22 Years as a Money Making Expert - How Anyone can make $10K+ a month - Daniel Priestley

38:07What key questions would you have around that? Well, I think the question I have is if I put myself back at 21 not knowing what I know now, or to many of the people who watch this show or our audience in general, you know, how would you start making money today? What would be your, you want to be an entrepreneur, but you don't know what the product is. There's so much online today about, you know, build an SMMA business, build all these different types of things, trade Forex, do crypto. But how do you meaningfully? Let's start eliminating some of these. So Forex trading, for example, is just a zero-sum game.

38:43There are winners and losers like going to a casino. know in the forex or any trading crypto trading forex trading any of that money moves from experts from from novices to experts um so a great picture to have in mind would be going and playing basketball against an nba team like let's say the three of us right the three of us amazing individuals we go and play basketball against a current nba uh team uh and the question would be do we think we could score a single point just one like one point in the whole game do we think we could get one point and the answer is categorically zero yeah of course not i'm glad i'm glad all three of us came to the point and i was like one of us is actually going to be amazing like even i don't even think if we just got the ball and threw it as as quick as possible i don't think we'd get a single point they they would figure that out real fast and just block or block all of that so we are so far out of our league it's a joke not a single point would be scored and that's the same as trading you're trading against people who they're the smartest people in the world they could have been nasa scientists uh they've got the best technology the access to information you don't even know they're trained they train all day so forget anything like trading it's not going to work um social media marketing you can add some value but it really is down to your ability to win clients.

40:06So here's a few principles that I would say for making money. Number one, if you care deeply about making money, stand next to the biggest pile of money you can get close to. So for example, where's the big piles of money right now? AI, technology, healthcare, aged care, biotech, like be as close to a big pile of money as you possibly can where the team are people who are making money and they're, sorry, they're innovating and adding value. so be around a team that's innovating adding value and there's a huge pile of money around there so it's pretty easy to go look at the trends what are vcs backing what are private equity companies backing um you know like there are magazine articles and all this sort of stuff that talk about the biggest most lucrative industries um even things like oil and gas or green tech um any of this they're attracting huge amounts of capital so stand next to that be as start by being as close to that pile of money as possible.

41:03And like a step further is your first bit of advice, which is align yourself with an entrepreneur doing something great. Align yourself with an entrepreneur doing something great in a sector that's rising. Yes. And then see yourself in five years time. Exactly. So be, yeah. So those two things, bearing in mind that the average age of a successful startup founder is 42. So if you're 21, you've got... How old are you? 43. Really? Yeah. I mean, here we go. I'm one year into the game. Oh, mate. You're still in the apprentice. Yeah, we're in the womb. You're finally out into the world. Good luck to you.

41:35Thank you. I hope it goes okay. My apprenticeship has gone well, and now I'm ready to get serious. I was reading that Herman Hauser was 40 when they started Arm. Fucking hell. That's a great fact. Isn't that crazy? But it's not crazy. Sorry, just context for listeners. Herman Hauser, founder of Arm, Arm just overtook Intel. and is the second largest AI company essentially in the world after Nvidia. 145 billion dollars and it's a UK company, right? So it's built out of UK technology, the universities here, the technology here comes back to the previous point. But I mean, to your point, he was a student of the game.

42:18Like he had been an entrepreneur for a long time. He'd done loads of things. He'd bought companies, sold companies, invested, grown. He'd put in - I bet he had an amazing mentor. Yeah, but in 20 years. Yeah. And the reason this is not amazing is this is the most standard thing in the world. If you go to news websites and you type in airplane, you're going to get a lot of airplane crashes because they're rare. But what you're not going to get is that 4 million people travel safely every single day and that almost all planes are pretty much the safest place you could possibly be as a plane. If you go to the news websites and look for entrepreneurs, you're going to see 22-year-olds who can code.

42:54and that's because they're incredibly rare. They're the plane crash of entrepreneurs. If I go to the media and say I'm a 43-year-old who's built a technology business and I've raised some capital, they go, that's not newsworthy. That's profitable and great company. Yeah, right, that's not newsworthy. So when we go to wealth managers, if we were to go to JP Morgan or if we were to go to Cootes or if we were to go to UBS and talk to a wealth manager and say, tell me about your typical client, They're going to say, oh, my typical client started a company in his early 40s or her early 40s, built it for about 15 years and then sold it at about 47, sorry, 57 and ended up with, you know, several million.

43:37And now we manage that for them. And that is the most non-newsworthy stock standard wealth creation in the world. So if you're 21, you've got 20 years of apprenticeship ahead of you if you want to, and you're still younger than the statistical average. of the millionaire who starts the company so in your 20s get a mentor stand next to a big pile of cash and be the most observant diligent hard-working junior in the room um that's that's like that would be the default advice there will come a time where you notice an opportunity there will come a time where you go hey i could be doing that um you know don't force it just just initially just say learning while earning that is like that's a home run um our friend timo posted something the other day which he said uh with every career make sure that you're either learning or earning preferably both never none and it was a great little tweak because it was like yeah you don't ever take a job where you're not learning or earning um take a job if you're earning a lot take a job if you're learning a lot and if you can do both awesome that's like that's that's setting the groundwork for for a big success um and direct report for an entrepreneur not a direct report for a career someone who you know someone who's not going to be an entrepreneur what is your advice for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur is it as simple as sitting next to that big pile of cash and getting a mentor like you said or is there a little more to it once you begin the entrepreneurial journey the most important thing is to know that it is a step-by-step process a hundred years ago if we went into the aviation industry it was an incredibly risky endeavor to be on a plane.

45:14Planes crashed all the time, taking off, landing, flying, all that sort of stuff. It was not a safe place to be. And then we figured out aviation. We created pre-flight checklists. We understood the principles of aerodynamics. And then planes are now the safest places to be. It's the same as business. The historical situation with business and entrepreneurship is that it was a risky endeavor, but not no more. It's riskier to be an employee of a large company because someone higher up can just fire you because of a decision you had no involvement in. And that's it. 100 % of your revenue, you go from having 100 grand a year income to zero the next day.

45:55And then it's hard to go and find something similar, especially if your whole industry is cutting that role. So you're in real trouble. So being an entrepreneur is less risky, but you need to know the checklists and the processes. Entrepreneurship is a step by step process it's incredibly process driven and what we know in silicon valley and what we know from like the best entrepreneurs that have ec backed is that they've got playbooks and they just execute the playbooks if you don't know those playbooks and you're just trying to fly your plane by flapping your arms you know you're in real trouble so there are step-by-step playbooks and you have to know those playbooks inside out if you're going to build and scale the business take us to the first step what would i do so he's like oh i don't know i know i've got no idea Yeah, I've heard about it.

46:40There's different ways of describing the playbooks, and I'll go with my way. There's a Silicon Valley way, which uses words like ideation, minimum viable product, go to market, those types of words. I'm just going to kind of use my playbooks. My playbook number one is called Chaos, which is concept audience offer sales. So what is the concept and why does this concept fit for me? And go and road test this with some smart people. Audience, who is it for and why are they going to throw money at this thing? and what's their problem and what's going on in their head and how do they relate to the problem and how would they value the solution and those sorts of things.

47:14Offer, what is it that we're going to offer? What's the package? What's included? How's it priced? And sales process, how do we take it to market? So chaos, concept, audience, offer sales. So essentially those first four things that we're doing, we're conducting fast, cheap experiments. And the goal at this playbook one is failure we want failure we want to create 10 ideas so that we know the nine that are suboptimal and the one that we scale with and we're just constantly looking for 10 ideas that's the best one 10 audiences that's the best audience 10 offers that's the best offer 10 sales approaches that's the best sales approach so we in this early stage we absolutely love figuring out the nine failures so I can double down on the one success and it's fast cheap failure.

48:04That's what we're looking for. It's fast cheap experiments. We're a scientist at this point more than an entrepreneur we're trying to figure out and we're very happy when we find something that doesn't work that we can kill off in this early stage. On this note, as a repeat entrepreneur, someone who's been through this process, right? So building heights after my last company failed and then building heights and I was talking about this last night at dinner, the really uncomfortable part relating to being in chaos. I knew that was the right process because I'd done it before and I'd got to something tangible.

48:36However, you can feel like a complete schizophrenic to your friends. Your friends are like, hey, what are you up to at the moment? And you're like, well, this week. And you're like, this is what I'm doing this week. And they speak to the next week. You're like, well, you're already doing something else. Can you not decide? It's a really interesting thing. As entrepreneur to entrepreneur, you can respect this process. Most of us, a lot of your friends not entrepreneurs and you look like a mental case that you just are doing. And it gets embarrassing. You actually start to become quite embarrassed that that's your process.

49:03Have you felt that? Well, I'm good at explaining that at the moment we're in the early stages of a business. It's a bit like feeling around in a dark room for the light switches. And we've got to turn on four light switches. One is our concept, one's who it's for, our audience, our offer, and our sales process. And at the moment I'm road testing stuff. Can I run some, can I throw some mud at the wall and see what sticks? Can I ask, can I get your advice? Well, can I tell you about this thing and just read your face? What are the questions you ask me? Yeah, exactly. And that's a good point. You go to a mentor, the questions they ask you are more important than the answers they give you.

49:37They're going to hit you with some hard questions. My brother and I... Sorry? No, no, go on. I was going to say step two. Go on. I was going to say, well, one of the things that I think is a big misconception about entrepreneurship is everyone looks at my brother and I and goes, Lottie was the smartest idea I've ever heard. You know, it's like so obvious. But when we started Lottie, it took us about three years to work out how it works. Like we were going around and around and around different business models continuously. Our team thought we were schizophrenic. Our team was like, you can't change the business model again.

50:08But we were trying to find the switch. Like we were trying to find what's the way of delivering on our sort of mission and our passion and doing it in a way that monetizes properly. And it took three years to find the business model. But eventually when you found it, you kind of discarded all this other stuff around you. And eventually it just felt pure and it has since taken off. Yeah. But for three years, you're scrabbling around going, how does this work? How does this work? You know, pitching ideas and they don't mind. I guess because in all business, you know, it's a marketplace, right? There's a buyer and a seller.

50:37Yeah. And actually the things that really works in that example is what people want to buy because you make their life easier. So people will happily pay the money if it makes their life easier or a process shorter, or they can deliver more customer success is an easy sale. And that's what you would have found eventually. So step two is we're now going to go out more to the marketplace. We're going to rather in step one, we're mostly talking to people one-to-one. Many of the conversations are going to be one-to-one conversations. There'll be sales chats. There'll be pitching conversations. We're not really doing anything at scale.

51:10in many cases like the best entrepreneurs will sit down and do 30 sales meetings one-to-one with people even if they're a multi-millionaire or billionaire they will still sit down and talk to customers to try and figure stuff out one-to-one they're looking for some themes um they're looking to hear the language that people use to describe things so all of that's happening one-to-one next thing is you kind of have to formalize it and take it to a bigger audience so this is one to many one to audience so there's a few things that start happening and we go into stage two normally stage one is two people working together so co-founders or a founder and an assistant or a founder and a salesperson or a founder and a cto but you normally have two people who are essentially trying to figure out two things can we sell it and can we build it if we sell it can we sell it can we deliver it so those are the two kind of things that you're trying to figure out whether you could do once you go one-to-many you're now campaigning so you're actually out there campaigning into the market.

52:08So the word campaigning is taking something across the threshold to a territory that you're not in. So if we're military campaigning, we're moving our army from this to this. If we're business campaigning, we're moving our ideas into new markets. So small campaigns normally require four people. So you're going to bring together a team of four. You're going to have some launch campaigns. You'll have your perfect repeatable weekly campaigns. you'll have your online messaging all of those things start to start to come together and the thing that makes all of this get immediate cut through is having a front person for the business so in the same way that Dave Grohl is the front person for the Foo Fighters and we don't know the other Foo Fighters as well you know we need a face for the business we need Chris Martin and the other guys from Coldplay that's it Chris Martin and the other guys from Coldplay so we need a Chris Martin we need a Dave Grohl we need you know the front person for the for the business So I call this person the key person of influence.

53:03Their job is to manufacture demand. Now, we live in a world where the supply of anything is easy to solve for most things. 99 % of things, you can supply it. The hard thing is manufacturing the demand side. So all businesses are an intersection of demand and supply. Most entrepreneurs fail because they're focused on the supply side. They're thinking about, oh, I love doing this thing. I love building websites. I'm going to build websites for people. That's supply side. Oh, I love health food, so I'm going to make health food for people. Supply side. The hard thing is not the supply side. The hard thing is really the demand side.

53:40Can I manufacture the demand for this thing? And realistically, if you can manufacture demand, you can solve the supply problem. Like, for example, if I could sign up lots of people for brain surgery, I could go out and find the brain surgeons to do the surgery. right so even something super complex i can find the supply side if i can get the demand going um so with with a few exceptions right elon you know reusable rockets that's a supply side problem right i get it i get it that there are some some exceptions but basically we need this we need this front person to be telling the stories to engaging markets engaging people so we've got to position someone as a key person of influence because the key person of influence is going to be doing the videos and the audios and the this and the that.

54:29They're going to be on the ads. They're going to be talking. They're going to be the person out there speaking at an event, recruiting people. They're going to be the final sign-off and the onboarding person for new team members. So there's going to be this buzz around that person. And I hate to say it, but that's just how the world works. You need that person. It's very hard to have a band that doesn't have a front person. So you've got to have that person. So most entrepreneurs struggle with this. They're not comfortable with it. they want to be behind the side behind the scenes working on the supply side that's not where the value lies the value is in having that person uh on the front side and no one does it for you you can't hire for this role you can't bring someone in to be there and if you hire for that role you put yourself at a lot of risk yeah they're going to run off with the business of course they are yeah um so ultimately that that has to happen in this next phase so what i encourage people to do at this phase is the five p's pitching getting really good at pitching your business, publishing content, publishing video, publishing books, publishing stories, publishing on LinkedIn, publishing on Twitter, putting ideas in public domain.

55:32Product ecosystem. This is building out the product. Now we've got a core offer, but now we need a recurring revenue product. We need some free gift stuff. We need some initial engagement products. So we've got to build what's called the product ecosystem. In the early stages, we only needed one thing. We now need four five six seven things to make this business work we need a gold silver bronze version so making product decisions and the reason you've got to be involved in that is because you're the one who's going to have to sell it so you've got to build your product ecosystem then raising profile getting on platforms getting out there talking to people um on one to many channels and driving strategic partnerships so being the one who goes and does the partnerships because ultimately it's the distribution deal it's the celebrity um endorsement deal it's the uh product packaging partnership that that comes together it's those big partnership or the funding capital partnerships um it's those big deals that then rocket this thing ahead so all of that falls on the founders shoulders so they got to basically do all of that separate to that they have to have a number two and the number two needs to build the team of around eight right so a total of about eight people so you got the founder plus about seven or eight people so you've got founder working with number two number two builds up the seven or eight so they're going to build out the sales team the ops team the delivery team the cs team whoever's there and that's going to be like our second order business that's going to be we've done stage one now we're stage two and we've got uh let's call it a team of eight doing seven figures of revenue let's talk about money What is the difference between wealth and income, for example?

57:16You know, you alluded to something on this earlier. Yeah. How would you describe the difference between wealth and income? And I guess, you know, wrapping up, how can entrepreneurs get rich? Because most aren't. So good questions, right? So income is obviously what you get paid year on year. Wealth is the thing that's producing that income, the asset, the underlying asset that produces the income and what that asset's worth. So, you know, the most obvious example would be a house that if you have a million pound house and it rents for thirty five thousand, you know, then you're getting thirty five thousand of income and then the house is worth a million.

57:51So your wealth, if you own that house outright is is the million and your income is the rent. If we think about high income earners, their wealth is in their skill set, the unique skills and the demand for those skills. but the income, the yield that they get is the annual pay or the annual income. If we talk about someone who's making money from having a personal brand, they might just be associated with something. They're leveraging their wealth, which is their personal brand, into this. It brings up this idea of wealth tax. The problem with wealth tax is what is a business worth once a government aggressively taxes it?

58:33so if you take james dyson for example and we impose a massive wealth tax on james dyson because he's been successful and his company we say oh his company's worth 10 billion let's say we say okay but is it worth 10 billion if it's now aggressively taxed and also if james dyson just says actually you know what i don't really want to do this i'll go start james dyson two uh company company number two and i'm going to go do that somewhere else there's no one in government who knows how to run that business so it just crashes just totally total collapse there's not a single like they're not going to be able to run that business at all especially if they have to go up against james dyson and you've seen like founder-led businesses over the last couple of years have absolutely killed it yeah in terms of wealth creation of course they do yeah so so this idea that like a company is only worth what investors are saying it's worth and we extrapolate if if someone buys one percent of a company for a million we go oh it's a hundred million company well yeah sort of we it is if everything is the way that it is right now but if you pull the stuff pulling the the the sticks out the whole thing comes crumbling down you know elon musk gets issued 56 billion worth of shares in tesla right so he built a company that is extraordinarily valuable uh pushed up to a trillion in value uh you know he's there producing something.

59:55He did a deal with the shareholders. And he said, if I can get it to this extraordinary value that none of you think is even possible, I get 10 % of that value, which turns out to be 56 billion. And if I can't, I get zero. And then we're like, oh, that's absolutely unbelievable that one person could get 56 billion. It's no more unbelievable than Ed Sheeran getting a percentage of the tickets that he sells. Well, more to the point, if you asked any other Fortune 500 CEO, they'd want to take that deal. They'd all much rather take their cushy three to five million dollar salary. The risk of not getting any salary or doing 10x is too high.

1:00:29People don't take that risk. Also, what's really happened is the shareholders have just taken a dilution in their value. We haven't had to pass the hat around the economy and say, oh, all these people who are doctors and nurses in the NHS or wherever, you've all got to put in a little bit because Elon needs he's 56 billion we've issued him some shares in a company that's valuable because he's part of that company and he has the valuation of those shares now uh it's the shareholders of the company that made a conscious decision we will happily dilute by 10 if you hit this target great happy days everyone's happy all right it's it's ridiculous to think that that's anything other than a you know engine room of wealth creation that's going on for all involved um yeah so how how do you become wealthy how do you become rich as an entrepreneur so you ultimately you need to it's very hard to become rich through dividends it's hard to become there's always something new to expend on the business there's always you know you can over very long periods of time you can pull money out of the business and buy other assets and all that sort of stuff that's that's great but most entrepreneurs become rich by leveraging the value of their company and selling their company an exit we call it an exit um and that's where you you you know take some of the money off the table.

1:01:45So you exit some or all of the shares, depending on how much diversification you want. It tends to come down to three things. Thing number one is a proprietary asset. The business is doing something that's unique and it's hard to copy it and it would be hard to aggressively compete with it fast. The business is already ahead of the race. It's out in front and it's got proprietary assets that are building in momentum. So that's thing number one. Thing Thing number two is it's got an incredible core team that runs that business really, really well. It's got an amazing culture and that culture is able to continue the success into the future.

1:02:24And then thing number three, which is a really big one, which is forecastable recurring revenues that a CFO can just look at the business. CFO wants a super simple spreadsheet. They just drag it out to the right 60 months and they go, okay, we can extrapolate this forward 60 months, if it continues to do this, that's how much money it generates, right? That's where it's heading. And then they can place a value on that. So recurring revenues, core team, and proprietary asset. Those three things are the trifecta, and then you can sell the company. And then the fourth thing would be to sell to Americans.

1:03:00So you are a multi-company, multi-million dollar, successful entrepreneur. Do you think that entrepreneurs be born or made i think entrepreneurs entrepreneurs we're all born very much with entrepreneurial spirit because entrepreneurial spirit is creativity um and it's bringing together teams and being disruptive and being willing to fully express so we're all born with that and then it's beaten out of us um we go to school and the schooling system was designed as a factory for factory workers so ultimately it was designed to make you component labor the component labor is to be refined, to fit into someone else's machine, and to be a good little moving part in someone else's big machine.

1:03:37And that was the whole schooling system. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's what we needed at the time. However, let's look at a few things. If I go to school and I come home and it says highly disruptive, that's a bad thing. I go into the real world, highly disruptive, very good thing. Go to school, got somebody else to do the maths homework. That's cheating. Go my own company, got someone else to do maths homework. delegation that's a cfo uh right i've hired a good team member um so you know we we know that you know essentially the schooling system is getting rid of the things that make you a good you know entrepreneur don't be don't be an attention seeker you know don't don't seek attention well actually if you're going to build a business you need to get attention so basically class clown kind of thing just for trying to garner attention to itself totally and And then plenty of people who are class clowns are now multimillionaires because they were able to capture people's attention.

1:04:34So I think everyone's born a variation of an entrepreneur. We do need certain skills. We do need to get those entrepreneurial skills. Unfortunately, we have a schooling system that is a long-term schooling system designed to remove those disruptive schools. If you were an industrialist in 1890, you do not want lots of entrepreneurial people running around. You want workers. You want workers. I think it's a remarkable thing, but all of my entrepreneur friends, all of the people I know in the game are the C students. Yeah. They are the C and D students. I was terrible at school. Yeah, I was awful at school.

1:05:08The thing that the deputy head called me in for sat down with my dad and said, your son is intellectually asleep. And my dad was like, I just think he's interested in other things. And I was already selling things on the side. And so I feel like you're being trained for the wrong thing. And it's even worse now that we have AI. yeah because ultimately the schooling system teaches you to be in a large language model that i prompt you and you give me a hallucinated response right so essentially that's that's what i'm training you to be an llm but what we need to do is train people to be good at prompting so rather than a kid learning how to deliver a hallucinated response they learn how to think through a problem where they can actually prompt the world and get back the responses and work with a big picture context and then fill in the content through other sources.

1:05:58So at some point we're going to have to flip the whole education system on its head where we acknowledge in the same way we have calculators. We don't need to, you know, we're going to say, well, we have LLMs. We can, it's easy to prompt something and get a hallucinated response. Yeah, it's a 19th century education taught by 20th century teachers to 21st century kids. Yeah. It's completely messed. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. All right. It's probably a bit late for me to ask this and I should have asked this like 12 years ago when I first met you, but what is an entrepreneur? So an entrepreneur is basically doing three things.

1:06:29They're pursuing a commercial goal. They want success. They want a successful business. They are taking a risk in order to pursue that goal. So there's some sort of risk taking behavior. And most importantly, they're accessing resources outside of their current sphere of influence, their current control. So if I already had all the resources, I would just be a leader because I've got the resources, I'm bringing it together. or an asset manager. If I didn't have a commercial goal, it would probably be a change maker, someone who's like trying to drive some sort of social change, but it's not a commercial endeavor.

1:07:03So it wouldn't be an entrepreneur. Yeah, so essentially, we kind of need all three of those things. We need to make sure that we've got, an entrepreneur is doing those three things together. Nice. I think the world has changed a lot in terms of our purpose and our fulfillment and what's important to us. And I think that nowadays, one of the most dominating conversations on social media in the context of work is about work-life balance. And I think the first chapter of my book is called The Lifestyle Myth. And it's about, do you and should you be aiming at just money? Or can you be designing your life differently?

1:07:39And so do you believe in work-life balance? And do you think that technology, the world, distribution, the internet gives people more of a chance to have it than before? work-life balance definitely means different things to different people to parents it normally means how much time do I spend with kids and family versus how much time do I work do I say yes to this paid thing that's in the evening or on the weekend or do I say no to it and spend time with the family and that's kind of like the trade-off that they're worried about to younger generation who don't have kids or families yet it often means you know how much time do I dedicate to working and getting ahead versus enjoying life with friends and all of that sort of stuff so um it's a tricky one too because people have very charged definitions of work i worked my ass off for 15 years like every hour god sent i rolled out of bed i worked i had breakfast i worked i went out to dinner i worked i finished up at 11 o 'clock at night i I went to bed and got up and did it all again seven days a week.

1:08:45I would take maybe two days per month in order to catch up on things like laundry and whatnot. I did zero PlayStations. I did zero faffing around with picnics. None of that stuff. I was just absolutely belligerent. But the thing about being belligerent for me is that I was building an amazing business that I felt was a true expression of what I was interested in the world. Um, the belligerent focus felt amazing. Um, the type of work that I was doing was running events, creating marketing campaigns, hiring people, juggling money, jumping on planes, flying to new cities, checking into cool hotels, taking people out to dinners, taking the team out to a really great bar in a new city.

1:09:34Like all of that was work. Your zone of genius is what feels like play to you and work to others. Exactly. So when I say become a belligerent workaholic if you can, I mean fully express, be creative, like go all in on something that you're passionate about and also making money doing it, like making millions doing it. So like for me, that's what I mean when I say go all in. What a lot of people hear is, oh, I should be a slave to a horrible boss. I don't mean that. You know, I don't mean that at all. But I do mean that if you found your thing and you want to be great at it, let's be real. you know last night i went and saw the foo fighters foo fighters do three concerts a week every week right and they you know the guys were machine yeah and they move and they move and they move and has he missed out on certain things of course he has yeah you know and taylor swift has the issue four concerts a week three concerts a week on the plane next city next city next city if you want to be the best you are going to have to put in the time i think the it's an interesting topic because i think the expectation from a lot of people is that they should be able to have huge upside and incredible work-life balance.

1:10:41Whereas I think the reality is much more like, especially for you, you did dedicate 10 to 15 years of belligerent work to put yourself into a position to result in many millions of pounds in the bank, owning your house, whatever that is, stability. And now you really are in the stage of your life of total play. You're absolutely loving it. And you get to choose your work-life balance now more. I get to choose. I'll tell you the thing that causes me a lot of stress now because i've got three young kids i could be saying yes if i was a single guy with no kids i like it's actually for me it's actually really stressful having to turn down really good stuff um like there are so many times where they're like jump on a plane come out to new york and do this thing i'm like i can't or on the weekend we're going to be doing this thing and it's like i'd love to but i can't or late at night we can do this thing on a different time zone and i would love to but we can't um so for me the stress is like my natural way of being is all in i just want to you know i just want to i want to kick the doors off the freaking hinges anything that i'm interested in i want to i want to go full force of it um and that's how that's what i love i love being belligerent focused one thing i'm after it so it actually is more stressful having other things that i have to balance in yeah um but that's you know that's how that for me is the decision i have to make what i don't like is i don't like people who want to choose work-life balance being like all annoyed that they're not getting the same result you know i'm sitting on the train the other day one guy's reading a personal development book and the other guy's playing a kid's game on his phone fine play the kid's game on your phone if you want to but don't be upset when this guy's earning way more money and is way more successful than you because this guy's reading a personal development book and you're playing a kid's game on the phone yeah you might have your reasons for doing it i I don't care what your reasons are, but just that snapshot, that's the horse to back.

1:12:30That's not. Your inputs drive that outputs. And someone's going to say, oh, but he might have just completed brain surgery and is just finally switching off. Whatever. Yeah. Great. But people say this thing, and I think it's such a, again, such a huge misconception about life, which is like work smart, not hard. But I feel like the privilege to work smart comes from often having worked incredibly hard for a long period of time. It's like saying, you know, a knife should cut through things really fast because it's so sharp. Well, how did the knife get so sharp? It had to be sharpened. It's the same.

1:13:05Working smart is like being a sharp knife. You only get to be working smart because you're really damn good at what you do. You've honed it. Yeah, you got good because you were phenomenally belligerent. And it's that work ethic and attitude and consistency, right? you look at, you know, there's crazy stats on something like Warren Buffett, like something like 90 % of his wealth has come in the last decade or something completely crazy. And it's like, you know, by the way, I will perfect example. Yeah, perfect example. But I also will say this, there's there's not working smart. And that's a different thing.

1:13:36So for example, 16 hours a day as an Uber driver, you're not generating an asset, you're not learning some new skill, you're not moving up the ranks in anything, you're just doing a lot of work. So that I would say is, that's hard work right there are plenty of people who say oh my dad was a post postman for 40 years and he worked hard because he got up really early and he was yeah okay that's true but we all know that that doesn't create any exponential growth and they say that he deserved more which again is an interesting concept that you can work incredibly hard no one's saying these people don't but there is a combination of what are you building for the future always and having your eye on and you've got to pick you've got to pick you've got to play a strategic game you've got to pick and say like i can't work with i can't work with how the world should be i can't i can only work with how the world is um and then knock the doors down yeah and then kick the doors down so yes there are certain things i would have liked to have done if only they were highly paid for me would have loved to have been a famous snowboarder right all i do is go out and work work work on snowboarding uh all day long i'm up the mountain fantastic it's just not how the world is so i've got to pick things i've got to work with the way the world is i can't sit there and say the world should reward different careers in a different way you know architects should get way more they're building something that's going to last 100 years yeah makes a good argument but this is the market rate for architects um that's that's how it works so final question and related what is your image of success what does success look like to you what do you tell your kids success looks like um so for me success is making the most of doing making the most of what i've got right i was born into a certain time certain place certain resources certain things this particular time is an incredible time so i have this feeling of like there's this wave am i surfing the wave success is surfing the waves um not getting dumped by them not getting left behind by them but but looking around seeing what waves are there to surf and surfing those waves well um working with people I love working with.

1:15:37Success for me is that I'm 87 years old. I'm sitting around with people I've been friends with for 50 years. We're talking about the good old days. We're talking about how great things were. I'm sitting there and my wife's there and my kids are there and my grandkids are there. Success is there's a big family home and there's multiple generations who all love coming back because they love the family vibe. They love the friendships. The friends come, the family comes and there's good stories. There's great stories as to how it was all created and all that sort of stuff. And then, you know, and then on to the next, on to the next generation.

1:16:12And at 42, you're literally one year into living your good days. You're living the best years of your life right now. So, dude, thank you so much for coming on Secret Leaders. What a pleasure.