It Took Me 10 Years to Realize, and I Will Tell You in 2 Minutes.
1. A 9-5 job is blocking you from reaching your potential.
I wasted years of my life.
Dying inside. Afraid. Going nowhere. Overthinking. Drowning in perfectionism. Petrified to leave my banking job. Vomiting daily from severe anxiety.
In this short post, I’m going to turn everything I did in the last 10 years into the big realizations that saved my life and made me wealthy (many are counter-intuitive).
1. A 9-5 job is blocking you from reaching your potential.
Nothing wrong with a job.
It’s safe (to a degree), comfortable, and a place to learn a few basics. But your potential is unlocked when you become an owner. When there’s no one else to blame – and you either have value and get paid for it, or you don’t.
My level of growth exploded after I quit my job to run an online business.
I went from a sales guy to a community manager, accountant, bookkeeper, HR manager, account manager, etc. There’s no comparison.
You’ll never go far if all you ever do is work a job. Rip the safety pants off and make unprotected love to your fantasies.
2. You'll make 10x more money starting a side business after hours and letting it eventually replace your main income.
Point #1 sounds smart. But if you just quit everything and go to $0 income, you’ll become desperate and needy like I did 14 years ago when I quit my startup.
The place to explore solopreneurship or entrepreneurship is on the side. It gives you the balance of risk and reward to test your ideas. Slowly over time you can replace your job salary with whatever you do after hours.
I’m so glad I built a side hustle and grew it. You can do the same. Part-time, first.
3. If you study successful people you'll see a pattern: they're obsessed.
The reason most people don’t succeed is they don’t know what it takes.
When life throws them a curveball they quit everything. Or when they get sick they can’t keep working on their dream at a reduced number of hours. Or they’re lukewarm with every idea they have. Or they quit their goal too soon. Sad.
I’m a psychopath because I spent 5 years interviewing people at the top of their game – Olympic athletes, startup unicorn founders, military leaders, etc. None of them had this mediocre, softcore approach to their goal. They were all in – not half-pregnant.
It inspired the sh*t out of me. The pattern was so obvious.
So I knew whatever I chose to do with my life, I had to go balls deep with it and be obsessed to the point of insanity.
The threshold of participation needed to get momentum is way higher than you think.Just “giving it a go” or “trying” isn’t enough. Your competition already does that. This strategy doesn’t work for most people so they blame life or external factors.
The only strategy is to want your goal more than most people by becoming obsessed. Obsession is an energy people feel. It makes them gain confidence in what you’re doing and look up to you as a leader in your field.
Either be obsessed or stay mediocre. There’s no in-between.
4. If you buy Bitcoin & own it for 5 years, you'll make more money than any of your smart friends with investment properties.
This makes me laugh.
With all the debt, real estate talk and complex investing strategies my friends have, I actually made more money than all of them by buying Bitcoin and never selling.
The game is up though. Large institutions and now major countries are starting to buy Bitcoin. Half the states of America have legislation in the works to gain permission to buy Bitcoin for their citizens.
At this point technologies like Bitcoin are obvious. They work because they have real scarcity that currency, bonds, and stocks simply don’t have.
Don’t buy Bitcoin. No. Do deep research on it because the idea sells itself (not financial advice).
5. You don't really want millions of dollars. You just want more free time.
Every second Youtuber posts videos of their houses and cars.
It seems like millions of dollars is what everyone wants. I believed that lie too. Now I know that money isn’t the real goal. It’s free time. With free time you can do whatever you want and it feels amazing.
More time allows you to go slow. To not rush to work. To go slow with your kids. To be present for your partner and family. To go on slow walks or waste time listening to 4-hour Tim Ferriss podcasts for the hell of it with no takeaways.
Free time is the ultimate luxury.
My former boss may drive a $350K Mercedes, but he has to constantly run from one meeting to the next. He has to take the train to work each day and use every second to answer work emails. He has to check Slack notifications and do his head in every time a new CEO takes over and resets the 10-year strategy for the 500th f*cking time.
There’s no amount of money you could pay me to rejoin that circus.
Build a lifestyle that gives you more free time. Escape to the countryside. Chill.
6. You’ll never be wealthy with a salary.
I tried. I saved every dollar. The numbers don’t stack up.
No one tells you this though. They pretend like salaries get bigger and so do the bonuses. And they do for a small few who play the politics game at work and nuke their mental health in the process.
But if you don’t want to play stupid games with stupid corporate people, you probably won’t get a $1M a year salary.
Salaries don’t make us rich because they barely keep up with inflation. And wage growth over the decades is slow because businesses have zero incentive to pay people more.
To maximize profit the game is now to pay people less and replace them with AI.
The wealthiest people are owners. They either own a business or they own a decent chunk of someone else’s business. The goal is to become an owner.
7. Busyness is a sign you're failing at life. Never trust busy people.
Busy people are ridiculous.
The worst are the ones who brag about it, or use busyness as an excuse. Some even go as far as acting like they’re a victim because of the busyness disease.
I just don’t trust busy people. They’re living blind, unaware of how much time they have. They can’t prioritize what matters and they’re easily distracted. I treat busy people like they’re heroin addicts. I stay away because they’re living a dangerous life that is completely oblivious to the fact time is our most precious resource.
Anyone can focus if they want to.
Busyness is a lame excuse that ends in tears, broken families, getting fired, and even getting divorced. Not worth it. Waste of time.
8. Your job in life is to stand out in all your weirdness, not fit in.
Fitting in made me a terrible human.
I hid my creativity for years. I tried to dress in a suit like others and jump through corporate hoops to impress bosses that happily would fired me without a care in the world. The weird part about me is I’m a deep thinker.
I consume weird books. I listen to strange music. I obsess over the silliest things. I come from a strange family. I cry uncontrollably when someone shows the tiniest bit of emotion. I’ve always found Asian culture interesting which is why I married my Chinese wife, even though Aussies gives me crap for it.
Writing online taught me a valuable lesson. Our job is to stand out in life, otherwise we fade into the background and have to beg for permission to do anything. Screw that. I’m so tired of gatekeepers.
Being weird is the only way to live. It means you’re being yourself.
9. Business is a psychological battle that'll teach you more about self-improvement than any self-help book.
Business sounds cool.
You learn some frameworks and make customers happy and you’re a millionaire, according to the MBA curriculum.
I’ve been in business 10+ years. Making customers happy has nothing to do with it. Customers will take advantage of you and bleed you dry if this is your guiding principle LOL.
Mastering business is understanding human psychology. It’s tapping into how humans think and understanding the universal problems we all face. Plus, it’s about understanding human desires in detail so you can ethically help people get them.
To build a successful business you run experiments with clear A/B tests and aim to be 1% better each time you sell or deliver anything. Over time you get smarter, become more in touch humans, and go through an intense period of self-improvement.
The more you improve as a business owner, the more revenue goes up. The opposite is true, too, which explains a lot of failing businesses.
10. Settling for second best is a bad decision. You get one life. Don't screw it up by being mediocre.
There were phases in my life that didn’t suck.
I deluded myself into thinking at these times that I was living a good life. I now know I was settling for second best. My long-term romantic partner back then wasn’t bad. But she wasn’t close to being the right wife or the mother of my children.
So I settled for second best. I told myself things would get better when there was no catalyst for change. And my partner refused to change any way.
Same with work. I hated banking but some days were okay. I’d eat some free lunch, drink coffees with customers, and sit in a few meetings with smart people.
But after 10 years in banking I hadn’t become any better at banking. The first year was full of growth because I had to do a lot of training. Then the learning curve went away. I was qualified to sell banking products to customers… so that was it.
It made me mediocre. I thought I knew everything. I dismissed many interactions with people because I thought there was nothing they could do for me.
Then I hit a phase where I refused to stay the same. I quit banking for a marketing job which ultimately became the catalyst to never work a job again. “Settling” is how normal people waste years of their lives that they can never get back.
If your life isn’t extraordinary, then change it until it is. You have the power.
Shorter ideas
11. Working in a flow state is smarter than trying to work harder.
12. If you're afraid to write online you must write online. Release your truths.
13. Walking barefoot in the sunshine is 10x better for your health than Athletic Greens supplements.
14. The coolest experiment is to disappear for 6 months and watch no one notice.
15. Opportunities that require you to ask for permission are the worst. Use the internet to join the permissionless economy.
16. Getting told no is how you learn to see your faults. People who don't get rejected slowly become stupider.
17. If you wanted your goal bad enough you'd start the hard part now.
18. You won't be remembered after you die. So quit building a legacy and start living all out.
The idea of building a legacy is comical.
Once someone dies the living forget them. We don’t spend our time thinking about the dead because there isn’t even enough time to think about the living.
Rather than build a legacy and delay the appreciation for what you can offer the world until a time when you won’t be there to enjoy it, do it now.
Start now. Live now. Help people with your talents. Assume no one cares when you’re dead (because they don’t). Now your goals are simpler and there’s no more delayed gratification.
Tell me which of these 18 ideas you loved the most and why in the comments.
P.S.
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Getting told no is how you learn to see your faults. People who don't get rejected slowly become stupider.
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