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Money Making Fundamentals

You'll be hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn't believe it's possible for them to make money be very rich, think about that. Most people who have made quite a lot of money, believe that they can do it and sometimes the belief precedes the action and sometimes the action precedes the belief but the belief is an essential part of that. So, don't expect yourself to be able to create the abundance if you don't believe it's possible. And remember if you think about the loop too, it's like confidence creates belief. Belief creates success, success creates power, power creates more confidence and it all starts with seeing other people who have done it so as an entrepreneur, you can see others who have done this and who've paved the way. That could build some confidence for you. That confidence, as you practice it more, in models that might not be yours but might be applicable to you builds a belief. That belief begins success, that success builds power. It's the same with money. So, let's...

talk about money making fundamentals. One of the things I really want to do elucidate to you is that making money will take effort so I'm not one of those people who's going to preach the wealth gospel of just thinking and this shall become, and the more you believe, the more you're gonna earn. Like, I don't think its that simple. I do believe that making money takes effort because you're making money just requires you to create systems, and to involve people, to enroll people. Whether it's enroll of customers, or enroll other employees to work with you, enroll collaborators, you're gonna have to become creative and resourceful, and responsive, and powerful and all those things. So it will take effort but effort doesn't necessarily mean struggle, okay? Struggle implies a negative yearning, right. Struggle is effort to the point of overexertion does that make sense? Do you see the difference between effort and struggle? Now, most people think they have to struggle to succeed, that have to struggle to make money, but the difference between struggle and effort is that if you can turn your struggle into a joyful effort, that change in your thought will produce the result, right? It will reduce the pain and produce the results. So I'll say it again, if you can turn your struggle into a joyful effort, it will reduce the pain and produce the result. So you're looking to find the things that you can put consistent effort behind and not looking at them as painful, looking at them as part of the journey and the effort being one of love and of joy rather than one of scratching, clawing, and struggling. And this doesn't mean that you won't have times when you do actually, literally, struggle in your path and when your making money. But you don't have to see your whole journey as painful and masochistic in order for you to create real success in your life. There's this whole mentality now of, you know, hustle and grind 24/ and you gotta be hurting, and you gotta wake up early, and go to bed late, And, you know, I work the nine to five and now I'm up working the seven to twelve or whatever, I don't know what the Gary Vee line is but like you're always hustling you're always working. And for me personally, that doesn't resonate with me because I feel like it creates a lot of people who become addicted to pain. And I personally don't like living like that and I find that you don't have to create this masochistic painful environment that you live in in order to create the results that you want. And, there's people who will argue for their pain. There are people who will argue for their own limitations. They'll say, no you do have to struggle, yo do have to bleed and if that's what you believe and if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. You guys heard that before? If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. So if you believe that it's gonna take you struggle and pain and you fight for it so that you do have to stay up late and you do miss family meals and you do neglect your relationships and you do have to hurt, then you will hurt and you might actually see success on the other side of that. But is that really success to you? I don't know. I don't think that creating a life of abundance involves pain or involves prolonged periods of pain and hurt or your purposely and consciously hurting yourself. There will be times when you will experience pain but you have to begin to evaluate your life and see a life as one of a joyful effort. What I found is that you can feel very light in life without... You can feel very light while still feeling the intensity of life. You can feel like you have to do a lot and there's a lot to be done and there's a lot of work that needs to be accomplished while still feeling light. It's when you get heavy, and dark, and you go into the pain on purpose because you think you have to, that it becomes a lot less fun. I mean, I could even think of this week. I had so much crap to do this week. I had all these calls I had to do, I was running around, I was still trying to train myself, I was still trying to keep all the pieces of my personal life together. I basically wrote this whole presentation this week and we did ten hours of prep yesterday before here to get here and it's very easy to look at that and say "Wow that was painful, that hurt" and when you do that, you're literally pushing away the things that will cause you to grow, Right? Because of course effort, with effort comes growth and when you see effort as pain, you don't wanna step into that effort and you don't grow as much. It's almost like the analogy of you stretching and you can say, "Aw my hamstrings hurt", or you can say, "This is how it feels when my hamstrings are stretching". There's a difference in perception when you're gonna have the same information coming through, but the way that you interpret that information creates the result that you have in your head. It's the same thing with money. So you can go through the effort of making money. You can go through the effort of creating a business and it can be very intense but it could also be light and fun. Money is a creative force and again as I said, as creators, it's our job to learn how to, how to create from this force. A lot of people... especially artists, so people who deal with different types of, you know, whether it's like painting, or drawing, or music, or dancing, or singing or things that are traditionally viewed as art don't think that their art is worth charging money for. They don't think that it's worth the effort they're putting in. They fail to see that their time is worth just as much os anybody else's, if not more. A lot of people see their work and they think, "Well, you know I'm a creative, how can I put a price on this? This is a piece of my soul how could I possibly, you know, equate a value to this?" Well you have to take your own human energy of effort into account and realize that if you're giving away a piece of your soul, shouldn't that cost something? [Chuckles] Isn't it worth something, you know? Especially if it's just your time. So as you understand this creative force, you understand that your time is worth money and that as you create things, it deserves to be given value back. Then you gain, basically, the capability to create and control your life because you realize what you put out there has value, you expect to get value back and when you do, you're not surprised. So it's this mindset of stepping into, "I'm creating something, I deserve to be compensated for it. When I am, I'm happy. Thank you and I'll raise my rates next time" and that's the way it goes. You know, and it's okay and honestly, the first step to making money is just traising your energy. You know, you will find that money flows more quickly to people who are deeply enjoying and finding supreme pleasure in their work and they put great loving care, and attention, and efforts, and detail in to the things that they produce. I mean, this suit is a perfect example. I went to the Hugo Boss, I actually wore this suit to my wedding. I like the blue a lot and I went to the Hugo Boss store and I stepped up on the, you know, on the little, they have like a fitting room with a stand where you sit up and you look yourself in the mirror. And the attendant, the tailor, who was working on the suit for me was, "Oh hello my friend, hello how are you? Let's try this color, let's try that color, here's this tie, here's that, what do you think about this cuff? What do you think about that? Oh we have to fix your tailoring here, oh this needs to be a little bit tighter. Okay stand up straight, okay look over here, turn around." He said, "Okay, now there's no shirt in the Hugo Boss store that I really like with this suit", so he takes me, he literally grabs me by the hand, and he walks me to the other side of the mall and he says, "okay, this guy, he needs a better shirt" and he takes me to another store that isn't related to his store and has me get a tailored suit from that store and then he takes that shirt back and he takes it back, he matches it up with the suit, he's doing this whole thing and of course he's getting a commission for this but I don't care because he's putting in so much loving, care, and attention and showing that he genuinely appreciates me being there that he wants me to have a great experience that I'm happy to have him make his commission off this. That's the whole point. And people are so attracted to your service, or your product, or your offering when you show this genuinely level of compare and compassionate energy. And this energy is both physical, it's the way you talk to people, it's the way that you stand, it's the way that you present yourself, it's physiological, it's psychological. It's the way that you treat people, it's the way that you talk to them. And this applies to anything you're doing. It can be a product, or a service, or an idea. I mean, did anyone watch the Rogan, Musk interview? [Audience Makes Noise] Man that thing was killer. It was killer and I think it was probably like 12-15 million views that was nuts. And Elon Musk said something very important. He said, "We don't make cars, we make the most enjoyable piece of technology of our own' He's like the car does all these crazy things with Easter eggs. It dances. They're adding like Atari games to it. They're adding all these things just to give you pure joy. It's not about the car and there's a reason why when all the other car companies went bamkrupt except Ford, Tesla was still on top because he's making things that people genuinely love. And you know what? They're showing this quirky energy too. It's like, they understand they're being kind of tongue and cheek like when they did the whole rocket man thing where they launched the thing, and this was Space X, but he has, you know, the dummy rocket guy and he launched the Tesla into space and he's doing all this crazy stuff but the fact that he's infusing personality into this. The fact that he's willing to be outspoken. The fact that he's willing to create interesting, fun things for us to engage upon. You don't need to make the car dance. There's no reason why the car should dance except that it's fun. And so when you raise your energy to create these awesome experiences for people whether it's a product or a service, that's what sells people. That's the point. You know, at the end of the day, these are all experiences that we're having and we're really exchanging our money to receive an emotion as the result. And that emotion can come in the form of a service or a product. But we're looking for that end result which is not related to the physical thing. You buy a Coach purse, you're looking to feel like you're fancy. You're looking to feel like you have something special. You're looking to feel, maybe, like some one-upmanship. You're looking to feel like you treated yourself in some way. You're looking to feel like you look good to other people but you're buying an emotional response that's predicated by a physical object. But you're not really buying the physical object right? This is very very important. And you know this more than anyone with the dating industry. You're buying things to make you feel a certain way. Everything you bought is tied to an emotional response. And so in order to create that emotional response in people, you have to have that raised energy then you gotta find a product or a service. The product or a service doesn't need itself to be exciting or interesting. This is the key right? The industry itself doesn't need to be exciting. It's the way that you present the product or service that needs to be exciting. So this is why, you know, you could have, you can be a sock maker and they're not really that interesting except that these are Outkast socks. You know, and that makes it more interesting and that's why I'll pay four times the price for. It's more about how you present it. If you said to someone, "I'm gonna go in the sock industry and how exciting does that sound to you?" They'd say, "sounds boring." "No, but I'm making really cool socks, here's what my socks look like and I have all these different cool prints, and all these different cool ideas" And really especially now, with the internet, and with the way that we could connect with a very specific section of our audience, you can go on Facebook and you can target people who like Outkast and then put your socks in front of them and that means something to people, you know. So you're connecting with people and you're finding a product or a service and the industry that you're in, isn't as important as the way that you present what it is that you're having people, you know, look to buy. Of course, you know, once you do this, once you raise your own energy and you're excited and you're happy to sell what you have and people are excited about what you have to offer and you have something that's fun and interesting, regardless of what the product or service is, you'll just keep yourself basically easy to work with and then bill them. It's a shame when people will raise their energy and get to the point where people wanna work with them and they have an interesting product or service, they don't make it easy to work with them. You have infinite amount of opportunities now to create ways where people to pay you money. You know, it's not as hard as it used to be. I look at my industry if I'm thinking about doing motivational tapes or whatever, you look at Tony Robbins back in the day and when he was making these tapes in the 80s, it cost like thousands and thousands of dollars to produce these things. They had to have whole studios, and you had distribute VHS tapes and it was really cost intensive. So, it would be hard to get someone to be able to buy your stuff and work with you because, well, it would just cost a lot of momey to produce this material. Now, especially, it's your job to make it as easy as possible to work with you. So, you have to learn the basic knots of starting a Shopify, learn how to do some online businesses and transactions but once people start to notice you, that's what creates the momentum. And so you make it easy to work with you and of course what happens then, is the fastest way to get more business is not social media, even though social media is the biggest medium we have right now. Word-of-mouth will always be the fastest. Word-of-mouth is always the goal standard because people, more often than not, always trust what their friends say over what they see online, the advertisements they read, the reviews they read from third parties. They always trust their friends. And as long as it's easy for you to work or as long as it's easy for someone to work with you, and it's easy for them to find where you are, buy from you, and keep buying from you, then it's gonna be really easy for friends to talk about how good your service is because remember you're excited, you've raised your energy because you have something cool to offer and then it just perpetuates itself. And so it's much easier to focus on, first your energy and then the product. And as long as you're easy to work with, people will start to fill the line. They'll start to line up for you. There's no time differential, okay? There's no standard time where you raise your energy and then you find that product or service and then the customers just come. You know, in the case of, like, one of my cleints for instance, his name is Derrick Struggle and he has this massive YouTube channel that over the past ten months really has just skyrocketed and he has this online course that he sells about Amazon FBA that is doing really well and he'll put links to it in his YouTube videos and the course is just absolutely crushing. He's gone from like six to eight figures in ten months. Absolutely nuts. But it's so easy to work with him because he has an awesome energy, he has a really cool idea, or a service, or a product and then all you have to do to work with him, is watch one of his videos and the link's right in the bio. It's not hard. There are ways to complicate business but at the end of it, the core is creating something that's worthwhile for people to interact with and make it easy for them to find you and work with you. And it's easier than ever now. And if you look at, So a simple example, this is one of my favorite examples. It's a classic example of finding a unique approach with a fun, interesting energy and raising that energy in order to create to create like a cool interesting experience for people. So first of all, this is what is called the Million Dollar Homepage. This is a site started by Alex Tew who, actually, he created the Calm app. Anyone know the Calm meditation app? This is back in 2005, and Alex at that time, was a law student. He was in school and he was just looking for a way to one, pay off his college debt because he had a bunch of college debt and two, possibly give himself a way out of having to continue going to law school because he just wasn't certain that this was gonna be a path for him. So what he did, was he came up with a unique idea and he said, "okay, I'm gonna build a simple one page website and on that website, I'm going to create slots with pixels." And these are ten by ten pixels on the smallest ones, or maybe hundred by hundred. "And I'm gonna open these slots up for advertisers and I'll put the advertisements with a link and a little rollover subtitle on the different ads." And he started advertising this. First, he told family and friends. Then he did a few small press releases which, again think about this, this is before really social media like 05, so there wasn't really as much traction with social media so he actually did a real press release, a couple of these press releases. And the idea was so unique and so interesting and kind of so quirky and endearing that this thing took off and over the period of like four months, he went from zero to a little bit over a million dollars. He's able to pay off his school easily and he made his own entry in entrepreneurship. And it just came off the back of an interesting idea. Now, you'll note that lots of people try to take this idea of the Million Dollar Homepage and copy it into their own version of it and it didn't work. So it's on you to find out what your own unique idea is and sometimes you can copy a model and sometimes you'll need to figure out your own interesting way of approaching. My thought on this is that if you come up with a model that's os unique as this, it's gonna be hard for copycats to create the same ripple effect because as Alex says, "The crucial thing in creating the media interest was the idea itself. It was unique and quirky enough to stand out. I only had to push the idea a bit in the first few days by sending out a press release which essentially acted as a catalyst. This interest coupled with traditional word-of-mouth created a buzz about the homepage, which in turn created more interest." And so this is really what it's about. The thing that I think is really cool about this, is the positioning and the top right, it says own a piece of internet history, so he's not even saying advertise your business I'll bring you more traffic. He's saying own a piece of history so I think that was a really cool thing about this. [Daniel] Look at this, a million pixels one dollar per pixel. You know? Pretty cool and how many of us have these unique, creative, interesting ideas inside of us and what would it take for you to have the courage to put something out there like this. You might shoot some shots like this and it doesn't work but the idea is flexing that muscle and this is what happens, you know, when you're able to build that power and that courage to go up and do that. So, let's see. Some reviews. So, money does equal power, but only to an extent. Remember that money itself can't create power in other areas of your life where it doesn't already exist. You can't use money to create physical power. You can't use money to become creative. You can't use money to become more connected to yourself. You can only use money to create potentially space and time for you to then work on those things. And of course, money reinforces itself. It's useful to have money especially in hard times because it will create some sense of freedom but at the same time, it's not gonna be the solution to get you out of the problems that come from lack of underdevelopment in other areas. People will argue for their limitations thinking that money can solve it all and get to the point where they realize that it can't and then have to backtrack. And of course, the Four Laws of Money mean that you have equal potential and a right to it. So remember money is not real, okay? Money is not rare, money is man-made, money is inherently good. Understanding these things help to free you up from some of the jargon, and the complexity, and the ideas around money that might be holding you back and holding you to a position of weakness and move you into a position of strength. Of course, money is made with creativity. So, it's your job then to figure out your creative approach to find this money and the idea is to raise your energy, to raise the way that you communicate with people, to be excited about what you have to offer, to create something that's really fun and interesting, to find an angle where even if the industry itself isn't exciting, the way that you present it is exciting. Of course, make it easy for you to be worked with, easy to find and easy to share. Some recommended reading, I almost forgot to recommend my own book. [Audience Laughs] I was like what book should I talk about with money? I don't know, oh yeah. So "Rich20Something" is a great book. I highly recommend it. "Do The Work" by Steven Pressfield. The reason I like this book is because it talks a lot about the idea of going pro and this is something that I come back to over and over again. The idea of not syncing to the average mentality of what's the minimum I could do or what have I done in the past, but really turning pro and stepping up your game. And of course, "Shoe Dog" anyone read "Shoe Dog" ? "Shoe Dog" is if you wanna talk about epic stories of financial struggle to financial success, "Shoe Dog" is great. And of course, "Shoe Dog" is a book like many others out there who tell great stories that really shows you that there is this real loop of confidence to belief to success to power and that's exactly what happened with Phil Knight who is the founder of Nike. So that is... that is money in a nutshell that's how to make it. Luck versus hard work. A lot of people think that, a lot of people don't understand how hard work and luck are connected. You need both to be successful. One of the few things that will happen, you'll either get lucky first and that initial luck will create some momentum that will allow you to get some movement but in order to maintain that movement, you're gonna need to have hard work. A lot of people think that people who really make it to the top have just succeeded on being lucky. But there's no way that you can get lucky over and over and over again without having to maintain that luck through a constant discipline of hard work. Now on the other hand, sometimes you won't get lucky right away and what will be required of you, is a lot of hard work on the front end. But then what happens is you do this hard work over a period of time and there comes a singular or maybe a few events where you get very lucky and from the outside it looks quite lucky but you know it's not lucky, you know it's actually the result and the antecedent of the hard work in the beginning. So it's either you do the hard work and eventually you get to the luck because of that work that you've done or you start with the luck but then you're gonna have to do hard work to back that up because there's no way that you can maintain that. This is a simple example of why lottery winners usually never maintain it because if you just had luck and you don't really understand what it takes to maintain the energy of that much money, you'll lose it all because your energy actually isn't high enough to maintain that level of new wealth because your mindset isn't there, you don't understand what it would take to actually maintain that, you've never actually dealt with that much money before, and you probably have a lot of doubts about you yourself can handle that much money even if you're happy to receive it. Because people see money as something that is given to them outside without control of it. when you win the lottery, you feel like well I have no idea how I got this, so I have no idea how to maintain this and I have no idea how this came. It must've come from something outside of me rather than, okay I've obviously you know caught a lucky break and now it's time for me to adjust my patterns, you know? So luck needs hard work, hard work needs luck. So when you first started and you thought about what it was that you were gonna sell, how is that different versus how you think about what you want to sell now in terms of creating your business so basically, when you first started and you decided okay, I'm gonna sell something and I'm gonna generate income or I'm gonna start by this one product what was that decision like versus how you think about what you wanna sell now and what products that you want to create now in your business? I think it kind of goes back to looking at that old clip of me and thinking about modeling what I saw out there, wanting so badly just to make something work even if it wasn't me just to prove to myself that I could make it work versus now, rejecting things that won't fit even if there's an opportunity there. Once you become more successful in your life and you start to have multiple things work, you sometimes get what's called opportunity overload where you have all these things you could be doing, all of them that might actually potentially work out in your favor and so you come to this point where you're almost confused as to which opportunity you should take because all of them have the potential to work out well for you as they should. But at that point, if you try to accept all these opportunities or multiple opportunities that don't really fit with who you are or what you want, you end up basically clogging your own system because you shut out the opportunities or you shut out the potential for you to work on things that are truly in alignment with you through other opportunities that only fulfill maybe one aspect which is probably the financial aspect. The more you, the more you look at your opportunities as having multiple different characteristics, the better you off you are. So you have to look at your opportunities, not just as the potential to make the most money, but also potential to grow you as a person, for you to learn long term and sometimes you could see your opportunities and know that they're that a stepping stone to the next thing so you're looking into the future a bit. And you start to look at your opportunities as having multiple factors rather than just the one factor. When I started off, I wanted anything that I'd do I did to make as much money as possible and I'm not opposed to making the much money as possible now but I'll look at an approach and say is this the right fit for me? And is there something that will be a better fit even if it doesn't make as much money? So recently, I exited one of my companies and it was really hard because we had venture funding and the people who funded us were personal friends of mine and there was a lot of pressure to perform in this role and the opportunity, the up side of this was really really big. We were partnered with a major magazine and there was a lot of opportunity for me to potentially become a star or whatever I wanted to be. You know, basically I could make my own platform. But we weren't in agreement or alignment with the investors and internally as a team, we weren't at a place where I actually wanted to create the company that everyone else wanted to create. So I had to make a really hard decision to exit the company, to leave the and sell my shares and to do that from a place of knowing that even though there was, I was losing an opportunity, there's a bigger opportunity cost by staying somewhere that I didn't want to be. And that's really hard for ambitious people to get their minds around because we only see the opportunity of things that could happen. We don't see the opportunity of things that we lose out on by taking advantage of things that aren't right for us. Sometimes we even think, oh you know, if I just take this opportunity and tough it out for a few months or a few years, I'll reap enough benefits to where it will be worth it. But most of the time it's not worth it. If you go to law school and you don't wanna be a lawyer, then it doesn't matter how worth it the lottery was. It's not worth it because you don't wanna be a lawyer. So you have to really consider what your threshold is and it's better if you come to that conclusion sooner than later. Does that resonate with people? Yeah? [Audience Member} Do you Have Any Difference in perspective in the way you see your manage money from a large corporation to a startup to even personal finances? So specifically what's the question? Difference in your perspective of the way you manage money in different scenarios. Yeah I mean I think that in the beginning, one of the biggest A-ha moments for me when I was just getting involved with entrepreneurship, you know because the first thing you do is you get like your business account, your business checking account and you're like I got the business name on the card now so it's super official. I just got the LLC, just got the Twitter account, it's like it's legit now. But what you don't realize is that for a while it's gonna take you a bit of time to reprogram how you think about your finances because we're so used to using our money as our personal bank account, our personal savings account and of course our personal savings account because it's our quote on quote. There's a lot of emotion attached to how much money is in there, how it's flowing, when we're getting paid, if we have enough to pay all the bills that we have and so there's a lot of emotion attached to that and as you separate that from that a bit, as you like build different companies, you begin to see the money as, again, potential as energy so you look at the account and you can say alright, there's not as much I need in here to do this specific thing so I'm not gonna feel, this isn't necessarily a personal failing as much as it is information that requires me to create new action. So I'm gonna have to go out and release a product. I have to change my strategy. I have to change my marketing. I need to create more money in here so that I can create better results in the outside world. And another way you manage your money, is it functions differently. So you don't necessarily... You're more, I would say careful, about how you spend the money with the business because you see every dollar that you spend as potential for you to create something new in the business and you don't wanna waste that potential. Whereas, with your own personal dollars, sometimes it's easy to get a little bit flippant. You're like I could buy what I want like it's my stuff. And I made this mistake too. Four, five years ago when I first started really making money online doing courses and stuff, I remember walking around the mall in Santa Monica and just having a grip of cash on me and thinking I could buy anything I want right now, it doesn't matter. And really it wasn't actually really my money as much as it was the company's money but I'm just like unlimited money's flowing, it doesn't matter and Sara sent me out to the grocery store and I came back with a Benz and I'm just like I just saw this and I thought... She's like where's the groceries? I'm like [Whispers] aw fuck the groceries. So I was just doing whatever with the money and then I realized, after a certain amount of time, that okay, yes there is abundant money. Yes you can make as much of it as you want but in order to be a responsible shepherd of it and become more powerful, you have to look at it as a resource and although it is an unlimited resource, you have to be able to create it in a way and shepherd it so that you can put the dollars where they need to be. And so that you can create the results you want. So it doesn't really help you if you're using it as, if you continue to use it as a personal bank account which separating it with your business checking and personal checking is the first step. I also recommend, I didn't put on here, if you guys haven't read "Profit First" by Mike Michalowicz, great, great book on managing your personal and your business finances, how to split them up, and it tells you basically a blueprint for how to lay out your finances so that you don't screw yourself over. I use it and it's super powerful and it's probably the reason why I didn't go completely crazy, so yeah.