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The difference between staying broke and building real wealth is leadership. I don't just mean the skill of leading people, but I also mean the skill of leading yourself. I currently run a portfolio of companies doing over $250 million a year in revenue with over 750 employees in total. And by the end of this video, you will walk away with the five key skills that will transform your life and your business to give you real wealth. So the first skill is disciplining yourself. Disciplining yourself means having control over your actions. So when a thought comes into your mind, how do you respond to it? And to what degree do you have control over that action in a way that makes your life better, not worse? Some people have a lot of control over their actions to the degree that you might say that they seem like they're a robot. Whereas on the other side you might have people who have no control over the actions. And you're like, that person's a frickin mess. Most people are somewhere in the middle. It's just, to what degree do you actually have control over yourself? If you practice personal discipline, it can actually increase your work productivity and your work performance by anywhere between 20 to 30%. If you work for an hour and then you make $100 instead of making $100, you can make $130 because of your productivity increase. And so though a lot of what I'm going to talk about is how you discipline yourself around work, what you have to understand is that most of the time the things that you do around work actually affect work the most. The reason why this is difficult for people is because a lot of people step into a leadership position. This can be as a boss, this can be as the leader of your friend group, whatever it might be, and you tell other people what to do, but then you cannot even demonstrate how to control yourself. People don't do what we say, they do what we do. And so people are watching you to see if you have control over yourself. Because if you don't have control over yourself, it's very unlikely they're just going to do what you say. I don't know if you've ever been to the doctor and they've been like, you know, it seems like you need to lose weight. And then you look at the doctor and you're like, dude, you're like 50 pounds overweight. Why are you telling me to lose weight? Like you're a hypocrite. If you talk to somebody and you tell them what to do, but then you can't even get your own shit together, well, then they're just looking at you like you're a hypocrite because there's no integrity in what you say because you don't actually do it. There was a time when I was running my first company. We had just started doing weekly team meetings. What I realized every time I showed up, everyone on the call was, like, dressed in sweatpants. They looked sloppy. They didn't have any makeup on, their hair wasn't brushed. Some of them even. I remember having, like, an unmade bed with laundry on it. And I was like, man, what is this? Everyone's looking like a disheveled mess. I remember I looked at myself and I was like, oh, I'm a disheveled mess. I just had better reasons as to why I showed up that way. I was like, well, I'm so busy. I'm doing so much. I had to do all this before. I've got meetings after. And so of course I'm in sweatpants with my hair and a bun and no makeup on. Didn't matter. What I started doing is I started saying, okay, I'm going to just do my makeup and do my hair and wear, like, a normal blouse. And within three weeks, every other person on my team had started doing the same. And so what it taught me is that it's not about what I say and what I ask people to do. It's what I demonstrate with my actions, and that is what people will do. And so if you want to have disciplined people around you, then you have to be disciplined yourself first. So a lot of people ask, how do you discipline yourself? The number one piece of advice I give people is rather than trying to re your way into discipline, make it as easy as possible for you to remain disciplined. And the best way to do that is to set up an environment that makes it as easy as possible to be disciplined. So let me hit on a few of the common areas in life where you can create an environment that makes it easy for you to remain disciplined so you can achieve your goals. The first one is your working space. The biggest hack that I ever got for basically making my working space functional. I leave my phone in a different room, and it's such a little thing. But if that phone is in within reach from you, then it's so likely that you're gonna reach for that phone. You're gonna start scrolling Instagram, you're gonna scroll Twitter. That's what happens to everybody all the time. The second thing you can do is if you have A problem with using social media, installing a timer on your phone, which limits how much time each day you can spend on each app. So if you find yourself on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, install a timer and put 15 minutes as your max for each platform. So then basically what that timer will do is show you how much time you've used of that platform each day, which then, just because you're measuring it, you're going to start consuming less. The last one is focusing on the one thing that's gonna drive something forward for you. The best way I have found to do this, having a sticky note that I put on my computer that has one word that cues me to remember the one thing that's most important for me. This varies based on what I'm focused on. This could be a way that I wanna show up for my team, or it could be a project I'm working on that I wanna remember every day. I wanna drive forward. You want to remember what your focus is. And so having that sticky note that reminds you what to focus on is key to making sure that you actually get the things done that you promised yourself you would. Now, the big like, oh, let talk about this. But it has probably the most effect on your discipline is who you surround yourself with. Invest more time in friends who make it easy to be disciplined in the things that matter to you, and less time in the friends who make it hard to remain disciplined in the things that matter to you. This doesn't mean that your friends are toxic. If your friends like to go out and party and drink, don't try and belittle them or judge them for what they want to do. They have different goals. Or maybe they have no goals you do. But if, like, hanging around them makes it harder for you to achieve your goals, it's kind of easier, especially when you're really trying to just remove yourself from the situation, expose yourself to it less. And the last one is having access to healthy food and exercise. Now for me, how do I do this one? Accessibility is better than anything. Having a set of dumbbells at home, having a gym that is close by, figuring out how to work out in your apartment gym, that is so much more helpful than having to drive 30 minutes to an amazing gym where you have this amazing trainer. Yes, it's all great, but it's like this big daunting thing that you're like, how do I fit this into my life? So for me, I have like what's ideal and then I have what's minimum, which Is like, at minimum, I've got bands, I've got, like, a little trx, and I've got, like, some little dumbbells I can take with me on any trip, so I can get a workout anywhere. So I know that I can remain disciplined under any conditions. And nobody can take those things from me because I can pack them in a suitcase for all I care. The second thing is make it as easy as possible to be healthy. What foods, for example, do we want to keep out of the house? What I actually find to be the best approach and I liked the most is I just have no junk food in the house. If I want something that badly, I'm going to have to go drive to get it. I take DoorDash and Uber Eats and all those off my screen. So if I really want to order something, I have to redownload the app and then I have to order it from there. I'm trying to make it as hard as possible and put as much friction in place for me to derail myself from the plan of staying disciplined. I lost over £100, and so I've remained very disciplined in that manner ever since then. If I'm not taking care of myself by being healthy, then I don't necessarily show up my best for my team, not because there's any rules that I need to follow, but because I need to know that I am at my best for everybody else. If I eat healthy and I exercise a certain amount of times a week, then I feel more confident to show up to people because I know that behind closed doors, I'm disciplined. What you really want to ask yourself is to what degree do you have control over your actions? Whichever one you feel that you have the least control over, maybe that's the one that you want to hone in on first. Because what's most important is that you have confidence in yourself. Discipline in private is what creates confidence in public. The reason I can appear this way and make content is because of all the things I just did before I even showed up to this room. In fact, I was sick last night. I felt terrible this morning. But I had a commitment to do this. I said, you know what? I could cancel or what would make me respect myself more. I would respect myself more if I still tried and at least gave a shot to film things. And so there is a real life example for you. How I use discipline in private to build confidence in public. The price of discipline is pleasure. Lots of people say they want to be disciplined because they understand the outcome that discipline gets Them. But what they should actually be asking themselves is what are they willing to give up to be disciplined? Because in order to be disciplined, you have to give up pleasures. Maybe it's alcohol. There's so many things that you have to give up to be disciplined. And so the question really is, are you willing to pay the price? People with more discipline do not have more willpower than people with less discipline. They have the ability to alter their environment ahead of time to make it easy for them later. The next skill is being flexible. What does being flexible mean? Your ability to respond to changing circumstances with little friction. Okay, so if you think about somebody who is not flexible, they resist the situation, they resist the reality, and so they spend all this time fighting it. So. So they create friction that doesn't allow them to solution to the thing that just happened. A lot of people have a hard time adapting, specifically in the workplace, when things don't go as planned, when a project isn't meeting deadline, when a person that you hire decides that they don't want to be there anymore. All these things happen every day in business. But it's really tough to get through those things if you aren't flexible. Now, here's a really interesting stat for you that I think was convincing for me, which is companies that practice flexibility in leadership are actually 23% more profitable and they produce 18% more revenue. Practicing flexibility means you don't fight change. You accept it, and you alter the course. A lot of the times, being really structured and organized works really well to build a company, to build a department, to build a team. But structure also can work against us when we're so structured that then when anything goes off plan, we fight it. What I have had to learn over time personally, is just that kind of rigid thinking makes change very difficult, and it makes it really hard to show up as a leader, whether it be for your family or your friends or your organization when you're constantly fighting change. Because if you look at the best leaders, what do they usually do? They lead change. How do you show up as a leader if you're resisting change? Most of the time, the greatest leaders of our generations, those are people who lead big changes because they're not afraid of what it means. And I'm sure they want to put structure in place, but they also realize that being able to step into ambiguity and not need to feel certain is a superpower. The first time that I really realized that I had the opportunity to learn how to be more flexible was when Covid hit. So when Covid Hit. I had three businesses that all served in person, brick and mortar facilities. I had a gym launch, which was all gym owners, so they were in person gyms. I had Prestige Labs, which gym owners bought the products for their gyms. And then I had Allen, which was a software that got leads into physical locations for a variety of in person businesses. And so when that happened, I remember the month prior to Covid, everything was crushing. Everything was going according to plan, and I was so frustrated. But I remember I asked myself this question when it hit, which was, what kind of person do I want to be in this situation? How do I want to show up? And what kind of leader do I want to be for my team? And what I realized is that I don't want to be the kind of leader who freaks out when there's change or loss or anything bad that happens. I want to be the kind of leader that stands tall even if it's painful, even if it's scary, even if it really tests me. I said, I'm going to use this as a time to sharpen my skills as a leader, because this is a test and the question is, can I pass or am I going to fail? And I really believe that the reason I was able to pass that test, I just completely leaned into flexibility. I changed how we did business in every single business out of all three. And it was really hard and it was really long days, and I was really exhausted. But at the same time, I kept asking myself, like, what am I learning from this? I was like, well, I'm learning how to lead change even better. I'm learning how to build an even stronger culture. And so I learned a lot of very valuable skills, but I wouldn't have learned any of those if I had resisted the change. And I saw that in my customers. What was fascinating to me that it wasn't the best gyms with the most customers that survived Covid, it was the gyms that were the most adaptable. Covid changed the fitness industry forever. Because then when did people realize, oh, I don't need to show up to the gym to be in shape. I can travel, I can do it from home, I can do zoom calls. So a lot of gyms incorporated in forever and have not stopped virtual training. And so there's a lot of innovation that can come from these things if we're not busy fighting it. So here's the question I would ask myself right now. What am I resisting right now? But if you didn't resist it, how would it make you better? We spend all this time telling ourselves why change is bad, Telling ourselves why if we change this thing, it's going to make our life worse. I want you to make the opposite argument. Whatever this change is, maybe it's like your spouse wants to move for a job. Maybe it's you want to start a business. Maybe it's you want to get in shape. Stop telling me all the reasons why it's going to be bad and scary and start telling me all the reasons why it's going to be good for you. Because our brains naturally want to go to the bad and scary. And so we have to train ourselves to think about what's going to be good. Because the reality is it's going to be both. It's going to be scary, and it's going to be good. It's just a matter of, do you want to get more of the good or do you want to get more of the bad? We're reframing a challenge as a growth opportunity. Every time in my life that I've grown the most, it's also been the most painful time of my life. You know, when I was barely making any money, just trying to, like, figure out my first business. I learned more in that time, in that year and a half than I did probably the five years prior. You know, during COVID for that one year, I learned more about leadership than I probably had the three years prior to that. Starting a new business in the first year of having in person team, I probably learned more about teams than I had learned in the last decade of business doing it remotely. And so just understand that every time there's a new challenge, yes, there's gonna be stuff that sucks about it. But if we reframe it as an opportunity to grow and to become more aligned with the person we want to be, we're always gonna get more out of it. And I love this quote by Albert Einstein. And I always think of this when I find myself resisting change, which is the measure of intelligence, is your ability to change. It's not when you get new information, when a new situation arises, when something changes in the environment, how do you respond? Do you fight it because that means you have low intelligence, or do you accept it and do you adapt to make it work? That is intelligent. The next skill is communicating transparently. What does this mean? I like to just put it simply, state the facts, tell the truth. When it comes to being a leader, a lot of people think that that means that you withhold information from others. And don't get me wrong, there are Times where you cannot disclose information to people. But I think that if you treat people like adults, they're more likely to act like adults. If you treat people like owners, they're more likely to act like owners. And so the more information that you give people that you have, the more likely people will act on that information. Companies that communicate transparently, they don't just double productivity. They don't even just triple productivity. It 4.5x's productivity in a company. When people communicate transparently from the top. Most people, when communication is not transparent and people are not telling people what's going on in an organization, they feel confused. And then they feel less clear about what they should be doing in their exact role. Because if they know what's happening in the company, they have context as to how their role can help make anything that's bad good and make anything that's good even better. Now, the problem is that a lot of leaders shy away from communicating transparently for a few reasons. One is they're fearful that it's going to be taken negatively if you are telling people the truth, which is like, yeah, here's what's bad, here's what's good. People are worried, like, oh, we don't want people to worry about this thing over here that maybe isn't going as planned, or it's like not looking too good. But at the same time, you also then don't expose yourself to the opportunity that somebody else on the team who you may not have thought of might have a solution for that thing that you're trying to figure out. The other reason is that they shouldn't expose people to all the information in a company. And I think that people are a lot more intuitive than you think. Like, you can see sales is down, you can see marketing is down. Like, you can see those metrics. But if you're not speaking to it, it almost feels like you're withholding information or even lying. So it creates even more of this gap between the leadership and the other people in a team. If you keep your team in the dark, they will keep you in the dark. If you don't know what's going on with them, then you can't solve problems that are small and prevent them from getting big. When I first made an effort to communicate more transparently with my team, the first thing that I did is I started doing a monthly financial call. I got the whole leadership team together, and I essentially went over our P and L with everybody. What I saw was that immediately people could reorient themselves on what they were working on. Because, you know what I did on that call is I said to my director of marketing, I said to my director of sales, I said to my director of customer success, here's the number in this P and L that you affect the most. Now, is anybody responsible solely for any one metric? No, never. Never going to happen. But people can have more influence than not over it. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, you know what, I don't actually think. I communicate very transparently with my team. My suggestion is this. Install a quarterly call where you share business performance and goals with the team. So this means sharing the financials. This means sharing progress towards goals that you're working on. If you want people to act like owners, you need to give them more information that owners have. Because how can you expect people to make decisions as good as you if they don't have all the information that you have? And so the question that I would ask myself is, am I giving my team all the information that they need to succeed, or am I withholding information from my team that makes it harder for them to succeed? The most valuable characteristic that a leader can have is not charisma, it's clarity. Clarity breeds conviction. Conviction breeds action, and then action breeds results. The next skill is being able to create a vision and strategic plan. If you look at the greatest leaders of all time, what do they do? Is they cast a vision. Why do people follow the best leaders of all time? What did they start with? They said, this is the vision I have. And then they started to recruit followers by casting that vision. And then once you have the vision, you have clear goals that define how you're going to get there. This means that in business, we want to tell people where we're going and then what our goals are to get there. And so what this does, it orients everybody in the same direction. And here's the problem. People want to feel like they're having an impact on the company, and they want to help the company achieve its goals. But if you don't know what the goals are and nobody's sharing those with you, then you don't know if you have an impact on them or not. If people don't know what the goals of the company are, then they have a really hard time understanding if their work is even helping us get to the goals. The reason why people do things is because of what happens next. Like comedians, why do they like to do comedy on stage? They like it because of the applause at the end People want to see a result from their actions. They want to see that when they work hard on something, they get rewarded for it. And what that looks like in business is that people see that the thing they did affects the outcome of the business. They win, the business wins. And the more that you can correlate those things and you can correlate their performance with the business performance, the more people are going to feel engaged in their work. Businesses that share their goals, at leave quarterly, are 3.5 times more likely to hit those goals. So there was a company that we were looking at buying, and that company didn't have goals and didn't have a vision for the team. And when I surveyed their team, their team said that they didn't like each other. They felt like they worked against each other. Sales felt like they were competitors with marketing. Marketing felt like they were competitors with customer success. Customer success felt like a competitor with product. The reason is because they didn't have a common vision or goals. And so everyone's objectives conflicted with one another because there was not a leader orienting everybody in the same direction. And so they all were ending up in different destinations. And so we were able to resolve this by saying, great, let's just install a quarterly planning cadence. You don't have to have this big grandiose vision, but let's at least tell people what our goals are on a annual basis. And that was able to eliminate all this competitive nature that people had. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, I don't have a vision and I don't have goals, just share with people what you want to have happen in the next 12 months. That will help more than you even know. It's not going to be perfect. You're going to iterate on it. At least giving people a vague idea of where you're going is better than doing nothing. People follow leaders who have a clear vision and know where they're going, because if they follow you, they want to know where they follow you to make sense. So once you've communicated that vision, you're like, here's what I have happen. The next thing you want to do is constantly reinforce and remind people. I think of myself like chief reminder Officer. If I'm not repeating myself and not repeating the important things, then they're not actually that important to people. So even if I think it all the time, if I don't say it all the time, then people don't believe it's real. People want to be reminded and they do need to be reminded. And so I try very hard to constantly remind people, minimum on a quarterly basis where we are going, and then on an individual basis between the quarter. I'm constantly trying to remind individuals. And that consistency is what keeps it top of mind for people and gives them confidence going into their work to know that they work in the right direction. And so a question that you can ask yourself is, am I unifying my team with this vision? Think about it like basketball. What's the vision? Let's get to the championship. Like, that's the vision that people want to get to. It's like, we have a very compelling vision. You need to figure out what's your hall of Fame, what's your NBA championship, And then how can you make that known to everybody on your team? Businesses die when a founder runs out of vision. And so the reason a lot of businesses aren't able to move forward is not because there aren't ways to move forward. It's because somebody doesn't know how to move forward, and then they don't make it known when they do know. And so you want to know what you're doing next, and you want to also make other people aware of what you're doing next. Vision doesn't just lead. It inspires others to take action. And that is how this ties into leadership. Because the best leaders, they don't just lead people, they inspire people to lead themselves. The last skill is holding your team accountable. It means ensuring your team takes responsibility for the actions that you have asked them to take. Now, organizations that intentionally try to hold people accountable can increase productivity by 15 to 20%. But what's even cooler is this. People who have at least one person they're accountable to are 95% more likely to achieve their goals. If somebody wants to lose weight and they just have one person that they've told they want to lose weight to, they're 95% more likely to achieve their goals. Same goes for business. And so if you are a leader, this is a key piece of your job. Your job is to be that person for somebody. And the reason is because your job is to help them achieve their goals. When leaders avoid accountability, it creates a culture where nobody takes accountability and nobody wants to hold anybody accountable. The reality is, is that holding people accountable, that makes people uncomfortable. It makes people uncomfortable to direct people in any manner. Just because it makes us uncomfortable doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. In fact, it probably means we should do it. Accountability is actually like the glue between an Action and a result. So it's like you want this action to occur to get this result, but if you don't have accountability in the middle as the glue, then you're likely not going to get the result. You'll get action, but you won't get the result. So what does that look like in an organization? It's a lot of people working, but they're not achieving anything. So back in my first business, I had a period of time where I essentially got rid of a leader that was above many other leaders in the team. And so when I got rid of that person, I took over that team and I realized that there was no accountability. And so because of that, there was a lot of action, but then there was nothing happening. The first thing that I did is I had huddles three times a week with those leaders and I had everybody report on their performance in that group meeting. And then they had to self identify if they were a red, yellow or a green. The business grew 15% the next month. You know, it's funny because people feel like I feel bad holding them accountable. Do you feel bad employing them? Because if you don't hold people accountable, they ain't going to have jobs. Accountability is expectations plus measurement, times, feedback, that's it. And so install expectations and a measurement tool so that you can hold people accountable. If you don't have those two things, you can't even tell someone how they're doing. So what does that mean? Expectation is clearly communicating what responsibilities you expect from somebody. It means what are the tasks they're responsible for? What are the decisions they're responsible for? What are the people that they're responsible for? Under what time and what quality do you want the work done? Setting expectations. Once you've set expectations, the question is you need to measure those expectations, which is, how do you know somebody accomplishes the expectation? How do you know they got the task done? How do you know that they are working with the other person? How do you know the project is done? This looks like deadlines, metrics, key performance indicators. And so for every expectation, you want to have a measurement. And then once you have those two things, you can use those to give people feedback. What do we need to do to get it to this instead? That's accountability. It's literally just pointing out the discrepancy and asking somebody what we can do to close that gap. And so ask yourself this, have I properly set expectations and put measurement in place so that I can hold people accountable? Accountability separates the wishmakers from the action takers. But accountability feels like an attack on people who are not willing to take ownership over their life. Responsibility is not a burden, it's a privilege. So holding people accountable to their responsibility is a gift, not a curse. I know that a lot of this applies to business, but all of these things can apply to literally every area of your life.