Ramit Sethi - I Will Teach You To Be Rich: How To Achieve A Wealthy Life In The 21st Century

Full transcript: Ramit Sethi on London Real

3:47 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, My guest today is Ramit Sethi, the American personal finance expert, author and entrepreneur. You launched the I Will Teach You to Be Rich blog while studying at Stanford University and now have over 1 million people reading your material. Forrest magazine named you the new finance guru, and you’ve been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Fox Business and CNBC. The New York Times. Best-selling book I Will Teach You to Be rich, details your plan for anyone to achieve the rich life, and has more than 20,000 documented success stories.

4:17 Roomie, Welcome to London, Real in New York City. Thanks for having me. It was great to have you. I know we’ve been trying to this for like, three or four years. Yes, I’m excited, Yeah, me too. I’m been a big fan for a long time of, like everything you do, your copy, your courses, your mindset, so this is great man, I want to jump into this. You know, I had someone in my studio about four years ago come in, and we had about 30 people in the audience.

4:38 And he said to everybody, What is your relationship with money? And everybody just stopped. And he said, Shout out one word and everyone started shouting out words, including me, and it was a crazy, crazy range. Some people said happiness, some people said hate problems, pain dirty and it was this crazy range, and I started to understand that. Everyone has a twisted relationship with money, including me.

5:03 And what was your work? You know, I think I said, Hassle or so now. I was post banking and I came out of there thinking that I look, I grew up with the American dream. I thought money would make me happy, you know, I went into banking and it took me 40 years, even with an M.I.T. education for me to finally realize my increasing bank balance was making me happy. So I went into broadcasting and I thought money was bad, so I wasn’t charging for anything.

5:28 I was putting out free content, so I was. I had a dysfunctional relationship, and so it’s taken me a while to react eight myself. What I love about your stuff is it you really get down to the core of it. It’s not necessarily about a balance sheet. Look, it’s about the emotion and this quote-unquote rich life.

5:45 So how did you figure this stuff out, and then how did you figure out to make it your life’s work? Because as a Stanford grad, everyone’s expecting you to start Google and you’re like, No, I’m gonna do this thing. Yeah, I don’t wake up in the morning and I don’t get excited about a Roth IRA, I’ll tell you that. But I do think money is an easy way into understanding human behavior, and I think I love the question that was asked at your event, What’s your relationship with money? Because most people, when I ask that question, they go like this, they’re rigid, and the answers are typically guilt, overwhelmed anxiety.

6:20 Sometimes we have people who say freedom, which is awesome, but when I ask them, What is freedom mean? Their answer is always. I want to do what I want when I want I say, Okay, what do you want to do? And then they go silent because they’ve never typically probed beyond that. And so I got interested in money many years ago because I took my college scholarship money and I invested it in the stock market.

6:45 And this is when I thought I was a genius. 1999 Everybody’s a genius, and then I lost half my money like that. Was it the Dot-com boom? Yeah, it helped. Okay.

6:53 Well, that’s why I thought it was a genius. it turned out it was just crazy times, and so I Danford Scholarship money. Yeah, stock market, yes, know what you were doing, they did. It was like, my dad. My dad had encouraged me to open up a Roth IRA when I was like, 15 years old.

7:09 So he was like, Yeah, whatever. But in retrospect, although I lost that money, that amount, it was a really valuable lesson because it humbled me and it taught me that much of the stuff that I had heard about money just wasn’t true. The things that we hear like you need to be understanding P.-e ratios. You need to be sitting in a dark room with green letters scrolling on your screen. That stuff has no connection to reality for ordinary people.

7:37 So I started learning about money as I was in college, I was watching TV shows, reading books, and I was also studying human behavior. And then there was that moment where, like in that book, The Emperor has no clothes. You realize that so much of the advice we have heard is just not true, or it’s not applicable, you know, I saw people going on TV saying, Don’t spend money on lattes and I bet everybody watching this has heard someone tell them Cut back $3 a day. Seven hundred years from now, you can have a hundred thousand dollars big. And I would look at my friends were like, Who wants to live like that?

8:12 I want to go out, I want to buy a round of drinks for my friends. And so there’s this disconnect of the advice. That was out there and the way that my friends and I wanted to live. And that got me interested in starting to explore money. That’s your psychology degree coming in totally right, so you’ve always been interested in the human mind, to a certain extent, a human behavior.

8:32 Why do we say we want to do something? And yet we don’t? That question fascinates me. Why do we claim we want to lose weight, but we don’t track our food or go work out? Why do we claim, especially in our 40s, that money is the most concerning thing?

8:50 And yet most of us have never read one book on money why? And that’s what’s fascinating. I think money is an easy way to get that wedge in because everybody has these money messages they grew up with. Whether it was our mom sitting around that dinner saying, We don’t talk about money in this house or easy come easy, go. Or that person’s rich.

9:13 Because they had to step on someone else to get there. These are money messages that we may have heard growing up. We all have different ones. And I had my own that I grew up with to immigrant parents who immigrated from India. And we learned him, and sometimes they serve us really well.

9:28 Like, I learned some awesome messages as I was young, but I also learned some that started to not serve me as I grew my business as I grew my income and as I started to craft my own type of rich life. Searching how you say that people want enough money to retire. I want enough money to finally have the room and then they don’t know what they want to do. Well, this is what drives me crazy, so this idea that one day I will have enough money to do what I truly want. And the idea is, one day I will finally go to the gym, one day I will finally travel, one day I will finally do all these hobbies.

10:05 It’s living life serially, like, as if you’re gonna do a then B, then C. One day I will finally be happy bingo that’s the ultimate. And what we discover is that as you get older, the ability the muscle to do those atrophies. You don’t turn 65 and then suddenly become an adventurous traveler and you don’t become 65 and suddenly say, Yeah, I’m gonna change my life about this. Now you could, but it’s prohibitively difficult.

10:33 And so what I would rather do is say, I want to live a life today, where I’m earning more, I’m spending time on fitness. I’m traveling family, and I actually think that society has started to tell us you can’t do that. They’ve actually lowered the sames. You should just be happy you have a job. Forget about retirement, that’s not even gonna be around when you retire.

10:55 Instead. What we can do is to say, You know what, I’m taking back control. I’m gonna surround myself with people who are into self-development who are successful. And I’m gonna see the secret skills and habits that they use, and I’m gonna adopt them for myself. I think you’re alluding to it, but maybe you could tell us what you call is the rich life.

11:13 And I think this is really important. Yeah, because it’s not necessarily what people think it is. If you might think it means you got the Bentley and the private jet, but you think that’s not what the rich life needs to be. Right? Yeah, I think that when you ask people, what does Rich mean?

11:29 The answers are so fascinating. So first off they say, I want to pay off all my debt. And I just think to myself, If that is your dream, it’s no wonder you’re not living a rich life. Because who gets motivated by saying I want to go from negative 10 to 0 is not aspirational. It may be if you’re in that time period, but dream bigger.

11:53 There’s more to life than being at zero debt. The second answer I get is a million dollars. Where’d that number come from, like, are you 20, are you 50, do you live in Manhattan, do you live in Kansas? Clearly, that numbers just picked out of thin air, and, you know, the third is just. I want to do what I want when I want, and again when I ask them what they haven’t really dialed it in.

12:14 When I think about a rich life, what I encourage people to do is to get super specific. When I moved to New York, my dream was to be able to take a taxi instead of going on the subway. If I had to go to a meeting in summer, the cost irrelevant. Three bucks, whatever. But for me that was rich, then it was to be able to order appetizers.

12:36 Cuz When I was a kid. We never did that right. We went out once there, once a month we had a coupon, we went to a pizza place. Hey, that was life. It sounds like my mom, exactly.

12:45 And of course, as you get older, maybe more successful, your dreams get bigger, but the specificity there was amazing. And so when people say my rich life is like, I like to eat out, I say, Awesome, you like to eat out, I love that. What would you do if you could quadruple your spending on that? And this is called a money dial? It’s like a stereo dial, you could turn that dial up.

13:11 What do people say to that? Okay, so they always say this thing that they go. I would eat out four times a week and I’m like, Whoa, hold on. They always go linearly, as if they would do the thing they love, and then they would do it four times more. And I asked them, Where do you eat out? and they’ll be like, Chipotle.

13:30 I’m like, You’re spending two times, four times, ten times more on that money, dial that thing you love. Are you still going to be eating at Chipotle? And you can see their eyes go like this because they’ve never considered that the money lens through which they’re viewing the world might change. So I had a guy in D.C. when I was on tour. And he said, My money dial is eating out.

13:54 And I said, What would you do if you could quadruple it? He said. Four times I said, Really, what would you do think about your dream, your money dial? And he gets quiet, and he says, I have a list of every Michelin star restaurant in D.C. I would go and I would go to each one, and then I said, Who would you take with you?

14:14 The room is completely silent, he goes. I would take my family why? because they have never been able to afford to eat at a place like that. So this concept of a rich life is so challenging because it’s not linear. If you love clothes, if you turn that, dial way up, If that’s the thing you love, then you can spend extravagantly on that, and you can cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t. So if you love clothes, you might not shop at the same place.

14:43 You might fly to Italy and go to the factory where it’s made by hand. If you love fitness, you might hire a trainer. If you love philanthropy, you might give ten times the money and ten times your time. But this is the beauty of a rich life it’s customized to you. It’s totally different than anyone else, and in fact, the more you dial it and the more crazy you’re gonna seem to other people.

15:07 And that’s exactly the way it should be. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. I mean, when I first started making some money in Wall Street, I said, I’m never gonna fly anything less than business class. I know this is one thing you look as well, and I and I know who. And five years up to that, I was like, When I make it, I’m gonna do this one thing, Yeah, and that’s what I did.

15:25 The other thing I like to do is I like spend money on hotel rooms. And when we go places, my wife, she’s like, Why are we spending so much? And I’m like, Honey, I’ve realized that’s the thing that makes me happy. Yeah, I don’t need a car, I don’t need a benzo, I don’t need all this stuff because that doesn’t make me happy. So let me do this.

15:40 I probably been listening to you. And so that stuff can really dial up your happiness because it triggers all those weird things from your childhood. I’m taking the family with me, I’m finally showing them, maybe that I made it, I’m treating them. That can give you a boost of happiness, as opposed to getting the same Mercedes Benz. That the next-door neighbors have.

15:58 That, you might think, makes you the rich life, but it actually doesn’t make you feel good. That is exactly, and that is where so many of our challenges come from when it comes with money. When you ask people, What do you think about money? And they say, I’m anxious, overwhelmed, guilty and you start asking them, Where do you spend your money? It starts to reveal everything first off.

16:16 Most people don’t know where they spend their money. That’s okay, not gonna blame anyone, why, because they don’t want to look at. It’s like a horror movie. Yeah, okay, so if you take any personal finance book, I challenge anyone, go to a book store. Look at the first chapter of any money book.

16:29 Do you know what it tells you to do? Save it, says it says Pull out all your receipts from the last year. Let’s figure out, let’s make a budget, where are you spending your money? And you know what people do, they go, No, that sounds horrible. Let’s put this back on the shelf.

16:43 People do not want to know where their money is because they know that they’re probably doing something wrong. And if there’s one thing humans are really good at, it is avoiding pain. So in this book, which is really a psychology book disguised as a money book? I started off by picking one area that we all have, one area that we are all kind of bad at, and one area we can improve quickly. And that’s credit cards, so people have credit cards, they don’t understand how credit cards screw them.

17:14 And if they have information like, read these words off this page and you will get your fees waived or your interest rate lowered. Suddenly they’re like, Oh my God, this works and I can take control, so people don’t understand where their money’s going. That’s okay, we can get to that later, but that’s not the first thing you start with. It’s like you wouldn’t take someone who wants to lose 100 pounds and start benching 225, that would make no sense. You want to start off, gradually, meet them where they are and work from there.

17:45 So with people and money, when they don’t know where their money’s going, they know that it’s probably not doing the right thing. But they don’t really want to sit there and fiddle with it and have to spend hours a day tracking a budget. What they want is for it to go where it needs to go and for them to be able to go out and spend on the things they love, it’s pretty much that simple. Hence, if you try to give people these things that require them to cut back on $3 lattes for the rest of their life, they’re just gonna go, that doesn’t sound that good to me. No thanks.

18:20 So if you start from a place of what they love, like, what is your money dial? And if I were to ask you? And we got two hotel rooms, which, by the way, I love that. I love awesome hotels. So we start with what you love and we say, Why for me?

18:35 I discovered I went on a six-week honeymoon with my wife, and we stayed in all these amazing places. High-low. We stayed at World-class hotels, we ate street food and we just did it. We went to people’s houses that were locals. We learn how to cook with them.

18:50 And I remember feeling really happy at one of the hotels that I was at and it was a place I had my eye on. For years, I wanted to stay there and I remember wondering, Why was I so happy beyond even being on my honeymoon with my wife? And I realized that to be able to be at that place and to not have to worry about money meant that had done the right things. For years I had worked hard, I’d showed up every day, I saved money and I invested it. And now I get to spend extravagantly on the thing that I love.

19:24 And at the same time, I don’t care about things like a car, I don’t need a car. I don’t care about eating out that much, I hardly ever eat out. That’s just not my rich life, but to go to a hotel that I love and to spend and bring my wife or bring my family. For me, that is my rich life, so for everyone, I would say, What is that thing that gives you joy? And what if you could 2 x, 4 X, 10 extra spending?

19:49 Really try to imagine what that would look like and feel like. It’s probably not just doing more of the same thing. It could be on a whole nother level you have never considered. Now came one of my wife, and I told her this, I said, Honey, we need to start spending more money. Isn’t what I’m like, Baby, I bet we could spend $1,000 a month more and get so much joy but.

20:10 But for her, she’s from Bulgaria originally, and it was a different mentality, you know, ex Communist State. But for her, it was like, This doesn’t make sense that if we spend more money, we’ll be, you know, exponentially, happier. How do you have that conversation with a significant other? It’s so it’s so tough, and I went through this with my own wife. Because everyone says, Get on the same page, have the conversation with your partner.

20:36 I was like, what conversation like, Please tell me the exact words to say, because this was harder than anything I had ever imagined. I came in with a point of view on money spend on this, don’t spend on that. And I’m like, Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this every day for 20 years, and what I discovered is it’s not as simple as let’s take my point of view. Let’s take her point of view, and let’s plug them together. It’s not Tetris, it doesn’t fit like that.

21:01 We had to go back way back to, What did our parents teach us about money? How do we think about? what does money make you feel? And I was so surprised that my wife said money makes her feel safe. That was a word I’ve never considered with money safe for me, money is growth and money is convenience, so I can pay away problems that I don’t want to deal with convenience. And it allows me. growth, compound interest, returns, all that stuff, but safety, what is that?

21:37 That was a term I had never connected, so I asked her, and there was this message of, What if we don’t have enough? What if it runs out? And I started to dig deeper, started to understand it, but I had never really considered it because I was like, If we run out, we’ll go out and make more. But to say that requires a whole foundation, knowing that you can earn more, not being afraid that you can run out and honor all. Did you always feel that way? did ya?

22:06 You always felt you could go out and earn more? Yeah, I did. I mean, I was like a soccer referee. When I was in my teens, I worked at a pizza place. I knew if I wanted to make more, I could work harder, and that message is something that, in retrospect, is pretty rare. And my parents taught me that they set a phrase, Why don’t you write it up?

22:28 We would talk about ideas over dinner, why don’t you write it up? And what they meant by that is you have something valuable the world needs to hear. Once you write it up and submit it, submit it to the Sacramento Bee, which I did write a book, which I eventually did. And I think everyone listening has something valuable that the world needs to hear. But no one tells them, Why don’t you write it up?

22:49 And so when they taught me that and I internalized it, I realized I have something valuable. I need to work at it, I need to shape it, I need to understand it better. But I have something that the world wants to hear. And the world will probably pay for it if I learn those skills. So bringing it back to the partner.

23:05 If you’re having a conversation with your partner, the worst thing you can do is what I did. Which is, Here’s an Excel spreadsheet, let’s fill in the numbers email thing. Very. It’s very, it’s very masculine and it’s very logical and it never works, it never works. I thought I was savvy at communication and money, but I was.

23:27 I went right back to excel when it came down to this. Excel should not have been the first thing it actually should have been. The last thing. What I should have done was to say I’d love to talk about money with you. I have a certain point of view on money, but that’s worked for me alone.

23:44 And now that we are getting together, I really want to create our money vision, and I need to hear. I want to hear what you think about it that opens up the conversation and then to say, When you think about money, how do you feel? If you could do anything with money, what would it be? And suddenly we would get into these amazing, beautiful conversation. I want to take my family once a year.

24:07 I don’t care about spending on that, really, why? And suddenly we start to craft our own shared message. So that’s what I would do if I were to do it again. And the other thing I would realize is you don’t have to agree on everything, it’s good. Maybe 75-.

24:23 You have shared values, but I have certain things I spend on that. My wife just does not care about like hotels, she doesn’t care, she has things she spends on. I don’t care about fine. We don’t have to agree on everything but the core essentials, family food savings, those things. If we get those right, the rest, we can afford to be different.

24:43 I’m totally having this conversation with my wife because I just think we haven’t really talked about it. Like she’ll say something. Every now and then, I’ll be like, What are you talking about? The conversation? Well, I guess it’s a good question, I guess, because in my mind, I hack, I’m handling the money.

24:59 And honey and honey were fine, right? And then she’s like, but I don’t know what’s happening, and you know, she doesn’t, maybe she doesn’t. Actually, no, we’re fine, or maybe she’s got a bunch of other concerns about money. So I think when we talk, I can say, What will make you feel fine? And I think it might mean something small the other day, she said.

25:17 She said I don’t have a pension, I think I should have a pension and I was like, Lea, that’s crazy. You don’t need a pension, but, you know, coming, her dad has a pension in that area and that does. This is the symbol of security she grew up with. And so in my mind, I’m thinking, That’s crazy, like, let’s even use a pension. But now I’m thinking, if that makes her calm about the money, then she’s gonna feel free to do so many other things.

25:39 And feel free to spend money when I want to spend money. Which is probably why she doesn’t like me. Booking the cabin with the hot tub, which I wanted the hot tub and I didn’t get it. You’re never gonna forget that one of the hot tub I got the sauna back well, the hot tub, and she’s like, It was thousand pounds. I was like, Honey, I just want the goddamn hopped.

25:54 So this is the thing I love this because it’s the pension thing. What most partners would do, especially if you’re more savvy with money, is you’d go in there and say pensions have been eradicated. And they’re actually not that important. And we can earn more from a 401k, whatever and all these words start coming out and the person’s eyes just glaze over. They start explaining, instead of asking and saying, Tell me more, Where did where did you hear about a pension who has a pension in your life?

26:23 Oh, your dad, so what does that pension mean to him? And I can almost predict she would say something like he knows if everything else goes away, at least he has that and he’s safe, safe. What does that mean? means you don’t have to worry, What would it take for you to not worry? What would it mean? And it might turn out to be something as simple as when I go to the grocery store.

26:41 I don’t have to worry if there’s money in the checking account, or I can send a little bit back to my family every Christmas. And if you answer that, then all the rest of it is irrelevant. I think with money, sometimes it’s the littlest things that make us feel good for me to know that I’m gonna sit in a certain seat on an airplane. What does it cost an extra 150 bucks? But that makes me feel really good and on the other hand, I just don’t care about certain things that are super expensive.

27:16 My computers, eight years old, couldn’t care less. It works great, so sometimes getting to the core of what makes you feel safe, what makes you feel good. That can take a long time, but when you get it, you discover, Man. I can lead a rich life and all I need to do is take my money and apply it there, and there we go. This must fix relationship problems, too.

27:39 It doesn’t fix it, it’s a help, it helps, because every one of those things where you’re not communicating they’re disagreeing, is gonna manifest itself in problems and arguments and tension. Yeah, come on, fix relationships, I wow, I’m like, Use my script to fix your 34 year old broken relationship. Now. I wish I got to get to that. Okay it.

27:58 What it does is to even have the conversation is amazing because most people don’t. You have to remember. Most people don’t even know there own attitudes about money. How could they have a conversation with their partner about it? So when you use, I will teach you be rich or whatever source you use, you’re gonna start to learn about your own philosophy on life.

28:17 What do I value? What do I not do? Did I ever know that I can actually achieve these returns over the long term? Wow, I figured out exactly when I’m gonna have 1 million dollars, or 2 million, or 5 million. This is all math, it’s not magic, it’s math. So once you understand those basics, then you can go. And because you learn the skills of communication and psychology, you can go to your partner.

28:42 Say, I’m so curious, I’ve been reading this book, it’s taught me so many things I never thought about money. I would love to do it together because I feel like money is a part of our relationship that we haven’t really talked about. And I would love to have these conversations together with you. Any partner would love that any partner it doesn’t matter, the age doesn’t matter, the gender doesn’t matter. The sophistication to know that you can do this together is life-changing.

29:08 Yeah, how do you feel about joint bank accounts? What do you usually recommend? Yeah, okay, I like joint accounts. I think that the way that I’ve set up our structure with my wife is. We have a joint account that pays our joint expenses like rent food, and then we have separate accounts where we have guilt free spending. So if I like to spend money on sweaters, great, that’s my guilt.

29:36 Free spending, no problem. She spends money on her thing, no questions asked. But we have our joint numbers and that’s where we start. Okay, all right, probably set that up as well. I was gonna ask you about something you call Invisible Scripts, you’re very controversial, and I appreciate this, yeah, about your views on some invisible scripts.

29:57 The most specific one, I think, is owning a house. Oh yeah, so I’d love to talk about that and also talk about the concept of invisible scripts. The fact that we have all these weird patterns and these things that we do, that we don’t even think about, yeah, now. Full disclosure I don’t know in a house and never have what now I don’t. You know, you’re just throwing money away on rent, and I’m a, you know, ex finance guy, I should that too.

30:18 So talk about, Okay, Cuz, that everyone’s gonna freak out, okay? So if you talk to anyone about real estate, the first thing they say is Gotta own a house and you’re throwing money away on rent. Okay, so you have, you have these odd phrases and you ask them, why, why are you throwing money away and right, you’re not building equity. Okay, okay, we’ll talk about that. And if you say, why would you buy a house?

30:43 Great investment, do it for the tax deduction. And then I can afford to retire one day. So all these phrases, if you’re listening, they just sound so logical because we’ve heard them repeated so many times. What I want people to do is to start challenging the phrases that have been fed to us by society. And if you run the math, you will discover that in many cities, including this see, it often makes no sense to buy at all.

31:13 I could buy a place tomorrow and I’ve been renting for ten years. Why, why, why would I do that? I’ll tell you why, because you are not throwing money away on rent, did you throw money away last night? When you went out to eat at a restaurant, no, you paid for something, you consumed it and you got value from that. If you’re renting, you’re paying for a roof over your head every month, and that’s it, you’re getting value from it.

31:39 What people do with real estate is they start to factor in all these things, like tax deductions. Which, by the way in, especially in America, recently have basically gone away. They forget to factor in phantom costs, and this is profound for people in life people rarely factor in phantom costs invisible costs. So if you’ve got an apartment, that’s renting for a thousand bucks a month and you’ve got an apartment, you can buy for a thousand bucks. And when people say, Oh, I just buy it because I build equity, what about the taxes that you have to pay here and not here?

32:18 What about repairs maintenance? What about HOA fees? What about closing fees? Now? Here’s the profound point. People say, Well, those are factored in to your rent, why would someone rent to you if they’re not making money on it? And the answer is, landlords don’t set the price based on costs they can only charge what the market will bear.

32:43 So when people say, Well, of course they’re making money, you need to know this. Most landlords don’t even know their costs, some landlords are profitable, but many are not. And this is the point you need to run the numbers on real estate. In short, a good rule of thumb, at least in America, is if you can’t put down 20- for a 30-year loan, you’re not ready. If you’re not gonna stay there for 10 years, minimum, you’re not ready.

33:14 If you don’t understand what terms like PMI are, you’re not ready, this the biggest financial decision of your life, you better know the basics of it. What the PMI is for people who can’t afford to put 20- down, they’re gonna give you an extra charge. So because of that instability, okay? And so what I want people to do is to get educated, run the numbers because this is a huge decision. Do not listen to your uncle, your aunt, your distant relatives saying you’re throwing money away on rent.

33:45 No, this is a big decision, get educated about it. So many of the emails I get from people in financial trouble. Or because they bought a house and they didn’t realize all the phantom expenses that would come with it all the fees. I talked about, all the maintenance, all the decorations that they’re now going to do, and so suddenly they are. They have this house, but they can’t travel anywhere, they can’t do anything, they have to commute longer.

34:10 So no rich life anymore. No, because the house now, if the house is something you love and you really want to decorate it, or you want to live in this one dream house, be my guest, I will buy eventually and that’s gonna drive people on Twitter insane. They think I’m blanket against buying, that’s not correct. What I want people to do is to run the numbers and not take these things that have been fed to us by society. That renting is for losers, it’s not, and you see this concept everywhere.

34:40 The New York Times writes. Headlines basically implying that rent are not as accomplished, or they’re not as valuable as homeowners. That’s not true. A rich life for people has changed. And it used to be.

34:57 I want to buy a house, I want to have 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, a dog, and then I retire. That’s not true anymore. For a lot of people we want to travel, maybe we want to be bicoastal, maybe we want to work remotely. These things are different. And so what I want with I will teach you to be rich and your rich life is to think really hard.

35:17 Do I want to buy a house, have I run the numbers? is it worth it to me? And if it’s not, it’s perfectly fine to say I’m not gonna do that. What we taught to buy houses by the banks, this is something that cooked up like a hundred years. Yes, yes, who do you think has the incentive to get you to buy it? Ah, the National Association of Realtors, one of the most powerful lobbying groups ever.

35:40 They want you to buy, so they create propaganda, saying real estate only goes up. Oh, when it goes up, it’s good and when it goes down it’s a great buying opportunity, so it’s always good. Is that what you’re telling me? No, it makes no sense. Then you have the government, which actually encourages people through things like formerly tax deductions, etc. they want people to buy houses.

36:03 Okay, so there’s that, and then, of course, there’s social, there’s our friends who say, Oh, you still rent or, wow, you bought this. That’s social approval that comes from our friends and parents is so insidious, so powerful. I used to have someone in New York City that I bought a house, and I’m like, No, you bought 10- of a house. The other 90- is a loan to the bank and you’re paying interest on that. But for them it was that thing and it made them feel good, and maybe that was part of the rich life.

36:33 But again, it’s this ingrained plan. You know, maybe the comparison. Maybe this isn’t fair, but if you ever look at the at the mythology behind a diamond ring for a wedding in like the whole diamond mines and de beers and a diamond, last forever. They’ve convinced you that’s the only way to show your love. And you have this rock with no secondary market, you know, and you start wondering, Why am I doing this?

36:53 It’s like buying a house is something similar, that’s very powerful, what you just offhandedly said with no secondary market. So for everyone watching, it’s important to know people buy a diamond ring, and there’s a lot of marketing behind it. I actually wrote a massive piece on how to buy an engagement ring and what I went through. And one of the things that people use to convince themselves of this emotional purchase is, Well, if we ever need to sell it, we can. And what they don’t realize is there’s effectively no resale value at all.

37:25 You can buy a ring, it could be three thousand dollars, it could be fifty thousand dollars. You go to sell it the next day. It’s effectively worthless, maybe ten, fifteen percent of what you paid, so we use that in the back of our logical. I had to say, Well, I’m doing it for a good reason, and that’s the way we work. We need to acknowledge that, don’t deny that we buy the things we want.

37:48 And in that article, I said, Look, if you want to buy a ring, and if your partner really wants it, do it. In fact, go extravagant on it if you want to but run the numbers and get educated about the facts, don’t let this little logical voice trick you into thinking This is a financial decision, it’s not. And so for housing. It might turn out to be good for your friend, but it would probably be better. If they were just honest and said, This makes me feel good, it makes me feel safe, it makes me feel accomplished.

38:23 That would be more honest if they had run the numbers now in the housing markets going up. And all your friends are talking about how they’re flipping houses. And I remember when I was in New York City around 2000 or something, the market was jacked and up. And when you got to dinner, all everybody would talk about was a goddamn housing crisis to stop enough. But like you said, I mean, these things go up and down.

38:43 I’ve never, and when people say, Oh, I’m gonna read you my kitchen, oh, the price, the house goes up. No, it doesn’t. I’ve never paid for anything I call the landlord when there’s a problem. Yeah, and they fix it. And then when I want to move one neighborhood in London and get the hell out and I do that often.

38:56 Then I go and I go and I go, so I know I’m paying for liquidity. Yes, and I just make that conscious decision. But, you know, there’s so much in what you just said that we could spend hours unpacking. But for everyone, I just want to point out a couple things. Number one, you do it for quiddity.

39:12 Which means if you want flexibility in your lifestyle, you want to be able to potentially pack up and move to a different neighborhood, city, state or even country that renting allows you to do that, and the other thing is this kitchen thing. Most people again, they think that if they redo the floors or the kitchen or the bathroom, that they’re going to make that back. And if you show them the numbers, saying you might spend thirty thousand dollars redoing this floor kitchen and you will get zero dollars of that back. Do you still want to do it? First of all, they would say that’s not true.

39:48 I saw on HGTV that bathrooms always pay. You show them the actual effects. Okay, it’s not true, and suddenly now at least you’re informed. Now you can say, You know, what is it worth? Thirty thousand dollars for me to have this wood on this floor?

40:03 If so awesome, you should do it. But part of the living, a rich life, is being honest with What am I spending on it and why? When I go to a nice hotel, I love to spend on it because I come back from lunch. The room has been made up and there’s little details in there that weren’t there before. If it meant on them.

40:23 Yeah, things like that and it. I realize it makes me feel that someone is there looking over me. It’s almost like, Yeah, it’s almost, yeah. It’s like having a parent there to take care of you, and I think, deep down, a lot of us love that. Now we might express that through a hotel that’s a relatively rare one.

40:44 We might express it through taking care of a partner or being taken care of. Maybe you love when your partner cooks for you or helps you with your clothes, whatever. For me, that’s my thing, the hotel. It feels really good to know that someone is there watching out and making sure waters are refilled and things like that. I know I sound insane, but this is what I love, This is my rich life.

41:04 Ever make you now examine your own? Oh yeah, I’m like, Lay down on the sofa, why do I need to be taken care of? Yeah, this turned into a therapy session. But what I, what I think is important is I’m comfortable knowing that this sounds insane to most people. This is my rich life, not yours, and I want everyone as they dial it in as they start to get really refine.

41:26 Whether it’s with a $30,000 income or a three million dollar income. Your rich life is yours, and you should dial that in overtime so that it becomes uniquely and unapologetically yours. If a house is part of that rich life, amazing, do it get informed, know the numbers, but do not make decisions on buying anything from a car to a house. Because society told me so, real estate is religion in America. It doesn’t mean it’s right, we should examine it, it’s a financial purchase as well, and we should understand the numbers.

42:04 Yeah, really Well said. And the fantom costs are so big in London, there’s something called a stamp tax. Oh, a great name, great euphemism. And it’s like five to eight percent of the price when you buy a house. So, you know, because I used to be in finance and I understand liquidity, I was just like, Has anyone noticed this?

42:21 You know, you buy a couple million pound house, yeah, it’s like a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Not to mention the bid offer. If you want to move, yes, get out of that thing. That could be another five, ten percent of the cost, so that’s crazy. So people don’t understand when you say five percent, that you have a lifetime of knowledge.

42:39 But to the average person, five percents like, Oh, out of a dollar, five cents, not bad. Let me give an example to people, so they understand the effect of fees on returns. This is very counterintuitive. If you pay a one percent fee for your investments to be managed, right, let’s say you’ve got some portfolio could be ten thousand bucks, could be ten million bucks. And let’s say you decide, I’m paying a financial advisor to look over my stuff because I don’t know all this money stuff.

43:10 1- per year. Most people say That sounds good. I don’t want to have to deal with this, and I trust this person now if I asked you for that. 1- fee, guess what percentage of your returns are going into your advisors pocket. Most people, they would say, 1-, maybe 4-.

43:31 The answer is 28-, 28-. Over your lifetime, we’ll go straight into that advisors pocket. The math is crazy. Counterintuitive 2- fees 56- over 50-. Why?

43:48 Wall Street, as you know, is so sophisticated it shrouds all these fees, it has convenience. They’ll give you a beautiful report if you have a lot of money. They’ll let you come to their Midtown Office and serve you this beautiful coffee on this awesome mug and you don’t need that stuff. What I want people to know is phantom. Costs are massive, and I actually feel like the ordinary person has virtually no way of fighting back unless they get hyper educated.

44:19 That’s why I wrote the book because Mom and Pop will never understand how one percent fee could take. 28- of their return. It doesn’t make any sense, the math is totally crazy. I saw my mom’s prospectus. She retired as a schoolteacher in California.

44:36 You would think California school teacher unions looking out for them. I saw the prospectus they gave her for where she should invest her retirement. It was in this nice colored font like it was looked like it was written by a crayons. You know, school teacher is so cool, and then I look at the fees. They were almost extortionate, they were over 2-, and they were bundled into expense ratios and fees and annuities.

44:59 How’s the average school teacher gonna fight back against that? And so I do think that in this world, I wish it were a little easier. I wish it were a little easier for us to make healthy food choices. I wish it were a little easier for us to make the right financial choices because most of us have generally similar goals. We want to feel safe, we want to feel good, want to live our life, but we want to be protected in our old age.

45:23 I wish I were a little easy for us to maintain good social relationships instead of just being on our phone and texting our family. Maybe once a week or once a month, that we would actually live closer and have time to serendipitously run into each other instead. Society has made it increasingly hard to win at these things. Snacks are everywhere, so you have to fight to find healthy food options or make it money. You have to fight some Wall Street predator, and instead you have to understand expense ratios and asset allocation.

46:00 That’s really hard stuff. And then with social relationships, you have to fight to maintain them and to see your friends and family. So I have to say, I kind of wish life were a little easier, just a little because we do have to take responsibility. But systemically it’s tough. And that’s why I wanted people to get educated about their money.

46:20 Fight back. And when you do that, suddenly you realize, Man. I can take control against these multi-billion dollar companies, and if I can do that, then I can do anything else I want to do. You tell people to invest on their own and 401ks and don’t think that the stock guru knows things you don’t. Yes, go in and just have a basic plan.

46:37 Yeah, boring is good, yeah, so everyone’s like, I want Alpha Chase Alpha 8-, so boring guys. Investment is not reality TV. You want to be entertained, turn on Bravo, okay? Investing is boring and it should be highly profitable, so you should spend less than one hour per month on your investments. And what I talked about in the book is to set up an automated system should not be looking at it.

47:03 It’s low cost, long term low fees, and over time it compounds. So that’s the first part, is just to automate the whole thing. Do not sit there and think you need to be reading all the news. None of that stuff is relevant to the individual investor. The second part, which is not talked about commonly, is to earn more.

47:20 So everybody focuses on these $3 questions. How do I cut back on lattes? Very few people focus on the $30,000 questions. How do I automate a good investment portfolio? How do I earn more money? Should I start a business? Should I negotiate my salary? These are all things that I teach in my programs and because so many people have been mired in these $3 questions for their entire life, they can’t look up and realize this stuff doesn’t matter.

47:51 I could buy as many lattes as I want, but if I negotiate a $25,000 raise, as my students routinely do. I could buy as many lattes as I want for the rest of my life. So instead of focusing on the $3 questions, what I want to do is for people to focus on the $30,000 questions. He opened up the can of worms. We got to find out, How do you get a raise?

48:12 And by the way, I think one of my employees read, Watch one of the days and then asked me, Did he get it? He got something okay. So my, my own team has, of course, read all my negotiation material, and I’m like, Man, you’re good, you’re good, they’re using this stuff, but it works. If you are a top performer, right? So let me give you a detailed example of how you can go in and ask for a raise.

48:35 Now. The typical way people think about it is they get nervous and they don’t do it at all that’s common. They just wait for the world to recognize them. I don’t like that. The second way they think about doing it is they get really aggressive.

48:49 Like they kick their boss’s door and saying, Give me 20k bosses like what you’re out of here, so that’s not good either. But the way to do it is calm, cool and methodical. So what you do is you set up a meeting with your boss. And you say, I would love to discuss what it takes to be a top performer in this role. Would it be possible for us to set up some time to talk?

49:12 Every boss is gonna take that meeting, you set it up, you go in there and you say, You know what? I really enjoy, what I’m doing, I love the work and the project that I’m on. I really want to know what it takes to excel in this role. What would it take to be a top performer? Now?

49:28 Most bosses never hear this never, so they’re just loving it. Oh wow, you’re gonna help me in my job, help me look good. Yes, so they might give you a little vague. Answer Well, you know, keep working on that project, but as the employee, it’s your job to push. Okay, I’m working on this project.

49:46 Right now, we’re targeting a 1 percent conversion rate. Would that make me a top performer? No, actually, 1.25 would make you top perform. Great, I’m gonna write that down as one. So you push him in, probe him and get these three things, and you say, You know what, I really appreciate you walking me through this, I’m gonna write these down and send you an email.

50:06 And six months from now, I’d like to rediscover for Murrell. I’d like to discuss a compensation adjustment, but for now, let me just focus on hitting these numbers and I’ll keep you updated. Bosses like Sounds great, go back to your desk, write it up, send the email. Now it’s your job to do two things, number one, you better hit those numbers. Okay, you committed to him, that’s what you’re going for.

50:30 You got to hit it, and this is where it’s real hard work. No fancy script is gonna change the fact that you need to be good if you want to raise, so that’s number one number two. You got to communicate to your boss every Friday or every other Friday, just wanted to give you a status check. We talked about these things. Here’s where I am, This is on track, this is not.

50:49 I’d love your help to connect to this person, etc. After a few weeks of this, your boss is going to love it because he or she is being kept in the loop. If there’s one thing bosses hate, including me, it’s not knowing the status of something, so let’s fast forward. Let’s assume you hit these numbers and your performance reviews coming up, so you walk in. And you say, six months ago, we discussed these things and I was so thankful that you were explicit about what it takes.

51:20 Now I have some good news and this is where you implement something. I call the briefcase technique you can google it the briefcase. Yeah, so it’s very theatrical, and whether you have a briefcase or a folder doesn’t matter. The point is you have prepared, so you come and you say, six months ago we talked about getting a one point, two, five percent conversion rate. Well, I’m really pleased to show you that we achieved a one point, three, three percent conversion rate shattering our goals.

51:50 I’m so happy that’s gonna result in an extra six hundred thousand dollars in revenue for the business or whatever. The second goal, the third goal achieved. And I just want to thank you because it has been amazing to have clarity on what it takes to be a top performer. Bosses like Great Job, Great Job, second part of the briefcase technique. Pull out this thing from your folder, you say.

52:10 Based on my research, it looks like the compensation range from my role is 65 to 72 K. And I’d like to discuss an adjustment to 72 K at the top of the range based on my performance here on these metrics, we jointly said, Well, now you to have a conversation, now it’s not, Do I like you or not? Now? It’s not kicking down the door and demanding money. Now it’s about your research, which you did, and you can use various salary sites.

52:42 It’s also about the work that you did. This is a totally different way of thinking about a raise. It is profoundly impactful because you’re doing the work, you’re taking the risk on yourself and at a certain point, your boss either has to recognize you. Which is how my students typically get ten twenty thousand dollar raises. Or you are so good that you know you can take your ticket and go somewhere else.

53:11 So this is the essence of what I cover in some of my programs, and I show you the exact words. And when the boss says, You know, we don’t have the budget for it. This year, I show you the body language and the words to use right back at the boss. But ultimately the core thing is get clear on what successes do the work? And then make sure you tell your boss and be specific in what you’re asking for.

53:36 Yeah, look, I love this, I get all three where I’m at and a lot of number twos. Yeah, and then people come in and they’re just like, I learn more, and I’m like, Why, Cuz? I knew, and I’m like, Okay, and it’s just, it’s you’re very rational sometimes, and I’m just like, Okay, but you know why you’ve been here for this. And because my friend, or because of the title, and it’s just this weird thing because they haven’t thought about it. But if someone wants to come in and help me make money, I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing anyways, if you really want to be active about it and you want to quantify it.

54:06 It’s hard for me to argue. And if my whole team was on that, trying to think about how we can all make more money. That’s a boss’s dream, that’s exactly it, and I love. We said, It’s a boss’s dream, your boss. This is the secret that many employees don’t know.

54:22 Your boss has a budget and what they are going to do is they’re gonna give the bulk of that budget to their top performer. Okay, and the rest are gonna get nothing or cost-of-living increases like two percent. You need to be that top performer, and just because your boss likes you does not mean anything they could like you. But when it comes down to a fixed pie of budget they have, they are going to give most of it to the top performer. Everyone else gonna get whatever’s left.

54:50 So if someone comes in as I discussed notice that they’re not aggravated and rigid, they’re not making irrational demands about my coworker. Who cares about your coworker? That’s nothing to do with this conversation. They are calm, cool, collected and methodical, and that is where a conversation about money goes. Notice the patterns.

55:11 By the way, same thing with investing is not sexy, it’s not fun and entertaining, it’s boring, calm, cool and collected. Buying a house, you can love it. I love the brick wall so beautiful. But let’s also be calm, cool and collected about the financial parts job starting a business. All of these things, people start off frenzied and they’re pulling their hair out, and what we want to do is go from hot to cool.

55:38 When you’re in a cool state of mind and you can make really good decisions. Yeah, so keep it always calm and cool. If you’re ever yelling about money or getting angry, you’re doing it wrong. Yeah, you’re gonna lose money, that’s right, it’s not gonna go. Well, if you’re getting heated in a conversation about money with your partner, best thing you can do is say, You know what?

55:56 I think that I need to take a few minutes because I’m not communicating the way that I want to, and I apologize for that. Can you give me ten minutes and let me come back and try this again? Every partner is gonna say yes, because you’re taking it on yourself, the key part of I will teach to be rich. You know, I post all these stories on Twitter and Instagram and my newsletter about people who negotiate $25,000 raise. They started a $300,000 business, and people like This is crazy, there’s no way, but the key difference is that I focus on them doing the hard work themselves.

56:31 Nobody’s gonna say, Hey, you seem nice. Here’s a twenty thousand dollar race, Never gonna happen. Your boss wants to pay you the minimum they can get away with unless you are a top performer. And you know, and they know that, in which case, they want to keep you happy for as long as they possibly can. So you got to do the work with your money, with your career, with your relationship, nobody’s gonna do it for you.

56:57 Ecology book is what it is. How do you feel about student loans, why you? So it looks like you, what do you think about it before I get into? Well, you know, I just came up, I just was thinking about it, and, you know, we both went to two good schools and I’m really happy. I went to my school and I think it put me on a great journey and put me around a great peer group and got me to demand a standard of excellence for myself.

57:23 And I’ve got a 15 year old stepdaughter and she’s going to school soon, and you hear everybody I was on, you know, I was up at James All Teachers Studio in his comedy Club, and, you know, he’s vehement. Lee arguing daughter’s not to go to school. They’re telling him to do one and they’re going to school, they’re going to school, yeah, they’re going to school. And, you know, these days it’s more expensive than when we went to Square away Mall. She’s when I went school.

57:43 Tuition was fourteen thousand five hundred dollars, and now it’s probably for one year at M.I.T. Yeah, it’s gotta be even more, maybe now. So for me, I still feel like it’s a good investment if it’s the right school and it gets the mentality. But I also know that a lot of kids these days are being crushed by the debt, so I don’t know. Just wonder what your thoughts I love.

58:02 I love everything you just said, and I think it’s rare to hear from someone who went to an elite school like you did. Sharing their perspective, it has become really popular. It’s almost the Mesha message du jour to say, Don’t go to college, it’s a waste of money. I actually disagree. I think going to college can be one of the best investments you make.

58:23 You do need to be thoughtful about where you go and you need to be thoughtful about your major. But if you look at lifetime earnings of college graduates, on average, they’re over a million dollars higher than non college graduates. And I don’t find the argument persuasive when people say Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Well, Mark Zuckerberg got into Harvard and he also dropped out because he had a massive play on his hands with Facebook. So if you are Mark Zuckerberg, you will know it.

58:52 But most of the people making these arguments, I actually think are being quite disingenuous because they themselves went to college, they became successful. They’re preaching to everyone else not to go to college and then their own kids go to college, so I don’t buy it. I will say that the price of college has gone way up way higher than inflation, and there’s a lot of uncomfortable reasons for that. When the government is guaranteeing loans, then prices have to go up. When you are not allowed to discharge loans in bankruptcy, then the price goes up even more.

59:30 So. If we want to control those costs are some really politically uncomfortable things that need to happen. But for individuals, the key things to know our number one lifetime earnings are higher. For college graduates, number two, college is not just about making more money. You meet friends, you’re gonna keep for life.

59:49 You learn different ways of thinking that you will never learn from watching videos on your own. Structured thinking with world-class instructors is something that you can never get once you are out of college. It’s very difficult. And third is be sensible about the colleges. You go to talk to people who went to colleges and had great experiences.

1:00:11 This is the key. That’s why I’m so glad you’re sharing what you are and why I’m sharing what it. I loved it, I would go back again. I will send my kids there and I had to pay for it on my own with scholarships. So there are ways of doing it.

1:00:24 But if you are only asking advice from unhappy, disaffected people, guess what kind of responses you’re gonna get. So if you’re sitting there on Twitter, saying, Is college debt good? You got a bunch of people with the icon of a dunce cap saying, Coach sucks like, I don’t know if I should listen to these people. Maybe I should also go talk to somebody who went to M.I.T. or somebody who went to a different school and had a great experience. Let’s understand, let’s get educated, and then we can make a good decision.

1:00:52 Yeah, it’s tricky. CUZ You know, I know someone who wouldn’t spoke at Upenn recently and is one of my mentors. And he said, You know, it’s sixty five thousand a year when they get out. The average salary is seventy thousand dollars a year. It doesn’t make sense.

1:01:04 I was like, Well, in a long enough time horizon, I think it maybe does, and you know those connections and those people and look at the boards of directors. Yeah, I just still disagree, but myopically, it might not look. And then maybe that doesn’t mean that you pay the same price for some smaller college. Well, that’s the thing state school somewhere else, yes, so there’s lots of options with college and people who know about colleges and education. They know that there are certain colleges that are not a good value, they are middle tier, they charge way too much, and those sort of savvy parents are like steering their children away from that.

1:01:41 Because you walk out with a ton of debt, but not the commensurate response from the market, I say, an M.I.T. Stanford, etc. State schools are amazing, there are so many amazing opportunities there. Also, we have to remember one thing that nobody talks about. It’s rare that people pay sticker price again. This is something that only people who are savvy with education.

1:02:03 We know 65k year is the sticker price that’s like the sticker price for a car very rare that people pay it. There are so many grants. And as my parents taught me, if you are good enough to get in, they will take care of the money for you. I want to say it again because it’s so important if you are good enough to get in, they will take care of the money for you. So even if I hadn’t had scholarships, Stanford would have given me a ton of financial aid because my parents didn’t make a ton of money.

1:02:31 Now, if your parents make a ton of money, or if you and your family make a ton of money, then you’re probably gonna pay more. That kind of makes sense, but I want people to get educated. If you think college cost 65 KA, then you don’t understand that almost nobody’s paying the sticker price, so go beneath the headlines. Rent is throwing money away. No, it’s not 65 k year, no, it’s not.

1:02:55 College graduation rates are too long. Look at the top performers go deeper than the headlines, and you might be surprised with what you discover. Yeah, that’s where you talk about being an entrepreneur, and maybe talk about your journey too, and maybe how you stumbled into this because you got a crazy story. And then also, you know this, this concept of is having a job okay, or is it bad, or should everybody have a business or a side hustle or multiple ones? Yeah, because again, if you get on Twitter, you can get tons there.

1:03:22 Everyone on Twitter thinks people with jobs are losers and I don’t understand it. I think having a job can be amazing. You get to work with a team, you get to do something that you yourself could not do alone. So I just want to start off by saying there’s no shame at all in having a job, it can actually incredible. And that’s why some of my co-workers in my company choose to work, and I will teach you to be rich.

1:03:45 They could start something on their own. My journey was unusual because it would have been very easy for me to go work at Google. In fact, I had an offer from Google to go work there, which was like awesome free food, laundry doctor, good, great co-workers. So I accepted the offer and they were like, Watch you take a couple weeks, you know, you’ve been in school for a long time. I was like, Oh, yeah, I plan to, I’m gonna take like, three months and just do nothing.

1:04:15 So I took the summer and during that time I was working on a start-up and the startup kind of took off and I went back to Google and I said, Hey, really appreciated the two and a half months, can I take a little longer? They’re like, What do you need? Another month? I was like, How about two and a half more years? They’re like, No, so I decided not to work at Google and I went full time on this startup.

1:04:39 It’s a big decision. Yeah, I was very unsure. I asked a lot of my teachers and advisers and parents, I asked everybody around friends, and it was interesting who gave me different advice. It was basically 50-50 split. Some people said, Do the startup like these startups, don’t come around that often?

1:05:05 If you got something that’s going well, do it. Other people told me, If you go to Google, you will have a resume that you can use forever. And I have to say that advice made me really angry because I’d been working hard since I was 14 years old. I was like, I have a pretty good resume already. When do I get to stop chasing the resume?

1:05:28 When do I have to work at Google? Then I have to go work at some other company, then I have to do XYZ. And who am I checking these boxes for? And I really resented someone telling me that I needed to check the boxes for this unseen person who would finally value me. And it kind of explains a lot about why I resent the ideas that I have to buy house.

1:05:52 Or that I have to do this, or that I don’t like that, I’ll do it my way and I’ll take the risk if it doesn’t work out fine. I’m accountable, but I want to chart my own path. So I decided to turn down the offer at Google, I went full time on this startup, two other co-founders, it was a collaboration company. We raised millions of dollars in venture capital and that was going, and at the same time I was continuing to write. I will teach you to be rich.

1:06:21 This was just a blog, and the way that I was doing that was I had back in college. I had tried to teach my friends about money after I learned, and everybody said, Oh, that sounds awesome, I’ll come to your class. And then they never showed up. Because people hate to go to events about money, you know, why makes them feel bad about themselves? And this was even at 2021.

1:06:43 Now imagine forty five who wants to go to some H.R. talk about 401K contributions. Now your co-workers look at you and realize you haven’t done anything. I’d rather just ignore him for another ten years, so I’ve got this startup that we’re doing. Meanwhile, I, you know, this teaching people personal finance didn’t work, nobody came, so I had started a blog. I was like, The world needs to hear what I have to say, Nobody’s listening.

1:07:10 Let me start this blog. Maybe these lazy college kids will read from their dorm room. That turned out to be a really good decision because I wrote in a way that you and I would be sitting here talking about money. Let’s grab a beer. Let’s make fun of our cheap friend who never tips when we go out to eat.

1:07:30 And let’s talk about investing and growing our money. Okay, so I’m doing these two things at once, and I think for a lot of us, it’s really hard to commit to one path. I think a lot of us are nervous about closing the doors on options. And, you know, is this gonna be the thing I want to do for the next 40 years? And I felt that I had these two things that I was doing eventually.

1:07:55 I will teach you to be rich, got to be so big. It got to be hundreds of thousands of readers that I went full-time on it. And when I did that, I had been writing it for about four or five years. I hadn’t really charged much, it was a hobby until I started. I just wanted to see if somebody would pay for anything online.

1:08:17 So in 2006, I created a $5 ebook, and I’d been writing a site for years, and I said, Here’s this ebook. It’s called Ramit’s Guide to Kicking Ass. And I charge four dollars and 95 cents, and I was petrified. Will anyone buy it? And they did.

1:08:38 But I also got a lot of angry comments calling me a sellout. I will teach Rumi to be rich, and that was when I started to become very interested in how to grow my business as well. So that’s the origin from there. If we fast forward, we have 20 programs now business, money, careers, psychology. We have about 42 thousand customers and our programs are anywhere from a few hundred bucks to ten, fifteen thousand dollars.

1:09:08 And what we do now is we actually are launching new ones that go around the country where people can come and meet. And so if you’re starting a business, which is the primary one people come to us for. That is, they can come meet, learn how to find an idea and how to grow it. And that’s what we do. And you have how many employees and you distribute your workforce like, tell us some lessons about how again you’re doing things your way.

1:09:35 Yeah, so that’s another thing. I always resented the idea of having to go into an office, and I don’t know why. It’s weird, I know, but I just don’t like the idea of having to be somewhere. Californians Yeah, that might be it. I like, Why do you get to tell me, and, you know, do I have to ask the boss if I can go on vacation?

1:09:56 Like I just didn’t like it? So I love working from home and I wanted to build a company where I could work remotely, and so I did that. All my company is remote. We have about 25 or so employees around the country fully bootstrapped company. So I always say the best type of funding is funding from your customers, and our customers have stuck.

1:10:17 Thus, they love what they’ve been able to achieve with raises with starting $100,000 businesses or even million-dollar businesses. So they keep coming back, And that allows us to build a remote company where we are high performers, and we keep creating these amazing pieces of material. And that attracts more customers. It’s like a beautiful flywheel. MMM.

1:10:38 And, as have you learned intellectual property when it comes to managing people remotely, do you have to meet up regularly? Is there a lot of that stuff going on? We do at least one all team meet up per year and we have an all team call every week on Zoom’. So we use Zoom and slack extensively. And we learned a lot of subtle things that we wouldn’t have learned had we not been fully remote.

1:11:02 One video is so important and when I first rolled out video, there were a lot of people. It was interesting who said my video cameras broken. It doesn’t work and I’ve. It took me a couple we like made a lot of broken cameras in this company. People were nervous about what they looked like and their background and things like that and what we had to do is say, Look, it doesn’t matter what your background is, we’re not here to judge your background, but it’s really important for us to see each other.

1:11:27 There’s something fundamentally human about that. The other thing we do is with our meetings, we have strict agendas, but we take some time to check in at the beginning. Hey, how was your weekend? See any movies, little things like that, which you would naturally do if we were here in person. But remotely you almost have to script them, and when you first do that, it can feel weird.

1:11:49 Why are we having three minutes for check-ins? But as one of my friends told me, if it’s important, it gets scheduled and it is important for us to have these social bonds. So we’ve done that as well. Three minutes of check-in. They start a very meaning where you can’t talk about business. Yeah, yeah, you’re forced to talk about non business stuff.

1:12:08 Yeah, we do that and we try to set a culture, and we’re actually building it in more formally to meetings as well. One other thing we do with our all team meetings is we try to encourage people will. I’ll pose a question? Here’s something Starbucks is doing, Why are they doing it? And you get feedback from all over the company, everyone from customer service to marketing, to copy to operations.

1:12:33 And that’s important because everyone wants to feel valued, and actually it’s amazing that the ideas you get when you ask the entire team turn out to be surprisingly good, really good. And they come from surprising places, so these are things again. If you were in the same office, you might just naturally do them, but we’ve had to engineer them. Yeah, I’m such a Nazi about video on calls, and I get so many people saying, Oh, it’s not working. But like, these are.

1:13:01 I always do Zoom video meetings, but these are like too weird lawyers and accountants and people here. And I’m always like, I want to see your face, and they’re like, Yeah, me like, that’s how to make a connection with you without it, like, you know. But people still send me conference call links. I’m like, speaking to, You know, some boardroom, Yes, people, I can’t see you, it just doesn’t make. The video thing is powerful, I think, and I think also encouraging people to talk a little bit more about their own personal lives again.

1:13:30 If people are not comfortable sharing, we have people on the In the company who are. They’re there to do a job and they want to keep work and private life separate? Totally respect that. That’s something that I think is important to respect, but I will say that when you create a culture where people want to be heard, then naturally, people want to talk about what’s going on in their lives. Even if it’s as simple as What TV show is good, right?

1:13:55 And I know a couple weeks ago I was like, Guys, I’m looking for something you to watch. What do you recommend like? What a great way for everyone to have a voice. And then they suggested a show I’d never heard of, and it’s awesome, so, you know, it’s a great way. To connect with people is just to remember life isn’t just about money, conversion rates, etc.

1:14:13 It’s also about just a fundamental human connection. Yeah, what do you tell people who want to start a business? You know, we don’t have hours? But still, I tell them, starting a business can be one of the most rewarding things you do. And I think that people who are ready to start a business and know it, they know it for a couple of reasons.

1:14:33 They know it because maybe they have a good job. Maybe not, but the reason that I started mine was I wanted to create my own path. If I want to go work out at 3 P.m. on a weekday, I want to be able to do that if I want to be able to travel for six weeks a year, like I do now with my wife, I want to be able to do that and I think, most importantly, I want to know that if I work harder, I will be rewarded for that. I think sometimes for a certain group of people, they say, Hey, I could create something absolutely amazing for my company and I don’t see any benefit, so what can I do on my own? For those people, I think starting a business can be amazing, people who have something the world needs to hear.

1:15:19 They might not be sure of their idea yet. A super common. The other common objection is I don’t have time and the third common objections, this is all overwhelming. I need to figure it out. I ask people on my email list, I said, Do you want to start a business?

1:15:34 A huge majority of them do. Eventually I said, How long have you been thinking about this? and over 40- of them said Years I think it’s too long. It’s too long to be thinking about something for years and not doing something about it. So what we do is we help people find that idea, we help them test it with the market. Because, like, I love to iron clothes, but I’m not starting a business based on ironing, nobody’s gonna pay me for that.

1:16:05 I’d love to eat spicy food. I would love to create a program called 60 Days to Habanero Zero. People want to pay me for that. It’s never gonna happen, but there are other things that people happily pay for. And so some of our students are.

1:16:17 We have a caricature artist who used to draw at Carnivals six, eight bucks an hour, she turned it into a multi six-figure business. We have Excel consultants, we have interior designers, stylists and we show them how to take what they’re naturally good at. Maybe dressing well, maybe helping with relationship problems and turn that into a business. And once you get those first two or three customers, first, one might be grandma. Second, one might be your sister.

1:16:43 But the third one means it’s not a fluke, and suddenly you can grow. If you can make a hundred, you can make a thousand, if you can make a thousand, you can make a lot more. So that’s what we teach Yakkung a lot of people because we teach business to that. Say not everyone to be an entrepreneur, and it’s not for everyone. But I think the entrepreneur journey can teach you so much about yourself.

1:17:02 I mean, just like the journey with your own money can teach you about yourself. And you know, you’ll never look at your company the same way again. Also, get you out of your comfort zone, sometimes putting your ideas out there, not fearing rejection or dealing with it. Like you said. Getting those first few customers seeing you can add value, understanding how to productize your IP and put it out there and scale it.

1:17:22 I mean, even if the business never goes anywhere big, yeah, it could easily lead to another opportunity. You could go to your boss and say, Now I see how this works. I’m gonna add value over the next six months, and I’m gonna come and ask you for a big fat raise. I mean, again, for me, it’s all progress, so I like what you’re saying, and I think it’s a totally different way to look at it. Some people come into a program like a business program like ours, earnable or whatever it might be.

1:17:46 And they’re like, How fast am I going to make my money back? That’s one way to look at it, but I almost feel like you’re missing the journey on it, which is what you talked about. What skills am I going to develop, How am I going to get out of my comfort zone? What am I going to learn that I could use to build an asset? So many people are working and if they stopped working tomorrow, they would have no asset.

1:18:09 But if you have an asset like this, video is an asset. And it will continue to accumulate views and potential people to visit your business for years to come. So I have emails I’ve written, and products I’ve created that generate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they were created years ago. That’s an asset, so I think for a lot of people in today, today’s day and age, it’s less about. Let me work at the same company for 40 years.

1:18:37 And for this small group of people, they say, You know what, I’m willing to do the work. But I want an asset that will pay me even as I travel or even as I have a flexible schedule and I’ll maintain it. I’ll support people, but I want to build an asset that’s different than a nine-to-five job. So for those people, I think it’s great, but if that’s not for you, that’s okay. Yeah, just go pick on your job, yeah.

1:18:59 Biggest lesson you learned in building this business or mistake, and then some of the big wins or realizations, Oh, look, and I’ll be this, I’ll be honest. You’ve written me using blogs about business failures, and I mean, I’ve read them and they’ve been super helpful to me. So thank you for that. I mean, for people that don’t know. Check out your blog.

1:19:18 You know, be like, this is why I wasted two million dollars on this idea, and I’ll tell you why, and that’s why I’m moving on from this business. It also shows a great thought process of you. It shows you’re willing to take risks. And so I know you’ve probably had some other. You know, 10 million dollar wins you, thank you, but maybe talks about.

1:19:34 Yeah, I. I definitely think that any entrepreneur who goes through a journey has some things that they are really proud of, that they never get to talk about. And they also have some failures. Every entrepreneur of any scale has some crazy failures. So for me, you know, that first ebook and getting called a sell out was mortifying.

1:19:58 It was the worst thing I could do. That could have happened to me. Because, like I had been writing for free for years and to get called a sellout was. It felt like a betrayal from my readers, but what also happened was I looked at the numbers again. Not just going with your feelings, but looking at the numbers.

1:20:17 And there were lots of people quietly buying, and I started to realize there’s something going on here. There’s these loud commenters saying everything should be free. I could find this on YouTube, etc. And there’s other people quietly buying and their open rates are higher. They’re asking for the next program, etc.

1:20:34 So I think in life you need to be very careful who you take advice from. That was what I learned. When you start off and you ask people, it’s like, If somebody starts a diet and you go, Hey, I’m thinking of starting a diet, what should I do? Don’t ever ask that question because a bunch of crackpots are gonna come out of the woodwork. Don’t eat fruit afternoon, but keto and intermittent fasting.

1:20:56 It’s like, Dude, why am I taking advice from you? why? That’s a great question to ask if someone is telling you need to buy a house and they’re in $800,000 of debt. Why would I take advice from you? So you want to be very careful? You want to ask people who had a great college experience, should I go to college?

1:21:14 Also, ask people who had a poor college experience integrate that information for an entrepreneur. You want to always listen to the people around you, but especially your paying customers. So I spend a lot more time asking them, What would you like to for me to write more about what should I create? Oh, you have a challenge, Let’s get on the phone, tell me about, I can’t promise I’m gonna create something, but I’d love to at least hear what’s on your mind. And so that is key.

1:21:43 Be careful who you take advice from. I think in terms of failures, lots of large financial failures. So one was. We spent 2 million dollars on Facebook ads, and it didn’t work, basically flushed it down the toilet. And I wrote up a huge post about this because I wanted to share with people.

1:22:04 The idea that everyone was out there, especially a few years ago, saying Facebook ads are where it’s at by my Facebook ads. Course. You can put a dollar and make two. It’s easy, it’s effortless, anyone can do it. Listen, this stuff is challenging, and whether it is investing or whether it’s starting a business, it’s supposed to be hard.

1:22:24 Otherwise everybody would do it. And if you have a dream of, I’m gonna put money in once and it will print money and I have to do no work, then you’re misleading yourself. That’s a get-rich-quick scheme. Everything I’ve talked about today is about doing the work. You can’t just go in and ask for 20K.

1:22:43 You can’t just build an asset and then it prints money forever. You still need to maintain it. Okay, so we did the Facebook ad thing, and what we discovered was most people say, I made it. I put a dollar and I made two. But they fail to track the invisible costs, and they failed to track it all the way back to profit.

1:23:04 And it’s really hard to do this. The math is complicated, you have cohorts, you have all kinds of refund rates and the technology is very challenging. We got good at it well, we got good at the technology part Facebook ad part, not so much. It just didn’t work for our business at the time, so we pulled the plug and we shared our numbers. I had another example of a multi-million dollar program that we created, and we kind of mismanaged it and never got enough resources.

1:23:32 It had a community component and at a certain it was amazing and magical until it wasn’t. And it was like when you become the last person at the party and you don’t want to be that. And we eventually realized this wasn’t right. The model we had chosen years ago was fatally flawed. He was still making money, but we pulled it off the market and some people were understandably angry.

1:23:57 But it was the right decision and I wanted to write that up and share with people. So those are mistakes that any entrepreneur will make small and large mistakes along the way. I just learned you got to live to fight another day. And make sure you’re keeping your eye on customers who love you, who want to join your programs or products or services. Those are the people who are going to be with you for the long term.

1:24:23 Do you think community products work or can building communities work? Because I read your blog and I’ve experimented with them. And people tell you that they’re out there. And they sell your courses on building your community product, but I don’t buy it. You said you wanted someone opinionated like that?

1:24:41 I don’t buy, I like, I like your point of view. I like the skepticism of, or it’s very hard, it’s very hard. I would say that it’s very challenging. If you are starting out, you’re one person and you want to build a community on something that can be awesome. I think that can be done.

1:24:57 But the bigger your business gets, the harder it gets to find something that is worth it for you to do. When I was starting out, if I could find a product that made thirty thousand dollars in a year or fifty thousand dollars, that was awesome. Yeah, let’s do it. Fifty thousand dollars doesn’t move the needle, and I will teach you to be rich. So if we’re doing a community product where people are paying $10 or $20 a month.

1:25:22 And the churn is, let’s say, after three or four months, that doesn’t move the needle for us now, there can be other reasons to do things besides money. But it’s challenging to find large community groups that generate certain amount of revenue. If revenue is the goal. Now. If we wanted to just do something free, awesome, but I do that on my Paige in Twitter, right?

1:25:48 And ML’s and emails, I will say. Though, as you and I both talked about, there’s something magical about being in the room. And we could have done this on Zoom. But I’m so glad we are here. So if you take money out of the equation, if you can afford to do that, then sometimes there can be ineffable value in bringing people together.

1:26:11 But that’s not a highly scalable, highly profitable business. Yeah, I think you’re right, and a lot of people say, Look, it’s subscription income, you know, it just renews every month. But I think you would wrote in one of your vlogs. When you bring someone in a community that’s one day old and someone that’s six months old, they don’t have anything in common. You think you’re gonna throw them in your overwhelming with content and everybody get along, and it just doesn’t work that way.

1:26:37 It’s not that simple. I love building communities, but I usually do it over an eight week period of intense work of a high piece of accountability. Yeah, you build a podcast, eight episodes on ITunes. You start a business, you do a webinar, you generate revenue, you, you work on my public speaking course. You do a public speech at the end of five minutes and people get together and they’ll work hard for eight weeks.

1:26:57 But after that, yeah, you, they’re not gonna work hard for eight months, they’re gonna lose interest. So I like that, but the other one I’ve struggled with and I don’t know. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. Okay, I like what you do. We have a phrase internally on our IWT product team, which is declare victory and go home.

1:27:14 And what that means is not everything has to go on forever. In fact, it can be amazing to declare victory at the top and leave before the party dies. Leave at the top. And that is amazing for people, especially if you tell them this is eight weeks, that’s what it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be high impact.

1:27:35 We’ve done this with some of our programs. People love it. And so I think what you’re doing is really smart because ongoing, so hard. Because the way they leave the program is, they say, I don’t want to pay for this anymore because it’s no longer giving me value. So they break up with you, and it’s just as opposed to It’s over.

1:27:53 You did great here you go. If you want to do something in the future with us, great, yeah, but we didn’t let you down by not delivering value. So look, I’m not an expert in this game, but by dipping my toe and it’s still been tricky and I’m sure someone out there has the model. But I don’t think as many people who say they have do so, I’ll just throw that out there. I think we should all be skeptical of what’s going.

1:28:13 I mean, look, people are watching this right now, they’re like, I will teach you to be rich. That sounds like a scam, and I’m like, Okay, I know the name, I might not have chosen that name again. – would you? It’s so clear it’s a 70. I was waiting for, you, come over, I was like, I will copy writing rule, but it’s so clear, so it is clear.

1:28:32 And I was sober when I chose that as a college student. I definitely think that when someone comes to my side, they’re looking like, What’s this guy gonna do here? And that’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for me, like I will teach you. Bridge was in The New York Times yesterday, and I talked about that, not because I need the ego hit of being in. At times I’ve been in there many times.

1:28:57 The key is to show people, Hey, I’m really serious about credibility. My students are my best credibility of all. They have crazy amount of documented success stories, and I post them everywhere and I want people. If they open up Chapter 1 of the book within 10 pages, they’re like, Oh my God, I have learned something about money I never knew. Same with our business programs, same with negotiation.

1:29:23 That’s why I give away 98- of my material for free. I got to prove to people because I’m kind of fighting with one hand behind my back. The other thing is, I think the bigger your business gets, the more you can truly embody your values. So as my business got larger, I decided, I’m gonna stake a claim and I’m gonna say nobody. With credit card debt can join our flagship programs, our flagship programs are our premier ones.

1:29:52 They’re pretty expensive over a thousand bucks. And immediately, that cost us millions of dollars in revenue. Millions. OK, why do we do it? Number one carrot and the stick.

1:30:05 I believe if people truly understood 18- interest rates, they would not spend $2,000 on a program. They would pay their debt off as fast as they could, and then they would go and invest in themselves. Okay, so I understand the math, it’s counterintuitive, so that’s why I’m doing it for them as protection, because most people don’t understand the math. The other thing is you can’t join a program that takes hard work. When you’re looking at your bills every day and wondering, How am I gonna pay my rent?

1:30:35 It’s not setting you up for success. Then the stick, I told them, Pay off your debt here, use the free chapter from my book here, take it, and when you’re ready, we will be here. That was the carrot. The stick is, if we find out you’ve joined our program with credit card debt, we will ban you for life. And the first time I rolled is how people were very angry.

1:30:57 Because in America, nobody likes to be told what they can do with their money. So I had to get more refined at messaging and explaining why I’m doing this. What is amazing was we saw the impact immediately, but not just on our revenue. we saw it on refund rates, we saw it on the type of emails. People send us people who are in severe credit card debt and then they join a program and then they get stressed out. Are sending really angry emails.

1:31:25 I don’t want my staff to have to deal with that. So it actually trickled through the organization. And what is amazing is it sets the stage for us as our business is, like, we’re not here just to make a quick buck. We’re here for life, and if you are not ready, that’s okay. Use the free material, pay off the debt.

1:31:43 But when the time is right, come back to us, we will be here for you. So it really sets the stage of what kind of business we want to be. I think for everybody here, you don’t have to copy that, that’s not the point. The point is just like your money dial, decide what kind of business you want to be and turn it up and get to be. Uniquely you.

1:32:01 When you do that, people know what you stand for, yeah, people really appreciate something with core values and people appreciate boundaries as well, and they’ll remember you for that. Yes, and yeah, we had a similar experience so used to have a low monthly Pion price point of, like, 297 a month, and we doubled that, and it changed completely the type of students, the feedback we were gay, would you notice? I mean, people were more committed. Funny enough, by actually using that monthly price point, we got more full pays. Yep, and okay, interesting and much less refunds, and it just it.

1:32:34 It grabbed a completely different type of person. Then I’m teaching these courses live in a community, the community. Just the vibe got jacked up, people had more success, people saw the people having success. Yeah, I can’t believe we ever used to do we did. The next step might be to remove the payment plan.

1:32:48 Amazing, and that’s I mean, that’s not as explicit at what you’re doing, but it actually, of course, tracks a different type of person. But as a young businessperson, you’re like, I need any revenue to keep this thing going. Yes, it’s a great thing. I’ve never heard anyone say that. As you grow as a business, you can like, crystallize those values and push it out through, become more uniquely you.

1:33:06 By the way we did something similar, we actually took away the monthly payment plan for one of our programs and it immediately increased the quality. Because if you can’t afford that program, then you shouldn’t be in it. This was a higher-end program. I will say also, I had somebody who asked me, How can I get more people to join my program? And the program was about two thousand bucks, and I said, What was the last program?

1:33:34 You joined at two thousand dollars and he said, I’ve never bought anything in two thousand bucks. And I said, Why would you expect someone to buy from you when you haven’t invested in yourself and this concept of, if you haven’t, actually gone through that journey? Scrolling to the end of a sales page, seeing two thousand bucks or monthly payments of $1.99. And making that calculus, making that decision, then you don’t understand what one of your customers will go through. This person was trying to make a quick buck.

1:34:07 They didn’t invest in themselves, they just turned around, created this thing over a weekend and then charged two thousand bucks. Not surprisingly, there, that business did not do well if you want to be premier in the market. If you want people to buy from you and let your reputation perceive you in The New York Times on YouTube, people are really smart. This is what I’ve learned in business. You think you can trick them.

1:34:32 Oh, all right up this high P sales copy, you might be able to trick an unsophisticated once. But people are very savvy, especially in the market. They’ve now read all the claims, all the hype, make a million dollars in a day, all these sales copy with all these testimonials. They’re so savvy that number one, they can sniff it out. Number two, if you don’t deliver, they’ll just refund which they should, right.

1:35:00 We offer refunds on almost all of our programs. You should, if our stuff isn’t amazing, ask for your money back. But three, I think there’s actually been a reversion now to less. Hype based promises make a million dollars in a day and instead slow, calm, cool, collected, methodical do the work and the real high-quality. Students and customers are looking for.

1:35:24 Someone who tells it to him Straight, Look, you’re not gonna make a million dollars in a month, it’s not gonna happen. We will help you work through finding an idea you’re gonna get a small number of paying clients. You’re gonna learn how to raise your rates. You’re gonna learn how to take what you might be offering as a service and productize it. And if you want to go deeper beyond $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month, you can do that’s more advanced.

1:35:49 I think it’s really important you would never expect a Spanish teacher in Spanish 101 to stay with you for the next ten years. Help you become conversationally fluent and do it all for free. That doesn’t make any sense. Spanish 101 is to get the basics, then you go to the next class and you invest in yourself over time. Most people will not keep going, That’s okay, they want to stop fine, but people need to remember.

1:36:17 Don’t look for the hype. If you’re a course creator or a program creator, your customers are way savvy than you give them credit for. And when you target savvy, sophisticated people, you’re gonna get an amazing business with high quality customers. Super good advice ten years from now. Twenty Thirty What is your life look like? Business look like? Are you living in the city? Tell me where you headed.

1:36:41 So I think 10 years from now, start with family, you know, one of the things I’m starting this year is I’m starting a family tradition of a family reunion. And we don’t have this in our family. It’s not a tradition. This year I’ve been working with the rest of my family. We’re gonna start it.

1:36:59 So 10 years would be a success if we are doing that once a year and everybody’s coming, that would be the first place I would start. Where are we living? Probably not the city, maybe somewhere back in California. I think with the business, what would be amazing would be to be able to be impacting and influencing people as all parts of their rich life. So starting a business, we’ve got our new program turnable, finding a dream job, we’re helping people do that and continuing that money.

1:37:31 Of course, we’re helping people not only with setting up their allocations on automation, but love and money. I think that is so interesting and on and on with psychology, potentially even travel or fitness. A rich life is not just about money that’s important, but it’s a small part. I think once you do one of these things, once you get your investments working or once you start a business and get a few clients. You realize, Oh my God, I can actually take control of this, I don’t have to accept what the world gave me, I can create my own path.

1:38:01 So in 10 years I would love to see my students coming up to me and saying, You know, what started with Dream Job got a $20,000 raise. Did Ernabel? I have a business now, my husband and I. We work from home together, our children, we love spending two months with them, traveling and on and on. That would be my dream.

1:38:21 Powerful man. What’s a daily practice view that’s non-negotiable? Working out got into that a few years I did. I was a skinny Indian dude, and I used to joke about it because which actually is joke about stuff I shouldn’t have been. I shouldn’t have joked about it in retrospect, because, you know, our language really characterizes who we are.

1:38:42 Yeah, and I was skinny, and I thought, I’m just a skinny Indian guy, but the thing was, I never had any role. Models who looked like a superhero. There’s no Indian superheroes that I grew up with, and in retrospect, I actually wish there had been. I wish I had been exposed to that because in my family it wasn’t like laudable to go to workout at the gym. It was laudable to be good at spelling bees, and that’s what I did.

1:39:13 So you’re as a parent, your values will be communicated to your kids and a lot of times kids are smart, smart. They’ll pick up on what you hold as a high achievement. In my early 20s, I finally asked a friend of mine, Dude, can you show me how to work out? So he take me to gym and as well. He’s like showing me some machines.

1:39:33 I go, Man, I really want to like, put some mass on, and he goes, Alright, do you like Chinese food? I was like, Yeah, he’s like, Do you like Thai food? I was like, Yeah, he’s like, Do you like milk? Yeah, he’s like, Okay, yeah, you need to eat all those things. And I was like, All right, so I didn’t know anything. I just started and I asked a friend and I started, and eventually I decided I want to be.

1:39:56 I want to learn how this works, I want to learn how fitness works. How does some of these people just know how to squat and deadlift? Was I absent the day they taught this? It certainly was not taught in my family, and so I started to. I got a trainer and that took a lot of courage for me to walk across the street.

1:40:14 I walked into the gym and I was just like, I want a trainer. I didn’t know what’s bodybuilding, strength training, I didn’t know any of that, but it has changed my life. It’s non-negotiable. I still pay for a trainer, even though I could like Find the workouts on YouTube. Because I want to invest in myself, just like I asked my students to invest in themselves, and it has changed my life, it’s changed my health.

1:40:35 It’s also just made me realize that putting the work in is the beauty of it. When I started, vanity was the goal. I think vanity is a perfectly fine reason to start something. It’s fine. Over time, I fell in love with the craft of lifting, of learning about macros of all those things.

1:40:54 And I think if you find something you are meant to do, then yes, vanity or some number fine. But falling in love with the practice of it, I think, is a true pinnacle of being a great student. Yeah, that’s powerful. It’s been fun to watch you go through that. Thank you.

1:41:11 If I were to ask five of your friends, what’s around a superpower, how are you able to? How are you able to do all this that you do? That’s a good question, Say it is. If you asked five of my friends, What is my superpower? It would be making fun of trolls on the Internet.

1:41:30 Besides that, it would be, I would say that they would probably say, staying like patient like. I’ve been doing business for over 15 years. I’ve been working on fitness for almost eight years, day in and day out. And for whatever reason, I like slow, methodical stuff. I don’t jump around a lot, and I think that, you know, if I think about having kids, I think that’s a superpower.

1:42:04 To be able to stay focused on something for years and years like to really fall in love with it. Because times get tough. Times definitely have gotten tough in my business. We went through layoffs, that was a really tough time and it would have been very easy to throw in the towel. But if I only was in love with the money of it or the status of it, those are the first things to go.

1:42:29 But if you’re in love with the students, the clients, the outcomes, then you’re like, There’s no way I’m gonna turn my back on this. Like I will find a way to sustain and to reinvent the business, which we did. So I think that would be the superpower, they might say, which is like just the ability to stay focused on something for so long. Yeah, it’s a good answer. What was the best day of your life and the worst day?

1:42:53 Wow, best day? I didn’t know it at the time, but my best day was meeting my wife. And we. You know, you kind of wish you could videotape the moment where you met your partner and look at it. Years later, I met her at a friend’s barbecue and we started talking.

1:43:17 And although we don’t have video, we do have text messages from the first time we ever communicated. So for our anniversary, I dug up those old text messages and found a way to go way back. And it was so fun to watch those first messages that we send to each other. That was the best day, worst day. Having to make tough decisions in business, I think, is up there having to let some really talented people go?

1:43:47 I would say I’m very fortunate to not have had any close deaths in my family. So I think for people watching who have had that, that would be the first thing that they would jump to, and I’m very fortunate now to have not had that. So, yeah, tough times whenever we had to see when we had to see people go. And I remember, you know, my own health, suffering and thinking like, I’m not even the one who’s about to lose my job. And so I still think about some of the folks we had, and I’m still in touch with many of them.

1:44:21 But that was tough times for sure. Yeah, what scares you? I would say being making the wrong decisions, being ordinary, like waking up one day and saying, I feel trapped. I feel like my calendar has already filled up with stuff from months ago that I don’t want to do. Suddenly I’ve become that caricature of an unhappy American, that would be like a driving fear for me, right?

1:45:00 And that drives you to continue innovating this business, so you love it. Yes, and in fact, turning that dial way up one of my friends who’s a little older than me, he said. When you have kids, if you allow them to, they will suck all the oxygen out of your relationship so that you and your partner will forget about each other, he said. They’ll suck all the oxygen you’ll end up spending all your time scheduling appointments to take them to. And he said, You have to fight that, you have to fight it so that you and your partner can stay connected.

1:45:32 And I think in business we see that as well. Your business will suck all the time or cash out if you don’t fight for what you want. Same in life, life will suck all your time away. So my wife and I decided that we wanted to take a six-week trip every year, every year. And it was a crazy, outlandish thing that we said, How are we gonna do this?

1:45:54 And we want to stay in these type of hotels and go on these crazy experiences. And we set the goal and we both run our own businesses. So to be able to do that means throughout the whole year, we’ve executed right. We’ve planned right? And then, of course, we want to bring our family to parts of it as well, but it.

1:46:14 It’s a huge goal. And the more we turn that dial, the more we’re like. This is the kind of life we want for ourselves, and that rich life is where we create it. And it might not make sense for other people. Totally respect that, but whenever I meet, someone who tells me like this is how we live our life, we homeschool our children.

1:46:37 Or I wear this brand because I love the values or we travel this type of place. I love it, I love it, it’s so rare, one of my students write in the book in the first page, he says, My wife and I used this book. We retired in our mid 30s and we travel around the country in an R.V. that sounds like hell to me. I do not want to travel in an RV, but I love that he and his wife do it. That is their rich life.

1:47:01 I want everyone to create theirs. It’s nice. What would we be surprised to learn about you, something you do in your spare time or a guilty pleasure or something? No, not, I will teach you to be rich ish. I watch a lot of TV and a lot of trashy TV, and the irony is, I don’t have a TV, so I watch it all on my computer.

1:47:21 And then one of my friends was like, You can’t really talk about not having a TV. If you have Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, like basically every service, I was like, That’s me. So if there’s a good TV show out there, odds are I’ve watched it on Netflix. You recommend or hear embarrassed. Oh dude, I’m embarrassed about all my Bravo shows Vanderpump rules Shahs of Sunset like, Yes, I watched them all, and I liked it.

1:47:50 It’s just like mindless, and I’m like, I don’t have any dramatic friends like this anymore. Once you become married, I think the drama kind of subside, so I’m like, Oh, I like that, what’s going on today? I’ve added Pump a little drama over there. What keeps you awake at night? People, people.

1:48:09 I never used to understand that question. Honestly, I was like, Keeps me awake, I sleep great until I grew an employee base. And then you realize the business itself is pretty straightforward. You know, for any business is generally straightforward. You create something, you find customers, you sell it, etc.

1:48:28 That’s straightforward. Its people challenges that keep me awake, and that is, is this person getting along? Do we have the right structure? This person wants to take on this role, but that role is not right for them and now we need to have a tough conversation. Now I get it, and I think if you were to ask parents, they would say the same thing.

1:48:49 But just relating to children, the easy problems in life are things around money and numbers. Those are easy, they’re straightforward. It’s just math, but it’s very challenging when it comes to people different perspectives, different ways of communication. So I would say that human psychology now I feel very confident about it. Employee and team psychology is a whole nother ballgame, and you’re learning, Oh yeah, amen, to that remy to always ask you questions at the end, I’m and ask you if you could pick up the phone and call the 20 year old Remy team that young man some advice sophomore at Stanford.

1:49:28 I guess not writing the blog yet, but talking to your friends about this stuff, I mean, what would you tell them based on everything you know? Now?

1:49:59 I love this conversation, really appreciate you and everything you’ve been doing. I’ve been following your stuff for many, many, many years. Highly recommend this book I will teach you to be. I’m guessing Amazon to find this. How do people get on your email list? Find out more about your courses. Awesome, follow you. Well, thank you for the conversation. That’s been awesome you can find me at.

1:50:23 I will teach you to be rich, calm, you can get on my newsletter. We have a new program if you want to start a business called Earnable. It’s phenomenal and I would love to meet everyone watching in person. I’m gonna be traveling and meeting everyone. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter.

1:50:39 I am Act Roommate RA MIT That’s it that remain, you know, early adopter, that’s right, Damn Stan, for good, and you’re doing like a tour throughout the country. I’m going to start just you do a lot of that stuff anyway. Yeah, I did. I did it last year with Book Tour and on an RV. No, no RVs for me.

1:50:54 Definitely not, but there’s something magical about being in the room. And if you get in a room, if you’re watching this and you feel like you’re the only one who’s interested in self-development. You found this channel and you’re watching and you can watch all your other interviews. Imagine being in a room with other people like that in your hometown, and suddenly you realize, Wow, I’m not alone as very powerful. Yeah, for sure.

1:51:17 Again, man, your stuff is great. I’ve been following, you learned a lot from you and I’m glad we finally made this happy -. Wishing you all the best of the future with everything you do, let’s do this again sometime you.