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If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe your mind. But go all the way. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery and isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. Imagine if you're going to try go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods and the knights will flame with fire. Do it, do it, do it all the way. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. Ah. If I wanted to become a millionaire in 2025, I'd do these seven things. This is my step by step guide. Or you could literally just do the opposite of all these. And it's basically a guaranteed way to stay poor. Number one reps before results. I loved this quote. I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. This was Bruce Lee, kind of the goat. Winning looks like luck from the outside, but when you zoom in, it's a numbers game. First you do reps, then you suck, then you improve, then you win, then you repeat or you find a harder game. Most people never get past the reps stage. They hit a little bit of resistance and then they absolutely fold. That is why you do not have the life that you want right now. When I first started getting on the Internet, people thought it was bizarre that I had so many businesses by then. Well, I had been buying businesses and investing for 15 years, so of course I had a little head start. The first time that I raised my very first fund, I had to sell something like 150 investors in one on one meetings before I got my first big check. That led to a business that eventually did a billion dollars in assets under management at First Trust. But that first year was miserable. And so you have to realize that more reps equals more learning. More learning equals better decisions. Better decisions equal better wins. I sort of think about it like a game of dominoes, where you can basically see how to make one fall in front of the other by having one that is stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and Stronger because momentum compounds. So every industry has outliers. But if you dig deeper, they almost always fall into two categories. They are, in fact, statistical anomalies. You aren't one of them. They weren't actually lucky. Their first try was their 50th rep in disguise. Nobody actually hits it big on their first try like, a lot of people I know. Go back to Mark Zuckerberg and think, well, he actually tinkered on countless projects before he built Facebook. Or you see a writer that goes viral all the time. Well, they probably wrote for 10 years in obscurity. You know, Ray Kroc said it best luck is a dividend on sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. I found this to be true again and again. In life, there's really no such thing as an overnight success. And if you realize this, then the question is really, how do you stack your game so that you have a higher likelihood of winning? I think a lot of people don't know how to apply a rule like this. So the way that I do is I set rep goals, not outcome goals. So what does that mean? That means you stop judging your early results because the first 20 reps are going to be atrocious, embarrassing to watch, and you think like an athlete. So athletes think about, if I want to hit this outcome, they actually don't set the outcome as the goal. They set their actions. So let's say you want to lose 20 pounds or you want to grow your business at $2 million in revenue. Well, if you want to lose 20 pounds, what do you do? You say, I need to go to the gym five days a week. I need to walk 10,000 hours every day. I shouldn't eat processed foods and I'm not going to drink. I'm going to do that for 30 days, then 60 days, then 90 days. I'm going to see where I'm at in business. It's the same thing. I want to hit $1 million in revenue. Right now, I'm only at $100,000. What are the five tasks that I can do that I think will increase my likelihood of success? That's it. And if you can do that continuously over time, you are much more likely to become a millionaire. Number two, the flake tax. Most people think success comes from big moves, like a genius idea, perfect opportunity, lucky break. But actually, it comes from this one simple formula. Say you'll do something, actually do it. Repeat. That's it. Sounds obvious, but here's the problem. Most people don't do it. You over Commit you underdeliver. You spend your career making excuses. And over time, that comes as a cost. Your most important promise is a promise you make to yourself. Now, the reason why this works, like compound interest, is every time you follow through, you actually earn credibility points with yourself. Every time you flake, you lose them. Then you think, I don't. It doesn't really matter if I keep promises to myself. And at first you don't notice, no one notices. But over time, this creates an exponential gap. A good example would be I had an employee, super smart. I've often found the smarter you are, the more often you can make excuses for yourself. And he's what I call a flake. Makes promises, misses deadlines, explains why a lot. Super verbose and stagnates. Whereas the type of person you want to be is an executor. So two types of people. I had one of these. They're called a flake. You make promises, you miss deadlines, you explain why verbosely. That means you stagnate as opposed to an executor, which means you make promises and you keep them. You earn trust, you get more opportunities. The results flakes have what's called linear progress. They kind of go side to side like this. They're always having to start over. They never really break out to the next level. Executors have compounding trust, which means the things they do get easier with time and they keep getting more opportunities because these things get easier with time. The guy who delivers consistently will have more money in his bank account by the end. That's just the end of it. Doing the thing is the fastest way to stand out, because most people don't. So keep your promise to yourself and watch how you start to keep promises to other people. In 90% of businesses, they are built either to just survive or to throw thrive. We ran 5,000 business owners through our model to figure out could we predict those that will thrive or survive. The answer is this quiz. We call it the Empire Builder Index. It's completely free for you. It's about 15 questions and it will tell you if your business is set up for you to not only win, but maybe one day sell it. We score and rank you from A to F and then tell you the things that you need to change inside of your business in order for that business to be more fun to run and potentially more fun for somebody else to take over and thus you to become more profitable. If you want this free quiz, you can click the link in the show description and ask about the Empire Builders Index. You'll get it delivered right to you. It's free. It takes about 90 seconds, maybe a couple minutes at most to fill out, and hopefully at the end you will get an incredible score. But if you don't get an incredible score, you're also welcome to reach out to my team. We have workshops, we have communities, we. We have just about everything builders need to grow. We're happy to help you if we can. Number three, a very controversial one by one of my favorite authors of all time. His name was Bukowski, Charles Bukowski. It actually, he says it multiple ways, but one of my favorite poems of his is about being a writer, and it's so good, I want to read it to you. He says, if you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe your mind. But go all the way. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery and isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods and the knights will flame with fire. Do it, do it, do it all the way. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. What does this mean? It means when you say you are going to do a thing, that's one thing, but if you are going to say it, do it. Do not just try. Bukowski is obsessed with this idea of removing the word try from your vocabulary. And he would say, you know, not to try either for Cadillac's creation or immortality. You wait. And if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough, you reach out, slap it and kill it. Or if you like it looks, you make a pet out of it. And I think those encompass the idea that you should paste on your forehead, which is writing about writer's block is better than not writing at all, that you find what you love and let it kill you. That's his line. And we are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. Remove try from your vocabulary. By the way, if you're building a business right now and you're stuck or you want to break out to the next level, maybe you're not where you want to be today. Believe me, I've been there many, many times. I want you to know I got you. We help thousands of business owners a year figure out how to scale to the next level. One of my favorite mentors said, every level you have, there's just a higher level and a higher devil. And so if you've been in business for a while and you're doing six, seven, or eight figures, there's probably one thing standing in the way of your next level. That's why we host Growth and Scale workshops four times a year throughout the year in Austin, in Miami, in San Diego. And you may be a fit to come to one of them. If it sounds interesting to you to get help on how to scale your business to the next level, you can reach out to my team at the link in the show notes. We believe in you building, but we also believe that it's a lonely road and you can't do it by yourself. Number four, be a fixer, not a freeloader. So there's a dividing line between two types of people in today's world. At my company, we call these fixers and freeloaders, and they're different than flakes and executors. The leaky ship analogy basically is this. You're on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly a hole appears. Water pours in. What happens next? Well, you have a bunch of people who say, I'm so proud of our boat. The hole just gives it character. Guys, let's not be negative. Don't worry about the hole. Are you going to fix it? Technically, it's not a hole. It's a special port. If there is a hole there, it's there for a reason. What, like you're an expert at shipbuilding? Everyone, let's just mind our own business. Or I like it with a hole even better. And this always makes me chuckle because while it's ridiculous that we would think of drowning in a boat while you have one guy trying to patch it and everyone else saying things that don't matter, it's very true. And it's example of what's happening in society and kind of scary how accurate it is in multiple different ways, the freeloaders, they just kind of react. They tell you all their feelings about it. While the freeloaders are not searching for how to fix it. They're searching for ways to feel better about it. They discuss, they theorize, they wait. You guys have met somebody like this, haven't you? You're like, you've brought me that same problem. Diane, about you and your husband for 15 years. Have you tried therapy? Have you talked to them in person? Have you sat down? Have you looked yourself in the mirror and tried to be better? Is there anything we want to do here? Or do we just want to still talk the issue for 72 years later? Whereas fixers are a totally different breed. They see a problem and they just end up fixing it. You know what a wild part is, some weird things happen in our culture today where we think that if we fix things and somebody doesn't pay us for it, that's like, ugh, really? Like, I'm working at this company and I shouldn't have to do this thing. That's not my job. That's a terrible way to stay poor forever. You also don't want that in your culture of your company. I was at my friend Andy Frisella's company, and he has a saying which is, how you do anything is how you do everything. And I remember the moment that I realized how deep his culture was is that I was in the bathroom at his beautiful hundred thousand square foot headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri. I was fixing my makeup or something in the bathroom, and this woman comes out of the stall, and she grabs the soap and water and starts washing her hands. And then when she's done, she grabs a paper towel and she wipes the countertop and the sink and then throws it away. I thought that was nice. Like a little touch above and beyond. I don't do that every time I wash my hands. And then another woman came in. She does the same thing. She washes her hands, she grabs the paper towel, she cleans the countertop, she cleans the sink. And I, like, pause for a second, and I do the inappropriate thing that I do because I just can't be quiet ever. And I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you. Why are you washing that countertop? And the thing, like, is that something that you do here? And she just looks at me with this look of disdain and says, how you do anything is how you do everything right? And so I march out of the bathroom immediately and go to my friend DJ who works at the company, and I'm like, who was that? Was that like your new CEO, your head of marketing, your coo? And he was like, oh, no, that's Sally, she's on the sales team. She's kind of junior. She's new, but I think she's going to work out here. And I realized how deep their culture was because even his employees were repeating it back. That is the perfect example of a fixer. And humans like that, they get to architect the entire world as opposed to be a meme where you're wishing and hoping that somebody else will fix things. The truth of the matter is the world is always going to be full of leaks. And that's actually kind of our opportunity. Okay. Number five is climbing the NPC ladder to main character energy. So I like to ask people, where are you on the NPC ladder? See, first, there are NPCs, right? These are in video games, non player characters. They exist to create the illusion of a world alive. Like, you know, they populate the towns, they kind of repeat that scripted dialogue and react in super predictable ways. They don't actually play the game. They're like a glorified chair, right? The shopkeeper who says, welcome, traveler. Welcome, traveler. Welcome, traveler. The blacksmith who does the same thing. The idea is they don't connect the dots. They're not important. And generally speaking, they're just wandering around. Then There are the PCs, the player characters. They're the ones that make things happen, the ones with all of the control, the ones who are actually debating whether not somebody should fight dragon, but like, let's go fix the. The village and kill the dragon. PCs understand something that most people don't, which is no one's coming to save you or pick you up, and the world defaults to people who step up. And so I think about the NPC ladder as this low end, not my problem. Nobody told me to do anything. Someone should fix this. If nobody steps up, I guess I will. I'll handle it. So the idea in business is you probably right now in your business have people who say these things to you. This tells you how you should pay them. At the low end of the scale, you have minimum wage labor, which is what I consider bottom rung. And at the high end of the ladder, you have top rung, or what I would consider C suite, or people who are on a path for growth. Bottom rung employees, minimum wage employees say things like, I just work here. I don't know, not my job. Second rung, they say, oh, nobody told me to do that. So it's not like I won't do it. But nobody told me you have to tell me to do something. They're like a human Motion det. You know, only take action when directed and somebody is moving in front of them. Third rung is somebody that says, someone should really fix this. It's like an armchair CEO, right? They're diagnosing project problems, they're telling you what's wrong, but they don't actually fix it. Then the next rung is, well, if nobody else steps up, I guess I will. I think about this as the lazy fixer. This is like, well, you know, I guess I'm doing this again. Well, I'm always working late instead of the other guy. And then you got the top tier. The PCs who say, I'll handle it. They see the problem, they take action. The idea is, in your business, I want you to catalog every single person along those lines, and then I want you to communicate this with your team. I get on our Monday morning meeting and I say, hey, by the way, guys, if you say these sorts of lines, you get paid this sort of level. If you say these sorts of line, you'll get paid that sort of level. You decide, do you want to be a main character? Do you want to be part of the show? Neither are wrong, but you got to decide and they pay different. I built something for you builders. If you are building a business right now, I think this is the playbook for scaling businesses. We call it our contrarian operating system. It's how I manage all of our businesses to both grow really simply but consistently. And it's free for you. If you want it. Just click the link in the show description and try out the operating system. I really think you guys, if you want to have a business, not a job, you have to have a system and a process and not a hope and a prayer. If this is useful for you all as well, you can talk to my team. We have tons of resources for builders. I am here to make sure you succeed. Number six, action before opportunity. Most people are allergic to this concept. They wait for the perfect role, the dream project, the right time. And they convince themselves that when the time comes, they're going to take action. But your bank account is a direct reflection of how fast you move and how many risks you take. So I want you to think action first, then opportunity follows. In your business, this is how I think about it. You take action even when you don't know what to do, which increases your trust and belief in your ability to move, which actually creates more opportunity for you, which gives you more actions to take. This is the virtuous cycle that I want you to follow. And how do you do this in practice, I'd ask yourself, today, what is my typical timeline for one activity that's really important for my business or life, that might be something like, hey, I'll get to that by the end of the day today. Every time you want to give a deadline that's like, end of day today, tomorrow, next week, try doing it in one hour, try doing it in 20 minutes. Try materially changing the trajectory of your life by compressing timelines. Because people who compress timelines, they win. And the last one is number seven, your economic superpower is I do. That leads to graphs like this, which show you that over time, if you are never married and if you were married and never divorced, there is a delta of somewhere between 300,000 to a million dollars in net worth, which is kind of crazy. Now, I'm not telling you to go out there and marry just about anybody you find. But what I will tell you is put your priority of partnership very high one, because it's cool I'm married. I could tell you it's actually pretty cool. It's hard at times, but nowhere near as hard, I think, as being single. Being single is really hard actually. But you know what's cool? When you find your person, you are going to have to compromise. You're going to have to take action. You're going to have to trust, you're going to have to be a better person. They're going to be a mirror and reflection of all the things you hate about yourself constantly. But it turns out one of the fastest ways to wealth is finding another human who can tolerate you for the long term. And so in a world in which people tell you that marriage doesn't matter, I'm going to say the opposite. In fact, when I do business deals, I like to see people that can have a long term partner because at least that guy can tolerate them. All right, seven things I would do if I wanted to be a millionaire in 2025. One kind of crazy one. You're at the end all the way to a bunch you would be crazy not to listen to. Hey crew, this is so cool. The podcast is growing like crazy. And it's only actually because of one thing. You. I don't know if you know this, but the only way the big deal pod grows is when you share it with somebody else. We don't do ads, we don't do pay for play, we don't go on other people's podcasts and talk about it. So if you think there was something helpful here, if we made you money. We made you think about your business or life differently. The most beautiful thing you can do for me is share it. And the most beautiful thing you can do for someone that you care about is to share it with them. Help them grow alongside you. So please, share the pod. That's how we grow. And also tag me on anything you share. I love resharing other builders across Instagram, Twitter, and all other platforms. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You're super important to me.