From the Archive: Ramit Sethi on Building a Rich Life, Dream Jobs & Online Businesses

24:15If you do that, people will respond and we show you the actual word-for-word scripts that we use in the course. That's one of the things we do a lot of. I like the, here's what I've done, as well as the ask advice. If the advice you're asking for is not well-informed and shows that you haven't really done the research, then it's like you say, then no one's gonna reply. You didn't reply to people. But if you show like, look, I followed your career here, here, here, and here. I've done this, this, and this. Now, what would you do here? Then I think that inspires a conversation. Totally. People want to know that they're talking to someone who's actually done something, not someone who just jotted off an email hoping for a magic bullet to fall down from the sky.

24:55Right. So, okay, so again, though, how is she narrowing down to her dream job? All right, so here's the big thing. Whether it's with your dream job or starting a company, finding an idea, it's all about testing. A lot of people believe that you're going to sit and wait to find your passion. This is another big lie that everyone tells you. Oy, passion is gonna fall down from the sky. How many people do we know that are in their 60s, they never found their passion? Because finding your passion means you literally find it, you seize it. I like to discourage my students from just waiting around and looking up to the heavens.

25:30So what she did was she made a list of certain things that she's good at, certain companies she's interested in, certain positions. And the truth is, when you're starting off, you don't know anything and that's okay. Like when I start in a new area, I really don't know anything and that's okay. But what I do is I try to learn about it. I do my online research. Most importantly, I go talk to people in that industry. So she did that. For example, she thought BizDev was cool. She went and talked to three or four BizDev people. She realized this isn't what I want to do with my life. So she crossed that off the list.

26:00Most people, they don't do this. They wait for a passion to fall from the sky. The truth is, I believe, when you get good at something, you get passionate. So the first step is not to wait for your passion. It's to go test your ideas and find out what's going to get you that dream job or that business you want to start. Okay. So she started testing in different areas. She got some response. And then where did the six-figure job come in? Remember, this is one of the students. She was brand new, so she didn't get a six-figure job, but she did negotiate a$10 ,000 raise. So she ends up narrowing it down to, like I said, sales companies, B2C tech.

26:37And I taught her how to negotiate. So I'm Indian guy. I was bred to negotiate. I taught her everything she needed to know. They tried to put the muscle on her. You know, she's young, she's inexperienced. They tried to say, you have two days, we have an exploding offer, we need to know. All these kind of typical gambits that they use. So she knew that she had done such a great job leading up to that, that she had a lot of leverage. Something that a lot of people don't realize. By the time a company likes you, especially the hiring manager, you have a lot of leverage. They already spent thousands recruiting you.

27:11They don't want to lose you. So I taught her some of the words to use and how to negotiate and even pit the companies against each other. And she ended up getting offers from both. She negotiated$10 ,000 raise and she made the decision to go to one of the companies. What are some of those keywords? Like I know we're dipping a little into what you charge for typically, but what are some of the keywords people can use or look for in these negotiations? Well, the first thing they're going to ask you is, what is your existing salary? What's your current salary? And you don't want to answer that, okay?

27:42Because the minute you answer that, you've now put yourself in a box and they know exactly what to offer you. And also anchoring is a very strong cognitive bias, like you just anchored them. Exactly. So the truth is your future salary has very little to do with your existing salary. Your future salary has to do with the value you're adding to the company. So here's the exact words I like to use. instead of saying, uh, my current salary is 50K or I don't want to tell you that, which is just weird. I say, you know, I'm sure we can get to the numbers if and when we both decide this is a great position for both of us.

28:16But right now, I'm just trying to see if this is a good fit, just like I'm sure you're trying to see if this is a good fit. My response when I'm negotiating a salary like that is I say, look, you guys do this all day long. I'm intent on doing a good job for you, but my job isn't to negotiate salaries. So you have to give me guidance on what salary we should pick here. Like I basically throw it at them in a slightly different way than you just said. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So either way, whatever you're comfortable with, but the idea is there are certain things we call them competence triggers.

28:50So a competence trigger is the sign of someone who's really good. Let me give you an example. Let's say that we're talking about a guy walking into a bar, all right? And let's pretend for a minute. Guy walks into a bar, sounds like. Guy walks into a bar. Exactly. And he walks in. He's kind of hunched over. He looks around very furtively. He has no friends. He's staring at a group of people and he's standing alone and he's maybe sipping weirdly on a glass of water. You're like, this guy is really creeping me out. It sounds like you just followed me to a bar last night. Now imagine you have another guy walking.

29:26He walks in. He takes a slow look at the room. He takes off his coat, walks over to the bartender. The bartender says, hey, how you doing? And he tells a couple jokes. He sees his friends in the corner, buys them around, goes over, and he's the life of the party. Just from looking at these two guys, not even hearing a word they say, who are you more impressed or attracted to? Well, of course, the latter guy. So that is a competence trigger, walking in, knowing the bartender, telling a joke. The truth is, competence triggers are all around us, and you can use them. Sometimes you can act as if, So a high value person who has five job offers, he's never going to answer the question about how much do you currently make.

30:06He'll say, you know what? Let's first figure out if this is a good fit. I'm sure we can discuss the numbers later. And when the hiring manager sees that, whether or not you have five job offers, they instantly slot you with all the other people because you're using the same competence trigger as truly high competence people. It's not unethical. It's not being sneaky because you're not lying and saying I have five offers. You're just acting as a person who has five other job offers would act as if and soon you will become Fake it till you make it So, okay, so she did this with two companies How did you train her to have that appropriate swagger or was it like built in?

30:46No, no, no way. It's not built into most of my students and it wasn't built into me except for You know, I learned how to negotiate with like macy's when I was a kid I sat down with her and I recorded all these things. It's all on video in a lot of my courses and she negotiated against me. And I played the mean recruiter. I played the nice guy. I played, and every time she did it, I systematically tweaked her responses. Men and women have very different ways of negotiating. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, young women in particular tend to chronically over-smile or use upturned questions at the end of a sentence, which is crippling to their negotiation.

31:23Why is that? Why is that crippling? I mean, it's one of the lowest competence triggers. you can convey. And we even see this in the research. So what we did was we corrected each of those things. And you can see the before and after. It's pretty amazing. And by the time she went in and negotiated, they were blown away. They're like, this person negotiates like someone with 20 years more experience. It's not that she's magic. It's not that she had some skill that no one else had. She's just practiced just like any of us can do. So, okay. So she did a couple of things. One is she kind of listed all her interests and companies and then tried to dig into the middle of the company by asking people for advice, going out to coffee with people, learning more.

32:03And then where did she apply for the job? How did she break through to HR? Oh, she didn't go through HR. If you go through HR, you might as well just throw your application in the trash. For most jobs. She first reached out to personal contacts. So a lot of us don't know someone directly at the company, but we have some way of knowing someone who knows someone there. Maybe it's through your college alumni database. Maybe it's through LinkedIn. Maybe it's just from emailing them and saying, I really admire your article in blah, blah newspaper. She did that. Remember, at this point, she was young.

32:37She was 21, 22. And she worked her way into having coffee. And once she asked great questions, they liked her. And they actually said, when you're ready to apply, send me an email. And so they were the ones who sent her resume in for her. You know, I've met so many people where when they have gotten their dream jobs, it has worked somewhat like this. Like this is very valuable advice.

33:17So you have a course on this, like how to find your dream job. What are some books people can read about like, I'm really fascinated with this idea of competence triggers. Like, is there anything you would recommend about competence triggers? You know, there's nothing in the literature that I found that was really recommended. There's a couple places I would look. One is to look at your friends. So all of us have friends that are really good. For example, social skills. There's a lot of competence triggers to be found. And I would, I was kind of socially awkward. I think we're all socially awkward to a large extent in something.

33:51And I would kind of watch my friends. You know, we all have friends who are just, they walk in a room and everyone likes them. And one thing I learned about socially awkward people, well, there's two things. One, they're socially awkward. Two, a lot of them don't know that they're socially awkward. So I was socially awkward, but at least I knew it. And what I would do is I would watch my friends who were super smooth and I would just notice things they do. Now, if you have friends that are really smooth, I would encourage you to watch them. If you're not sure, take a look at the Today Show or the Tonight Show.

34:22When you watch those celebrities go on there, notice the things they do, how they lean forward, how they smile, what kind of answers they give. Those people on the Tonight Show are the best of the best. So what can you learn from them? I totally agree. And there's two slogans or there's two things that makes me think. One is you're the average of the five people you surround yourself with. So now you can have many groups of five. It's just depending on what you're focusing on. So in this case, you're focusing on this idea of confidence or confidence triggers or whatever. So surround yourself with five people who are incredibly smooth and you'll pick up on it.

35:00The other thing is, before I give a talk or before I do an interview like this, I'll watch the best interviews in the world. So I'll watch Howard Stern. Before interviewing you, just a half hour ago, I was listening to the podcast Opie and Anthony from 2012, they were interviewing Donald Rumsfeld and Louis C.K. So it was just this completely insane, like Louis C.K. asking Donald Rumsfeld if he was a lizard or not. But this was a good interview for me to kind of get me into mode here. Love it. Love it. And it's not just surrounding yourself. It's like really paying attention to what they say, right?

35:35So certain people, like, there are questions that are kind of awkward, like, oh, have you lost weight? You could interpret that in a really negative, awkward way. Or you could watch how really socially skilled people handle a question like that. And each time you can learn. Doesn't mean you have to copy them, but you can learn what they do and then apply it to your own personality. Yeah, great stuff. So, you know, anyway, moving on from there, I did the dream job stuff, helped a bunch of people get jobs. That made me very happy because we spent so much of our life there. You did this as a course.

36:07What did you charge for the course? The course ranges anywhere from, we did a course ranging from$2 ,000 to$12 ,000. So my courses are very high end. I give away 98 % of my material for free. The premium stuff, why do we demand such a serious investment? I'll tell you why. We spend years building these courses. These are not some$10 eBooks. My belief is people can enjoy free material all they want. In fact, I create my free material to be better than anyone else's paid stuff. But when you truly get serious about these things, like finding a dream job, starting an online business, earning money on the side, or improving your psychology.

36:44When you finally get serious, realize I don't want to just sort through 5 million free e-books. I want the best. I want the thing that guarantees results. And so we spend millions of dollars creating these courses. And therefore, I know the results. In fact, for each of my courses, they already have results proven before they launch. That's all the work we do, testing and developing them for years. So that's why we do these serious, large courses. And I would rather create a few courses that are life-changing, then create 50 of these little e-books, which are just, they're not my thing. That's not my style.

37:18It's not what I want to do with my life. Well, and I have to give you a lot of credit. Like you had that first best-selling book and a lot of people would just continue writing books, but you just, and you know, the books, you hardly make it. Nobody makes any money on a book. Even a New York Times best-selling book, you're not going to make any money. So you really took that kind of momentum from that and became an info product business, a course business. Well, I'll tell you a couple other things. So first of all - You must have had a lot of pressure to do another book. Oh, I still get it. I mean, my publisher, the publishers keep taking me out to these fancy lunches.

37:51I'm like, keep the lunches coming, but I'm not ready to write another book. I'll tell you some of the beautiful benefits of courses. So first of all, we created our own software so we can track people going through it. And if you join any one of my courses, you get a phone call, usually within hours of joining. For some courses, will actually check in with you multiple times throughout the course. We have communities, we have all this stuff. So I can give you a book, and my book, it's specifically geared to get you to take action, and a lot of books are great. But with courses, I can actually follow you through and make sure everything works for you, and I can afford to do that because I can test all this stuff.

38:30With a book, if I'm making 10 bucks back, or in fact, in real terms, about a dollar a book, I can't afford to do that kind of huge, multi-million dollar testing. But with a course, I can. And that's the beautiful benefit to everyone. It's win-win-win for everybody. Which brings me to like with this girl, it sounds like you were doing serious coaching with her. And in part, you were doing that because she was going to be a strong testimonial, strong social proof so you could sell a course. But what do you do with the people who don't have you videotaping them and analyzing frame by frame what they're doing?

39:03Well, by the end, the goal is for us to be able to predict virtually any possible problem or objection and roll it into the course. So I'll give you an example. We just rolled out a new course called Zero to Launch. This is the first course we ever did on building an online business. I've been doing online business for years and years, but we never taught it. And interesting, I'll tell you why. A lot of people said, can you teach us how to create an online business? And we could have made millions for the last few years. But I said, no. And I told them, I said, I can do it, but you can't. And I didn't mean it to be arrogant or condescending.

39:39I really didn't. What I actually said, it was out of a profound respect. I said, this is really hard. I don't want to sell you some$100 course and tell you make a million dollars in a week because it's really hard stuff. But over the years, we finally learned how to take what we did and refine it and distill it down so that we knew people could be successful. So we took people, we tested it with many, many beta students. and each test we learned, okay, so this is a problem or we need to fix this or we don't need this at all in the course. And so by the time it was done, we knew it was perfect.

40:16We knew it worked. And that's the benefit, and I think this is true of anything, of doing the hard work before. So a lot of, like for example, it can be anything from launching a course to showing up at work to even ironing a shirt. I love ironing, I'm a weirdo. Most people, they take a shirt, they put it on the ironing board and start ironing. most of the work should be done with your hands, getting the wrinkles out before you ever put the iron to the shirt. I did not know that. Well, listen, white people don't iron that much. Indian people have been ironing for generations. Why is that? We know that.

40:47Like in the heat, things get wrinkled. What's the story? I have no idea, but I just know that I'm not that good at many things, but I'm really good at ironing. Indians too have like, in India, it's like wrinkle-free clothing. There's a lot of like linens, you know, where you don't care as much about the wrinkles. Can we spend the next 30 minutes talking about ironing? Because I could talk about it forever. No, no, no. I want to learn zero to launch. Okay. So I'm at zero. What do I do first? All right, so this is the whole dream, right? You go to sleep, you're making passive income. And I have to tell you that candidly for most people, it's BS, all right?

41:22And I say that as a guy who makes a lot of passive income. I'm not trying to dissuade anyone. In fact, I even have a course showing you how to do it. And I'm telling you, you got to be realistic. This is really hard. So I have all these screenshots on this site, zerotolaunchsystem.com, and I show people, like, here's my iPhone. I'm out on a Friday night. Take a look at all these sales that are coming in, okay? So that's the aspirational part. I think the other part that we really want to do beyond the money is we all have something inside of us that we're good at, we want to share. Could be you're great at ironing, could be you know how to do analytics, or you know how to train your dog, whatever.

41:58In the past, we had to wait. We had to go through these Manhattan gatekeepers, book agents, TV agents, but now we can go direct to the world, right? There's so many things we can teach people and we can just put it up there, find the right audience and help them. And let's say, okay, let's say I have, I could decrease your student loan debt. So this is my product. I've researched all the laws. I have this product and I think there's some demand for it because it's a trillion dollars in student loan debt. So what do I do next? All right, so first of all, we would have you do very, very extensive research.

42:30and this is what most people don't do. This separates a product that will make millions versus a product that will make close to nothing, maybe a couple thousand bucks. And ultimately right now, what's going to happen with that product? So we would have you discuss who is the buyer, go deeper than you ever thought possible into knowing exactly what their hopes, fears, and dreams are so that by the time you're doing research and even crafting a little bit of copy, they're nodding their heads like, oh my God, that's me. And I'll tell you why that's a tough product, the one you just said. Okay, and I happen to know this because I created a product years ago on how to save money.

43:06And it was very inexpensive. It was a good product. Guess what? People who want to save money don't want to pay to do it. So if you did a student loan thing, you could have the best product in the world. It will be a very, very difficult product to sell. Okay? I'm going to switch products. I want to get rid of my cancer without chemotherapy. So let's say I have 100 different ways, well-researched, I'm going to cure cancer without chemotherapy. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't encourage you to do it. I'm very strong on creating something that is tested and truly valuable. It's easy to make money, especially with someone who has cancer.

43:45That's not the kind of students that I teach. That's not the kind of products I want to create. Let me give you an example of something that would be incredibly powerful. Okay, all right. So let's say that you've come up with a way to teach adults about karate. This is just one that I came up with. There's a million different ones, okay? Could be a self-defense class. Could be abs, okay? So like, let's say losing weight. This is even a better example. So you used to be overweight and you just gave birth to two or three children and you look amazing. So your friends are always coming up to you, what do you eat, James?

44:15What's your diet? And you try to tell them, oh, use this recipe, but they never listen. But everyone keeps asking you about it. So you decide to put together a product. and now where do you start? Because there's a million other weight loss products. Why would anyone buy yours? So this is where the differentiation comes in, the research. So there's a million other products on finding a job. Why does ours do so well? Same thing with freelancing or starting a business. Why does ours do well? And I'm going to tell you just one example of what makes ours stand out and which means yours can stand out too.

44:52When we created a product called Earn 1K, this was a different one. This was for freelancing. I want to read you the headline from that sales page, just so you know. So Earn 1K on the side. Finally, a proven, legitimate program to identify a profitable idea and turn it into a reliable side income of$1 ,000 a month with just five hours a week. Now let me deconstruct that for you to show you why this was worth millions to us, okay? So say earn 1K on the side. We actually find that most of our students earn much more than 1K. They earn tens of thousands of dollars. Because I guess if it's a scalable 1K, they could just keep growing.

45:36Yeah, but if you tell someone earn 10K on the side, guess what they say? I can't do it. It's not for me. There's no way I could earn 10K. All right, so on the side, because in our research, we discovered that people think to earn more money, they have to quit their job and start the next Google. Not true. So we addressed that before they even consciously objected. Then we said, finally, a proven legitimate program. Why? Because when people think about earning more money, what do they think about? I don't know. Scam. That's why we said a proven legitimate program to identify a profitable idea. Because the number one barrier is, I don't have an idea.

46:11You see, so each of these things, we didn't just come up with it, we didn't just sit in our room and write it. It's all about the research. For example, if you were creating a weight loss product for men, you're going to use words like strength, abs. If you do it for women, it's going to be very different. You're not going to talk about bulking up. What are you going to talk about? Beauty. Beauty, getting lean, those kind of things. Okay? So, yes, gender matters. Yes, age matters. We have students that are creating products for women who are looking for love, and they tell me, oh, my audience is women 23 to 54.

46:47I said, there's literally nothing in common with a 23-year-old woman looking for love and a 53-year-old woman looking for love. They want different things. They use different language. You have to be utterly focused and responsive on who it is you're targeting. Okay, so let's say what's the next step then in building the product or selling the product? All right, so first of all, notice that we haven't even built a thing yet. We're just doing research. And again, a lot of people want to jump right into building. Oh, let me build this product and make a bunch of money. And I tell them, just slow down, do the research.

47:18And when you get it right, you will make a thousand times what other people make. I mean, the money will come more than you know what to do with. Focus on actually adding value. I like the fact that their initial research is just simply their friends asking them. So they know exactly what people want from their friends. Exactly. So they go from their friends, Then they go beyond that to find people online and even offline who they don't know who will tell them the honest truth. And we teach them the words to ask and all that stuff. So they find out, is this viable? A lot of ideas are not viable.

47:50We have ideas, for example. I've been working on a couple of ideas for years. We still can't figure out how to make it work. So we're just waiting until we crack the code. And finally, they're like, okay, I've got a lot of people who have said, yes, they want this. They know exactly what the pain points are. So they know exactly what to build. They go out and build it, and we teach them what's the format to start with, what should they price it at, how do they name it, what website do they create. We teach them all this stuff. In fact, we just do the website effectively for them. And there's something really magical about the first time you get a sale.

48:27I have to tell you, it blows people's mind because most of us live in a world where we have a fixed income, and therefore we sit around and argue about taxes, and we just try to protect ourselves. but when you earn your first 50 bucks or 100 bucks, you realize, oh my God, if I can do that once, I can do it five times. And if I can do it five times, I can do it 20 times a month. And soon I can equal my own income. And that is a mind-blowing moment. And so let me figure this out. So you help them identify the profitable idea, basically. And then you actually help them make the website, like you have a template or something that they can use to make the website.

49:06And what does that website look like? They're selling their product or people accepting credit cards or what is it? How far do you go? Well, we have software. So we built software that has pre-made templates and there's a whole bunch of them and you can customize it all. But I'll tell you, so it's very easy, right? We set it up and we know the best practices because we've been testing it for years and years. But we don't sell directly from our site. In fact, if you come to my site right now, you can't buy anything. And we have like these very odd things we do with our business. Like I don't allow people with credit card debt to join my flagship courses and all these things.

49:42So instead of trying to sell things and just make a quick buck, we show people how to build a relationship. We show them how to use email. Like people on my email list, they join. Some of them, they've been reading my site for six, seven, eight years. They haven't bought a thing. That's okay, because I know one day when the time is right, they will. So it's all about, instead of trying to make a quick buck, add massive value. When you do, price is a mere triviality. Doesn't matter. So, okay, so once they're in, though, and again, they come up with their idea, you help them create their website, which they could sell products off of.

50:19How do they then drive traffic to the site? So we teach them this. So part of it is you write remarkable content. This is the same way I grew my site. So we're not writing just top 10 ways to do blah, blah, blah. Because we've done all this research, we know what people's pain points are, right? Like if you're teaching men how to dress or women how to dress, you can write content about how you wake up in the morning and you look at your closet, you're like, ugh, I don't know what to wear. That is a very powerful piece compared to six spring fashion items. And then you take those and you go to other sites with other traffic and you say, hey, I have this great piece.

50:55I'd love to share it with your audience. Would you be interested? And then eventually you can get traffic just like that. It's very simple.

51:14By the way, what you just said is the most powerful way to get traffic to your site. So, you know, I give this Q &A on Twitter every Thursday, every single week. And I've done this for three or four years. Every Thursday, every single week, someone asks, how can I get traffic to my blog? And the number one answer is don't put content on your blog. First, guest blog on highly trafficked sites because that's how you just, you don't care about your little tiny piece of real estate on the internet. You care about your name and your message being seen by lots of people. And so it's very important to get on like well-read sites.

51:52Exactly. Go where the traffic is. Go where the people you want to reach are. Nobody cares about your site. In fact, nobody cares about you when you're starting out. So, and the other important thing you said is tell stories. Don't just stand on a pedestal and give a list because it's like you said, who the hell are you? You have to tell your story to introduce who you are. And it has to be some, you have to be someone people relate to, someone who has a story that, you know, everyone else has gone through. Like, oh, I can't find pants to wear in the morning because I didn't iron anything. Exactly.

52:23Well, you do this best. And I think everyone listening is infatuated and obsessed with the way you tell stories. total vulnerability, something that I'm learning from. And just, it's fun, it's funny, and you don't take yourself too seriously. All of us have problems. Like for me, when I was starting out, it was like, all right, I don't know where my money's going. Then it was like, I don't know how to start this business or I'm socially awkward, whatever. We can all talk about that. And we all have these experiences that if you can share, people say, hey, that's what I was thinking too. Let me click and check this guy's side out.

52:56Oh, he's got an email newsletter where he gives away a free PDF on blah, blah, blah? Yeah, totally. They sign up, they like you, and one day when you have something to sell, they are delighted to pay. I see, so okay, so someone has the product, sets up kind of a little site, but starts guest blogging on highly traffic sites, and essentially now tries to maybe collect email addresses as the first step? That's right. And then eventually upsell to the email list. That's right. If they have a course, if and when they have one, They're going to release it. And it's the best way for selling is you're actually doing them a favor because they've been reading your free stuff.

53:35They're like, I want more. I want something else. I want a system. And when you give it to them, you're actually fulfilling their demand. So it's awesome. So that's great because that is the process you use for your product. Like you're all, you're basically just describing your methodology. And this has been your methodology from the beginning. Well, that's why we spent years and years perfecting the methodology before we ever wanted to teach anyone else. We wanted to know it inside and out. What's like your most successful student right now? Oh, let me give you, we put video interviews of all of them on zerotolaunchsystem.com.

54:06But one of my favorites is this guy named James. And he's, I think he's probably in his 40s. He's a chemistry tutor. And, you know, chemistry tutors, they don't make that much. They do fine. He ended up using some of my material to earn over$200 ,000. And he wanted to be able to take off a month because his son was born. So he went through Zero to Launch. He took his chemistry tutoring, which he used to do as a coaching service, and he packaged it up into an online product. So all of us have something we're good at. You could be chemistry, you could be whatever. So what was the online product?

54:44Like how to learn chemistry in six months? Or what was the actual product? It was a chemistry product for people to get higher scores on their chemistry tests in college. Okay, so he compressed what they were learning in class and helped them really deeply understand these chemistry things, all right? So he ended up earning a ton of money. He was able to take a month off with his son. And what, I think the key points, there's two things. First of all, this isn't just for 20-somethings. This guy's older, he's got a family. And second, you can connect with people on anything. Chemistry is not the most emotional topic.

55:20Like, in one of your recent posts, you write about someone driving off a bridge. I mean, that's very emotional. Chemistry is not like that, but everyone can connect to the right target market. All right. You can tell stories about chemistry. You can tell stories about how you felt when the professor started talking about something and you were just left behind looking around. Am I the only one? There's a million different ways. So we have that student. We have fitness instructors. We have PR coaches. We have so many people. And I interviewed a ton of them right on that site. And has anybody quit their job full time and now they're doing this business full time?

55:57Oh yeah, a lot of them. So in fact, I just interviewed one of my other students. Okay, this one is crazy. So her name is Julia. And you know what caricature artists are? Yes. So these are like the people you see at a fair and they draw a picture of you and they kind of exaggerate it. So she is a caricature artist. She used to make$8 an hour. Normal caricature artist rate. she recently over the last few years she used my material and we did one case study on her about a year and a half ago she had increased her earnings to 125 000 in a year oh my gosh i recently interviewed her just a couple weeks ago and this year she's on track to make over 200 000 what the heck what so is she what is she doing so this is the beautiful thing i love this example because a lot of artists say, hey, that might work if you're an analytics guru, but I'm, you know, I'm a creative.

56:51It doesn't work for me. And she's as far as you can get from an analytics guru as anyone. She was an$8 an hour caricaturist. What she did was, first of all, she stopped going to these fairs where she was just a commodity. And she started focusing on places where she could charge what she was worth. Turns out she's actually really good. She drew a caricature of me. It looks great. She's really good. So you have to be good. You can't just triple your price and expect anyone to pay it. Then we taught her how to refine her messaging, how to come up with packages. For example, what does a corporate person who's planning a corporate party, what do they care about?

57:30You think they care about the difference between 20 bucks or 30 bucks an hour? They couldn't care less. That money means nothing to them. What do they care about if you're hiring a caricature artist to show up at your executive party. She says, she's good. She's good. She better show up on time. She better have a backup plan. So they want to cover their ass. So she learned how to understand what her market wants instead of just thinking that her art itself was good enough. Because your art matters up to a point, no matter what industry you're in. But after that, all these other things matter. And so she started actually doing that.

58:04She moved up the value chain to over$100 an hour. Then she got really advanced. She actually hired other artists under her. And that was when her business exploded. So we cover all this in this interview I'm going to put up online. Her name is Julia, the caricature artist. But we have so many stories like this. It just goes to show everyone that you can live a rich life, you can earn more, and there's a limit to how much you can cut, but no limit to how much you can earn. You know, it's interesting because right now we're living in probably an age of greater economic uncertainty than any time since the depression.

58:40And I'm even including the financial crisis. Like there was a lot of fear during the financial crisis, but steadily since the financial crisis, people have been kind of underemployed to a greater and greater extent. People have been demoted. People are unhappy at their jobs. And this is why I wrote, choose yourself, is because now you kind of have to break down the gatekeepers. You have to go from the$8 an hour to building your own business and figuring out the way through, figuring out the language of business. Like here's someone who was an artist who was savvy enough because of your course, I guess, to start landing corporate gigs, hiring people and so on.

59:21And I really think everybody has to start doing things like this. Like this is gonna be the new economy of the 21st century. Yeah, and that's why I love the phrase you use, choose yourself, because no one else is gonna do it for you. and the route that we normally take, that's fine. You can do that route. You can get a job and I actually encourage people to get a great job and start something on the side. Start off slow but no one is going to choose for you to live a rich life. No one is going to choose for you to have extraordinary experiences, to travel on a Wednesday. You know, we all see these people on their Facebook feeds.

59:57They're posting pictures from Tahiti. You're like, what do these people do to be able to do this? and the answer is they chose themselves. They made some tough choices. They tried things without the certainty of knowing it would work. But if you try just one new thing a week, at the end of the year, you have 52 new things you tried and most people have zero. It's funny you say, start off doing something on the side. So, you know, my first job was at HBO and I was doing lots of things on the side until I figured out what worked for me. Like I was trying to do a TV show on the side. I started a business on the side.

1:00:34And ultimately, I was a very fearful person. I didn't want to leave my job until my business on the side was enough to pay me and my employees. So it really took two years of doing on the side before I jumped ship. Totally. This is the idea. If you look at someone from the outside and you see they have a successful business or they got a blog and a podcast, and you're like, wow, there's no way I could do that. I felt exactly the same way. I would look at people and they would write a post and get like 100 comments. And I'm like, how do you do that? My posts got zero comments for the first six months.

1:01:13But the answer is sometimes you jump in anyway and you say, I will figure it out as I go. But you can analyze it all you want from the sidelines, but there's nothing as powerful as actually jumping in. You will learn more from doing it than from dreaming or analyzing it for, I mean, by a factor of a million. Let's say we have a sizable and growing team. That's great, Ramit. So are you a seven-figure-plus business? We are. That's great. And essentially, you're practicing what you preach. Like what you teach is what you've done. Exactly. And I have to tell you, I never wanted to be the kind of guy who wrote an e-book about writing e-books.

1:01:50That's why I intentionally wrote a book first. That's why I spoke at companies, et cetera. That's why I created stuff in the areas of careers, et cetera, before ever getting near online business. I think it's important that you gotta ask yourself, who am I listening to? So they're listening to your podcast. Why? What do they get out of it? Are you credible to them? Obviously you are. There's so many people that we read on our blog readers or Twitter or whatever, and you kind of dig in and you're like, what has this person really done besides create a course or XYZ? And I think that there's value in following the very best.

1:02:25In fact, if you follow the very best, you will learn 100 times more than following the B and C list people. So that's just something I keep in mind when I learn from other people. That's kind of like the 80-20 rule a little bit. Exactly. You're going to get a lot of benefit from the top people. What I like is the 80-20 rule times two. So you find the 20 % that creates 80 % of the value. And then of that 20%, you find the 20 % of them that creates 80 % of that value. So you're left with, and this sounds all too many numbers, but 4 % of the content out there actually has 64 % of the actual value out there.

1:03:05I love it. So I try to narrow it down as well. And then you do one more. You have 1 % creates about 50 % of the value on the internet. But isn't it true, though? I mean, the people who I have found that have really taught me massive things, I can count them on maybe two hands. I'm talking about big, big wins. And I think for all of us, if we look at the big changes in our life, there are a few key people in our life who have given us honest advice, who have always put us first, who have helped us make the right decisions. And then there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of posts that we read while we're on our lunch break or on the train or whatever.

1:03:38And that's fine. I mean, we all need entertainment. But when it comes to making serious changes in our life, if you can follow, if you can befriend that 4%, the changes in your life can be absolutely massive. So, okay, so this again gets down to, you know, you're the average of the five people around you. It is, I would almost say it's a challenge for the listeners. Find those 4%. Find the people that you can really spend some time with to learn from. Like there's another saying, you know, if you're in a room, stand next to the smartest person in the room. So I saw this example used in the case of Harold Ramis, the actor, director.

1:04:16Who would he stand next to? Bill Murray. And of course, they created Ghostbusters and Stripes and many other movies. So all of this is interesting advice. So what are what, you know, given that many people are not signed up for your courses at this point, of course, what are some life hacks or what are some just quick suggestions you can give to these listeners that they can put to work that would change their lives? They can see an actual change in their lives. All right. So a couple of things. Number one, one of the biggest challenges people have is going to the gym or working out more. This is almost a universal thing.

1:04:55And I'll just give a quick suggestion. It has nothing to do with business. It's just about living a rich life. I had this problem. At night, I would be really motivated, and in the morning, I wouldn't go at all. And I tried to figure out why. What are the barriers in my life that are preventing me from going? And so I started testing stuff, and I finally realized my closet was in the other room. I would wake up in the morning. It was freezing cold and I'd have to walk in my boxers to the other room and get my gym clothes. Now, it seems foolish and I'm not really that lazy, but I just didn't want to do it.

1:05:28So once I find... So you wouldn't want to wake up and go to the other room and change into gym clothes, which would take like three minutes. It would take like one minute, but I was freezing. And so I looked at myself and I'm like, am I really that lazy? But it's not about being lazy. It's just that we try to do the minimum amount of work for most things in life. So I took the easy ride out, which is predictable, like most of us do for most things. That's just human nature. And instead I said, you know what? I really want to go to the gym. So I took my gym clothes and I folded them. I put them right near my bed.

1:06:01The next morning I woke up, put my feet down. There they are, changed into them, went right to the gym. And I was measuring how often I went to the gym because I was trying different things, waking up at different times, you know, all these different things. This was the one thing that worked for me. So for you, whether it's going to the gym or eating healthy, cooking for yourself, whatever it is, instead of waiting for that magical moment where you're just going to suddenly get inspired, forget about inspiration. Test it. Come up with a system and test five different ways. Could be setting your alarm 10 minutes early.

1:06:34Could be going to the gym at night. Could be having a friend text you. Whatever. What about sleeping in your gym clothes? then you don't even have to change into them. That would be even better. Try it. It could be a little gross when you get to the gym, but who cares? We're all gross there. I love it. The idea is don't wait for inspiration to hit. Test your way to it. Well, let's give a challenge. Oh, I love it. All right. I'm going to pass along a challenge that one of my friends shared with me. Actually, I'll give you a new one. All right. You talked about being, you know, surrounding yourself with top performers and people who can really teach you more than you know.

1:07:15I would challenge everyone listening to pick one person who you have admired. Maybe you've read their blog. Maybe it's James and you've followed his podcast. Maybe it's someone you read about in the newspaper. I would challenge each of you to send that person an email, just a thank you email that says, I really appreciate what you do. Your work moved me because X, Y, Z, and here's what I did as a result of it. You don't have to ask for anything. You just say thank you. And if you do that, you will be shocked at how many of those people reply and how you can build a relationship with people just based on gratitude.

1:07:50And I'll say two things to that. I used that technique and it works incredibly. Like I created two completely different careers as a result of using that technique. The other thing is you can't get offended when it's a quantity game. You can't get offended if somebody doesn't respond because some people get a lot of emails. Some people don't get a lot of emails. But if you do this, some will respond. Love it. What's another one? All right. This one comes straight from Gretchen Rubin, who's a friend of ours. She challenged my students, and now I want to challenge yours. She challenged them. She said, you know, we all have these alarm clocks we set in the morning, and we wake up.

1:08:31A lot of us are groggy. But she said, we never set alarm clocks for ourself at night. And she said, I want to challenge each of you for the next 14 days to get seven hours of sleep. And when she issued this challenge, I kind of shrugged, I was like, that's so easy. And later that night, I found myself in my bed, playing around on my computer till 1 a.m., and I didn't get seven hours of sleep. It turned out to be surprisingly hard. But once I did, it taught me to set limits at the end of the night, and it changed so many things, waking up in the morning, being refreshed, and just realizing I have a finite amount of time in the day.

1:09:07I better make it count because at night I have to be asleep by this time. It was very challenging, but very rewarding. I have to say that's incredibly valuable too because you sleep for one third of your life and people ignore sleep hygiene. They just don't care about it, even though it's such a massive percentage of our living hours. So that's a good little life hack. The alarm clock at night, I like that. And remember, you can test different things. So I had to figure out how to test it. I ended up having to leave my computer in the other room so I could finally go to sleep because otherwise I'd just keep playing on it.

1:09:41So you can test all different things just knowing that you will hit that goal eventually. I have confidence in you. So what's next for you? Like, are you just gonna keep doing these courses for the rest of your life? Or like, what do you wanna do? No, I love doing courses. We're certainly planning to expand. I think part of a rich life is personal finance. part of a rich life is entrepreneurship, psychology, one day, health and fitness, parenting, travel. So I wanna, whether it's courses, whether it's a whole different way of presenting it, that is TBD. But I do wanna help in all different parts of living a rich life.

1:10:20Well, that's great. Ramit Sethi, what's the best way people can find you? I always go to ramitsethi.com and it kind of directs me around, but you also have zerotolaunchsystem.com right now. what's your favorite place where people could reach you? They can go to IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com and they can find out everything about me. They can reach me directly at Ramit at IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com as well. I sign up for your daily newsletter. What I get out of your newsletter personally is you obviously have done a very good job mastering copywriting skills. So learning how to title something and get people to open your email and then drive their eyes through the email so they get to your message.

1:11:03I think you do a very good job at it. I encourage people to, at the very least, sign up for your free materials or whatever you have just to study your copywriting styles very good. I love it. Thank you very much and thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show, Ramit.

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