How to Make $1,000,000 After You Graduate (5 steps)

0:00If 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?

0:34You 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.

0:59And 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 got to know in order to make this happen. And at the end, I have specific ideas.

1:30I 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.

1:54If you're listening to this on audio, I'm just going to tell you right now, you're going to want to go watch this on YouTube because there's slides and they're good slides. There's slides with beautiful pictures on them. And there are 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 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?

2:22That'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 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. It 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.

2:54But I don't know about you. I personally, I liked the idea, but I did not know what my passion actually was. If you told me what 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.

3:21So 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.

3:53I just took it for an EZA, 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. This is 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.

4:30And so here's my promise to you. My pinky is out for you here. I'm gonna 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 got to do in order to make that dream happen, to get to paradise.

5:11advice. But before I give you any advice, rule number one, never ask directions from somebody who's never been to that destination before or never trust a bald barber for a haircut. 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 100 others. My current portfolio of companies that I own and operate will do close to$100 million this year in revenue.

5:46And 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, Bebo, 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 pretty embarrassing to even try to say, but the truth is, have a podcast that's pretty popular, have a Twitter that's pretty popular. Justin Bieber follows me.

6:16He 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.

6:47So 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 asked 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, right? So everybody had the entrepreneur side down. And then he said, cool, you guys are all seniors, right?

7:18We 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. And 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 the person said, well, yeah, 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 everybody had great jobs lined up after school.

8:00And so he just asked why, and he asked why we were crazy. This quote from Andrew Wilkinson to me explains it well. He said, going to 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 most harmful addictions in the world are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

8:30and 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 my job 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.

9:04And 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 going to, something bad is going to happen to you. But the worst thing that can happen to you is that 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.

9:37But someday never comes.

9:43My 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.

10:19If 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?

10:56I 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. He has 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.

11:30It'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 Taigo Jungle Taio 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.

12:01It 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.

12:34Okay, 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 knew he should go after comedy because he realized that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing.

13:05You 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 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's 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 end of year, strategically broke.

13:39And I chose this phrase instead of saying unemployed or saying I'm traveling. I said, I am being strategically broke. 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.

14:09But 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.

14:45They 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? And that's what I did. I literally, I tutored stats, even though I was a C plus 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.

15:21It 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 is an 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.

15:48You 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 a terrible business and we knew nothing about the food business.

16:24I 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, 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.

16:58And 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 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.

17:37Whatever 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 one in 10 chance 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%.

18:13So now you're an odds-on favorite to win. You're going to win 2 out of every 3 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.

18:51And 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 got to 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.

19:25If 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 whiteboard and write down an answer. How do you win when you lose? and somebody said, well, maybe you win because you learned 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.

20:03And 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.

20:35It doesn't have to be building with your hands. It can be engineering, robotics, things like that. So Elon Musk type stuff, rockets, cars, that type of thing. You can learn to build that stuff and you will suck it at the beginning. But if you're going to do this for a few years, you'll be pretty damn good by year two, three, four. You will know what you're doing. You'll be able to build at least prototypes and maybe even your V1 of things yourself. So you can 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 can also learn how to build or make content.

21:07So, 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.