Sam Parr (0:00)

If you click this video, it's probably not the first video you've ever clicked. Like this. Maybe one like this, or this, or this. There are a ton of videos on YouTube that are promising you how you can get rich quick. And I get it because everybody wants that. I wanted it too. Let me guess, it didn't work. You did not, in fact, get rich quickly. And that's not your fault, because most advice on the Internet either comes from people who themselves never got rich, or it's too vague, it's too general. It's just things like work hard, find your passion, things like that. And as bad of a reputation as Get Rich Quick has, the truth is, it is actually possible to get rich quickly, right? You can get rich slow, you can get rich quick. You can get rich. But most of the people who are doing these videos, they've actually never done it themselves. A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a talk at Berkeley. And the talk I chose to give was called how to make a million dollars after you graduate. And I gave that talk because that's what I wanted when I was a college kid. Like, I didn't know any better. I just thought, well, I'm. What am I doing all this studying for? Why am I working so hard? Because I wanted to get a job that would be successful, that would give me money, and then I would be financially free. And. And that's what I wanted. I wasn't really ashamed to admit it. Now the problem was the whole time in college, nobody was explaining to me, like, what do you actually go do to make that happen? Right? I was learning about mitosis, and I was learning about, you know, the history of the world wars, and nobody was telling me, I'm here at school to learn how to be successful. Nobody was telling me how to actually do that. And so this talk that I gave at Berkeley has, at the beginning, it does have some of those core principles, the things that you gotta know in order to make this happen. And at the end, I have specific ideas. I call them my white belt businesses. So the specific ideas that I would go do if I wanted to make this process faster, it took me about 10 years, but I think I could have done it in about four if I knew what I was doing. So this is it. I'm doing it. This is my get Rich Quick video. Enjoy.

Micheal (1:46)

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like a days off on a road. Let's try.

Sam Parr (1:54)

If you're listening to this on audio. I'm just going to tell you right now, you're going to want to go watch on YouTube because they're slides and they're good slides. They're slides with beautiful pictures on them. And they're things that are going to make this way easier to understand. So just go to YouTube and type my first million on YouTube and you will find this, this video. And while you're there, just subscribe. Just do the good thing. This is not going to be like one of those videos where the thumbnail and the title sound really good, sound really promising. And then you watch and 40 minutes in, you're like, dude, what is the message? That's my promise to you. I'm actually going to tell you a bunch of really core principles with my real story and then some. Some specifics of how you can actually implement this. All right, so let's jump in. The premise of this talk is how to make your first million. I says, after Berkeley, because I did this at Berkeley. It's how to make your first million in your 20s. So how to make it in a few years rather than working for 40 years, saving up, and then hitting this goal when you're 60, 65, ready for retirement. And most people who talk to you online or in person will tell you, just follow your passion. But I don't know about. Personally, I liked the idea, but I did not know what my passion actually was. If you told me, what's your passion? When I was in school, I don't know, I would have said recess. Because there was not something that I was so passionate about that I just thought, oh, wow, this is it. This is my true calling. Maybe there's some people out there that are that lucky, but I wasn't one of them. And so that advice didn't really work for me. So I'm not going to tell you to follow your passion. Instead, I'm going to do what somebody did for me when I was younger. So this is me in college. I went to Duke University and I thought I was going to be a doctor. I was pre med. I spent my whole college career taking physics and biology and chemistry classes. And finally my last semester, when I was done with all those requirements, I had taken the MCATs, I was ready to go to med school. I finally took the easy class. I took the blow off class, the class that my roommate always was taking, Rocks for Jocks type of classes. And it was called getting Rich. I just took it for an easy A. But instead, it actually was the most important class. I Took my entire college career, you know, because at the time, I knew what I wanted, right? I wanted to be happy, I wanted to be rich, I wanted to have abs. But, you know, my plan was just. There was no plan. It was really just a goal. And a goal without a plan is just a wish. And so I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea how to actually get there. And then I met this guy. This guy came into my class and he changed my life. And it's not actually a picture of him. This is just a picture when I search cool men's haircut. But that guy had a really cool haircut. And he walked in and he blew my mind. And so here's my promise to you. My pinky is out for you here. I'm going to tell you how I did it. How I made a million dollars when I was in my 20s, how you can do it, and specific ideas that I would be doing if I was you today to go make it happen again. Because even if you don't follow my exact path, I know better now. I know how I could have got there easier and with less pain and faster. And I'm going to tell you what those three ideas are, okay? Along the way, between you today and this picture of you at the end lying on a hammock under an umbrella at a beach somewhere, there are sort of five key checkpoints, five things that you gotta do in order to make that dream happen, to get to paradise. But, you know, before I give you any advice, rule number one, never ask directions from somebody who's never been to that destination before, you know? Or never trust a bald barber for a haircut, right? I want to fast my credentials here so that you know that I'm legit. So if you give me a minute to brag. I don't like to brag, but I got to brag here because you should not be listening to business advice or money advice from anybody who has not achieved it themselves. Here's my basic resume. I've started over 10 companies, three of them have sold. I've invested in over a hundred others. My current portfolio of companies that I own and operate will do close to a hundred million dollars this year in revenue. And that's where I'm at now. And when I was in my 20s, I started off completely clueless. And so I went from clueless to that. And I think you can, too. It took me about 15 years. I think you could do it faster if you knew better. One of my companies, Bevo, got acquired by Amazon. I started a newsletter company called the Milk Road that got bought after about a year. I'm also a quote unquote, thought leader. And I have to put Dr. Evil up here because that's, you know, pretty embarrassing to even even try to say. But the truth is, have a podcast, that's pretty popular, have a Twitter, that's pretty popular. Uh, Justin Bieber follows me. He did not respond to my dm, so that's a little bit of a soft spot for me. You get the idea. Okay? I'm legit. Do I have permission to continue? Are we good? So this is me back in 2010. I'm sitting in that classroom, and I am painfully average. I have average grades. I have an average social life. It's not even so bad that I'm like, oh, wow, this is going to make for a really great comeback story. Nobody was rooting for me because I was just in the middle and I was stuck. And I was not bad enough where I felt even really a lot of motivation to change it. I just thought, that's who I am. I'm kind of a middle of the pack sort of guy. So that was me, Mr. Mediocre. And what changed? I met a girl. Not my wife. It was a woman named Lisa Keister. And she changed my life, my plan. Without even knowing it, I took her class. And in walks Mr. Cool Haircut. And Mr. Cool Haircut asks a question. He's supposed to be giving a talk, but he says, instead of giving a talk, let me just ask a simple question. Who here wants to be an entrepreneur someday? Who here wants to be wealthy and be a successful entrepreneur? Everybody's hands went up. So everybody had the wantrepreneur side down. And then he said, cool. You guys are all seniors, right? We said, yes. He said, awesome. So you're graduating in just a couple months? Yes. Who here is already working on their business idea? One hand went up. He said, okay, well, who knows that they're going to go start a startup when they graduate? And two hands went up. He said, wow. So out of a class of 100% of people who wanted to go be an entrepreneur, almost none of you are actually going to go be an entrepreneur. What's up with that? And he said, well, what are you planning to do? And person said, well, you know, I do want to start a company someday, but I got a great job at UBS and I got a great job at McKinsey, and they had. Everybody had great jobs lined up after school. And so he just asked why, and he Asked why, like, we were crazy. This quote from Andrew Wilkinson to me explains it well. He said, go into business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA in the same way, going and getting a job at a business in order to learn how to run a business that doesn't really work. That's not actually what happens. And instead, what will happen to you is what Nassim Taleb calls the third grade addiction. So the three, three most harmful addictions in the world are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. And for most of us, we will be trapped by that salary monster. As soon as you get on that path of having the job and you have the salary, it is very, very hard to get off that. And so that is the first trap for anybody who wants to get rich, is that most of you will talk yourself into why you need to have a job. I did this too, by the way. I went and got a job for about two months and quit, you know, quit my. My job for after two months. Even though it was a six figure job straight out of college, it was a good job. And it wasn't like the job was boring or terrible in any way. But I just realized, like, this is not getting me closer to the thing I actually want. And so the safe path which was taking the job was actually kind of dangerous because it was dangerous to my dream. Right. I think we all think of danger as danger to you. Like, oh, it's gonna. Something bad's gonna happen to you. But the worst thing that could happen to you is actually you choose a path and you spend all your time and energy working on something that's not your dream. And so if I had a dream of being a successful entrepreneur, which is what I did, then the salary monster was the very first thing to avoid. And so you need to slay the salary monster. Most of you will fall into the someday trap where you say that someday you will go start that company and someday you will make it happen. But someday never comes. My friend Trevor has this great analogy that I want to offer to you here. And it's the story of two tigers. And there's two tigers that were, you know, born together, same mom, separated at birth. And one tiger was taken by these wonderful tiger loving people and cared for and raised at a zoo. He was loved every day. They brushed his hair, they fed him everything that he loved, and they taught him new tricks. They just cared for him in every way they could. They took care of him. That is the zoo tiger. And the other tiger was neglected. He was left alone in the jungle to survive on his own. He had to. If he wanted to eat, he had to hunt. If he wanted to drink, he had to find water. And he had to survive against all predators and prey. And so they became these two tigers, the zoo tiger and the jungle tiger. And let me ask you a quick question. So after 10 years of being raised this way, if the jungle tiger was put in the zoo, what would happen? He would be bored. He would be bored out of his mind. He would be like, what am I supposed to do all day? I just sit here. I just sit here and look pretty. His entire way of life would be almost neutered, and he would be put in a zoo and he would be bored out of his mind. And this is most entrepreneurs, if they ever get a corporate job, they sort of sit there at their desk and they wonder, what am I supposed to be doing here? I don't understand. What does this job title mean? And the opposite is also interesting. So if you take the zoo tiger, you put him in the jungle, after 10 years, what happens to him? He dies. There's no idea how to actually survive in the real world because he has been coddled and cared for and lived in this structured box his entire life. And that is the problem with the someday trap, which is if you spend your life in these jobs, even good jobs, even challenging jobs, you are being raised as a zoo tiger. And every year that you are in the zoo, you are less likely to be able to survive in the jungle. It's not impossible, but man, your conditioning is really wiring you for that. And so you get to choose early on if you are going to be a zoo tiger and a jungle tiger. And you should know that the jungle tiger's path is often much more uncertain, much more uncomfortable, and he's going to get dirty and rough and get some cuts and bumps and bruises. But in the end, it's what he wants, to be able to survive on his own. Okay, so that is the zoo tiger jungle tire story. And I say all of this to say that step one of being successful is not about intelligence. It's not about experience. It's not about strategy at all. It is about courage. And that courage is the rate limiting step for 99% of smart people. And so if you consider yourself a smart person, instead of trying to pour more water into the bucket of intelligence or information and read the next article or learn the next strategy, in fact, you should actually look at your courage bucket and make sure that it is full and that you are ready to go. Because if you don't do that, none of the other stuff will work. Okay, let's move on. Oh, yeah, this is a little slide I had here. Courage is like toilet paper during a hurricane. It is in scarce supply. It is not on the shelves. Okay, now you've done step one. You've decided to go do it. You've decided to do it now, not someday. So what is the second thing that you got to do? Well, the next thing that's going to happen is you're going to fail, and you're going to fail miserably. I know very few people who just decided to be an entrepreneur and then went and did it. But you have to decide if you're going to be okay with that kind of failure. And I love this Bill Burr quote. I want to read it to you here. Bill Burr, the famous comedian, said he. He knew he should go after comedy because he realized that sleeping on a Futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse? Sleeping in a king bed next to a wife that you're not really in love with. But for some reason, you married and you've got a couple of kids and you've got a job that you hate, and you're laying there fantasizing about chasing your dream and sleeping on a futon. There is no risk when you go after a dream, there is no risk when you go after a dream, there is a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe. I love this Bill Burr quote. And I agree with it wholly. Now, let me tell you, practically speaking, strategically speaking, how I did this. So I decided when I graduated from college that I was going to spend a year strategically broke. And I chose this phrase instead of saying unemployed or saying, I'm traveling, I said, I am being strategically broken. And I said that because it got people to ask me questions, intelligent questions, like, what does that mean? Why are you doing that? And I had to have a real answer for it. And so I decided I'm not going to med school. And I calculated what I call the freedom number. And the freedom number is a very important number. A lot of people will calculate their desired net worth. They will calculate their dream amount of money that they want to have. That is a sort of a maximum number you want to have, but you actually want to calculate the minimum number. And the minimum number I call the freedom number, which is the minimum salary you need to have maximum freedom. Okay, so what is the minimum amount you need to earn that would give you the most of your time every day to go do whatever it is that you want to do. You know, for me, for example, I calculated that I needed roughly, I think it was like 15 grand to live on for the year. And I said if I have 15 grand, then I can pay all my bills and I could just spend all my time doing whatever I want. And so 15 grand became my target. And this is when all my friends were targeting six figure salaries or whatever they wanted to get as much as they could and they were willing to go work banking jobs 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week, trying to get that extra 10k or 20k salary. Whereas I was going the opposite way. I was like, can I tutor kids? Can I like coach basketball at a school? Like it's, there's. And that's what I did. I literally, I tutored stats even though I was a C stats student and I taught basketball at a school for autistic children. And that's what I did. That was my job. When I was graduated from a prestigious school, I decided to spend a year doing that because that paid me my 15k that I needed in the minimum amount of time. It only took me like, you know, whatever, four hours a week or five hours a week of time to do that. And then I had 80 hours a week free to do whatever I wanted. And so I wanted my freedom number to be hit and to do this, you're going to live a little scrappy. This is actual pictures from my apartment at the time. So this is, you know, our art is like a towel on the wall, this ugly craigslist couch. We slept on air mattresses. You notice that the air mattress is next to the couch because we put three people in a two bedroom apartment. Like you know, just the basic things. This was our kitchen. You know, I don't know why we nailed the garbage bag to the wall, but like we did whatever we needed to do. We just didn't spend money on anything that was going to because it was decreasing our freedom if we spent money on other stuff. And we used that time to start our first business. And this is us on CNN pitching our first business, Wasabi sushi. And it worked right away. We had a brilliant idea, we were brilliant co founders and we had a huge success right away. Oh wait, that's not at all what happened actually. It was a terrible idea. We decided to start a sushi franchise even though restaurants are terrible business and we knew nothing about the food business. I started it. Not with two brilliant co founders, but with my two buddies who were equally clueless as me. And it did not work immediately. It was not a huge success. It failed badly. And this failure was very painful because reality punched us in the mouth. We had told everybody we knew that we were doing this. Everyone we graduated with, our teachers, our parents, our friends and family, all of them. And we made no money. In fact, we lost money doing this. We burned about $25,000 of prize money that we had won to do this. We made no money during or after. And now we had a new label. Instead of being entrepreneurs, we were labeled as failures. And this is where I want to offer you a chance to play a game. Because this is the second fork in the road. The first fork in the road was, are you even going to get started? Right? That was the salary monster. Well, the second fork in the road is are you going to quit after the first failure? Which is almost inevitable. And so if there was a game where I had a piece of paper, and on this piece of paper I had, let's say there was 10 circles. And under the 10 circles, one of the 10 circles had a prize and the other nine had were. You lose, try again. So I let you play the game. You pick a number, think of that number in your head right now. Whatever number you thought of, it's not that you lost. Okay, cool. So you lose round one. And that makes sense. You only had a 1 in 10 chance of, of winning, which is, by the way, similar to the odds of a successful business when you start a new business. Now, the trick here is that even though the game is rigged against you, meaning I have a 9 out of 10 chance of winning, you have a 1 out of 10 chance of winning. You do have one tool at your disposal, which is that you get to play the game as many times as you want. Well, the funny thing about that is that if you get to play a game like this, Even with a 1 out of 10 chance to win, if you got to play that 10 times, your odds of success now go up to about 65%. So now you're an odds on favorite to win. You're going to win two out of every three times you actually try that. And so this is the game of entrepreneurship. The game of entrepreneurship is you have to have the courage to start and then you have to have the endurance to try 10 times. Okay, so these are my first two lessons to you. Number one, start now. Number two, play the game 10 times. It took me 10 years to be successful, and that was about 10 attempts. So I think technically it was about eight or nine years total. But 10 or 11 attempts in those eight or nine years, that's about normal. It takes about a year to try anything in earnest. And I was willing to try 10 times. And this is the same is true for all of my cohort of friends. So of all of my friends, we were in San Francisco together, we were in our early 20s and we all wanted to be successful. A couple of them got it in their first, second or third try, but most of us, it took about 10 tries. But the amazing thing is that after 10 years, almost everybody is successful. You know, the great quote from Naval is that startups fail, but founders don't. And you gotta remember that the startup itself might fail, but you won't fail if you play the game 10 times. Now, the third thing you need to do is answer this thought experiment. If you know that you're going to lose many times for sure on the first and probably the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time that you're going to try this, can you win even when you lose? At Berkeley, I had people come up to the, to the whiteboard and write down an answer, how do you win when you lose? And somebody said, well, maybe you win because you, you learn some lessons. Okay, that's great, you won when you lost. How else? Maybe you met some great people along the way, you earned some connections, Great, that's another way to win. When you lose, what else can you do? And so the one that I want to draw your attention to is the skills that you will build while you fail. And so even though the startups you're doing might fail, in fact probably will fail, even though you believe in your heart there's no chance this is going to fail, this is totally going to work. The one thing that you can control that will certainly succeed is if you build your skill stack. And there are three master skills you must build along the way. The first skill is learning to build. The second skill is learning to sell. And the third skill is learning to get lucky. Let's walk through them. Learning to build. Okay, you are going to have to choose one way to build, one way to make things. It doesn't have to be building with your hands, it can be engineering, robotics, things like that. So building Elon Musk type stuff, rockets, cars, that type of thing, you can learn to build that stuff. And you will suck at the beginning. But if you're going to do this for a few years, you'll be pretty Damn good by year 2, 3, 4. You will know what you're doing. You'll be able to build at least prototypes and maybe even you know your V1 of things yourself. So you could build things with your hands, you could build things with code so you can learn to program, you can build things as a designer. You could also learn how to build our mate content. So you know this podcast YouTube channel. You need to learn how to make something. And so that is the first thing you're going to learn. Pick a path of what thing you're going to learn to make and then practice that nonstop. And so you should pick the thing that you love the most. Don't try to strategize this. Just pick the one you're drawn to. Pick the one that you think would be really cool if you could do it, that you think you would have the energy to do even when you're tired after work. And that's the one you want to pick, and that's the one you want to start doing. And you're going to do it hundreds and hundreds of times. Hey, can I tell you a Steve.