Get Rich While You Are Young | Ep 1001

0:00I am making this for people who want to get rich. And if that is not you, that is totally fine. There's no judgment. You can skip this. But this is for people who are trying to call it money max for the short period. So if you if you want to max, you have to min and you have to be willing to do that for a period of time. And so I'm going to give you an argument that I think is very compelling for why you should do it sooner. And so if you want to get rich, then you should try and get rich as young as possible. And I will break down very logical reasons for why. So number one, first and foremost, one of the most underrated reasons is the math behind getting wealthy.

0:34So money compounds at three to four times the rate in the beginning as it does later, meaning your increase in compounding on the excess cash you have in the earlier parts of your career will outpace the increase in earning power. And so, for example, if you have$1 extra when you're 25, it might be$90 by the time you're 70, right? Whereas if that same dollar at 35 would only be a third as much, and that same dollar at 45 would be a ninth as much, right? And so the idea is the dollars that you make, even though they may be smaller by proportion, when you allow compounding to compound actually results in more money later.

1:21Now, my argument there is not that you must take 100 % of your dollars and put it into the S &P 500. That's never been my argument. But that the dollars you do choose to put into investments of any kind at an earlier part in your career do get disproportionate returns. So that's thing one. the second thing is that your skills will also compound disproportionately that you acquired a younger age right like there's a certain amount of repetitions that are required in order for you to become good bill gates was able to get those repetitions early because he started coding early and then as a result he was able to build software first and then basically was able to keep this kind of sustained advantage like i talked to a guy yesterday um not yesterday two days ago who had seven hundred thousand dollars by the time he was 19 right that saved up that was very interesting.

2:03Now imagine that that was a 65 year old guy. We wouldn't be as impressed, right? And so time has very real impact on the scope or scale of your accomplishments as it relates to your reputation. Meaning when I was younger and a millionaire early, it meant a lot more. And so you actually get more reputational gravitas, right? And so, um, you can leverage a smaller win when you are younger for your reputation because you are younger, right? And I'll give you a secret that I only found out later is that you basically have until you're 30 to be considered young. The moment I turned 30, I was just a white dude.

2:37Before that, I was a young white dude. Then I was just white dude and then no one cared after that, right? So in other words, youth is a multiplier on every win that you have, whether that be press, network, mentors, capital access. I just made an investment this last week. I wrote a$500 ,000 check to a kid who was 18 years old and he had just done$30 million a year in an e-commerce business and wanted to develop a tool to help e-commerce stores. So I was like, I knew he had the avatar. I knew he'd be able to do it. But the fact that he was 18 and had accomplished that made me think, okay, this guy's really sharp.

3:07Now he got into my stuff at age 15. So it took him three years to get there, right? But in other words, that multiplier decays around 30, right? But so you have this period of time where going all in yields higher returns even for the same outcome. Now, number three, you leverage early success into bigger, later success. So he's$30 million business. Obviously everything's different in terms of what your scale of success is, right? But you can, you can, you can ladder on top of it. They're stepping stones. So for example, me, when I went through the beginning, it was like, I was able to get in shape really early and I was able to leverage that into personal training and online training clients, which I was able to leverage into a gym.

3:48And then from gym, I got into multiple gyms. And then from multiple gyms, I was able to start gym launch. And so the thing is, is that every part of my career has been going back and basically taking a stepping stone on what I learned from the enterprise I did before. And then obviously the sale of gym launch got, basically gave us our cash for acquisition.com to start the family office. And so everything builds on itself. And so if you, if you're going to have these steps, it's like the steps are set. It's just how soon do you want to get to this step? It's just how late you want to start. Right?

4:18So next one is that I'll just rapid fire some reasons why I think gets better to get rich while you're wrong young, which is that like, you also have more energy, right? So think about it like this, like you, you, like, you have to play the cards you're dealt. Getting those repetitions in takes energy. And I only know this now that I'm almost, you know, 40, which is wild to say, um, that I have less energy than I see some 18 year olds. Right. And so like, that is a clear advantage that they have. And so if you have that, then like, you want to use it, right. In addition to that, you have fewer requirements, meaning there are fewer things that you must do.

4:53You probably don't have kids yet. You probably aren't, you know, wifed up yet or husbanded up yet. You probably don't have the same level of geographic dependence. And so you are more flexible. You can go to places where learning can occur faster. You can have fewer strengths attached. You can live for less, which means you can be more aggressive with the excess cash that you make to reinvest in skills or informal investments because you understand the value of multiplying and compounding, right? And again, this geographical flexibility, I think, is wildly underrated. One of the things that you get the advantage of when you're younger is that like, if you want to be in, you know, politics, go to DC.

5:26If you want to be in finance, go to New York. If you want to be an influencer in media, go to, you know, go to LA, right? Those are great places to learn. Now, once you become Joe Rogan, you can move to Austin and do whatever the hell you want, right? But the thing is, is that when you want to get those reps, you want to go where the reps are, right? You want to go where the fish are if you're trying to fish. And what you're fishing for right now is skills and network, right? You're trying to get places and you want to do it before you have strings tying you down and roots that you have set. And that is, again, it's a competitive advantage.

5:54It's not to say that when you're older, you can't do it. It's just harder. Right. And so if you believe that, uh, it's hard for you now to, uh, forego your existing path, which may have been given to you by your siblings or society or whatever, I promise you, it will only get harder. And if you can't do it now, the likely that you're able to do it later goes down. Right. And for me, I want to stack bets where the probabilities are highest for my success. And whenever you enter a new system, by the way, this is game theory, the most adaptable player wins. So it's not, it's like survival of the fittest, right?

6:26And fittest is most adaptable. And when you are younger, you have the most adaptability. You have the most neuroplasticity as in you can learn faster. You have the most energy so you can do repetitions. You have the least geographical constraints. You can move to where the, where the action is. When you do earn, you make more dollars on each dollar you make. All the skills you acquire compound with time because you only get better at it. The accomplishments that you get from being young mean more because you're young than they do when they're old. And so the final point that I'll say is this, is that you want to model success, not the exceptions.

7:01Of course, we want to tell the story of, of, uh, of, of Colonel Sanders who started, you know, Colonel Sanders when he's 63. And there's a bunch of, you know, other, uh, kind of call it exception stories of people who are older and then started companies. Uh, and then obviously we're really successful, but like, But wouldn't it be better to be the rule than the exception? Like the richest people often got rich when they were young because they decided to. Right. And I will say this because I love this quote from James Clear. But the thing that separates winners and losers are not their goals. People's goals are the same.

7:31The difference between the people who win and lose is the actions they take as a result. And the risk that they're willing to tolerate and the pain that they're willing to endure for extended periods of time with an uncertain payoff. And so if you think that you need certainty in order to move forward, I promise you that this world will never give it to you. And so it's really that there will always be uncertain. And at some point you grow the cojones, the gonads, by the way, that's bisexual or unisex. Everybody's got gonads. You will grow the gonads or they will drop or whatever it is. I told you I was gonna do some HR stuff.

8:00You will grow the, grow the nads you need to take the bets. And so I think what really happens is that at some point you realize that you're not going to die. If you fail, you will just learn and you will get better, which is the point of the process. and you will never finish and you will never actually win because by the time you win, you will have already planted a much bigger goal that you want because the goal that you had came in shooting distance. And the easiest analogy I can say for this is this. When I wanted to bench 315, for example, I was a dream of mine when I was in high school, right?

8:30Because I remember that just one big plate was, wow, the strong kids could do a full plate, right? And then two plates was like super strong. Three plates was crazy. By the time I benched 315, I knew I was going to hit 315 because I had done 275 for five and I did the 295 for, you know, a tripler instead of five. And so 315 seemed obvious, right? And so the thing is, is that by the time you accomplish goals, the goals themselves seem less meaningful because you already did the work to make that goal reasonable, which is why you achieved it, which is why you have to do so much work that is unreasonable that you do not become successful.

9:00And the best way to do that is to start when you're younger for all the reasons I just gave. All right. That's why you should succeed while you're young. That's why you should ignore the people who are telling you, uh, who don't have what you want, telling you how to get something that they've never gotten. All right. Feeling spicy this morning.