Getting Rich is a Game. Here’s How to Win.

Key Concepts

• Value Creation and Exchange: The core strategy for getting rich involves creating something others want (value creation) and exchanging it for money (value exchange).
• Market Value vs. Societal Value: Market value, determined by supply and demand, is the only value that matters in the game of getting rich, regardless of societal value.
• Three Core Actions: Every economic entity (individual or business) performs three actions: doing the work, selling the work, and administering/maintaining the work.
• Four Levels of the Game: The game progresses through four levels: Employee, Self-Employed, Business Owner/Operator, and Investor.
• Economic Entities: Individuals and Businesses.
• Active vs. Passive Income: Active income requires trading time for money, while passive income comes from ownership of assets.
• Leverage: The ability to decouple earning power from time spent, increasing with each level of the game.
• The Three S's: Stability, Security, and Stress, which often hold people back from starting their own businesses.

Rules of the Game

• Rule #1: Only the government or central bank can print money.
• Rule #2: To make money, someone else must voluntarily give it to you.
• Rule #3: You cannot force anyone to give you money unless you are the government.

Strategy for Winning

• Create Value: Do or make something that someone else wants.
• Exchange Value: Exchange that value for money.
• Market Value Focus: Prioritize creating things with high market value, even if their societal value is low.

Three Core Actions

1. Doing the Work (Value Creation): Performing the tasks that create value, e.g., a software engineer writing code, a doctor treating patients.
2. Selling the Work (Value Exchange): Exchanging the created value for money, e.g., Apple selling iPhones, a software engineer selling their skills to Google.
3. Administering and Maintaining the Work: Managing the resources and processes needed to continue doing and selling the work, e.g., a doctor keeping their qualifications up to date, Apple's HR and legal departments.

Four Levels of the Game

1. Level 1: Employee:
   • Focus: Primarily doing the work (95%), with minimal selling (less than 1%) and some administration (5%).
   • Income: Salary plus bonus.
   • Leverage: Low; trading time for money.
   • Economic Entity: Individual.
   • Example: A software engineer at Google.
2. Level 2: Self-Employed:
   • Focus: Balancing doing the work (40%) with selling the work (50%+) and some administration (10%).
   • Income: Profits and Dividends.
   • Leverage: Medium; trading outcomes for money.
   • Economic Entity: Business.
   • Challenge: Acquiring and retaining clients.
   • Example: A freelance web designer.
3. Level 3: Business Owner/Operator:
   • Focus: Primarily administering the work (managing a team) and selling the work, with minimal time spent doing the work.
   • Income: Profits and Dividends.
   • Leverage: High; leveraging the work of others.
   • Economic Entity: Business.
   • Challenge: Managing employees and scaling the business.
   • Example: A web design agency owner with employees.
4. Level 4: Investor:
   • Focus: Owning assets and businesses, with minimal involvement in day-to-day operations.
   • Income: Passive income from ownership.
   • Leverage: Very High; income decoupled from time and effort.
   • Economic Entity: Business.
   • Example: A founder who hires a CEO to run their company.

Economic Entities: Individual vs. Business

| Feature | Individual (Employee) be able to sell either sell yourself or sell a product or sell a service because if we think back to these three things these three core actions in the in the capitalist world and the hardest thing is selling the work selling the work like the person who can bring more money into the business that will always be a role that is like if you go to a business and you and you say to them hey if you hire me I will literally make you way more money than I cost that is a very easy thing for them to say yes to if you're a freelancer and you go to a business or a client and you say "Hey if you hire me for 10 grand I'll bring in 100 grand guaranteed of course they're going to hire you that just makes perfect sense." If you go to a big company and you say "Hey I can increase your conversion rate on your website by x amount." And that will make you more money it helps them sell the work they recognize that that's the hardest part and you'll always be with work you'll always have a job and that's why I think that if you want to win this game of getting rich you've got to recognize that this setup where as an employee you spend less than 1% of your time trying to do sales uh unless you work in sales u but you probably don't right like most employees don't work in sales kind of almost by definition because there's like zillions of other roles and sales is like very few of them you're spending almost no time trying to sell sell stuff um but if you get to level two self-employed business owner or investor or if you get laid off and you need to find another job your your skill of being able to sell yourself or to sell something is like literally the most important thing so why like I I think this is where the disconnect is the disconnect is that sales is the most important part of getting rich in this capitalist world and yet as an employee you're probably not the one who's directly bringing in money for your business and so with all this said the advice I would give to someone who wants to hear my my advice and is still watching in this video is firstly get close to the money whatever your job is if you agree with me that that's like the most important thing like being able to bring money in because that's like the hardest part then figuring out how to get closer to the sales side of the business that you're working in is very very important and very very useful this kind of vibes with something that Naval Rabicon says which is that if you can learn to build and learn to sell you'll be unstoppable and you'll always have a job for life but the building stuff is not the hard part the selling stuff is the hard part so learning to sell is literally the most important thing this is why a lot of people say build a personal brand your personal brand is your professional reputation if in whatever industry you're in you're able to build a strong professional reputation you are way more likely to be able to sell yourself should you need a job in the future this is why even though I don't like the word networking is particularly important because you're getting yourself known you're getting yourself seen you're hopefully adding value to other people and the person who adds value to someone else even if they're not in your company even if they're in different companies that person gets known as someone who is helpful and people want to work with other people who are helpful if you decide to go from employee to self-employed or business owner and you've got a personal brand you've got a professional reputation you're respected amongst the people in your industry it's way more likely you're going to be able to get clients because you already have people around who know like and trust you this does not mean you have to write on LinkedIn writing on LinkedIn is not the only way of building a personal brand or developing your professional reputation if you care about getting rich and you're an employee I would really strongly recommend starting a side hustle again you don't have to obviously you can do whatever you want i'm just a guy on the internet so what do I know um but I think if I were giving my friends advice I would say start a side hustle crucially start a side hustle that makes money don't just do it as a hobby the difference between a hobby and a business is that a business makes money but a hobby does not what starting a side hustle does whether it's baking cookies and trying to sell them at the local school fair or like setting up a lemonade stand is that ultimately the point of the side hustle is to teach you to sell maybe the side hustle can grow to the point where it replaces your income fantastic you're winning a life that's kind of what it did for me like YouTube was a side hustle it grew to the point where it replaced my income as a doctor and then some and then I was able to quit my day job so to focus on the YouTube thing before starting my YouTube channel when I was in medical school I started a side hustle trying to sell courses to help people get into med school so I'd be teaching courses up and down the country um like physical classroom courses to help like 17 and 18 year olds do well in their medical exams and I was making a few thousand pounds every summer holiday from that from that side hustle but what that did was teach me the skills of how to sell stuff over the internet and that was the thing that really helped when I started my next business off the back of my YouTube channel tip number four would be to invest and or negotiate for ownership the people that win the game of getting rich are the people ultimately who are owners rather than people who are operators so if you're working in an industry where it is acceptable for you to get stock options like in tech or whatever that's actually a totally legit way of like you know being an employee but having a decent chunk of equity in the company that you're helping build so that you're building an asset that can hopefully get you leverage and income further down the line that's not correlated directly with your time if you work in a small business can you negotiate with the business owner being like "Hey can I take less of a salary and a little bit more profit share i'd like a stake in the upside can I get some equity in the business?" That kind of thing on top of that or if you're unable to do any of those things being able to you know save a good amount of money and invest it in things like the stock market yeah it's not going to get you rich quickly but it can get you rich slowly over a long period of time that is where you are investing in ownership in other companies so for example I own some Apple stock tiny tiny tiny percentage of it which means I can make passive income from the dividends that the Apple stock generates i don't know if it's a dividend stock but like whatever or like I can sell it further down the line but basically investing in assets is a reasonable way of very slowly getting rich over time but if you really want to speedrun the game of getting rich it's it's really about moving from level one and moving more to levels two level three and level four it's just that the issue is that school and basically society prepares us only for level one and there's this whole idea that like oh my god going self-employed is really scary and like what if you lose money and like it's so stressful and like oh managing people is hard and yeah all of those things are hard but they're no harder than being dependent and relying on a single employer to be your only source of sustenance in this world to feed you and your family and also if you're in a country like the US where that single employer is your source of health insurance for you and your family man that would be scary AF ultimately the reason people are scared to start a business if you want to get rich is because of some misguided thing around stability and security some fear that starting a business is going to be stressful and I think all of those ultimately come down to a fear of selling yourself or just like not having the skills or recognizing that what that you as a commodity you as you incorporated are not winning right now in the supply demand curve and the nice thing about that is that that's under your control you can do something about it you can learn high income skills you can increase your personal brand and or professional reputation all of these things require work right you know getting rich is not is not something that happens without any work it's something that is hard it's something that takes a reasonable amount of time but if you have the goal of making enough money that you're able to do what you want you're able to not do things you don't want to do you're able to you know stick it to your boss if your boss is being annoying you're able to work with people you like you're able to have like time freedom and location freedom like that kind of lifestyle requires you to put in quite a lot of work and so that ultimately is the game of getting rich this has been my take on how to win that game and if you're interested and you haven't yet seen this video this is titled How to Get Rich and this is my little rant about the uncomfortable truth that more people need to hear around what it takes to really get rich so thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and I will hopefully see you in the next one | Income | Salary + Bonus to be able to sell either sell yourself or sell a product or sell a service because if we think back to these three things these three core actions in the in the capitalist world and the hardest thing is selling the work selling the work like the person who can bring more money into the business that will always be a role that is like if you go to a business and you and you say to them hey if you hire me I will literally make you way more money than I cost that is a very easy thing for them to say yes to if you're a freelancer and you go to a business or a client and you say "Hey if you hire me for 10 grand I'll bring in 100 grand guaranteed of course they're going to hire you that just makes perfect sense." If you go to a big company and you say "Hey I can increase your conversion rate on your website by x amount." And that will make you more money it helps them sell the work they recognize that that's the hardest part and you'll always be with work you'll always have a job and that's why I think that if you want to win this game of getting rich you've got to recognize that this setup where as an employee you spend less than 1% of your time trying to do sales uh unless you work in sales u but you probably don't right like most employees don't work in sales kind of almost by definition because there's like zillions of other roles and sales is like very few of them you're spending almost no time trying to sell sell stuff um but if you get to level two self-employed business owner or investor or if you get laid off and you need to find another job your your skill of being able to sell yourself or to sell something is like literally the most important thing so why like I I think this is where the disconnect is the disconnect is that sales is the most important part of getting rich in this capitalist world and yet as an employee you're probably not the one who's directly bringing in money for your business and so with all this said the advice I would give to someone who wants to hear my my advice and is still watching in this video is firstly get close to the money whatever your job is if you agree with me that that's like the most important thing like being able to bring money in because that's like the hardest part then figuring out how to get closer to the sales side of the business that you're working in is very very important and very very useful this kind of vibes with something that Naval Rabicon says which is that if you can learn to build and learn to sell you'll be unstoppable and you'll always have a job for life but the building stuff is not the hard part the selling stuff is the hard part so learning to sell is literally the most important thing this is why a lot of people say build a personal brand your personal brand is your professional reputation if in whatever industry you're in you're able to build a strong professional reputation you are way more likely to be able to sell yourself should you need a job in the future this is why even though I don't like the word networking is particularly important because you're getting yourself known you're getting yourself seen you're hopefully adding value to other people and the person who adds value to someone else even if they're not in your company even if they're in different companies that person gets known as someone who is helpful and people want to work with other people who are helpful if you decide to go from employee to self-employed or business owner and you've got a personal brand you've got a professional reputation you're respected amongst the people in your industry it's way more likely you're going to be able to get clients because you already have people around who know like and trust you this does not mean you have to write on LinkedIn writing on LinkedIn is not the only way of building a personal brand or developing your professional reputation if you care about getting rich and you're an employee I would really strongly recommend starting a side hustle again you don't have to obviously you can do whatever you want i'm just a guy on the internet so what do I know um but I think if I were giving my friends advice I would say start a side hustle crucially start a side hustle that makes money don't just do it as a hobby the difference between a hobby and a business is that a business makes money but a hobby does not what starting a side hustle does whether it's baking cookies and