around people I'm actually really as you know cautious of who I spend my time with so I only want to do with people that I can learn from who I enjoy being with and who value the same experiences equally or more meaning I don't want to go on a trip with someone which I've done this before and the whole time they're moaning they're

complaining oh this thing wasn't right that thing wasn't right this trip is blah blah blah I don't ever want to be around that person that's the Terrible terrible person to be around and so I've identified that one of the times that I'm I'm the happiest is when I'm around other like-minded people we're not we don't have to talk about business all the time but it's other people who share the same ideas and thoughts and values that I do and they're excited to be there as much as I am maybe even more than I'm excited to

be there those are the things that I truly value my life and so that's why I talked about this earlier when I bought some of these things like well I didn't buy my house I'm reading my house but when I moved into my house or when I bought my boat it was because I was like these things can enable more experiences right so I can invite my friends or people that are coming in town that I really respect I could say hey you're in Miami for the week why don't I take you out on my

boat we'll spend the day together and so that's I I bought that for that reason I didn't buy a boat to show it off on Instagram and to say I bought a boat I've actually not even made a post about it on my Instagram yet I bought a boat so that I could then invite people that I care about on the boat and we could spend quality time together same thing with my house we had our first dinner party this last weekend and so I invited people that I cared about I wanted to learn from

and that Shar the same values with me we had uh three couples two other couples my girlfriend and I and we spent a really quality dinner together that my girlfriend cooked for us right so the entire dinner probably cost us $200 right but so it's not like it was incredibly expensive it was cheaper than us going out for sure but it was the fact that it was with quality people that made me love it so much number 20 I always prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption this is because it's very easy for you to say

I'm tired I'm exhausted I want to take the day off so let me just veg out let me lay on the couch let me watch TV let me scroll on Instagram whatever else it is the problem with that is if you've noticed most of the time when you do that you actually feel more tired than you were previously so for me what I try to do is a demanding activity so if I'm feeling tired or or exhaust or something like that I'll go play paddle with my friends I'll go work out I'll sit in the

sauna I'll hit the coal plunge I will try to read something I'll try to do something stimulating because I've actually found that when I'm able to do that it forces me to be in the present moment and then when I'm in the present mode I'm I'm happy and then after that I'm actually much more able to relax and recharge I can take a nap after that I can go to sleep after that etc etc so I almost try as much as possible to never fall into passive consumption of me just laying on the couch and

all of a sudden 6 hours have passed and haven't done anything because I know for a fact that I will regret that in the future and it won't make me any more energized number 21 speak slowly with intention and practice Temperance nothing good has ever come from responding with emotion quickly and without thinking this is something that I have to remind myself very constantly cuz if you haven't noticed yet or watch my videos I like to talk very quickly and what I've learned is that most of the time the people that I respect the most

in this world that I love talking to they speak very slowly they speak very intentionally and if you're watching this video and you've been with me so far and all of a sudden I just changed up the speed at which I'm talking you're probably paying closer attention and so even right now this is how I'm going to try to finish the rest of this video but it's very hard for me so I try as much as possible not to respond very quickly I try as much as possible not to respond emotionally and to respond without

thinking and so anytime someone says something to me I actually take a few seconds before I respond back to them number 22 how I do one thing is how I do everything this is something that my girlfriend and I say to each other almost every single day but it's a law that I hold true the way that you make your bed affects the way that you run your business the way the clothes that you wear every single day affects the way that the world perceives you how you literally do every single thing it matters and

most people think well no one's going to see this or no one's going to care about this or I'm the only person that's going to ever know that this happened but you don't understand that that is a simply a standard that you're setting for yourself so if you are out of shape if you eat unhealthy and you look bad then if I were to try to do work with you I would say well this person obviously doesn't care that much because if they cared they'd have a higher standard and if they have a had a

higher standard they wouldn't let themselves look or be that way and some of you might find that terrible or mean but I'm just telling you that that's almost always the case and that's why just as a to side note I literally laugh out loud when I see some of the people who are in charge of our health system in the United States and how unbelievably obese these people are how unbelievably unhealthy these people are how could you put somebody in charge of the diet or nutrition in the United States that is legitimately 100 to 200

pounds overweight what makes that person qualified right so understand that everything matters everything you do matters and how the world perceives you will be based on everything that you do number 23 making money is easy don't make it hard this is in here because I learned after working like 80 90 hour work weeks that I was making as much money as when I worked like 10 to 20 hour work weeks and because I was so conditioned around work work work grind grind grind I was literally creating work for me that didn't actually impact the bottom

line whatsoever and I learned that you you can make money incredibly easy money is abundant it flows to you from multiple sources there's an unlimited amount of money out there and so instead of choosing the hardest way to make money why not choose an easy way to make money and another really example of this I see people that I know friends or whatever else it is making an unbelievably like gobs and gobs and gobs of money and they they barely even work and so I have to ask myself I'm forced to reflect and say if

they're barely working and they're making all this money and I was working really hard and I'm only making this amount of money then obviously working hard doesn't equal making more money and so that's why I remind myself that making money is easy don't try to make it hard on yourself number 24 we are unbelievably tiny and short-lived don't sweat the small stuff we are one of 7 billion in our population which occupies 1 3,000 of Humanity's existence we are one of 10 million different species Earth is one of a 100 billion planets in the galaxy

with two trillion galaxies in the universe AKA it doesn't matter chill out it's fine it's okay everything that you're stressed and worried about right now it's literally such a small thing on the grand scheme of not just your life but the entire universe that it is actually funny it's it's hilarious now when I think about how worked up I used to get over all these little trivial things when no one's going to give a you know what in 10 years in 5 years in maybe even 2 weeks no one's going to remember this things that

you're worried about today and so I always remember myself that it's we are on this planet for such a short amount of time and we are so much less important than what we think we are that it's not I shouldn't sweat so much of all the small stuff number 25 my anger or sadness typically stems from an assumption that I have no options or an assumption that I don't know the right option to pick this is on here because whenever I found myself angry at somebody else or angry at a situation it's because I think

that oh there's no way I can get what I want out of this outcome there's no way that I can get the things that I wanted to get out of this outcome to happen but once again first of all things are neither good nor bad thinking makes them so so you can just decide actually this is a good outcome second of all what I've learned here is that there's always more options you can always turn any problem into an opportunity and so if I'm sad about something or if I'm angry about something I need to

realize that I'm just making an assumption that there are no options or I don't know the right option to pick when in reality all of them can be great if I choose to make it so now number 26 you cannot be both present and unhappy at the same time you may be in an unhappy situation but you are not unhappy it's just a situation to be dealt with this is from the book The Power of Now and it's I I was trying to reflect and figure out why is it when I'm riding my motorcycle why

is it when I'm flying my plane am I so stressfree am I so happy and I realize it's because doing those things forces me to be in the present moment right same thing when I play uh like sports with my friends why am I so happy why is it so relaxing for me it's because I am forced to be right here I can't even think about I don't have time to think about the problems of next week or these things going on these things there it's because I'm forced to be here and right now and

so you know if I don't want to spend my whole life flying planes and riding motorcycles I need to learn to be present even when I'm not doing these insane crazy stunts or activities and so now I just try to practice being present every single day I try to practice whenever I feel my mind wandering I try to bring it back into the present moment another great way that I do that is through meditation that forces me to be present and kind of throw out those thoughts that are trying to attack me on a day-to-day

basis number 27 don't be a part of other people's agendas create and follow your own I remember this happened one time when my friend invited me to go out on his boat in Miami and I didn't want to go I had work to do and I didn't really want to go on this boat for like multiple different reasons but like I felt bad and and I was like oh well can we change the time here he like no I can only do this time and it's not my friend's fault whatsoever this is totally my fault

but because I was was like trying to appease his agenda I went on that boat and then I didn't even enjoy the boat and I didn't enjoy after the boat because I was so stressed out about all this other stuff going on and so I realized like okay the only way that I can make sure that I am designing this life that I want is I create my own agenda so I don't want to be a part of somebody else's agenda I want to create my own agenda now the best part is that when you

create your agenda and it can match up with other people's agendas that's amazing but I'll no longer subvert my agenda for somebody else's agenda because I know that that almost always leads me being unhappy number 28 say no as often as possible to both myself and to others this kind of goes along with 27 but you know don't be afraid to say no if you want to Don't Be Afraid someone invites you to their wedding someone invites you to you know some kind of party someone invites you to a dinner someone hits you up oh

let's go get coffee let's go do this thing here I used to be I used to feel so bad like even with my clients like I have clients come into town sometimes they hit me up and like oh let's grab dinner let's do this and you know sometimes I do hang out with them but I almost felt like I was obligated to go spend time with that person but then I I'm not obligated to do anything for anybody it's not in our contract that I have to go to dinner with this person and so I'm

not going to I'm not going to be afraid to say no to somebody if I want to if I don't want to do something just say no to it same thing to myself right I'm not I'm okay to say no to myself I'm like oh man I'd really really it's it's Saturday I'd really like to have ice cream I'd really like to do this thing over here I can say no to myself as well even if it's the thing I feel that I want I can give myself permission to say no number 29 our comfortability

is literally killing us on a cellular level stay away from too much convenience and cheap dopamine the longer the wait for the payoff such as building a business working out flying my plane the stronger the endorphin high and the longer we will live this is why I don't drink alcohol do drugs eat refined sugar or watch TV or social media so I there's a lot of studies and science that shows out there but the way that we live right now the way that most people live right now is legitimately killing you every single day because

you need uncomfortability in order for your cells to adapt and grow if you live this life of you look at some of these like Saudi princes royal family people that have money that is handed down to them you wonder how could they mess it up how could they kill themselves so early through drugs or or be so lethargic whatever else it is it's because it is that same access to comfortability that is their actual demise the thing that you think you want so much of it's actually a thing that likely will kill you very early

on and so try to prioritize whenever possible the things that delay a longer payoff like building a business becoming really great a specific skill working out you know for me flying my plane etc etc number 30 don't let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what's true this is a reminder for me because when I was younger I was the person who always wanted to prove other people wrong and even when I knew I was wrong after the facts were presented to me I would be very stubborn I

would be very oh well like that that doesn't count because of these reasons here oh blah blah blah blah and I would never admit that I was wrong and now I actually start a conversation and argument with the assumption that I'm wrong I started saying like I could be wrong about this because I've learned that that is a way better way and I say face way more I cannot tell you in my business how many times I came to an employee a contractor somebody and I was like why is this not done why haven't you

done this and they're like I sent this long message and they're like dude I did this yesterday or two days ago three or you told me not to do this a week ago and this is a message here and I just look like an idiot right and so I now never assume that I'm right and I now always just seek for the truth so if they say oh I've already told you this instead of me being like no you didn't I say okay show me where you told me this and then they show it to

me and I go great this was my mistake I'm sorry so I try as much as possible not to look at what's right or wrong but simply look at what's true or not true number 31 there is an incredible Compound Effect from working with the same people over and over again I'm really fortunate in my business to have team members that have been with me for three or four years since almost the start of my business and when you work with somebody like that it's like having a in a relationship like a partner when you're

working with with someone like that there things you've greased the wheels things go so much smoother that way you don't have to question their motives you don't have to question and make sure they know what they're doing you don't have to wonder how they check the SOP on this thing you don't have to question their decision-making framework you already know right and so For Better or For Worse you know what you're going to get from that and so there's a huge Compound Effect if you have someone really great inside your business do everything you can

to keep them inside your business because having to start with new employees over and over again like every 3 months 6 months months 12 months something like that that turnover that can kill your bu business faster than almost anything else will number 32 be wary of your associations this is one way the world judges you if someone shows you who they are believe them this is on here because I realize that if I were go to an event or I was on somebody's podcast and someone took a photo of me with them if that person

ever ended up doing something bad later on and I was shown in a photo with that person now all of a sudden I could be associated with doing something bad and so that's why you see like really successful people they're very insulated they don't let a lot of people in their Inner Circle and that's for a variety of reasons but one of the reasons is because the world will judge you with who you surround yourself with so if I was surrounded by a bunch of terrible people you're probably going to assume that I'm a terrible

person if I'm surrounded by a bunch of great people you're going to assume that I'm probably a great person and if somebody shows you who they are if your mom your sister your dad your uncle your brother a client an employee a friend if they do something and you're like wow I did not know that person was like that and then you think oh that's just that one time they were just stressed they were just this you're kidding yourself you need to believe that that is exactly who that person is and treat it accordingly because

they have showed you who they really are and so once someone shows you who they are don't justify it know that's who they are and then decide if you want to keep that person in your life or not number 33 if it's not going to grow on its own it's not worth doing going back to what I talked about earlier about the compound effects and making money the easy way not the hard way if you're going to spend all this time doing something you might as well do something that can grow on its own so

examples of thing growing on their own would be like my YouTube channel so that's one of the reasons why we're very bullish on YouTube I can I have videos that I created three years ago that are still growing my Channel today another example will be recurring Revenue I have a membership site called scaling school that makes me a considerable amount of money every single month and new people come in and I don't have to do any work on it another thing would be referrals from current clients we focus so much on making our client success

experience so amazing that we have clients come in they love us they refer more clients then they come in they refer more clients and so all these are ways that I don't have to continuously push this rock up the hill I can do that initial work and then it can slowly grow on its own and those are the things that you want to prioritize doing in your life number 34 create a culture in which it's okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them people are always either focused on never making any mistakes

they're so perfect and they create this environment that nobody wants to live in or admit their mistakes so people lie or they create a culture where oh mistakes are fine yeah yeah okay yeah I know you said that you're were going to do this again and you didn't do it blah blah blah but it's okay we're a culture of acceptance and blah no you want to create a culture where it is okay to make mistakes that's fine okay people make mistakes that's the only way you can learn and grow but if that person makes the

same mistake over and over and over and over again and you've given them the proper training and feedback that shows that you shouldn't be doing it then that is the person you should fire that is the culture you should create where you should say I've given you so many opportunities here it's clear that you either don't understand this mistake or you don't care and so at this point we're going to have to let you go and that's what I really pride myself at our company is that I allow people to mess up but if they

mess up three four five times in a row after we've already told them that person's got to go 35 success is getting there Excellence is staying there I read this in the book I think it's The Road Less stupid but it's a great quote because you can everyone says oh you're successful oh you're successful oh you're successful but typically success you can do a short burst of success you could do one to three years of your life you could be very successful you could accumulate wealth you could accumulate material objects even great relationships great family

etc etc but if you don't maintain that level of standard for yourself when nobody's watching when after you've won all the accolades after you've gone on stage after you've been commended then you're going to lose it all and so that's why success is getting to that point but Excellence is staying at that point consistently over time number 36 technology should be enabling us to do l L and less work and have higher and higher returns AKA leverage if you're in business I don't care if you're working for somebody else or you run your own company

I don't care if you're a brick and mortar or you're a tech SAS startup you need to figure out how you should be leveraging technology to your benefit most people are consumed by technology but the smartest people out there they figure out how they can leverage technology to grow their business without a lot of overhead so a great example is this I talked about this on my Instagram recently but a lot of people don't know their revenue per employee this is a metric that people use to essentially measure the efficiency of a company so if

you have 10 employees you make a million dollars a year then you have a $100,000 Revenue per employee what should be happening is every year you should be having a higher and higher Revenue per employee because every year more and more technology like AI is coming out that's replacing employees or it's allowing employees to do multiple jobs at once because the technology is doing a lot of the work for them so you should be aiming for a revenue per employee of 200,000 400,000 800,000 that number should be increasing over time and if it's decreasing over

time then you're going against the trend and you very likely will find yourself out of business number 37 always take into account someone's believability and their ability to articulate this is important because kind of like what I talked about earlier if somebody shows who they are believe them in our company our leadership team we create what I call a change log and it's any decision that we make as an organization or as a team leader proposes to us I write it in this change log with the date and the person that made that decision and

the reason we made that decision and what happens is over time we can see if this person made the right decision or wrong decision and so when I talked about earlier creating that culture where you allow mistakes but you don't want them to happen over and over again if you consistently have somebody proposing ideas and telling them you got to do this you got to do this you got to do this and then you do it and it doesn't work out it doesn't mean you necessarily have to fire them right away but you need to

take into account their believability in the future so let's say for example your media guy guy says you need to be on Tik Tok you need to be on Tik Tok you need be on Tik Tok you get on Tik Tok nothing happens you need to be on Snapchat you you get on you need to be on Club grp you need on Club gr you get on nothing happens right and so they've told you three different times you do this thing you do it you never see an increase in sales well now the next person

comes on and say you need to be on insert new trend right here you're going to take into account their believability as to whether you're going to take their advice or not and the second part of this their ability to articulate is so important when it comes to business we just had our quarterly meeting about a week ago and we've gotten so good at these now where my leadership team only comes to me with a Google document with an unbelievable amount of data that they have cleared up through chat GPT and present to me the

decisions they want to make or the reflections of why they hit or didn't hit their previous quarters goals that it makes the meeting so simple and so easy so if somebody can say hey Ry here's why we didn't hit the marketing goal it was because these things here that caused to this that led to this and this is what we're going to fix next quarter and here's the data that I have to back this up then we're done okay cool there's no emotion involved in this great good to go but what most people do is

they go oh we didn't hit it because and they just ramble for 45 minutes on something they could have said 3 minutes if they did a little bit of preparation beforehand number 38 don't hold opinions on things I know little about this became a way for me to almost forgive myself or give me permission not to keep up with all of these things going on in the world so I like to think I live a very simple life and I kind of protect myself I insulate myself from a lot of what goes on outside of

the world for example I didn't even know there was a hurricane coming until just like a day or two ago and so sometimes people are shocked and they're almost upset but when I go in a conversation and someone's like what do you think about this election and this political figure here and that there I literally never say anything I legitimately never say and then when people ask my opinion I say unfortunately I don't know enough about this to talk about it because I just don't care and what will happen more often than not is if

I try to say something because I'm afraid of looking dumb I'll sound like an idiot because I have no idea what's going on and so now I am totally comfort with the fact that for example right now I know nothing about sports is 0% about sports I have no idea any of what's going on in anything in the sport World politics I have absolutely no idea the weather the local news none of the stuff I even know about government ordinances don't even care about whatsoever and so I'm not going to hold an opinion on these

things if I know so little about it and that's totally fine for me because the things that I do know a lot about I do know a lot about it and I'm not afraid to hold an opinion about those things and be Str strong-headed about that opinion it's okay for me to be wrong and I'm I'm totally fine admitting that but I will have an opinion about it but that's because I've simplified my my life and my my energy towards the things that I really do care about and those I'll defend and the things that

I I could care less about I won't even talk about number 39 it's important to wake up every day at 100% And already know what my most important tasks are for the day what I've learned is that once you get to a level where you've done all these other principles and you've optimized and you systemized you've delegated you're going to have a lot of free time on your hand and so sometimes you can use that free time for good or you can use it for bad and what I found myself doing was I was using

my free time for bad and so I would only I would optimize my time to where I'm only doing the highest leverage activities in my business like making uh these YouTube videos or working on the strategy of my business working on the product etc etc but because I was only working let's say 3 to four hours a day in all that other time if I was eating junk food or watching TV or staying up late then the next day in the morning when I needed all of that really great energy to do those really hard

things that I need to be doing for those three to four hours I wouldn't have the energy to do it I wouldn't want to do it I wouldn't be at 100% because of the decisions I made the day before and so you almost think oh well if I delegate all my life out and I systemize all my life out I have all this freedom I don't have to do anything I don't want to do but that's true to a point but the truth is is that when you do that you're likely only going to be

doing really difficult deep work things and you can't do really difficult deep work things when you feel like crap when you have no energy and so that's why typically when you feel bad or you don't feel like working most people will just sit at their desk and check off a sauna task and go through their inbox and and message back on slack because those are very low energy requirement tasks and you feel productive but what happens when you delegate all that stuff out when you have a director of operations when you have an executive assistant

when you have nothing to do but the Deep work well then if you don't set yourself up for the Deep work correctly then you're not only failing you you're failing the rest of the people in your company that are relying on you all right so the last three are going to be about investing and so my money principles number 40 remove the principle as quickly as possible and only play with house money if you don't know what principle is it's essentially whenever you invest into something that's the initial amount that you invested in and I

learned this lesson back in 2019 or 20120 I was doing a lot of Leverage trading which is when you like trade above the amount of money that you actually have with cryptocurrency I know very dumb decisions but I was making a lot of money at one point I had an account with over a million dollars in it or right right shy of million I think it was like $900,000 something like that and in one day ironically enough it was on my birthday in April and I think it was either 2019 or 2020 I forget I

was at a house with my friends skiing in Breen Ridge and because I was so overleveraged I lost all of my money in one day the entire accounts and so that hit me obviously kind of hard and I realized you know what what I should have done is I should have made this all this profit taken out my principal amount that I had originally put in there that way if I lost everything at least I didn't lose that initial whatever I invested in there 250,000 or 300,000 something like that at least I didn't lose that

amount of money because when you lose your the all of your gains and the principle then you have to make two times that money back in order to even just get back to where you were before so now anytime I make investments if it's ever possible I try to pull out my principal and then just leave the games inside of there and then I can play with that money because it's it's free money at that point number 41 always structure deals so that I get my money back first and I know exactly how I'm getting

my money back now this was actually something that I got from Alex rosi when I listened to one of his videos on money and I had just started my portfolio company and I was starting to sign my first Equity deals and I'm really grateful for him for talking about this because I structured my first portfolio deals so that I was when if I had to loan the company money or there was distributions or whatever else it was I was always the first person to get my money back and so by going into those deals that

way I was able to recoup my investment very quickly and thus give me my principal back and then make all this additional money on top of it without having to worry about the business going under and me losing my entire investment there also the other part of this is knowing exactly how I'm getting my money back so there was specific payment schedules and times and dates of when I was going to get paid and for some people they had to give personal guarantees that I'd get my money back because some of these businesses were a

little bit risky and I didn't want to do it unless I was guaranteed to get my money back and I know some of you might be like oh I would never do that with my business but that's because you have no leverage I have leverage these people wanted me to work with them and so I was really grateful for that because when the time came we made a lot of money in the business but I also knew exactly when and how much I was going to get my money back and that way it became a

way smarter investment than me just handshaking deal with somebody like yeah this business is going to explode let's crush it together and then I have no idea what or when I'm going to get all my money back number 42 and this is the lesson that I learned from all that money I lost those millions of dollars I lost in cryptocurrency and that Ponzi scheme diversify in asset classes and the people/ companies who you work with inside of those assets classes so the mistake I had made at the time was that I was very bullish on

cryptocurrency so I had a lot of my net worth tied up in cryptocurrency in addition of that I because I'm a simple guy I wanted to consolidate a lot of my portfolio so I put it all inside one online exchange and then of course what happened I lost a lot of that money a lot of that money because I was like oh this is the simplest option because I try to make life as simple as possible little that I know is that if I had sprinkled out that allocation across m multiple different uh let's say

online ledgers or in multiple different asset classes like crypto and real estate and stocks and bonds I would have had a way less uh a way smaller amount lost of my total net worth and so now uh I actually have a specific number cap of how much money I can invest with any one given person or individual and then I have a specific percentage cap of how much in uh one asset class like crypto or real estate or stocks can be in my overall portfolio if you're watching this and you are a business owner and

you want my help in Skilling your business make sure you go down below and book a call to speak with myself or my team