One Question Friday: What’s The Fastest Way You've Had Your Life Changed By Money?

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) answer one listener's question: What’s the fastest way you’ve had your life changed by money or what’s the fastest way you’ve seen someone else’s life get changed by money? To submit your question and hear yourself on My First Million, go to MFMPod.com and click on the circle with the microphone in the lower right hand corner. ----- Links: * The Million Dollar Homepage * Calm.com * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Hey guys, it's Ezra from Grand Rapids. I was listening to the pod the other day and I remember you guys saying that getting rich quick is the best way to get rich. So I'm just wondering, what's the fastest way you've had your life changed by money? Or what's the fastest way you've seen someone else's life get changed by money? Thanks.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  All right, we were asked, what's the, this is a one question Friday, we were asked, what's the fastest that either of us, Sean and Sam, have jumped in wealth and how it felt? And/or the same question, but for some of the people we know. You want to go first?

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, you go. I think you, you might have a good story here.

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  I'll talk about a friend first. So I was with a friend that sold his company for close to a billion dollars. And I was with him. I was with him when the money hit the bank. We are at their apartment and immediately like, he's like, all right, I think it, I think it happened. We went to the ATM. He previously had like $300,000 in his bank, which is not a little amount. So he wasn't like destitute at all. But he was 28 and we went to the ATM and there was $90 million in the bank account. And immediately afterwards, we went to McDonald's and we had a number one each. We each got a Big Mac and we went back to his apartment and

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  watched TV and like, we're like, that's pretty cool, isn't it? And it was really cool. Like, it was pretty crazy. The crazy part is not just the 90 million, but if you do the math of 90 million conservatively, if you look at historical average, 90 million at, let's just round it up to 100, 100 million at 30 becomes 200 at 40, which becomes 450, which becomes 800 at 60, which becomes 1.1 at 70, 1.1 billion. So you can see this, it's not just that they have 90 million dollars. It's like, well, you're, it's a surefire way, more likely than not, that you're going to be a billionaire at some point while you're alive. That was crazy. So that, that's one story. Do you have one?

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  I got a couple. So we've told this one on the pod before. People are sort of familiar, but I'll do a fast version of it, which is million dollar homepage. So Alex too, who is a friend, and I think you're friends with him as well. He, I think he was 21 years old and he was like, I want to be a millionaire. I want a million dollars. How do I like do this? And he kind of asked himself this question, which was like, how do I make a million dollars? In like the next like month or two, you know, which is not the question most people ask. Nobody will teach you or recommend that you ask this question, but he asked it. And guess what? The brain is a question answering machine. And so you ask that question, the brain, if you believe that everything is possible, will start to come up with ideas. And one of the ideas he

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  came up with, this is back in, I don't know when million dollar.

• 2:58Sam Parr?

  Maybe like 2007 or 2006.

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, something like that. So basically 2005, he creates million dollar homepage. And he's basically like, you know, just like, I don't know, he's 19, 20, 21 years old, something like that. And he's like, okay, I'm going to make a website that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. Each pixel is just like a little square. And he's like, cool. Every pixel is a dollar. And he kind of made it like at the top, it says, be a part of internet history. And the website's still up. You can go to milliondollarhomepage.com and you can kind of, you could see all the pixels. And so basically he was like, if I sell each of these squares for $1, I will make a million dollars. And sure enough, he did. January 11th, the final tally was $1,037,100

• 3:45Shaan Puri?

  by the end of it. And so he literally made a million dollars. And I asked him, I was like, you know, how'd you get like, you know, he basically, he built something that was like designed to go viral. So it was almost so stupid. And so like, either, some people shared it because they thought it was fun, funny and cool. And other people thought it was dumb, dumb and dumber. And so like, you know, either way, it evoked a reaction out of everybody. And so you can go there right now and you could see all the pictures that pixels that sold. And basically companies would buy it because they thought, oh, if this is going to get a bunch of traffic, then cool, I might get a bunch of clicks if I put my billboard here. A bunch of people have tried to replicate this since, but he made a million dollars in I think two months time period. And

• 4:27Sam Parr?

  And then he went on to do something bigger.

• 4:29Shaan Puri?

  Over the course. He blew all the money in the course of the next year, just kind of having a party, bought a condo, you know, like he did what a 21 year old would do. And he was like, oh, I for sure, I'm just gonna, dude, I did it so easy the first time. I'm just gonna keep making hits. I don't have to worry about saving this. I can just blow it. And then I think it was 10 years of like not having another hit, trying thing after thing, after thing, after thing, until he built Calm. And then Calm took several years before Calm became a thing. And now Calm is a, I don't know, $2 billion company or something like that in the meditation space. So kind of an amazing story on his part.

• 5:08Sam Parr?

  I, what I did, starting at age 20, or I forget which age I was, like two years before my exit, I used personal capital or, and as well, which is like mint.com. It's just like mint, but different. And you can manually add stuff. And I manually added enough money that it said my net worth was 16 or 17 million dollars. And so I had that on there and I just started like seeing that number because of course, money, you can buy stuff, but in a lot of cases, it's really just like this, like number on a spreadsheet where like, you know, it's just like a digital thing. Like you could put three zeros behind it and like, it kind of starts feeling real for a minute. And that's what I did. And so I put that my net worth was like 17 million dollars, like

• 5:52Sam Parr?

  two years or a year and a half before my exit. And then when I got paid, I remember thinking like, this feels cool. But then like 20 minutes later, I was like, it kind of, I was, I'm kind of used to this now already. Like I see that number already. And so I would say I'm still getting used to.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Bro, you're, you're a manifester.

• 6:10Sam Parr?

  I am. What do, what, I think, what do we say? We're the manifest cowboys, baby. I manifest stuff. That's what I do. I'm not a business person. I'm a, I'm a manifester. You know?

• 6:22Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty good on the spot.

• 6:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what I do.

• 6:25Shaan Puri?

  Cowboys, no small boy stuff. I love that.

• 6:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what I do. I like, I'm not a business man. I'm a, I'm a guy who dreams and tries to achieve it. It just so happens that it's in the form of business, but that's what I did and it made a difference. And I actually noticed that here, but here's my, I wrote this down. So I felt a big difference when I had $20,000. The next big difference that I felt in my life was when I hit $100,000. This is all liquid net worth. The next big difference was when I hit 500,000. And then the next one was 10 million. And I think that maybe. Maybe like the 40 or 50 range will be the next one and then maybe like the 100 range will be the next one. That's what I think. But I remember feeling like between like 500,000 and like 10 million, I kind of almost felt the same.

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, similarly, first jump was 25K. We won it in prize money for our startup like at a business plan competition. And it was like, oh, sweet. We can work on this for the whole year. And just this will be here. This is the money we need to live on and we need to so three of us lived on 25K for a year and a half or something like that. It was amazing. And that was a huge jump because it was freedom for a year and a half to not think about money to just try to build something cool. I'll also share something that's similar. So forget getting super rich quick, which I think is a good exercise to do. Like, what would I do if I really wanted to like 5X 10X if I wanted to make a million dollars in three months, what would I do? And

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  if I wanted to do that, how would I do it? Worthwhile exercise. The other one is like baby goals. So I heard Kevin Hart on some podcasts and they were like, Kevin, man, you've you're now like the biggest movie star in the world. Like, you know, you're up there, bro. You have the huge comedy specials, movies, you got it all. Like, did you think that you could do this? He's like, he's like, well, I never really thought about it, to be honest. Like, I just, he's like, I didn't think like this huge goal because that would almost like it just seemed too too different from where I was. It wasn't really even yet useful if I thought about it. I could say it, but like, didn't matter because I was so far from it. He's like, so I just did baby goals. Like, just here's a little baby goal. Let me get to this point. And then another baby

• 8:38Shaan Puri?

  goal, another baby goal. And I actually think that baby goals are a lot more useful and a lot less talked about than like, having the big hairy audacious, you know, dream and goal. You need both. They're both useful at different times. But I would say most people would should would probably be better off doubling down on a baby goal. I'm gonna give you an example. When I was 21, we were working on our business, our startup, and we had a business plan and we had a LLC and we had all the like important sounding things that we thought it takes Business cards, a logo. Yeah, business cards, people, a logo, we had a website, we had a blog, we had investor, we had like everything we thought it takes to do this. And so nine months go by and we're like, this was the sushi

• 9:22Shaan Puri?

  restaurant chain, nine months go by and we're like, we've been doing our planning and then we've been doing our like getting the chef on board and then we're trying to find a location and then we're trying to figure out how much does it cost to build it out, all the things you kind of got to do to launch this thing. And I remember one day, just sitting there with my buddy Trevor and we were just like, God, like, I feel like we're just like acting business, we're playing startup. Yeah, you're playing house. It's like, you know, oh, come over, let's play house, let's play doctor. It's like, we're playing business. Cause we got this like, and literally it was, it's embarrassing. We had a binder of a business plan that was like 300 pages and we used to brag about how well thought through our business was like, we've thought through every detail, what are Binders full of them.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  With the uniforms will be, what, yeah, binders full of, full of plans in this case. And we had like, here's how, here's how we're going to do employee promotions because we think that the way that companies work is like all this shit that didn't matter. And like, again, 21 years old, too dumb to know that that wasn't what was important. Until we got, we took it to a meeting and we got sort of laughed at where the guy was like, oh, like this is your business plan? And we were like, yeah, it's a, and we thunked this binder onto the desk and he was like, I'm not reading this. And we were like, oh, yeah, that's okay. But just, we wanted to show you, we've thought it through. He goes, that means you're thinking about the wrong things. And we were like, oh, so we kind of were getting, we get this feeling like, maybe we're doing this wrong. This is about nine months in, maybe we're doing this wrong. So we're just sitting there one day, we're like, all right, why don't we just like,

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  for the weekend, let's just make a business and like, let's just try to make a thousand dollars. Like, can we make a thousand dollars in a weekend? Forty-eight hours as a challenge to ourselves? Can we get to a thousand dollars? And I swear, I learned more about like actually building a business in that forty-eight hour, thousand dollar challenge than I did the entire year of like working on the business. Because we were like, okay, how would we do this? What's a product that we think people want? We don't, you know, we're instead of like being married to our current idea. It's like, well, what's a simple product that like people want? And my buddy was like, oh, we used to live in Boulder. And he was like, Trevor was like, you know, you ever seen like every time we walk around campus, all the sorority girls and like frat guys, they all have these wristbands on like the Liv Strong band,

• 11:35Shaan Puri?

  but they have this like stack of wristbands. And he's like, there's this new one that's like a really thick one. It's like triple the size. And it's like, I don't know, that seems to be in. He's like, what if we made those? Like, that seems like that's pretty simple, like to sell those. And we're like, oh, yeah, you could just like customize it. You could put like, you know, the hustle on it, or you could put like Milk Road on it. You could put like your brand name or your, your frat name or whatever on it. That'd be cool. I think we could sell like a bunch of those. And so we're like, okay. What should we call it? And like everything that we had been super thought through and thoughtful about, we just like did in five seconds. Like, what's a good name? What's a good name for these like fat like wristband things? Oh, let's call it the fat band. And then we created the fatband.com, bought it on GoDaddy in five seconds. Logo here, let me just use impact, the like thick font.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay, impact, that's the, that's the logo. Boom, done.

• 12:23Shaan Puri?

  Product, okay, let's not try to have the best product. Like, is there just something on Ali, we had heard of Alibaba as like, is there something on Alibaba or AliExpress that we could just get these like made? I didn't even know the word dropshipping, but we figured out that same concept ourselves. We're like, oh, dude, you could just buy these for, you know, seventeen cents. And then if you include shipping, it's only this much. If we sold each one for a dollar fifty, like that would work. We could do it. We'd only need to sell whatever it was. Like, we only need to sell seven hundred bands in order to make a thousand dollars. And hey, that's actually, we could even be profitable if we did it. It's like, all right, well, how do we sell this thing? We only have, you know, like twenty-four hours left. And so we just started like posting on our own Facebook pages and calling like anybody who we could think of to be like, hey, would you, do you want this for your sorority? Do you want this for your, your group?

• 13:05Shaan Puri?

  And like, we found one girl who he used to date, who like,

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Basically, she bought, she was like, oh, my parents are having an anniversary party and there's like 200 people coming. I'll take like 250 of them. And we like made a sale and we were like, yeah, just like read out your card, credit card. I don't even know how we took the payment. Like, we didn't even have anything to take payment. We just like took the payments on our PayPal or something. And dude, that feeling of getting to a thousand dollars, like you can see the smile on my face. I still feel that how good that felt that weekend. And that was when I first was like, oh, this is what it feels like to do something real. Everything else we've been doing is fake. And like, I was so obvious to me. And it changed the way we did our main business, too. And like that thing paid for like, you know, a little bit of side hustle money as we went.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  This data is wrong every freaking time.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Whoa, I can see the client's whole history, calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  HubSpot, grow better.

• 14:10Sam Parr?

  So I've built maybe seven or eight different businesses, whether that just be like a real estate thing, or the hustle, or court, or just whatever. I think almost all of them, I got to 100,000 in sales before I filed an LLC. And the reason I do that is momentum and like people are like Ben's laughing and people are like, oh, it's illegal. First, I don't think that's illegal. You can use your social security number and like get a lot of the stuff. Like you can like enter your social security number. And second, I have no idea. It actually might be illegal. But like, I don't care because I'm willing to like sacrifice those things and get in trouble for the sake of momentum, because momentum is like the lifeblood, like when you're going. Because once you start getting sales, it gets addicting and you like taste,

• 14:52Sam Parr?

  you taste it and it works out amazing. Listen to this. So there's this, so I tweeted out that I want to dress better. And this guy who's got like a fashion Instagram thing, what's it called? Like well-built style or something like that. He DM'd me and he's like, hey, like, look at my Instagram. Like, I think it fits what you want. And I go, yeah, this actually is great. He goes, tell you what, I'm going to make you a presentation on all the things that you buy. Just send me a Pinterest board of the people who you admire and like your personality. I'll study your Instagram and study your Twitter to understand your body and your personality, things like that. And I'm gonna send you a PowerPoint with like image like it looks for you and then just a link to buy like all these clothes. And I said, all right, great.

• 15:33Sam Parr?

  What's in it for you? He goes, if you like it, pay me $300. And so he spent like a week doing this and he sent it to me. I was like, this is sick, man. I would have paid way more than $300, by the way. And I just, he goes, he goes, well, that's awesome. Here's my email. Just PayPal me 300 bucks. And I did it. And this is a beautiful, perfect example of a person who just, they just did it. They did it the right way. And it just worked. And like, then you do that maybe 10 more times. And then eventually you create, you create a questionnaire on your website. And then you like do a pay half upfront. And then you do this, and then you do that. And then you hire a couple more people. Like, it turns into shit really fast. We don't plan like, well, how many people would buy this? You really just think like, well, how big do I want it to be? And like, would a million people buy this over the course of three years? Yeah, maybe. That sounds about right. All

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  right, that's cool. Let's do it. And that's typically how it works for me. And I think that's how it should work for most people in most cases. Not all the time. Some guys are starting big companies like car companies and shit like that. And that doesn't require planning. But for most people, most of the time, this works.

• 16:34Shaan Puri?

  The, the question was about getting rich quick. And I think my takeaways are that there is a benefit to actually thinking through, how would I do it if I wanted to? Like, let me not just be like, pretend to be morally opposed to the idea of getting my outcome faster. Right? Like, it's fine. Getting rich quick kind of gets a bad rap. But like, I think we all would love to get to our dream outcomes faster, if possible. Might as well ask the question, could I get there really fast? And what does the brain come up with? You don't, you're not obligated to do it. Second thing is, instead of focusing on getting rich quick, I would say get revenue quick. Especially if you're kind of like early in your entrepreneurial career, because getting any revenue quick will like make the whole thing real. You'll stop playing startup, and you'll actually be in the

• 17:17Shaan Puri?

  game. You'll feel what's real. It'll force you to focus on the only the stuff that matters. And you won't end up like me with a 300 page binder full of business plans. Like, it's almost like a caricature, how dumb that was. But it's like, I took it to the extreme end of like, The wrong way to build a business is like to super overplan and never like go to market and actually try your thing. And you know, the fat band thing that I did was by far the best thing I did early on in my, my kind of entrepreneurial thing. Didn't get rich off of it, but in a way I did because I actually learned about how to do a business for real, which is what ended up helping me become wealthy. But you know, that skill ended up helping me become wealthy, that experience did.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  It was like enough money to get like a blooming onion and maybe a steak dinner at Outback Steakhouse. So I consider that a success, right? That's all you want.

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  Now, we were big on that fondue places. You ever been to a fondue place? I feel like you're lactose intolerant. You're probably, I could, I could see that you're lactose intolerant.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Dude, are you, do you see, I look like the embodiment of a glass of milk. Like, it looks like I just eat potatoes, milk and corn all day.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  When you were talking about that fashion guy, he was like, you know, I, I think you got potential. You, you're a tall, tall drink of water. And it's like, you're a tall glass of milk. That's the way I would describe you.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  I get it straight from the utter every morning. Yeah. I mean, look at me.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  I'm like a melting bar of chocolate. I'm like a melting piece of fudge and you're a tall drink of milk.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. If corn were a human, it would look like me.

• 18:48Shaan Puri?

  You ever thought about if a corn on the cob had legs?

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. All right. That's the sign that we're done. See ya.