If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This

Hello friends, welcome back to the channel, so I made my first million at the age of 26, but if I had followed the tips that I am going to share in

this

video, I probably would have gotten there much sooner, so these are the Five Key Lessons What I would give to my younger self if I had to start over. Okay, so let's start with the first lesson, when I was younger. Everyone I knew was a doctor. My parents were doctors. All his friends were doctors. and the way people got rich, like the people I knew who had a lot of money, they essentially got there because they were doctors and they bought houses in London in the 1980s, so the whole message about financial success was Just like that.

Implicit was that you get a job like working as a doctor and then over time you buy houses and then over time you become financially successful. All words to that effect, but then, at the age of 17, I read a book that changed my life. and that was Tim Ferriss' four-hour work week and I will always be indebted to Tim Ferriss for putting me on

this

path because this book taught me that financial success doesn't actually have to look like you work hard for 65 years and then quit. You retire to the beach when you have a lot of property, that taught me that that wasn't really the way and that, in fact, there was a way to be financially successful while you're relatively young and can join what he calls the nouveau riche. , that is, people who recognize the value of the freedom of time and independence rather than just the value of money, and the book made me realize that, wait a minute, do I really want to live a life in the that appears every day? work maybe not necessarily enjoying my day job maybe I find it enjoyable in some parts but overall I may not enjoy it.

Do I really want to do it for the sake of the promise of retiring later and reading all four? hour work week was the first time in my life that I really thought: wow, I'm going to set a goal to achieve financial freedom. Financial Independence. I didn't even have that terminology before reading the book, but it became clear. goal in my mind and that's lesson number one, lesson number one is to have a clear goal in mind for financial freedom. You don't necessarily need to have a number. I never had a magic number. I don't have a magic number yet.

In my opinion, I need x amount of money to consider myself financially independent, but what the four-hour work week taught me was that actually generating passive or active income streams or creating a business was the way to unlock freedom and the Optionality that I

wanted

from my life and so the reason I mention this as lesson number one is that you know, this video is how I became a

millionaire

when I was 20, basically if you don't have a goal of becoming financially independent or financially free. or being a

millionaire

, whatever it is while you're young, then it probably won't happen.

These kinds of things don't happen accidentally. People don't just wake up and stumble upon some kind of thing that makes them super financially successful every single one of them. The person I know who has achieved whatever they consider Financial Freedom has done it very, very intentionally, they have had it as a goal in their mind and even just the fact that you then have this as a goal means that you know the manifestation and all. that kind of thing, but essentially the brain starts recognizing patterns and starts looking for opportunities to help you reach that goal, so ever since I read the four-hour work week and got the idea that I want to be financially free, suddenly my brain started seeing these opportunities everywhere and then every year through medical school as I continued my studies while socializing doing all the things in the back of my mind and sometimes in the front of my mind was this idea. de I want to be financially free, therefore I need to build assets and build businesses around me that allow me to make money while I sleep, so I want to do medicine.

I can do it for fun instead of money, and you probably already have. I came across this idea that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and for most of us and certainly for me growing up, the people I spent my time with were not on this path to financial freedom. . The people I spent my time with are still very good friends of mine, they're all very normal people who

wanted

to be doctors, lawyers, management consultants or investment bankers, all that kind of stuff, but I was. Really, the only person in my friend group, besides my brother, who was into all this like, oh, let's create things on the Internet, let's make money online, all this kind of stuff, but I think the really cool thing about the time We live in is that you don't necessarily need to have real people around you who are doing this to benefit from this average effect of the five people around you because, depending on the type of content you consume, what books you read, what books you listen to, what podcasts you listen to what YouTube videos you watch those things may in some way reflect the effects of these five people around you obviously I would still hang out with my friends I'm not going to tell my friends Hi Jake, I'm not going out with you You don't like him anymore because it's not like trying to make money online, but that means that while I'm at the gym I'm not out running, I'm listening to podcasts like the freelance podcast or my first million or smart passive income with plat Flynn or online marketing made easy with any Porterfield.

I would keep an eye out for podcasts where people talk about how they make money. Everything will make my brain tune into the frequency of the things I do. I need to be aware of the world to try to move towards this goal of financial freedom that I have. Oh and by the way, in case you haven't heard my new book just came out, it's called feeling good about productivity, it's a guide on how to do more of what matters to you it's a combination of the last 10 years and more from my own experience with productivity combined with hundreds of hours of research and expert interviews and trying to condense it all into a book.

It has 54 practical experiments that you can perform. Apply it in your life to be more productive in a way that is really enjoyable, meaningful and sustainable, so if you want to watch it, visit the website Feelgoodproductivity.com, which is linked in the video description and is available in countries around the world. world. world, now let's move on to lesson number two and this is what I wish someone had told me when I was very, very young. I somewhat understood this message implicitly, but I wish it had been told to me more explicitly now again in In my previous life, all I knew was the way you make money by having a job, like working as a doctor, working as a lawyer and people give you money for doing that and it's like that was the only conception of money I had. but a job is basically if you imagine a machine, a job is where you are a component, a cog within that machine, your work component and the entire educational system teaches us to be work components within some type of machine, the system Modern education is built from that machine. behind the Industrial Revolution, where the goal was to train people to become cogs in factories, where we enter the education system as a unique individual with our own strengths and desires and all these kinds of things, creativity and we are all spit out by the educational system with a grade point average or with standardized tests and all this kind of stuff, we are very trained to be a cog within a machine.

Now, in this metaphor, the gear inside the machine is known as a job, but the machine itself is known as a business and the person who owns the machine, the owner of the business, is the one who becomes rich while he is young, so lesson number two is that if you want to become a millionaire by age 20, you need to start your own business there. There are very few jobs that allow you to become a millionaire, very rarely that will happen when you are 20, maybe if you work at Goldman Sachs, maybe if you are a neurosurgeon in the US, then of course yes you will become millionaire.

This will probably happen when you're 30, you'll probably have to work very, very, very, very, very hard for it. You don't have that much influence on your time. By far the most sensible route if you really care about having a lot of financial success is that you need to have your own business so what is a business? Well, a business to really simplify a business simply solves a problem in exchange for money. A business simply solves a problem in exchange for money. Now, generally speaking, there are also three different types of businesses, possibly too, but come on. with three, the first is a service business where you are doing one thing and then you charge money for the thing, for example an accountant is, broadly speaking, a service business where you are doing someone's accounts and then you are charging money for the thing, a mechanic or a plumber is a service business, you do something like mechanics or plumbing and you charge people for that service.

Next, we have product businesses where you make something and then charge more than one person for that service, ideally, so for example, you own a bakery that is a product business, you bake a lot of bread and then you charge people for the bread, you are making money and that is the business, the machine, the people who bake the bread and work within the business. the gears have a job, but the person who owns the bakery is the owner of the business, they own the machine, that person becomes very and then the third type of business is a bit of a modern innovation, but I would call it a content where the business The model is that you are creating content online and monetizing it through advertising.

There is a bit of nuance here. Some would say that a content business is not really a proper type of business because it is really just a marketing channel for someone. someone else's product because fundamentally the way this video makes money in AdSense, for example, there were ads before this video, but I think the content is becoming much more of its own, that's why I call it a third category of business and why That's the advice that I would tell my younger self is that if you want to be a millionaire in your 20s, then you need to build some kind of business, whether it's a service business or a product business or a content business or maybe In this way, once you have all this money that you are going to earn throughout your journey in business and life, then you will want a place to invest, which is where the sponsor of this video and that is trading 212. and trading 212 is a fantastic application that allows you to invest in stocks, shares and funds without commissions.

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It's literally free money, you could do it too and trading with 212 is really useful. app to be able to invest in these things you can also open an eye server base in the UK it is very useful so thank you very much to 212 for sponsoring this video so at this point we have the goal of financial independence and We have adjusted our content.Accordingly, we know that the only real way to get there is to start some type of business, so the question arises: how do you actually start the business? Honestly, the main thing I would say is just try it.

I already talked about the three different types of businesses, service products and content. I would recommend starting with a service business. A service business is by far the easiest way to start making money. Now, when I was 13, I started my first service business and got started. being a freelance web designer and after a few months I started calling myself a web design agency. It was just me as a 13 year old kid in school, coming home from school and designing websites and trying to market my services on the internet on a website. That was called getacoder.com back in the day and it was where I first tried how to make money online.

I was solving a problem, like web design stuff and charging for the solution, I mean five dollars, ten dollars here and there, then from age. from 14 to 19 I had another type of mini business that I would call it and it was private tutoring and they paid me for that I was paid four pounds an hour, then four pounds and fifty, then five pounds and six pounds and then I started doing it was for gcses and levels, so exams here in the UK and they paid me £15 an hour and that was more money than I had ever seen in my life.

I felt very rich. I would go to the bank and then call you. I know, I have my little cash in my hand and I put it in a little envelope and deposit like 360 ​​pounds this month. I am rich and that is why this is less than having a strong bias to act in the best way that you learn to do. building a business is trying to build a business, you don't learn how to build a business by doing an MBA, you don't learn how to build a business by reading books, you don't learn how to build a business by watching videos. you learn how to build a business by actually doing it and then while you're doing it, you can now supplement the action with your learning.

Action is the base and learning is the complement, so I was doing service-based business from the age of 13 to 19 and then I graduated to, let's say, a product business where at the age of 19 I decided making a product that was a course that would help people get into medical school, still with a service component because I was the one teaching that. course initially but then at some point I hired people as cogs and hired online employees as contractors to work within my business so that they were teaching the courses and I owned the business and in our first year we made 10K that year, which was like Wow, ten thousand pounds in a single year, what the hell the second year we made around 80 thousand 30 we made around 150 thousand and then year four, five and six we were still hovering around that 150 income mark thousand a year with margins of around 30, so me?

I was taking home between £40 and £50k while I was at medical school and then at the age of 23 I pivoted a bit into the content business. I decided to start my YouTube channel. My reasoning was, "Hey, if I make videos that help people get When I went to medical school, which is what I was doing in 2017, people were buying my courses, so this YouTube channel started as a marketing asset for my business, but then over time I realized that making videos is much more fun, much more rewarding, and actually much more lucrative than this old medical school admissions business, but the The lesson I would tell my younger self is that at every stage, if you're really trying to achieve financial freedom, if you're trying to be a millionaire when you're 20 or however old you are, you focus on action, you have a bias towards action, but that brings us to lesson number four and I think this was the biggest mistake I made and if I had done things differently, I probably would have reached this millionaire point before I was 26. buying to act is really good, but I think in my case I was too biased towards action and I didn't spend enough time learning every time I did something.

I was basically trying to invent the Playbook from scratch when I built my first business doing this medical school admissions thing. I was trying to build it from scratch. I didn't know anything about sales and marketing. I didn't know anything about operations, finance, delegation or management. I didn't even know what. these words meant I didn't even know they existed, obviously I had heard the word marketing but I thought what is marketing. I don't know about billboards, so, for example, we got to a point with that Med sex business where we were stuck at 150,000 annual revenue at this point.

I was thinking, damn, how can we make more money? There are really only two ways to make more money, at least Topline, which is: either you get more clients or you charge more money from those clients, which I did. I don't realize that this whole thing about how to get more clients and how to charge them more money is literally called sales and marketing and there are literally books and courses and videos and podcasts that are about sales and marketing and this. These are things that people have already figured out and if I had bothered to read a book on sales and marketing, I would have completely leveled the business because I would have had a firmware update on my mind.

I would have said, oh, this is how you do it similarly, we got to a point with our business about two years ago where I felt very overwhelmed, we were generating about 100,000 revenue and I felt very overwhelmed because I was doing all the administration , all operations, all logistics, all accounting. all the accounting, all the tax returns, like all that stuff. I was doing it all myself while trying to study medicine while trying to have a social life and at the same time trying to be the coder and developer. And I just didn't know it at the time, but this is something that every company goes through and at that point you need to hire someone and that's where companies grow through hiring, delegating, managing, onboarding, leadership, vision.

I just had no idea that was possible because I had never read a book at the time on how to do business, thanks overseas these are just some of the business books I have read in the last few years and if I had read literally any of these when I was younger or something similar to business books, I would have realized that these are actually the mistakes I'm making, this one in particular. emails Reviewed by Michael Gerber, this book describes literally all the things I was struggling with when I was trying to build that first business and if I had known this existed, I would have said, "wow, I don't have to be so overwhelmed." I don't have to do all these things myself.

I can hire people that would have blown me away. I wish someone had told me that these books even existed. I had no idea that I had been so skewed in action to the point that I forgot to learn along the way, so the advice I would implore from my younger self who is on this journey to financial independence is lesson number four. Please take time each week to learn things by reading books, listening to audiobooks, listening to podcasts. take courses, if you want, watch YouTube videos where people really go into the details instead of saying staying at the surface level, even thinking about hiring a coach or getting a mentor, hiring a coach is the biggest return expense on the investment I have made in my life. life if when I was younger, when I was first making money with my business at the age of 19, I wish someone would have sat me down and said, hey, look man, do you think you can get better at tennis without a Coach, maybe you can, maybe you can?

I watch tennis videos on YouTube and I like to read books about it, but do you think you would improve faster in tennis if you had a tennis coach? Everyone probably has a tennis coach. I had a tennis coach when I was young, why didn't I think so? You should hire a business advisor. I just didn't realize it. I just didn't know it existed, so if you're at this point in the video, I implore you, please, younger me or whoever is watching this. I had spent more time learning, learning is always the thing that gets taken off the calendar because there are always other things going on in the business and even as I was planning this video I realized that this is a lesson that I'm still not learning.

Moving forward enough for myself, at this point, the things I need to learn to improve the business are no longer found in books, audiobooks and podcasts, particularly because people tend not to delve as deeply into those things and don't have much. context, but the way people improve their business at the stage I'm at is by hiring coaches and My Girl by going to events and masterminds where you're surrounded by other business owners; There are even people I know who spend fifty thousand dollars a year to literally join a Zoom call once a quarter with other business owners and say that that $50,000 spend has generated a 10x ROI or further.

I mean, by paying 50,000, they have unlocked learnings that have allowed them to earn 500,000. Totally obvious, but depending on where you are on the journey, I feel like I'm really passionate about this. I'll just implore myself that there are books about these things, you don't need to invent the Playbook from scratch, please take my advice, learn. From the mistakes I have made, please learn along the way, but remember that action is the basis and learning is the complement. Oh, that felt like a good rant, let's move on to final lesson number five, which is basically what I tried to do. my first daughter on the Internet when she was 13 years old.

I'm 29 now and it took me 13 years to earn my first million. My journey to similar income over time has been a slow, compound long-term gain, so for me personally I basically made zero dollars between the ages of 13 and 19 despite trying all of these things, then I made about 10,000 a year between 19 and 20. Then I made about 100,000 a year between 21 and 25 and then I started making a million a year and beyond. the age of 25 and a little onwards 26 onwards but the point I want to make is that it took me 13 years from the age of 13 to the age of 26 to earn my first million, that's a long time but the key over time and this is the The final lesson is that you should not stop, you should not give up because there are many people who start the path of building a business or making a YouTube channel, whatever it is, they start on the path but then they stop, they do not they do it.

I don't see results immediately and they stop and that's why it's actually a lot harder to do these side things when you have a day job. I was doing it as a student where my time was worthless, like I wasn't earning anything. money on my time and so even if I was working four hours and making like ten dollars, I thought yeah, I'm making money, it's better than nothing, but now it's really hard for my friends who have real jobs because now you have a hourly rate and a paycheck that comes once a month and nothing stifles innovation more than a paycheck that comes once a month because now you're thinking, well, I could spend 10 hours working on my business. this weekend but I don't really need it.

I have money on the way. I feel so comfortable like life is good and if you're happy with those kinds of things in life, great, all the power to you, but I also have a lot. from friends who have those jobs but who would love to have financial freedom, would love to be able to quit work or work part-time and have the freedom to unlock the autonomy and the life that they really want to lead, but they do. They're not consistent, they're not taking action and part of that is because they expect results too soon and you can't expect results too soon in this game, you have to play the long game, you have to play the long game.

In the long-term game, you must not give up and you must have, as Garyvee calls it, impatience with actions, but supreme patience with results and, honestly, the way I have done this over time is that for me all this buildingbusiness and learning the skills and getting paid for them and learning all the things and providing value along the way and all this kind of stuff, it's all been so fun, it's been so enjoyable, it's been so energizing, it's been so stimulating as I remember it even in the past. When I was 13, I couldn't wait to get home from school to get on the computer, get a coder profile, and see if I had any jobs that first day I got my first five.

A dollar job to get an encoder was like, oh my gosh. I have made money on the Internet. I made a PayPal account. I had to lie about my age because I was 13 and the minimum age was 18, but I had like five dollars in my PayPal account, oh, it blew my mind and it was so exciting and I still have that feeling now building this business, even the things that I was building while I was in medical school and while I was working as a doctor building the YouTube channel, and if you're playing this game, then find a way to do it long term and I think the way to do it long term It's finding a way to make it feel good and this is, in fact, what my new book is about to feel like.

Good productivity. I'll link it below if you want to check it out. Basically, the thesis of the book is that if you want to do more things that matter to you, focus on making them feel good, because feeling good boosts energy. productivity and just improving your life in general, so if you fancy checking this out there will be some bonuses. There's a link below and I think that's really the way to think about it. It's like, say, when I was working as a doctor and creating this YouTube channel or when I was a medical student and creating the first course business or whatever when I was in high school and was creating websites at the same time. the business was more fun than the alternative, I would rather work on my business than scroll through Tick Tock or scroll through Instagram or scroll through Twitter or watch something on Netflix.

It's more energizing. It's more stimulating. More fun. I feel like I'm using my skills. I feel like I'm learning I feel like I'm leveling up and if you can get to that point where the work that you're doing really feels like play and you're doing this thing of following this advice and learning along the way. So it's hard to imagine a world where you wouldn't achieve financial success at least at some point. What matters is that you are solving a problem and you are getting paid for the solution and you are building a business you are building the machine and you are the owner of that machine you are not a cog in someone else's machine so here is the advice What I give to myself, find a way to make it fun, find a way to enjoy the journey because the more you enjoy the journey, the more sustainable the journey is and it takes a long time to get the results, but if you stay in the walk long enough, you'll look back on your life and think, oh my god, wow!

I had a great time building this business. I would not change anything. I wouldn't change it for the world. I'm a fucking billionaire where I can do whatever I want and I can quit my job because I can actually do anything. I want like if someone had told me that 13 years ago, 16 years ago, when I started on this path, I would have had a stroke, a heart attack, and a hernia all at the same time, I wouldn't have even known that it's even remotely possible now. If you're interested in specific ideas for side hustles and businesses you could start, then I have a list of seven side hustle ideas here to hopefully give you more ideas about what type of business you can start, so thank you.

Thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video, bye.