The Wisdom Wall, every show

“So your brain books the fantasy as like a partial payment on the real thing. And it actually gives you the reward before you've done the work. So the drive to do the actual work drains out of you. Fascinating. So in other words, manifestation is actually anesthesia, not fuel.”

“I think angel investing is dumb for your first dollars. You're going to lose 80% of your takes. So I still think angel investing is dumb for 99.9% of people. Don't play a game where you bet on other people's ability before you've bet enough on your own and stacked up enough cash.”

“he talks about how, um, you know, you'll never get rich renting your time. And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, mathematically it's not true. Like Sheryl Sandberg, quite rich. Always been an employee.”

“with AI and automation, it's not eighty-twenty anymore. It's ninety-nine-one, which is like the right decision at the right time Will always outperform effort alone, and the one percent of things you choose to work on will now drive 99% of your results.”

“if you're a creator today and you're not thinking about acquiring businesses and how to get equity and what's called distributing equity, where they keep paying you over time, you're making a huge mistake. If you are only living off of AdSense and you are only living off even info products or education or anything like…”

“So if you're like, it's hard being a woman, nobody wants to give me respect as much as they do men, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You make yourself a victim. Then you get treated like one. If you act like prey, you get preyed upon.”

“A hard truth is if you don't like your bank account, Your bank account is a reflection of how valuable you are currently in your skill set.”

“What happens when your guys go out of power and the other guys come into power? Then you just play a game of going after one another. It's why we shouldn't Arrest former presidents for political reasons.”

“I think if you are young, Hungry, and you want to make big moves, and make a bunch of money, you should not take a remote job. You want to be in the office.”

“the data shows us that women are the, have the purchasing power in the household. Like if you are Amazon or Walmart, you actually want to get to the female. Because she's typically the one doing a lot of the household spending. But the one with the understanding of the full financial picture is typically the man.”

“if what you're really going for is I want to make You know, 200,300 1500 thousand, a million bucks a year, and that, that is my goal, not to change the world. There's so many better ways to do it than do a startup, in my opinion.”

“If you have an 80% close rate, you are way too underpriced in your business. If you have a 60% close rate, You're too underpriced in your business. If you have a 45 to 30% close rate, you're probably sitting just about right with your business pricing. And that's if you have a normal sales team, not even a good one.”

“Also, by the way, way easier to sell fewer people more expensive things than it is to sell a ton of people something really cheap.”

“Never, ever imitate. Don't let your sales people talk you into it. Don't let your friends talk you into it. Don't do it. Go premium. Premium is always easier.”

“The market rate is the average of everybody else's fear. It's basically like I mean, most people are broke. Most business owners don't make any money. Why, dear God, would you price off of what most people do?”

“If the line's out the door, that's a clear sign of, in some ways, a pricing error, unless you have high volume, high speed sales.”

“Your floor is double what you charge today because anything less than double isn't worth the sweat.”

“Because most owners don't have their business fail because of not enough cash flow or because they can't generate enough profit. It's because they give up. And this problem has nothing to do with talent. It's really that you're too tired to keep going this way.”

“I could tell the good operators by the status of their cleaning vans. And so you open up the doors, and if it's a mess, I know that guy's not going to be on time, they're not going to hit their quota, and they're definitely never going to be in management.”

“Most people do not get rich through a salary. Pause. They get rich because their skills were so good somebody wanted them to own.”

“I've learned that great employees want clarity. Great friends and partners want clarity. Weak ones want comfort. And I don't want you to confuse the two.”

“the standard management advice of like how you're supposed to give feedback, which is called the sandwich, which is praise, criticism, praise, trains employees to distrust, to distrust, praise and dread criticism.”

“If we have an entire generation of angry, non-motivated, uh, left out of society young men, it doesn't end well for any society. That's usually the case for revolt.”

“Stranger gives advice on life they don't have to live with no repercussions for actions. Not a great incentive alignment.”

“Walking the factory floor often is you choosing when to get information. Letting the factory floor come to you is information attacking you all day, every day, forever, and having no prioritization.”

“the only reason anybody, anybody buys anything is exclusivity, timeliness, scarcity, uh, relevance. And he's like, if you can figure out a way to wrap all four of those around whatever you do, you'll be able to sell more and more frequently, um, and with less struggle.”

“the most successful people I know have nothing in fucking common about how they run their days. Like, Almost nothing. Some of them drink a lot, some of them drink zero, some of them get up early, some of them stay up late, like, almost no similarities. But they all did aspire to do something really, really big or…”

“So, you know, if they were a Green Beret or a nuclear sub operator or, you know, investment banking or, you know, worked at McKinsey on their acquisitions team, I just know they're going to be able to handle a lot. And if they've really only worked in corporate jobs, or especially if they've only ever freelanced, I…”

“I think there's some ego and I see it a lot in our, in our leadership teams where they want to figure out an innovative way to do it. And I'm like, why would you, you have no context. You haven't wanted this before. You haven't done it before. So why would you With no data, no context, and no history of winning, just…”

“The rational buyer can only be met With emotional responses.”

“If you spent more than two weeks planning without doing one thing that touches a real human with a real ask that is uncomfortable, you're building an idea instead of a business.”

“Discipline is not a signal of high character. It's a signal you respect systems that keep you disciplined. Believe it or not, a lack of discipline tends to be a design problem.”

“Let's spin this up in 24 hours and see if anyone bites. If they do, we'll build it, which basically means we don't have a product. We're not ready, actually, to launch this, but I want to spin it up, see if we can get credit cards, and if we can't, we're gonna launch it, and then we'll figure it out. We'll build the…”

“And so the worst entrepreneurs, I think, try to ship at a hundred percent and end up shipping at 40% six months later because they never had real data to work against.”

“When nobody believes, that's when you know you're actually doing something interesting.”

“The wealthiest people in the world, they are not building apps. They're not on magazine covers. They're not pitching VCs. They own boring businesses that print money.”

“most owners have what we call poor owner mindset, which I don't love the words because it, it's kind of got a negative connotation, but, um, they price things below what they would pay for them. They don't price them based on outcome. They price them based on wallet. That's really dangerous in business. That's why…”

“AI is just a giant replication machine, right? It's gonna take everything that it's been trained on and give you the average.”

“My biggest concern today is if you outsource your thinking entirely, like I am seeing people do to AI, your critical thinking skills and your taste will just Atrophy. Like muscles.”

“If intelligence is cheap, then judgment probably matters more. If content is infinite, then what type of content means more? If perfection is standard, Then authenticity is probably what we're chasing.”

“in some ways, the execution now is not the hard part. It's like, what idea are you gonna do?”

“Like if I will take a confident executor with a sprinkle of delusion over almost anybody else, the entire game is almost all confidence.”

“Like, our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of, and if you can't do that, um, then you probably shouldn't be in charge.”

“You don't take a break from opportunities just to focus on operations unless you absolutely have to. And I think that's right.”

“in business you should take the first 10% of every dollar that you make and you put that in your bank account. Not in your business's bank account, in your bank account.”

“Because you can't manipulate someone who likes being alone.”

“Most creators are exposed to feedback constantly. The result is work shaped by reaction rather than conviction.”

“burnout is not you're overworked. Plenty of people work hard without burning out. So what's the difference? Why can this person work forever, and that person hates their life at the same job? Well, it happens when you live too long against your nature. You suppress parts of yourself to maintain this identity, and your…”

“To do most things at the highest level, you have to be fucking unhinged. You have to not be normal. That's what's required.”

“People who are great Are not great because they believe they are. They are great because they're always trying to prove themselves because they know how flawed they are”

“Toxic people don't wanna change with feedback. They change with reduced access.”

“toxic people don't win because they're evil. They win because everyone else is so busy trying to be liked.”

“part of my screening process for hiring is actually, yeah, I love taking them to coffee. I love, yeah, I love, you'll see all of our offices are glass, so I watch how they walk in, how they walk out, um, because it really is a sign of, I haven't met a lot of people who have been really successful at our firms, um, who…”

“The truth of the matter is to win, you have to suffer. There is no other way around it.”

“if you just avoid everybody that you don't like, or everybody that is even toxic, or everybody that is pushing boundaries, then that means you don't get better at holding them.”

“optimists, they sound too Pollyanna, but, and, but they make all the money, and pessimists sound smart and then make nothing.”

“The more difficult conversations you have, The higher the bank account you will eventually have.”

“so not only do I think we don't sell enough, I think we price ourselves out of deals all the time, because we're the cheapest, you know. Because we're like, oh, no, no, no, I want to over serve the customer. No, you lost my business because I don't trust that it could be quality at that price.”

“Well, above and beyond in this instance means something that drives meaningful revenue or views, let's say on a video. And if it doesn't do those two things, it's actually not meaningful work. It could just be busy work.”

“I think burnout actually happens because we don't have processes. If we had processes, and systems, and people, and ways that we followed along to things, we wouldn't burn out.”

“I think one of the worst things you can do as a creator is hire the thing you think the business needs, not the thing you want. And so, take your pain off as the creator before you add in to the Uh, need of the business.”

“You shouldn't angel invest in like high growth startups unless you're already a millionaire. Like if you can afford to lose money, then I think angel investing makes sense.”

“everybody says, like, don't build angry. I'm like, wrong. Like, there's no greater fuel than being a little pissed off.”

“I think that 10 X is often easier than two X. That actually, if you try to build a really big business, you are gonna bumble fuck your way at least into a lifestyle business. But if all you try to do is build a lifestyle business, you're gonna end up building either a business that is a job, or not make enough money…”

“you can only save your way to zero. Uh, there is a bottom on it, and you gotta eat, and you gotta look cute, like you guys all do, and you gotta, like, go out and enjoy life, and so, um, I don't like the obsessive focus on savings culture, because I actually think it's much easier to earn than it is to save, and if you…”

“you are also more likely to make more money if your friend group has more money, and it doesn't mean we should leave people behind that, that aren't our aspiration. I'm not saying that. Bring them with you, but get a couple rich bitches in your group because it helps.”

“It's not product that's king. It's distribution that's king.”

“And so I think anybody that's telling you that actually doesn't realize that they have survivorship bias. They went on one thing and it worked, which is actually an anomaly, not normal. And simultaneously, they don't actually understand portfolio theory and the rule of diversification.”

“I do not believe the underpriced attention is on a platform. I believe the under price attention is in your niche and choosing your niche intelligently will catapult you.”

“And the way that you get intention, in my opinion, is you don't do content, you do community.”

“You don't wait for top talent to fit your role. When you find top talent, you bring them in.”

“Because they're going to be your next referral source. They're going to send you talent better than any recruiter.”

“culture doesn't drip down. It radiates out. It's like a cold. It spreads person to person, desk to desk.”

“if you're pretty serious in business, there's a great reason to, like, never settle a case if somebody comes after you, and you think that it's ridiculous, and they're just trying to be litigious. It's like, no, no, I will go and spend much more than it would ever take to settle with you, because I refuse to allow this…”

“the more you're a pro, the more you get to draw that line. So if you feel like you can't be authentically yourself to come to a job yet, and that is somehow important to you, that you can wear whatever you want, do whatever you want, get better. Because the better you are, the more you get away with.”

“Because the truth those guys know is that it's actually far easier to buy profits than it is to grow them, and yet we sell this dream that startups are the way to go, and that we should start from zero, even though 90% of them fail, most entrepreneurs only make 67,000 dollars a year that start a startup, and the first…”

“A lot of people don't realize that your only job as a CEO is this, that you have one job as a CEO, and this is what I tell all my teams. I am here to protect our ability to persevere. I'm here to make sure we survive. That's it. Everything else doesn't matter”

“AI cannot be your friend. Why? Because it can't have your same life experience. A friend is somebody who can sit there with you, who can travel through time with you, Who understands what it's like being human, who understands your perspective, and will Tell you the difficult things when you need to be told the…”

“They need the return on that dollar to be so significant that they hold you to a level that is actually irrational.”

“Some weird things happen in our culture today, where we think that if we fix things and somebody doesn't pay us for it, that's like, ugh, really? Like, I'm working at this company, and I shouldn't have to do this thing that's not my job. That's a terrible way to stay poor forever.”

“I really never believe in hiring people when they are on a losing streak. It's like, I don't believe on betting on sports teams when they're on a losing streak. It's the same thing. They've got to break that streak and then they can come and work for you.”

“Which is you have to almost water down your message slightly to go so wide. And it has a direct anti-correlation to conversion, aka getting people to buy things from you.”

“If you charge low prices, your product will be perceived as low value, increase your prices, and you will not only make more money, but people will actually use your product and value it more.”

“Also remember guys, you can only price yourself the absolute cheapest to the bottom. There is no value in being the second Most cheap.”

“Price sensitive customers are often less loyal anyway. They'll jump ship the second a cheaper option comes along. By raising prices, you filter out basically bargain hunters and find your true fans or what we call your right fit customers.”

“Moral of the story, guys, if you don't raise your prices, you won't have any margin. If you don't have any margin, you won't be able to beat your competitors, and the number one rule of business is whoever makes the most money wins because they can just pay more for your customers, and eventually, because you were…”

“Hotels aren't businesses. They're real estate with too many parts masquerading as a business.”

“Even at a smaller size, consulting firms, they require too much capital in the business attached to your consultants, aka labor costs. People are expensive. It's kind of also not a business, but a collection of individual jobs. So don't buy jobs.”

“Until AI completely takes over and can deep fake mimic everything, which is probably like tomorrow, you can't transition a personal brand to yourself. I've seen lots of people try to sell their face branded YouTube account, social site, or education business. Again, with their face all over it, it doesn't really work.”

“And I, in fact, think that if you work for a business right now where they tell you that it is a family, you should run away because it's not true. You don't fire your family unless, you know, they did something really gross. You don't, uh, you don't yell at your family in a performance review and tell them that…”

“But I think we should be honest about the fact that the best businesses are like teams. You trade players when they don't fit anymore. They trade you when they want a different salary or a different geography. You guys hope that you make each other better. You take care of each other. You exit in the right way. You…”

“In fact, if you're running a team right now in the business sense, one of the most important things that I've realized is you have to have built in incentive friction on your teams.”

“One of the other keys to teamwork that I've been thinking about a lot lately is I think personality hires got a really bad rap. So if you're a personality hire out there, I actually think you got a really big place. Um, there are a lot of reasons why you need a team that is completely different.”

“And today more than ever, I think attention is critical. And so one of the reasons I got online is because our businesses need the lifeblood of the 21st century highest form of leverage, which is attention.”

“And, uh, and you go to a startup, there's no way they're putting you through a training program. There's no way they're critiquing your PowerPoint skills. Um, you know, everybody's just barely treading water.”

“Lesson number one is you never get rich investing. You get rich earning. And so the only people who are going to tell you to go invest first to make your first million are people that are trying to sell you something. Because it's just really hard to make money investing without money. That's rule number one. Your…”

“I mean, most of the reasons that people don't work out when you hire them is, is not capability, it's effort. And so if you can decrease the likelihood that you won't work hard for them, you have a much higher likelihood of getting the gig.”

“I don't think you have to do it forever, but you should do it when you're young. And, um, if anybody's getting triggered thinking about, well, I wouldn't want to work for Cody because she's super tough, and she's going to make me work really hard. I think it's a tragedy, actually. I think, I think there's something…”

“One of my favorite questions is, when was the last time you, you pulled an all-nighter? You stayed up all night working on something that you loved? And a lot of times you can tell if somebody is an interested versus obsessed person by the fact that they're like, You know? Um, or they might say the opposite. You know…”

“I think it is, it's very hard these days to make a profitable business. I think there's never been a harder time to make a profitable business. Never been an easier time to start a business.”

“So rich people have gotten told no so many times. They've been rejected so many times that it almost just bounces off of them. They kind of go, yeah, I'm gonna do it anyway. Thanks for the feedback. I'm gonna try it. I think poor people They have confirmation bias of no. So when stuff has happened to them that's bad,…”

“And I think that's the difference also between allies, those are people who want you to win, and friends, who are people that want you to stay with them, whatever level they're at.”

“I don't think that people realize the repercussions of not allowing other people to rise with you. And in fact, your reputation is one of your most valuable assets”

“and then we do what's called inoculations against reputation, which is basically, uh, Can you say things a few times that you think are very, very true, but you know will be very, very unpopular? And if you do that so often, then people don't get that surprised by what you say. And I think Joe Rogan's a great example…”

“I think it is the peak of ego to be like, oh, I shouldn't let this person go because they have it better with me than anybody else. I don't know. I believe in their individual capacity to go and do something great that lights up their soul. And if this isn't it, then let's move them on to the next thing.”

“I think W-II is just your tax status. And actually, it doesn't matter. If you, are you not smarter than the average entrepreneur if you are a W-II employee, and you use the wages earned with zero risk, because you're working with somebody else, to invest in assets that then increase your income stream, but allow you to…”

“He said, when it's easy, do more. When it's hard, do something totally different. And I loved this principle. Easy, Keep going. Apply pressure. When it's hard, stop, think, change your frame.”

“Why do you think so many of us make money today? It's because we normalized 70 hour workdays with incredible amounts of output required. It sucks, I remember doing it, but you are much more likely to win if you are willing to do that.”

“If you want to achieve really high-level things, you have to be around others who have already achieved those things. So I often talk about this idea of you need to leave your hometown to grow.”

“Well, they're sitting there empty because in order for them to sell it, they'd have to mark down their portfolio, which means that they'd have to say, we told you investors this was worth a hundred dollars. It's actually worth 20. And because of that, they're going to have a ripple effect through their entire…”

“In some places, price controls are intelligent. Like for instance, we should be thoughtful about life-saving drugs and trying to make sure that we have price controls so people can have access to them and there doesn't become a massive amount of profiteering. But the problem becomes when we think that something that…”

“I do believe the truth that you shouldn't call people in your business, your family, because at the end of the day, you're probably not going to fire mom and dad unless they're really fucking awful, but you might have to let somebody go from one of your businesses.”

“This allows you to have group interaction and verbiage and language. Which is one of the most important parts to cult building, also culture building, which is really not that different at a company.”

“No 50 50 partnerships. Never accept marriage. It's no. Most partnerships end. And so, in my mind, you need to have one person who's in charge. You need to have a great exit plan. Start with the end in mind, because you will likely get divorced.”

“When you say your worst parts aloud, I do think you're uncancellable.”

“The truth of the matter is, is as often as possible, you can level up where you are the low man on the totem pole to the people around you. The faster you do that, the faster you can steal somebody's 10,000 hours.”

“Just because you started out with one group doesn't mean you should finish with them. And it doesn't mean they're less than you. It doesn't mean you're more than them. It simply means that you guys are moving at different speeds on a marathon.”

“the best performers have to narrow down their aperture as opposed to widen it to have unfair levels of, of success. So if you think about it this way, how have the best people, uh, in any industry achieved something incredible? Is it by doing what is average, normal, or shallow? Absolutely not. They go deep into one…”

“If those three things take up more than 20% of any conversation, you should move on.”

“80% of the people you interact with are not going to want you to be one cent more successful than they are. They want you to be just below where they are.”

“the only silver lining is that if you get through this all, the eye-numbing boredom, and you prove that you are not just okay but great, you will eventually get to do things you love and make more money than you ever imagined. However, it will feel kind of like slowly pulling off your fingernails one by one at first,…”

“I think bad bosses are the number one reason there are great entrepreneurs, and if there are less bad bosses, there'd be less great entrepreneurs.”

“You've said a statement that I am not sure is true, and the statement is, That no matter what, in order to have less stress, I need to make less money. I would say back to you, what if you don't? And what if it's in fact easy for you to not do that? And so once you start asking yourself questions like that, it just…”

“I think if you haven't played the game in a while, you have to play harder than everybody else and longer than everybody else, and there's basically no other way around it. If you want to get back in the game of being an employee, you can play harder than the rest of everybody else. The older you are, the harder that…”

“it really never ends well if you use the victim card. Your bosses are going to remember. It's not going to get you ahead long term.”

“And so, you know, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking grad school and you're thinking, you know, the next step, unless it is for a massively high increase in salary, a passion that you can't stop and you're in a good enough financial position Or something that you have to do in order to get to the…”

“if you have the capacity for violence, but not the need for violence, that's actually really important to humanity overall. I mean, we know this from the theory of disarmament, and what happens at a certain level, some people need to have arms in order for others to not push forward. So I do think there's a huge place…”

“We kind of believe that you need to have Financial freedom, typically, before you can have physical freedom, aka, like, work where you want, when you want, on what you want, and then finally you could have philosophical freedom, freedom of, of your mind.”

“It seems like there's like a life hack from like, uh, age 18 to let's call it 35 ish. If somewhere in there you can move around and get like the fluidity and open the aperture to what's available in life. Then you have this long runway. And if you don't do that, it seems you're less monetarily successful. And then at…”

“And that works great if you're a venture capitalist, and you're just, like, looking for the next connect to To invest in, but it doesn't work very well if you want to build something meaningful, and it requires a lot of your mental focus.”

“People try to go out and get the gnarliest, meanest divorce attorney that they can get. And that's actually a terrible idea. You'll spend a ton of money on your divorce attorneys. And instead you guys decided to commit to something for life. Try to exit it as peacefully as you entered it.”

“One, I think jobs are just more valuable MBAs that pay you.”

“You like your Tesla? You wouldn't have it if fucking Elon wasn't a psychopath out there working super hard every day. And the same thing goes for most of the things that we take for granted. It's because some irrational human Was so driven for the pursuit that they loved, that they labored on, that eventually led to…”

“That's what minimum wage and those jobs are meant for. They're not meant To stay for you for your entire career. You're meant to climb the ladder from a skills perspective, and then you won't have to work so many hours unless you want to.”

“But if you master budgeting, that does not make a billionaire. If you master deal making, that makes billionaires.”

“If you can steal from your top competitor, you should.”

“And if you have money, And expertise and like audience or a name, you should be getting unfair terms every single time.”

“There's no way that mini golf courses over the longterm are going to be the best use of land for most locations. And so eventually you're going to get your business sort of taken from you by your landlord, which is okay if it's a longterm and you just get to kind of like cashflow it on in the meantime, but, but I would…”

“I would be out there right now going after every one of their client lists, even if they were unrelated and doing discounts and coupon codes, giving a rev share to the owner who probably could use it and taking their client space. And that's how I would buy distressed assets. I wouldn't spend a dime.”

“Once you've made a few million dollars, and I mean that literally, then I think go into angel investing, or if you're on a path where You're making really good money and you've made at least half a million, a million bucks. Then I think you can start angel investing, but until then, you know, let other people lose…”

“if you don't have an unfair advantage, if you can't like write down why specifically you're going to win instead of somebody else, you should be really careful speculating on stocks because the big boys don't really do it.”

“It's hard to be ideologically free. It's hard to be time free. It's hard to really have any freedom if you don't have financial freedom.”

“And I think that's what deep discounting does. It trains customers to buy the discounts of the product. So if a customer only says yes at 30% off, that is your price now.”

“If more than half of your deals only close when you close them, you have a hero complex business”

“Custom, custom work at standard pricing means you're effectively donating your margin to your pickiest clients.”

“Could your current price pay somebody else to deliver the work and still leave you cash on the side? Profit. If the answer is no, delegation is mathematically impossible for you.”

“First you determine how much money does your work make or save your client each year. Then I want you to take that number, plug it into this equation. I'm going to put it up on the screen, but it's basically your price equals 10 to 20% of the value you created for this user. You charge 10% of that value if you're…”

“A price is only good or bad by comparison. So control the comparison, anchor it to the cost of doing nothing.”

“each time you swoop in and try to fix things yourself, especially where those problems are outside of your unique subject matter expertise, you basically remove the highest dollar use of your time for whatever seems urgent, but is really just in front of you.”

“what happens is you keep diving in front of every problem, and your brain gets rewired neuron by neuron to prefer being needed to winning, being free, or making more money.”

“if there's a task that touches you more than twice a week, it gets a written system or a named owner, and I like you to do it by Friday.”

“The thing is, buyers don't buy jobs, they buy machines that make them money, whether you, the previous owner, shows up or not. And people don't give you more money if you are the entirety of a division or a group. If the whole operation lives in your head, there's really nothing on the table to purchase or to pay you…”

“Money amplifies a life that is already working. It basically can't rescue a life that is completely not working. So if the machine you built is eating your marriage, your health, your weekends, the next zero on the revenue line does nothing for you.”

“And I think this is the disaster that most entrepreneurs are doing, which is like chasing all three at once and not trying to filter advice through what you want for your life as an adult with the Willpower to choose yourself. So you're like, no, I'll have freedom and an empire and a payday. And like, you can't pick…”

“Like on this path, the metric that matters is profit per hour of your time. And I break this down specifically so you can see a nice little graph on it, but revenue for you would be a vanity number, like a two million dollar business and it nets you 500 K on 15 hours a week. Would beat a ten million dollar business…”

“The first one I hear the most is, I'll hire when we hit X number. Like, no you won't. The number's going to gonna move every time you get close, uh, because it's more about control.”

“Do not take the seat back the first time someone runs it at 80% of your standard, because they're going to. If you have five people running at 80% versus you at 95%, guess who wins? Your 95% was costing you your entire life.”

“The gold standard is presence without dependence. So you're close enough to sense when something bad's going on. You're far enough that it runs without you, like not absent or indispensable.”

“Your CEO, as a CEO, your real job is really three things, which is give a vision so big other people see their dream is bigger underneath you. Create systems inside of your business so that the business runs without you, and be so delusional optimistic that other people believe you can succeed.”

“I think businesses drift towards death quietly. They never run right into a wall on them. You always are kind of like moving your way towards it, but ignoring all the signs. And this checkpoint actually catches it early.”

“take the single assumption your dream depends on. Usually some version of like people will pay for this. Design the cheapest possible way to get a real yes or no from a real customer. Like one offer email, one weekend of doing the thing manually. Run it inside seven days.”

“pick one phrase you want people to remember, and then move that phrase through different levels. Start with the idea, then make it visual, then raise the stakes, then make it personal.”

“A newsletter with a 100,000 engaged subscribers can be more valuable than a million rented followers.”

“It's one of the biggest differences between amateurs and pro. Amateurs are rushy. They're like afraid of silence. They fill all the words, so, um, you know, I guess. If you want to be a great speaker, silence is not empty. Remember, silence is like tension. It's sexy. It's confidence. It tells the audience this…”

“If you want to make a point, do not start with the point. Start with a moment when someone discovered the point.”

“So every time you soften the truth, I want you to think that you buy yourself a few seconds of comfort, but you cost someone else weeks or months of improvement.”

“The most respectful thing you can do for a competent adult is treat them like one. They can handle the truth or you guys shouldn't be working together.”

“Like half the time you learn context that might change the picture. The other half, they talk their own way to the fix and then they own it.”

“Often, I think in the beginning, you want to try to give tough feedback in private until you've created a culture where everybody's so used to feedback. That giving it in public isn't that big of a deal.”

“I think most workplace drama exists because people are having the wrong conversation with the wrong person and not willing to say it to their face.”

“if you do that and you stop being everybody's emotional middleman, The team is going to start handling its own friction instead of laundering it through you.”

“We used to have this graph back when I worked at Vanguard a million years ago and the graph was like, uh, S and P 500 per return, which was, you know, let's call it 10% on average over 10 years. And then it was average investor return, which was like three and a half, four percent. And then it was, uh, average…”

“Now these companies are, you know, nine, 1011 years in, and a lot of those gains are gone. Uh, so you gotta be careful with that big pop.”

“The value that you deposit minus the favor you withdraw equals how much relationship capital you have. The truth is most people go negative on the very first call, and then they wonder why nobody picks up the second time.”

“If you want to get into big rooms, stay there and get re-invited. Never make an introduction without permission ever. Ever, ever double opt in or die.”

“But the thing is, powerful people never ever forget who showed up while it was on fire. Like, everyone can clap at a win. A loss is the only thing that tells you who's real. So I like to think about it like the times you showed up when it was burning minus the times you cashed in right after. That's when you learn,…”

“I don't think the trick is actually being open to everyone. It's engineering a few channels where it is actually okay to tell the truth.”

“Keep at least a few friends who will happily tell you you are being a full-blown idiot, because success actually removes all the friction and difficulty from life. Your job is to manually put some back in”

“the truth that you actually get is the truth times how honest people are with you times how many layers you have in the company. And so each layer passes along, I don't know, let's say, 90% hard truth. That sounds fine. But 90% across five layers is .59%. But 90% across five layers is 59%. By the time it hits the…”

“I think what feels like unteachable instinct is usually just a set of rules you've never written down.”

“Most people start at delegate and end up paying someone to do work that should have never been done in the first place.”

“A chief of staff is someone senior enough to be a representative version of you in the room. They can negotiate on your behalf. They can take home meetings off your plate and sit across from your other executives instead of you.”

“Most are someone who hasn't finished thinking, hoping to think out loud at you. A vague gotta second protects the asker and taxes you. A brief forces them to do the thinking before they spend your time.”

“When a task belongs to whomever, or more likely everybody, or the team, it belongs to nobody, which means it belongs to you.”

“If a project would have flopped without me swooping in, then swooping in robs the owner of the exact lesson that would have made them great.”

“if you have any of that wiggle in you, any of that concern about your pricing, concern about your value, it bleeds down The business like a waterfall.”

“the lifetime skill accumulation is going to be what actually pays you more long term.”

“And I think that relentless focus on the thing that matters instead of the thing that's right in front of you is really, really hard and rare. And maybe it's not as hard as we think it is. It's just, you have to be willing to kill social, social niceties to focus on what matters.”

“by the time a decision has come to me, it's only two bad choices that are left. And so if it's easy choices, if, if there's any easy choice or good choice, somebody else has already made it. But when you're at the top, the only options are usually bad or not great. Otherwise it would have been handled already.”

“Broke people buy for price. Rich people buy for risk mitigation.”

“Wealthy buyers protect four currencies above almost everything else. Time, risk, reputation, and control.”

“Risk is the hidden one, and it's the one most salespeople completely miss. Successful people are surrounded by other people pitching them, advising them, managing their money, asking for more money. And so every time they say yes, it's exposure. So every new vendor is a possible weak link with their name attached to it”

“If you take away their sense of control and you stop being a vendor, then you actually start being a threat. You're, you're trying to box them into something. They don't like to be boxed in.”

“So you don't open with, you're doing this wrong. You open with, you've clearly built something that works. That's why this gap has to be closed.”

“In sales, everyone fights over this. It's called the price anchor. But the real anchor gets set earlier when you frame the problem. This is called priming. So, let the buyer decide the conversation is about, this is expensive, and you'll spend the rest of it defending the price. If you instead frame it as, this…”

“your job isn't to decide what they can afford. Not your job. Your job is to make the value clear enough that they can decide whether it matters. Show them the outcome, not the price.”

“premium buyers don't punish confidence, you guys. They actually punish your uncertainty.”

“If you've got an optimizer on your hands, give yourself room to move, but you're never going to slash the price like you're clearing mattresses on a holiday weekend. We're not going to do that. You're going to give the concession a name and a reason.”

“Drag a delegator through 17 options, and you're creating work, which is the one thing they're paying you to avoid. For them, the close is speed and certainty.”

“Maybe the most useless sentence in sales is just checking in.”

“smart buyers, they can actually smell what I call borrowed status. So don't name name drop just to look important. I want you to use a relevant example to make the decision feel safer.”

“And restraint is one of the most underrated signals you can give in selling. The moment you're willing to say, don't buy the biggest thing, the buyer actually believes you when you say, buy this thing instead.”

“When you sell to rich people, the prize was never their money. The prize is their trust. Money follows trust. Referrals follow trust. The next five clients follow trust. So that rich client you close, that doesn't stay one client. They become five or 10 because you made them look smart for choosing you.”

“Your motivation to do a task equals the expectancy times value divided by impulsiveness times delay.”

“So again, you don't have a willpower problem. You're not lazy. You have an equation problem. Willpower is really hard to scale. Equations, though, they can be solved.”

“That specificness Is the entire mechanism. So kind of hands future you a finished decision. So you don't have to argue about it in the morning.”

“Don't try to make up the mess day with a bigger action. Have you ever done that? You're like, I missed my walk today, so I won't do 10,000 steps. I'll do 20,000 steps. And you're like, well, that's ludicrous. I don't have time. We don't want to do that because it actually triggers the avoidance reflex harder because…”

“the more successful you get, the more you forget that, you know, your presence can have negative or positive effects. Like when you give feedback, sometimes you have to be careful at which levels of the game because it can just ruin somebody, uh, or simultaneously they want to hang out with you more, even though you're…”

“you can change your location and even change your title, but if you are a people pleaser and you stay well, and if you don't know how to delegate and you never figure it out, it's really problematic because you, you can, you build like this, like constraint that isn't even there.”

“Speed is just compressing the distance between you and reality.”

“Information doesn't age like wine. It ages like milk, which ain't good.”

“I have a rule. It's called the 24 hour rule. And now I think it's even a shorter rule. Might be the two hour rule now. But the rule is when you meet with somebody that you want something from, you should Overwhelm them with the speed at which you respond back after the meeting with something impressive.”

“If the meeting didn't produce one or the other, it was therapy. That's not a meeting. If the next meeting can't produce ether, cancel it.”

“When you're good at something you don't love, the golden handcuffs get tighter.”

“you never, Sell anybody anything. You only find people who are predisposed to already want what you're selling. And if somebody hasn't already done the action you want them to do, don't ever assume they're going to do that action. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

“I think the, the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich.”

“You don't need to be right every time. You need to stay in the game long enough to be right once in a really big way. Then all of your wrongs get wiped away.”

“Fast thinking or being quick on your feet is actually a myth. So I think what you're really seeing is fast structuring. So all the research that we've been doing shows the best communicators aren't improvising. They're slotting ideas into frameworks they use hundreds of times.”

“If you want to figure out what the job of a CEO is, it's communicate well, get other people to buy into your dream, and understand how to solve complex problems using a series of unrelated disciplines or networks.”

“The memo doesn't just communicate the idea. It is the idea.”

“Curiosity isn't triggered by knowing nothing. It's triggered by knowing almost enough. Like a partial answer. A question, but not the resolution. A setup. No payoff. The brain experiences this as a physical discomfort.”

“Before you explain something, create a reason to care about what you're explaining. I do not want you to lead with the answer. I want you to lead with the gap.”

“In conversation, this means starting with the conclusion, then walking backwards through the evidence. And your brain It actually resists doing this in storytelling because our brains are made to chronologically order the events. That feels natural, but natural to you is torturous to your listener.”

“the human brain actually doesn't care about abstractions. It doesn't store them. In fact, the human brain stores images, stories, specific moments.”

“I want you to still remember that you're not competing with the machines. You're competing with the humans who use them.”

“A direct, meaningful relationship with your audience is something AI can't create yet, and that's where you have to use technology or you will die by others who use technology.”

“My working theory right now is that emotion is our moat.”

“If you can create 10,000 images in a minute, the person who can say, no, no, no, not that, that's crap, this wins.”

“As AI sort of lowers the cost of creation, I think the real bottleneck becomes psychological. Maybe it's courage, like courage to put your ideas out there, and to not let them be a gross generalization of everybody else's nonsense”

“Because when everything is too polished, imperfection is the interesting part. Imperfection is real. Not all the other stuff.”

“if you can actually harness the power of AI to increase the speed, scope, and depth of your work, you're going to be just fine. But if you use it, not as an editor, but as the doer in everything and the decider, then I think we're going to be like idiocracy with a bunch of people hooked up to VR, like, you know, veins…”

“I, I don't think there's ever been a better moment to build an AI first business and eat every existing market's lunch because the incumbents are too busy putting out fires, sitting in meetings, slapping AI first on their pitch decks instead of actually building things.”

“if you're fit, or if you're physically good-looking, or well-styled, but you're right, it's not, I have a hot Gucci jacket or something. It's like, if I am a type of person that is able to style myself, and I am attractive, That actually has real reciprocal effects and probably is worth spending money on, which to me…”

“So the research on linguistic hedging shows that excessive qualifiers reduce perceived competence and authority, especially in high status environments.”

“So when something is easy to understand, people judge it as more truthful and more intelligent. So ironically, overexplaining actually reduces your fluency. It makes simple things feel heavy.”

“But when you rush your most important points, you subconsciously signal, I need to get through this before you reject it.”

“Smart, insecure speakers try to prove they're smart. Secure, smart speakers make everyone else feel smart.”

“If a business requires you to be brilliant to survive, it's actually a pretty shitty business.”

“some of the best deals, they're never for the public. They're only behind closed doors.”

“solitude isn't automatically good because it magnifies whatever the fuck is in there, you know?”

“if you are a high performer, Like I consider myself to be, you actually have a higher likelihood of this happening to you because society over rewards competence. So we're really good at ignoring internal signs. Your persona is highly reinforced.”

“you don't get paid To play the game, you get paid to practice. The game is the highlight, the stage, the awards, the applause. That is not what the money is for. The money is for the boring, invisible, humiliating work that happens long before anyone claps.”

“reframing emotional accusations reduces hostility faster than a direct rebuttal.”

“This is key if you want to be a CEO in business. You need to negotiate forward, not backward. Instead of replaying the old scene for the 12th time, you can say, next time this happens, what do you need from me? Here's what I need from you.”

“Both have utility, but the catch is exploitation just gets you efficiency a little bit better. Exploration is where you get breakthroughs.”

“Can't only means it's illegal. It's physically impossible, or it is against some sort of contractual terms we have written down in ink or blood. And if it is not those three things, then can't's not the right word.”

“Pattern one, they set far fewer goals than normal people. Two or three directional goals, thousands of executive decisions continuously over time.”

“Pattern two, their goals are binary, not incremental. So, make life multi-planetary. Dominate microprocessors. Become the most customer-obsessed company on Earth. Become a mom. Find a husband. Grow your business. Binary goals. They are qualitative in some ways, but they lead to massive quantitative outcomes.”

“top speakers or the people that you look up to or the CEOs you look up to in the world, they look pretty calm when they speak because they're actually trying to regulate the room's nervous system without anyone noticing.”

“I sit quiet and within like 30 to 90 seconds, the entire energy shifts back towards you because people mirror these micro behaviors faster than they actually process your words.”

“And questions shut that down instantly. It like immediately forces the brain to come into the present moment, whether it wants to or not. And this is how you pull anyone back into the conversation, even if they were drifting.”

“If you're in a sexy space, you're competing with 100,000 of smart people. If you're in a boring space, you're competing with less because boring is often not as competitive.”

“I think the richer you are, the faster you move on average. And the one thing I've always found with knowing as many billionaires as we've gotten to know over the years is like, they're just faster than anybody imagines. I think a lot of times people think they're always smarter. I'm not sure that's always the case,…”

“if you want to get rich, go talk to a hundred customers that tell you no to get one. And if you want to buy a business, go look at a hundred deals to find one. Like every answer is basically quantity and more. And if you don't pile on more pain and failure, you're never going to have the thing that you want.”

“the best way to get something you were unqualified for is to show, don't tell is to do proof of work, not proof of resume.”

“If you stay in the place that you were born, it is really hard to change the human who you were.”

“I think they lie to you guys when they say that you have to live on your couch in order to have success. I do not think you have to do that. I think you have to do very hard things, but I don't think you have to go to the point of bankruptcy and breaking and, and all of that in order to win”

“when you have something hard to say, say it to somebody's face, no matter what, you will have more respect For not going around somebody else's back, and instead having the cojones, as we would say in Spanish, to say it straight up.”

“We've habit stacked for so long. Our number one priority as being business related, uh, or money related that, you know, we just have to rewire our system to say, no, no, no, this actually makes me money here, but it's very hard to see the direct line correlation between my workout and my balance sheet. You know, that…”

“And the truth of it is, your team is not going to do that. That is going to have to be a you thing at most levels of the business.”

“And what I've found in investing in hundreds of businesses now, it's almost always fixable to your point. Almost always. But the reason it won't be is because you don't move fast enough. You don't have people who have been there before around you, and you don't focus on profit. You focus on what is going to look good,…”

“This is also how you never have somebody repeat your idea to a group of people and be able to take credit for it again, right? When you speak decisively and you say something in front of a group, it would be ridiculous for somebody else to reframe your ideas and take them as your own.”

“Respect is about how fast you can signal, I'm a friend, which is trust and warmth, and you can rely on me. Competence. The faster you can signal those two things, the more people like you and respect you.”

“You've basically non-committed just as much as the other person has, but you sound like you have authority even while you're saying, I don't know, I got to talk to a couple of people, it'll probably take me a day or two, right? Instead, we're pausing, we're framing, and we're saying we're going to regroup at a date,…”

“I believe that what's happening right now is a lack of urgency bias. What you're really saying is, I think you guys are slow, like really slow. But because we frame it in this fancier way, it's harder to push back on.”

“Now leaders earn respect by voicing uncomfortable truths. It breaks tension. It actually makes people believe in you more than anyone else in the room.”

“Especially in a world of AI where everything's easier to build, the moat is community. It's, it's how many people want to buy your stuff because they want to associate with you.”

“The best idea, uh, SOPs ideally you take a screenshot or you take a picture of it and everybody signs off what they did. And this sounds kind of annoying and over the top, but I learned it from boring businesses because that's what you have to do with technicians.”

“Like what you are doing is building a Rolodex of pieces of content that are your life resume. And so let's make sure that it's really good and that what we do is so interesting that when somebody else sees it, uh, they wanna steal even the napkin that we left behind at the bar, like Picasso.”

“You don't always have to be the expert if you can borrow somebody else's 10,000 hours.”

“He's a billionaire multiple times over. He runs something called Bridgewater Capital, and people still think he's a fake. So like, if that's gonna happen to him, it's gonna happen to all of us, which I think gave me some chill on like, all right, like people just might not like you and that's okay.”

“we try to do what we call show don't tell. So oftentimes we're on the site with a small business owner. And they're showing us, like, how did we build this? Can I see the truck? How much did it cost? Can I see the return for that? Can we look at the spreadsheets you have for historicals? Can we treat, treat it a little…”

“The only thing that really matters in due diligence is two things if you're buying a company. Uh, are the numbers real? Because we buy, we don't buy hopes and dreams. We buy realities and cashflow. And two, um, does it seem like the numbers that they gave me will continue? So like, do I believe what they're telling me?…”

“Pros obsess on price, pros obsess on terms, amateurs obsess on price.”

“They say that the editor is the last storyteller. Something to think about, I think, in content where a lot of people go, well, I'm going to write the idea, I'm going to shoot it, and then I'll just ship it off to, I don't know, whatever, some outsourced VA. The last storyteller is your editor, I believe.”

“first when you start a business, content or otherwise, uh, you are everything, right? You are the generalist. You're the janitor, you're the CEO, you're the poster, you're the editor, you're all of it. Then the second level you hire generalists. So the VA is responding to emails, posting stuff, editing things, et…”

“Imagine we're in a boat right now and I give you one direction and I give you one or what happens? You own a fucking circle. That doesn't work. So how does real progress happens? You go left, right, Left. Right. And that allows for forward movement, but it feels a little bit like this while you're on the journey.”

“And I think the truth of the matter is that most people are talking about stuff online because it's a trend, because they think they should talk about it, not because it's something they're uniquely skilled at.”

“So you either have done it or you document it. Those are the two ways to do it.”

“If you wanna be cool, you gotta do cool shit. So, like, when you go do cool shit, your life is the content. You don't have to come up with ideas. You live it every single day.”

“They do what I call start small and then lose all. It's like saying, I want to build the Sistine Chapel. And then you go, the first thing I'm going to do is pick out which candles I want inside of the building. Way too tiny. If you did that, And reverse engineered from candles all the way to the foundation, you'd never…”

“It's the businesses you work in, pay right now, that you compete with, and that you get paid by. It's literally everything that you make money on your P&L from, everything that you spend money on your P&L from, everything on your credit card statement, everything in your Venmo. Those are the businesses you want to buy…”

“because what's the number one reason why somebody hires one small business over another? You're the first to respond.”

“when you have all the reps, The, the thing that you propose to have the reps at, you're not so scared to have the confrontation. And so some of the part about being a strong man, or I think a competent human is like, if somebody comes at me and says, or somebody comes at you and says, Hey, you haven't really done this…”

“go live an incredible life. Go do something adventurous, go take huge risks, and that will lead to content so good, you will never have to sit in a room and come up with ideas.”

“I think half of entrepreneurship is just pain tolerance plus consistency.”

“In order to sell things, To people who don't have a lot of money. You have to sell a huge amount of volume to be able to live. Volume is hard to get when you're not a very good operator.”

“No one who buys a Birkin Bag is trying to ask for discounts. This is a customer that actually wants to pay more for the alligator extra ridiculous thing on top.”

“So if you think about rich people, if they have an infinite amount of money, they can buy almost anything, right? Except more time. So if you can do something that allows them to buy back their time, they will pay you for it, potentially up to a complete no cap at the top, which I really like.”

“They aren't price sensitive. They're value sensitive.”

“If you want to sell to wealthy customers, you got to ask yourself the rule of two. Does your offer hit at least two of these categories? If you're selling convenience, add exclusivity. If you're selling status, add scarcity. If you're selling privacy, add convenience.”

“if you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money.”

“the only embarrassing way that you can do this is by trying to pretend you're something you're not. Because then people can see. But if you're pretty candid about the fact that, yeah, man, I'm not making as much as I want to, and I know you guys have seven figures over here. I'm working on my first five. I'd love to…”

“So in business, unlike sports, we don't fall to the levels we practice. We fall to the level of those we hire.”

“I believe that the internet and attention is the most powerful weapon that you have today in the 21st century, and if you have money, you can buy attention, uh, but if you don't have money, you can't buy attention”

“Make yourself so useful that you become so valuable to them for zero dollars that they end up eventually wanting to pay you a lot of zeros.”

“if you want to be a leader in a business and you don't want to hate your business and hate your life, you have to name and frame everything so that you can automate things and then eventually delegate and outsource it. Otherwise you don't have a business. You have a job.”

“They use an un-grandfathering strategy, so you don't get to stay in your price point forever, at some point you just got to keep moving up, and they realize that if they have the best content in the world, people will continue to pay.”

“This is also why you want to sell more things to rich people because they actually much more value convenience and continuance as opposed to price and discounts.”

“I have not met a business yet that does not need multiple price tiers. Every single business does.”

“Usually there's the rule of 20 to a hundred. So a 20 to a hundred percent premium for commercial work is standard practice.”

“price changes don't always have to mean you charge more. It might mean you charge less, but they have to pay more up front.”

“Remind your customer how they trusted you instead of reminding them how long they've been with you and how you don't care.”

“first you imitate. Then you iterate. Then you innovate. Not the other way around, you know.”

“Please don't do fifty-fifty partnerships up front with no milestones and giving them all your money away up front. That's not how this works.”

“Your largest problem won't be your gross margin, AKA what percentage you make on each item you buy and sell. It'll be your net profit. And getting enough volume to handle your fixed costs.”

“Dry cleaners appear to be a stable, reliable business, but the truth is the chemicals used in dry cleaning are often toxic. And if you're not up to code, the cleanup costs can be insane.”

“if you're not capable of having difficult conversations to the point where you start to enjoy them because you learn from them, You'll probably never be very successful.”

“there's one real skill set if you want to make a ton of money in investing and it is asking a lot of questions continuously. And never being scared that you don't know the answer because, uh, you're, you're, it's a, it's a, You know, zero sum game. You either get all the information to make the best decision or you…”

“if you want to get fit, if you want to get financially free, you have to be okay setting boundaries for other people to stay out of if they are not going to help you progress because we are just not strong enough as individual willpowered beings to have willpower all the time against everything.”

“I never really trust someone who hasn't pushed back against not only The other side, but their side. Because you have to be willing to do both in order to have, like, a reasonable rational debate.”

“Most people think that they want to learn tactics or tools I think the best way to learn is case studies. That's why Harvard, for instance, has the biggest library in the world of business case studies. Because once you've seen somebody else's playbook, you can figure out how to re-engineer it.”

“Once you get to somebody who's a little bit older, who's been in the game a long time, they're starting to think about legacy, not income. You want to find your mentors when they're focused on legacy.”

“Hey, Cody, uh, I would love to do anything you need You know, please tell me how I can help. Now why? Because what are you actually doing? You're giving me homework. I don't know you. I don't know what you're good at. I don't know if I should trust you. And you're asking me what you can do for me and I got to go figure…”

“The third thing that you should never do in an interview is come without something to give. So even when you're in an interview and you're not getting paid, you might not get the job. I love when people bring me an idea, and so you should come into the interview and say, hey, I don't know if this is useful, but I was…”

“Almost every business has what I call the one data point. There's one data point that if you could figure this out, everything else would be easier. Truth of the matter when you're building a business, it's almost always referrals.”

“You sound way more sophisticated when you talk about all the reasons why things won't work. You sound Pollyanna as fuck when you say that you might be capable of a lot.”

“And then with financial freedom, it wasn't that I wanted to work less, it was that I don't want other people to assert their will on me.”

“It's the best way to make more money is to figure out, one, are you a cost center or a profit center? And then two, how much of a profit center or a cost center are you? And if you can do that, it's not just that you're helping your boss and the company. You are now thinking like an owner for the first time ever.”

“So I think when you're in your twenties, you're in your learning phase. You still want to try to increase your earnings, but if I had to choose between earning more or learning in that period, I'd optimize for learning because learning has unlimited upside potential.”

“when rich people see hungry, driven, competent humans, by and large they want to help because it's rare and you are somehow a mirror for them.”

“I think the best way to get mentors today is go work for them. You know, don't, don't ask you to do stuff one off, go to the highest performing companies you think you can get into. And if they're not that switch to another one because you get paid to get mentored.”

“the more pain you can tolerate in business, the higher likelihood you'll succeed over time. It's just shots on goal”

“If it's the first rodeo and the first time you've ever run a business, do one thing really well until that thing is profitable, self-sustainable, and you don't have to focus on it a hundred percent of the time. A hundred, that's my rule.”

“when you become really successful, you are a mirror on the things somebody else could have been, and so you are a reflection of every decision that they made that was short-term as opposed to long-term, and so I've lost many a friend by the mirror”

“these friendships end up materially increasing our happiness, these worthless friends, whereas these transactional friendships actually end up in many ways decreasing our happiness.”

“If you mute, block these people, ignore, they don't exist in your sphere. They're not in the room with you ever. They're not in your business. They're not in your friend group. You're not shaking hands with them. So the only way they exist is if you allow them, which is actually a fascinating sort of phenomenon to…”

“people who are very famous and well-known on the internet, they're obsessed with their reputation and brand. It is never by accident. This shit is cultivated. It is created. It is mocked up. It is PowerPointed.”

“I think the fastest way to make money when you have no money is find other people who already have something valuable and sell it to other people.”

“if you did that with a boomer based business where that boomer wants more sales, needs somebody young and hungry, you could negotiate part of that business just to apprentice for them and take it over over the long time using seller financing. And that I think is so underutilized today”

“And if you don't have money right now, and you don't know how to make it, one of the best ways to start is just to learn to negotiate things that you don't want to”

“In my definition, good business equals profitable, cash flowing, what I call a cash flow versus cash suck business, so you get paid up front for a service, not after you provide a service. Sustainable, it can exist for a long time. Historical, it has existed for a long time. Understandable, you can explain it to…”

“Three things, three numbers you need to look at. If you want to figure out if you have a company that needs to sell more things or needs to create better things, you need to figure out, one, what's your referral rate? How often do your customers tell somebody else That they need to buy something from you. Two, how…”

“Oftentimes your first hire in a business Needs to be somebody who can do the opposite of what you can do.”

“I think most of the reasons why good hires do not work out is because the person and the problem set has not been clearly defined.”

“The right ask is, how do I create a vision so big That other people think their vision is bigger with me. And then the second question is, how do I become so good that they want to be with me and work with me because they think that I'm better in some instances. And if you can't do those two things, you'll never…”

“When you start your sentence with, if I were you, That's not empathy. You're not them. You're making it about you.”

“I found the people who are the most successful typically have the least knowledge ego out there. Not that we don't all have big egos. I'm sure you have a big ego in many ways, but you're like, no, no, no. I don't care where the information comes from. If it's better than me, smarter than me, gonna make me more money,…”

“I do think your, your worst decisions won't usually be the actions taken, but the humans chosen”

“And so even in, like, a small group of five or six people, the way to fix that is usually you call them out. You go, oh, hey, hey, Bob, like, how's it going? You thought about that the other day, didn't you? And then they're like, fucking put the computer down, right?”

“everything in business is just how fast can I make mistakes that won't kill me so that I can learn the next lesson and move forward in the game.”

“I think we got to talk about money more because money is really just one thing. It's just, I get to assert my will more on you, and you get to assert it less on me. The more I have on it, the more I push back on the world, and I create my own reality with this, like, green piece of paper.”

“in order to make money, you actually have to not tell me what you want to do. You have to tell me what you're willing to give up or sacrifice in order to get it.”

“And what I realized pretty quickly is the language is shallow, which means there's not many levels to the game of you becoming at least financially free. Now, you becoming the master, the top one percent, the 10%, a billionaire, that language is deep. That is Mandarin. But in order for you to start making a couple…”

“our little lizard brain cannot tell the difference between checking off a did I get up at 5:45 a.m. instead of six a.m. off the list as different from did I close a 10,000 dollar client today? Literally, our little lizard brains can't tell the difference between the two. So we fill up our days with a bunch of tasks…”

“Four is take more risk than seems reasonable. Most people don't succeed because they might work hard hours, they might work long hours, They might have a skill set that's valuable, which would be something like, let's say a pipe welder. That's a very valuable skill set, but they never take risk. They work for somebody…”

“In a market in which we're coming into a recession, in which things might get harder, you are probably going to be happier with a plumbing company that everybody needs, as opposed to a gaming company online, as opposed to starting that e-commerce store that you saw with some one-off widget that nobody really actually…”

“if the ads have been running for a long period of time, you know that the ad has been working. So if you look at the brand new ads, I don't know, maybe they work, maybe they don't, but if they've been running for a few months, okay, this ad is working.”

“I think one of the keys in success in your bank account is how good are you like one to five 1015, 20, and your small teams.”

“Your people actually are watching the way that you let people leave a company more than anything else. They are watching the way that you let high performers go and the way that you let low performers go. And when you let a high performer go and you talk shit about them, they will never forget that. Because they know…”

“When it comes to being a CEO that your people love, make sure that you don't confuse being loved and being liked.”

“most fights happen in transition moments. Fights don't typically happen during a continuous pattern. They happen in between coming home from work into the door. They happen leaving from the house to the airport. They happen from, you know, leaving a meeting and jumping into another meeting.”

“sometimes I think a lot of women today, if you're struggling to find somebody to be with, um, we have to be careful the stories that we tell ourselves. And so if you're out there saying men are bad, and they don't want a woman that works, and Um, you know, you're never gonna meet somebody because you're not this…”

“government, it's so fascinating. It's, it's really the only entity where power is determined by how much money you spend, not how much money you make.”

“I think for a lot of jobs post the industrial revolution, where we became knowledge workers instead, we just flipped how we measure work. And so now, Instead of measuring output, we didn't take the time to figure out how to measure output for knowledge workers, so we just said time. We said no matter what, no matter…”

“That thing where you say, no, that doesn't work for me. No, I'm not that interested in it. Then it opens the door. You're leaving open a little wedge for somebody to come back to you and say, hey, um, Why aren't you interested? Why doesn't that work for you? If I just say, no, thank you, there's no door. There's no,…”

“I think that's where the people should spend their very first dollars. Like skip the Gucci, skip the Fendi, skip any sort of expensive things, and outsource the menial tasks.”

“That is what they don't tell you about your first job, is that it won't actually crush you with the difficulty. It'll crush you with the banality and torturous meaninglessness of it all, because you don't get the right to earn to start. And even worse, you don't get the right to challenging problems.”

“I think job hopping is totally fine, but it shouldn't be lateral. So lots of different ways for you to jump a job. You can jump a job from side to side. You could jump a job from up and down, and you want to make sure that as often as possible, you're jumping from down to up.”

“It's the easiest way to make money is to make more money doing the current thing that you're already doing with one or two conversations.”

“If you want to make more money in negotiating a salary when you're jumping jobs, one of my favorite ways to do that is using what's called a shadow influence.”

“it's always going to annoy your boss, because what are you doing? You're just saying, like, I want to take more money out of your pocket and put it into mine. And, like, we're humans, and so that's how they're going to respond to you, at least physically. So, as much as you can put yourself on their side of the table…”

“pick your side hustle kind of slowly and bail on it quickly if you see that there's not product market fit.”

“if you're a services based business like you are, so that means that you're trading, you know, your skill set and time for somebody else's dollars. Those are the fastest businesses that, you know, give you your cash on cash return right away, like give you your money back.”

“if you work for a big company or a company with a good name, that can last you Like, decades. I haven't worked at Goldman Sachs since, like, 2008, and I was, like, a peon analyst nobody back then, and yet the first thing people say about me still is that I worked at Goldman Sachs.”

“How I define broke is this. Being one negative event away from running out of money to live, eat, and survive. Being one negative event away from running out of money.”

“Every time you stop learning and earning, move to the next spot, and then you can apply the Naval Ravikant. Like, How to get rich. Like, really, really rich. But only after you're not broke. And when you're not, when you're, when you're broke, all you focus on is getting out of brokeville. Because you can't really do…”

“You want to have, I sort of think about it like when you go out and you move rural, you have to think about the number of human interactions you have every single day, and then think about those number of human interactions as network points, sort of like nodes that we talk about on, um, on electronics. Well, you want…”

“If he compares three hundred million dollars with hundreds of millions of views online, which he's doing with YouTube, with getting the next generation involved, he can create a cult-like movement.”

“there's two types of stability, active and passive. People get in trouble when they confuse the two. Relationships, for example, require attention and care. If you assume that your relationship is passively stable, you'll wake up one day to divorce papers.”

“most companies don't run at the speed of the fast. They run at the speed of the slowest.”

“I have a saying, which is money is a cruel mistress, and if you don't pay attention to her, she'll leave you for somebody who does. And the only way, I think, to get that mistress of money to stay with you is that you have to pay attention to her.”

“figuring out how to first do the important things that matter, second, do the hard things because those build willpower, and then third, do the efficient things because we all have to be humans paying bills and normal things like that.”

“And what I don't think people realize is that's buying a job. You're buying a job when you buy a company that small. And those types of deals exist all around this country. They're everywhere.”

“And the pros know the beauty of silence. And I think that's the biggest thing people mess up in the beginning is they talk themselves out of a deal.”

“The pro knows that you want control of the terms, not the price always.”

“Gyms are a hard business. Think about it. The more people that are in your gym, what do you feel? Not happy about it. You're like, I can't use the machine. It's kind of a tough business model.”

“And the best starters typically aren't the best operators.”

“if they start solving your problems, they're, it's a really good indicator that they're a good operator.”

“So I would say a good boring business is 15 to 50, 15 to 50% margins. 50 would be like really good. 15 would be like, okay, we've got a healthy business within lots of characteristics. One to three is awful.”

“You don't always have to be an expert, but like, you should try to do a few things before you try to talk about doing things.”

“I've done enough where I could do a turnaround. I wouldn't do a turnaround in the beginning.”

“Because capital right now is cheap, but introductions and audience are not.”

“In fact, it's why I don't think that most people should angel invest until they have some money. Like, I do not think angel investing is the way to become rich or wealthy early. Like you need to maximize your earnings. You need to get cashflow because you don't want to, you don't want to go to angel investing hungry.…”

“the old school method of holds co is basically lots of acquisitions done on fast growing companies to bolster the fact that their old school stuff Isn't growing that rapidly unless they throw a ton of spend at it.”

“I mean, a lot of these boring businesses, what I found is they're almost better in like secondary and tertiary markets that have some growth, but you're not paying like New York level prices for them, because then you have to really increase your prices because you can only like slam or cram so many, many golfers in at…”

“You need to figure out if you want a bond or a business, right? So bond is the check in the mail and a business is something you got to run. And so, yeah, for me, I like having a lot of bonds and only a few businesses because I'm operationally kind of a nightmare”

“I would buy the business just off of Realities, not dreams, and then layer your dreams on top of it, but don't give them the valuation for those.”

“I always try to steal these, the 10,000 hours instead of earn them myself if I can on a new sector.”

“because how these models work is you really make no money for the first three to four years. You basically break even. And then after it, you can start to have a pretty nice little return.”

“over time, what happens is those arbitrage opportunities, um, or the difficulty of doing something decreases, which means the return typically decreases too. And so this has happened in stocks. It's happened in real estate. Um, it will happen in crypto, but I think we're very early stages and it hasn't happened yet in…”

“when you go and buy a business, they do it kind of the same way. They buy, you buy a business based off the future cash flow of the business or the assets of the business, not you.”

“don't just look at the sexy community businesses because those people are going to over inflate the value. And you might be buying into a hype cycle. Um, but I would say look at a lot of like the unsexy community. What about like the dentist, the accounting firm, you know, because there are those communities all over…”

“I think the best business to buy is the adjacent business to what you already do.”

“When people think you're a little crazy for doing something, there's usually at least some opportunity left. Otherwise, all the smart people would have moved first, and I'm not smarter than anybody else.”

“So essentially the money is not in the taping of boxes and the stuffing of stuffing to make sure stuff doesn't break. It's actually in the little mailboxes in the front.”

“They're not That much cheaper, and they're not that much faster when you just drop one on your property. And I did a bunch of research, asked a bunch of people, they're kind of sexy, but they're not that much cheaper. But when they are cheaper is when you do them at scale.”

“the thing with angel investing is, you know, this, you need like 20, 30, 40 deals for every one to four that are going to go through.”

“And like one thing I've realized about wealth over time is, um, debt is just about everything you should always look for even before you do a startup investment. Is there any debt on the company? Am I in a first lien? Does that, you know, do I have first access to money if this company gets it in some way?”

“you gotta be doing cool stuff to hang around cool people. Rule number one... you have to actually be out there creating thing to be around creators. So I think that's rule number one and it's to have the lowest expectations humanly possible”