You could quit your job and end up making a LOT more money than you ever imagined. When I was fired from my last job, I was making $2200 a month after taxes. I was twenty-nine, and I had peaked in my career. There were no higher jobs available to me. That’s the joy of being in education. Look, that’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s a decent wage in our country, and the job gave me a huge amount of freedom. When you work in education, you discover that bureaucracy is built on incompetence. They gave me an assignment and told me it would take five to six months. I finished that project and two more in the first week. I spent most of my time taking walks around the campus because I had nothing else to work on. My manager was so incompetent that she performed at around 1% of my level. If I had stayed at that job, I would have gotten better and better at pretending to work. That’s how many large organizations work.
I was fired from that position, and I’ll tell you exactly why in a moment. I lost that job, and suddenly I had no income. I started working for myself because I never wanted to be that vulnerable again. Within six months I had replaced that income. Within twelve months I started making my old monthly salary every week. I was my own boss and making four times as much money, with no financial vulnerability. That’s the power of being your own boss. You get to reap those massive rewards.
The reward is significantly larger than the risk.
14
Risk and Reward
Tomorrow, your job could disappear. I can name a million reasons and ways you could be unemployed within twenty-four hours. The owner of your company steals all the money? POOF, you’re out of a job. Someone at work misinterprets your comment as sexual harassment? POOF, you’re fired. Your company fails to hit its unrealistic financial projections? POOF, you’re filling out a welfare application. No matter how good you are at your job, you can lose that job based on someone else’s actions. You are not the master of your destiny. If someone else can destroy your income stream, accidentally or on purpose, then you better start preparing.
Any single point of vulnerability is a very serious risk. Would you want to ride in a spaceship with only a single hull? One tiny hole in a window and everyone dies? There is a reason that submariners have those doors that lock between every compartment. If one section floods, the whole crew doesn’t have to die. But that’s how you are living financially. You have a single income stream. And if anything happens, one tiny crack in a window, it’s all gone. Your life is destroyed, and you are back on the old job hunt. Right now that market is crowded. Every day tens of thousands of people who are smarter and more qualified than me get fired.
Sometimes I send in a resume for a job that I’m qualified for just to see what happens. It feels awful. The entire job-search process makes you feel like a peasant cowering before some angry ancient god. I get told all the time I’m not good enough for jobs that pay ten percent of what I make now. I can’t get a job, even with a ninety-percent pay cut!
The reason we don’t start secondary revenue streams is because of a false sense of security. We are afraid of the responsibility. The thought of being in charge of your financial destiny is scary. But your real fear should be the fact that you are completely and utterly powerless. I had a friend who was a high-level executive vice president at one of the top companies in the world. It doesn’t matter where in the world you live; you would know who they are. He lived in a serious mansion, drove a brand new Hummer, and his wife had a beautiful Mercedes. Then one day that company dropped ten percent of the staff. And he was on the chopping block. Within a year he was living in a studio apartment with his wife, and they were struggling to get out from under cars they could no longer afford.
He had a great job making serious money, but it was still a single point of failure. That one point of risk is a problem. It doesn’t matter how much money you make at your job; you still have a single point of vulnerability. To me, that is far more terrifying than any other risk. I want to be very clear about something before we go further. I do NOT want you to quit your job tomorrow and start following this book as your new religion because that is the same mistake. If you quit and start a new project, you again are stuck with a single point of vulnerability. What you want to do is keep that job but launch a side project at home for just one to two hours a night. Start small and just focus on replacing your income. Once you are making more money at home than you do at the office, then you can leave that day job. If you follow my method, you will be able to quit your job within the next year. We want to really focus on protecting you from any future financial vulnerabilities.
By keeping your job and just investing a few hours at night to your first project, you get the reward without the risk. You have that primary income stream to support you while you invest time in your financial exit strategy.
II
Education
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein
15
You were trained to be a drone
If anybody were going to succeed in the American educational system, it would have been me.
I was in the top 1% of students with plenty of brainpower and plenty of opportunities. I took the SAT when I was just 12 years old and scored better than most high school seniors. That test scored my intelligence above 99.97%. In a room with one thousand people, only three will be smarter than me. I'm also a member of MENSA where your IQ has to be in the top 2%. I went to a great college on an academic scholarship and in my late twenties, I completed my master's degree in London. I’m highly intelligent and well educated. The problem is that my entire education was a waste.
I invested around $150,000 in my education. That includes scholarships, loans, money from my parents and my own personal investment. And looking around me, I got out LUCKY. Let’s do a little math. My top-of-the-industry job paid me $2200 a month after taxes. At that rate, I could pay off my education in a little under six years…
As long as I didn’t eat, drink or need to live anywhere.
That’s the discovery that most college graduates are making these days. You graduate with an overpriced garbage degree and the best job you can get sentences you to decades of debt. College only teaches you a single skill. It teaches you how to shut up and be a good little cubicle monkey. Free and creative thought isn’t encouraged at these universities anymore. Instead, you are taught to be quiet in class and turn in assignments on time.
That’s not how you create a leader – it’s how you create an average employee. There are a few majors that lead directly to specific careers, such as engineering, medicine, architecture, and accounting. But if you look at any college booklet, you will see that more than eighty percent of the degrees are basically worthless. You graduate college with massive student loans and no idea what the difference between APY and APR is. You have no idea how to check your credit score, let alone know what it means. You certainly know nothing about starting your own business or controlling your destiny.
All of my education was at top tier institutions. And the only thing I learned was that they screwed me. Every single skill I use in my life, I learned in high school. If you didn’t go to college, that’s not just fine. It’s excellent. Your education is completely irrelevant to me. I have people who work for me, and they all eventually leave me to start their own companies and make six figures. Did any of them go to college? I have no idea! I’ve never asked. I don’t drug test them, we don’t go on team building retreats, and I don’t care what they do outside of work. Because none of that stuff impacts their performance.
Colleges talk about how they “prepare you for life” which is so ridiculous. It’s a meaningless statement. They should be “teaching you how to make money.” That’s the reason we go to college. Nobody goes to college to learn how to be a man or a great mother or great husband or anything else like that. We go to college because people who go to college are supposed to make more money than people who don’t. But it’s a lie.
People who start and own companies make hundreds of time more money than their employees. That’s what college should prepare you for. But they don’t. The bad news is that college tricked you. The good news is that I’m here to fix that problem. I’m not interested in feel-good techniques or keg stands. I’m only interested in specific techniques that will generate income for you. Everything else is a waste.
Here, I’ll prove it. First, how much of the time you spent at college gave you knowledge or skills that affect your income? Second, how much did the stuff you learned at college bump your income? Third, how much time and money did you spend at college?
If you’re like me, you spent several years and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tiny amount of useful information. As for that big pay bump? Let’s factor in one other idea. How much money would you have made if you spent those four years working full time? By the time you graduated college, you could have been a manager at a Sears or something. Instead of losing money for four years, you could have been making money, and instead of theory, you would have real-world management experience.
To make matters even worse, most of the people teaching the few valuable courses shouldn’t be allowed within five hundred yards of a school. Nobody teaching marketing or business courses has ever made any actual money doing those things. They only know the theory.
Let’s try another fun metaphor.
Let’s say that in four weeks you have to fight in a mixed martial arts match against some steroid gobbling beast that bounces at a local bar. And if you lose the fight, these mysterious organizers are going to execute your entire family. Yeah, even your lovable Granny Josephine with the bad hip. These guys are serious.
You have two choices of trainers. One if a professor who has read every book on the art of warfare and can even give troop movement orders in Latin. He has studied the videotapes of every great fight and can go into detail on the thoughts and processes of combat. The other choice is a jerk who can’t read. At eighteen he didn’t graduate high school, and his parents threw him out of the house. He hopped on a plane to Thailand and made a living as a white fighter in Asian basements and parking garages. He has no idea what the rules are for boxing. He doesn’t know how to fight fair. He only knows how to win.
If you want to learn from someone who has never done what you need to do, then pick that fancy professor. Your family will die, and you will probably die in the ring too. But at least you received an excellent “education.” I’m like that dirty street fighter. I don’t know the fancy rules. I don’t know the acceptable practices.
I just know how to win.
16
How the American Education System has Failed You
When you go to the dog track, you get to watch a bunch of greyhounds chasing a fake rabbit in a circle. It’s a cool sporting event, and the crowd’s got plenty of energy. But it’s a little unjust. I mean, the fastest dog might win… but he never actually gets the rabbit.
Welcome to the American educational system.
Most colleges right now brag about their diversity, social programs, and multiculturalism. Those things are great to talk about, and killer copy to stick next to your stock models for the brochure, but none of them gets you one step closer to your goal. They never talk about the average income of their graduates. And they’d rather pole vault off a cliff than tell you how many of their graduates get GOOD jobs.
They keep putting these rabbits in front of you and promising that once you catch the next one, you get to be happy. You work your tail off as a kid to get into the best high school. Then you have to play sports and join as many clubs as possible in high school to get into a good college. And let’s dial into that bit of hot garbage for just a moment. Do you think being good at archery is going to help you ten years later when you are trying to find a job? Of course not. All those extracurriculars you have to do in high school are such a waste. Colleges want to pick students who spend time on things that won’t affect their income. That right there shows that college is not about income. It’s about something else.
You grit your teeth, you get those callouses on your hands from messing with those strings, and you pay your dues. You get into the right college, and you breathe a sigh of relief - finally, you can just focus on graduating and getting into the workforce. But it’s a lie. Most good jobs require you to train after college. If you want to be a stock trader you have to take all those courses and get your certifications. Even if you just want to show people houses to buy, you need to go to school and get a real estate license. At the end of college, you’re still unqualified for more than ninety percent of the careers in our country. You have to fill your already packed schedule with even more busywork to “separate yourself” from the horde of other “equally qualified” drones-in-training.
But maybe you keep chasing that rabbit because your parents were fooled too. They are convinced that a good education is the key to financial success in our society. And they would have been right – back when Andrew Carnegie was on top of the business world. That correlation no longer exists. Many very wealthy people never went to college. I can tell you right now, that if you didn’t go to college…
If instead, you learned a trade - something like laying tile or carpentry or being an electrician - it’s far EASIER for me to make you wealthy. That’s right. In my experience, lack of education is a significant advantage. At least you didn’t learn the wrong way to do everything!
Public education is just abysmal. You aren’t allowed to teach the smartest kids; you have to build every class around the laziest ones. And it means that nobody ends up learning anything. Look, it’s fine by me if you aren’t book smart. You already know that I think most of that stuff is garbage.
If they would separate the kids based on ability and interest, then the system would be so much stronger. Most kids know what path they want by the time they’re sixteen. If a kid at sixteen wants to work with his hands, there should be specific options that teach him that. And what I’m saying isn’t a novel or ridiculous idea. Many other countries like Japan and England use this type of system. The United States ranks first in hubris, but only 17th in the quality of our educational system. Both of those countries that turn desires into skills that make money are ranked higher.
And the cost of it all is staggering. You pay so much money to walk away with an albatross strapped around your neck. You could start a decent business in your town for less than 35k. Starting the business that I’m going to teach you will cost less than $500. That’s all I had to start my company.
Whatever your level of education, the system found some way to screw you. At best, you are an underpaid drone. At worst you didn’t even graduate because nothing they were teaching helped you. I’m sorry for that crap experience. Now it’s time to turn it around.
17
What you should have learned
There are so many great subjects that college could teach you. They could teach everything that I’m about to cover and so many other great subjects. But I think these are lessons that are sorely missing from high school.
I hate that I didn’t get to learn any physical skills in high school. Imagine if you learned “home repair” in high school. This class teaches you how to fix basic wiring problems, how to unclog a severe toilet problem and how to repair the washing machine. None of these are skills you can make money from. But they are skills that we pay other people for all the time. Think about how much money you would save if you had basic home repair skills. Over a lifetime, this ability alone would save you around ten thousand dollars. Not only that but you could graduate high school and find a place to live rent-free because you could be the superintendent.
What about home economics? Whether this is a euphemism for learning how to cook or learning how to balance your checkbook, both are skills you need. Learning how to cook your own food and to shop strategically would cut your food expenses every year by ten to twenty percent. You wouldn’t lose as much food to ov
ercooking. You would save the cost of going to restaurants and fast food joints. On top of that, food cooked at home is healthier so everyone in society would live longer.
Imagine if you spent a semester learning about credit - how loans work, what makes a good credit card, the different between APY and APR, and the basics of investing. This knowledge is critical to your financial survival. I can’t believe how many people tell me that they own their house. The only way you own your house is if you have no mortgage. If you are paying a mortgage, then you are renting your house from the bank. When you pay double the value, the bank lets you keep it. That’s how mortgages work. If you miss a few payments, they take the house away. Do they then give you back all the money you paid? Of course not. Would have been nice to know that when you were eighteen, though!
These are just some of the basics that we could be teaching people instead of trigonometry and history that they will never remember let alone use. We’ve all seen those shows where they walk up to someone on the street who can’t name the Vice President, let alone a Supreme Court justice. Nobody remembers that stuff.
It’s unfortunate, but education in our country is a racket. The strongest union in the country is the teachers union. Now if you are part of a different union, I don’t mean to hate on your union. But has your union screwed tens of millions of children out of their futures? That’s what I thought. When you have ruined an entire generation’s hope for the future, then you can brag that your union is as powerful as the teachers union. Teachers in that union can’t be fired even if they fall asleep or physically hurt a child. There are teachers in New York who sit in a room all day with each other and get paid. They can’t be in the same building as children because they are so dangerous, but they also can’t be fired. It takes years to fire a teacher who hurts a student. That’s beyond horrifying.
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