How to Get Rich (without luck, talent or a trust fund)

Want the 4 money rules that changed my life? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/fmd Episode 749: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) teaches the 4 simple rules that made him a millionaire by 30. — Show Notes: (0:00) Rule #1: Master a Money-Making Skill (5:00) Rule #2: Don’t Rent Your Time, Own Equity (8:19) Rule #3: Wait (9:44) Rule #4: Proximity is Power (12:08) Putting it all together — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  This little black book right here is very important to me. It has all of the rules of money and they're very simple, not that complicated to learn. But once you do, you can actually start to stack cash. I was in my twenties and I really didn't understand how to make money. I was trying hard, I was working hard, but I really wasn't getting anywhere. And once I learned the rules of money, I started to understand, oh, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. So the next 15 minutes, I'm going to tell you exactly what these four rules of money are. What I did to go from broke to ended up making my first million at age 30, and then being worth $30 million a few years later. And I was an idiot. I was running around with a fork and I was sticking it into different outlets. I was learning my lessons the hard way. And I want to save you a lot of years and a lot of pain by just telling you what I did and what actually works.

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  So if you're somebody who today, you don't love where you're at financially, maybe you're not financially free, and you want to get to that magic number, you want to get a million dollars liquid in your bank account. Well, this is the video for you. I'm going to tell you the four money rules.

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  Rule number one, you need one money-making skill. A money-making skill is a very specific term here. So when it comes to building wealth, there's really only four money-making skills. You need to pick one of these. The first one is selling. So this is persuading people, marketing, closing deals. The second one is making, which is products, apps, websites, videos, books. The next one is designing. So if you're having really great taste, understanding form and function, like a Steve Jobs type. And the fourth is hunting. So selling, making, designing, hunting. Hunting is spotting opportunities. It's finding great real estate deals or angel investing or figuring out the right stock to buy. You need to pick one of these skills and master it. Pick the one that's of most interest to you. Now mastering it is the hard part. So you're going to need to do it every day. And the way to do that is, let's say you want to learn sales, right?

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  Selling is the, is the master skill, the money-making skill you're trying to learn. You need to go to a place where selling is what they do. It is how they make their money. And when you get there, you're going to get a job and you might start at the bottom of the totem pole. And what you're going to do is you're going to look around, you're going to ask, who's the number one producer? Who is the number one salesperson here? Your job is to go sit next to them and then double their input. So if they're making 100 calls a day, you're going to make 200. You're not going to be as good at the calls as they are, but you're going to double the input. If they knock on 50 doors, you do 100, you get the idea. And you're going to sit next to them and you're going to study what they do. You're going to observe the difference between what they're doing and what you're doing. And then you're gonna double it every single time. That's what you're doing by day and at night, you're reading books, you're watching videos, you're obsessing over the art of selling. So your nine to five is where you get your practice reps.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  And then your five to nine, 5pm to 9pm, that's where you get ideas on how to improve. I got to be friends with Mr. Beesaw the last few years. And he's today, the number one YouTuber in the world. Every video he puts out gets hundreds of millions of views. And he showed me and he told me, he was like, dude, at the age of 12, I decided my skill was gonna be making YouTube videos, in his case. So he wanted to be a maker, he wanted to make YouTube videos. And every day, he would open up a dictionary and he would flip to a different random word. And whatever word he got, he had to force himself to think of 20 video ideas using that word. Not all of them were good, but he would force that muscle of idea generation. Cause for YouTube videos, the idea, the concept is the number one thing. And then he would go try to make that video and he would suck at it. He'd have a crappy thumbnail and a crappy lighting, crappy audio. Each day, he would try to make one of those things better in between every video.

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  It took him like, I don't know, 100 plus videos before he even got to 10,000 subscribers, before he started making any money off this thing. But he mastered the art of making videos. Warren Buffett is another example. He was a hunter. Hunting was the money-making skill he chose. And if you ever, you know, learn about Buffett, you'll learn that Buffett used to take the entire Moody's manual, so a 4,000-page book. And I'm not talking about like a Harry Potter book. This is a 4,000 pages of just corporate financials, essentially. And he would read it cover to cover. And he was, all he was looking for was a single stock that he thought was mispriced, high value, low price. Over his career, he's looked at, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of businesses. And in his most recent shareholder letter, he said, "All of my success, I can boil down to making about 12 good investing decisions." Just that out of hundreds of thousands of things he looked at. He became a master hunter.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  So you wanna master one of those four money-making skills, and that's a path to millions. If you master two of them, that's a path to billions. So if you look at Steve Jobs, he had designing and selling. He was one of the greatest. Design minds had great taste in design. And then he also had the ability to tell great stories and be extremely persuasive and come up with marketing campaigns. Elon Musk, he has making and selling. And that combo of sort of I can build and I can sell is one of the most overpowered combinations you can have. Because you don't need to become the top 1% of anything. That takes a lifetime to become a true master. What you need to do is become top 20% at two things that are not common. So for example, an engineer who's good at marketing. You find a lot of engineers and you don't need to become the best engineer, but you

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  need to become an engineer who's pretty good at engineering and pretty good at marketing. That's rare enough and you are super, super valuable. So your money-making skills are the foundation of your ability to make money, not just once, but anytime you wish. It's like a money button you can then push at any given time. So focus on skills before you focus on wealth. All right, rule number two, don't rent out your time, own equity. What people get wrong is they take the skill they learned and then they get hired for it. And then if they're good at it, they get promoted for it and they get a raise for it. It sounds like, well, I guess I'm moving in the right direction. I'm getting rich. Actually, you're moving in the complete wrong direction. As Nassim Taleb says, "The two most addictive things in the world are heroin and a monthly salary." You do not want to get hired to provide services where you're trading your time for their dollars. Renting out your time is not a path to get rich.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  Even the people who rent their time out at a high price, a lawyer, $1,000 an hour, they cap out. You know, the rich lawyers, they're all partners in the firm, meaning they own equity in the firm, meaning they get a cut of other lawyers' work, not their own. So how do you own equity? Well, two ways. Either you're going to invest, but you don't have the cash to do that maybe, or you're going to start a business. So then the question comes, what kind of business should you start? How do you take that money-making skill and turn it into a business? There's three things, three words to know. They all start with the letter C. Code, content, or capital. So code is like making a website or an app. I'll give you an example. My friend was a designer. He used to make $200,000 a year as part of a design agency. He was an employee, he was making a good living, and he was designing websites for clients. Client walks to the door, asks for something, he would design it.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  Well, he figured out he needed to turn his skill into a product or a business. And so he quit his job and he started making Shopify themes. Um, so he would make a theme and he could take that same theme and he could sell it to 2,000 different customers. And by the way, he didn't have to go and hand sell it to them. He would be asleep and they would be coming to his site, finding a library of themes and they would buy one. And now he pulls in 2 million a year of cash flow. He lives half the year in Bali, half the year in Japan. He is living his dream life because he understood the rules of money. How to first make, create a money-making skill, design, and then how to turn it into a business because he doesn't want to rent out his time, he wants to own equity. I'll give you another example, content. Let's take, um, someone who's pretty big at content in the business world, this guy named Alex Hermosy.

• 6:54Shaan Puri?

  He took his master money-making skill, which is selling, and he turned it into videos, YouTube videos, books and courses. His last book launch, he just did it about a month ago. His last book launch sold 3 million copies and with all the add-on courses he added to it, he made a hundred million dollars in a single weekend. A hundred million dollars as one guy, because he understood that he didn't need to sell his time in hourly chunks of consulting, he needed to turn it into a business. The last example is capital. So what does capital mean? Well, this is really for the skill of hunting usually, but it can be used for any, any of these. So this is where you want to take the money-making skill you have and you want to use it, uh, in the art of investing. Uh, my cousin did this. So my cousin had a job, making six figures, but he was sick of it. He didn't want to report to the office. He didn't like all the politics. He didn't like the boring meetings.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  And so he quit his job and he decided, I'm going to learn the art of hunting multifamily real estate. So like apartment buildings. He spent two years mastering that skill under somebody else who had been doing that for a decade. So he went and he learned and he looked, he identified the highest output person and he doubled their inputs. And then he left to do his own deals. And in his first year doing his own deals, they bought about 40 million dollars of real estate using down payments or equity from other investors who were happy to give him a cut because he was doing the hunting. He was finding the killer deal, the deal that would perform above market, that had a good margin of safety. He became a great hunter and he translated that into a business using this method of capital. So takeaway here is if you only rent out your time, you'll never get off the treadmill. Equity is the way.

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break because I gotta tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction, they locked my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes. And then they told me I gotta visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banked services are provided through Choice Financial Group.

• 9:05Shaan Puri?

  Call them NA and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. All right, rule number three, and this is the hardest rule of all of them. Okay, you ready for it? Four letters. Wait. You can't plant a seed in the soil and then the next day come dig it up and scream at it. Why aren't you growing yet? Right, that's not how a plant grows. You need to water it, you need to give it sunlight and you need to wait. Let the thing actually grow. Because if you're doing what I've said, right? You have developed one of the four money-making skills. You have not just developed it, you've spent two years really grinding and mastering. Then you have turned that into a business that you own equity in. Well, now getting rich is actually inevitable. But inevitable is not the same thing as instantaneous. So the bad news is, yes, it's gonna take trial and error. It's gonna take a couple of years for you to get it all figured out.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  But the good news is you only need to get rich once in a lifetime. Once you get rich once, as long as you're not, you know, totally an idiot and you're gonna blow it all, you can just let that compound from there. So the secret here is you have to be willing to wait. Now, waiting doesn't mean just sitting around doing nothing. The phrase I heard that I love best comes from Naval. He said, "Be impatient with action and patient with results." That combination, impatient with action, patient with results, is a killer unbeatable combination. I would never want to compete with somebody who was like that. And that's a good test for if you should become a banker.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  P.S. Before I go to the next one, if you're liking what's in this video and you actually want the notes from this, the team has actually written everything down from this video, so you don't have to write it down yourself. You can get it. It's in the description below. All right, let me keep going. The final rule, rule number four. Proximity is power. Even though I told you to wait, you know that good things take time, you're still gonna hate waiting. I hated it. You're gonna hate it too. The good news is you can actually speed up the result. How? You can make the plant grow a little faster. And the way you do it is you move. Literally, you move. So if you want to be a tech founder, you need to move to San Francisco. If you want to make movies, you go to L.A. Now, it's not that you had to do it, but if you want to increase your odds and you want to go faster, that's what you would do. Because proximity is power. Meaning, you want to be as close as you can to the white-hot center of action.

• 11:08Shaan Puri?

  You want to go join the network of people who are doing what you do. You want to be around people who have the same dream as you, who are in the same game as you. Maybe they're a little bit ahead and they can share what's going on. Maybe they're right where you are and you can all grow together and learn from each other's mistakes so that you don't have to learn every single mistake the hard way yourself. And when I say move, I don't just mean move to the city. I mean, you move to a house with as many like-minded, smart, ambitious, interesting people as you can. When I moved to San Francisco, I moved into a house with six other tech founders who I didn't know. And they weren't the best roommates and the bathrooms were stinky and all that good stuff. But the more important thing was I was around a group of really smart, ambitious people chasing the same dream as me. And those became great friends. Those became connections. Those became, you know, warm introductions to investors. You don't know exactly how it's all gonna play out,

• 11:53Shaan Puri?

  but you're creating luck for yourself. You learn faster. It's like osmosis. Just being around them will make you think a little differently, work a little differently, you know? If you hang out with a bunch of broke complainers, you'll become one. If you hang out with a bunch of killers, you will level up too. There's a cliche that's been around for a long time. You know, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Well, it's a cliche, but it's true. And it's been around for a long time for a reason. So if you want to change your life, change your zip code. I'll tell you a little story. I was 24 years old. I was living in Australia trying to start a startup. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I went to a local meetup for other founders. I thought, I should get around some other founders. And at the meetup, they... One week, they asked me, they said, "Hey, will you be the keynote speaker? Will you give the talk this week on stage?" And I think I was supposed to be flattered, but no, I was horrified. I was like, me?

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  24-year-old dumb shit me? I haven't done anything. If I'm the smartest guy in this room, I'm in the wrong room. So the next week, I literally packed my bags. I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco with no plan. I didn't even have a place to stay. But I knew that I needed to get around people who were smarter. And, um, you know, the most ambitious, smart group of people that I could, who all had the same dream as me. So let's recap. If you've done these four things, you've picked one of the four money-making skills, and you've done your two years mastering it. You then don't rent out your time and fall down the career trap of getting hired and getting raises. You take that skill and you start a business based on code, content, or capital. Then you wait and you're impatient with your action, but you're very patient with your results. And lastly, proximity is power. You speed up your development by moving to the white-hot center and getting around like-minded people.

• 13:22Shaan Puri?

  Well, congratulations. You have flipped the odds. Uh, the best advice in the world is to take actions that would make it absolutely unreasonable for you to fail. Let's take another example. Weight loss, dieting, right? I've been a type of person who's tried many diets, failed many times. And I think that's pretty common. I would say that dieting probably has a failure rate of 80 or 90%. Let's pretend with your diet, you just decided to do four things right. You made four decisions. So you ate clean whole foods, high protein, you exercised daily, and you slept well. If you actually did those things, and you did the weight process where you let it unfold, it is now actually unreasonable for you to not lose weight, to get into great shape. You have flipped the odds from 90% failure rate to 90% success rate. And that's what we're gonna do in the world of business and getting rich.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  Is, we've all heard the stats, right? 90% of new businesses fail. Well, that's true. Startups, individual business ideas do fail. But founders don't. If you keep going and your rate of learning is high, you follow the four rules I just told you, you will not fail. I'll leave you with a Steve Martin story that always inspired me. Steve Martin, the great comedian. He wanted to learn the banjo. And when he was young, he started learning the banjo, and he couldn't tell the difference between a C chord, a G chord. And his teacher was like, "Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. It's not like you have a huge natural talent for the banjo." And he was getting frustrated and impatient because he wanted to be great at something. He wanted the result, but it wasn't happening. And it didn't seem like he was naturally, like, on track to get there. But he made a little mindset shift. He said, "You know what?" Instead of trying to be great at the banjo today, let me just make a decision.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  He said, I'm going to play the banjo for 40 years because I can't imagine that somebody who's been playing the banjo for 40 years still sucks at it. And just by taking that long-term time horizon and understanding that he could flip his odds of success from, I'm probably going to be one of those guys who tries it, doesn't happen for him and I give up to, well, if I just stuck with this for 20, 40 years, I think I'd be great at it. And by the way, it never took 40 years. Within a decade, Seymour actually won multiple Grammys for his songs where he's playing the banjo. He changed his mindset around the banjo and years later is actually winning Grammys for it. And so this is the formula. This is the way. I hope you take this. I hope you be successful with this. I have nothing but love for you. I really rooted for you.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  And so if this was helpful, leave me a comment below and maybe I'll do a follow-up video. It's a little more detailed, but these are the high level, the four money rules.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

• 15:51Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked them, maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference. That's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.