➡ The author shares 21 principles of success that helped him become a millionaire by 28. The key points include: understanding that success leaves clues, meaning you should learn from those who have already achieved what you want; realizing that failures are opportunities to learn; always having a clear goal in mind; prioritizing lifestyle over retirement, meaning you should focus on creating a life you enjoy rather than working towards retirement; and recognizing that creativity is a skill that can be developed, which is crucial in today’s digital age.
➡ The text discusses the importance of developing creativity, becoming the best version of oneself, and understanding the concept of leverage. It emphasizes the need for energy, clarity, and willpower, multiplied by focus, to achieve success. The text also encourages positive self-talk about the future, maintaining balance in life, and taking quick action. It suggests that success is not just about hard work, but also about smart work, using resources effectively to get more output with less input.
➡ To succeed in business, it’s important to act quickly and focus on sales rather than getting caught up in details like business cards or websites. JustWorks is a platform that can help small businesses manage tasks like payroll and HR, allowing them to focus on growth. Einstein’s laws of compound growth and consistency can be applied to various aspects of life, including business, health, and relationships. It’s also important to be open to changing your decisions based on new information, a concept known as zero-based thinking. Lastly, setting goals is important, but it’s the daily actions and systems you put in place that will ultimately lead to achieving those goals.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of having a system to achieve goals, asking precise questions for better answers, and the three ways to build wealth: providing time, selling products, and selling creativity. It also highlights the power of optimization, the strategic use of debt, and the preference for investing over saving for financial success.
➡ This text emphasizes the importance of smart investing and goal setting. It suggests that instead of saving money, which loses value due to inflation, it’s better to invest in things that generate cash flow. It also uses the metaphor of a lion choosing to hunt an antelope over field mice, encouraging us to focus on high-value tasks (antelopes) rather than small, less rewarding tasks (field mice). Lastly, it encourages us to define what winning looks like to us personally, and to strive for that goal in the most efficient way possible.

I’m going to share with you 21 principles of success that I use to make my first million dollars by 28 years old. Now, as my network has grown and I’ve rubbed shoulders with some of the richest people in the world while traveling and Speaking at over 50 conferences in just the last four years, I can assure you that these principles are what make the top 1% of people successful. So if you want to achieve success in the shortest amount of time possible, whether you’re just starting your career or you’re already making eight figures per year, then these principles are for you all.

So jumping in Succession rule number one is that success leaves clues. Now, this is something I’ve built my career off of. It sounds simple, but it’s actually one of the most misunderstood and maybe misused quotes ever. So let’s break this one down. I talk about this all the time, and that is basically if you really want the cheat code, the shortcut to success. You find other people who have already achieved the success that you want, and then you understand the clues they left behind. You reverse engineer how they got there. Now, number one, when you get advice, making sure you’re getting advice from somebody who’s actually achieved it.

Two, like I said, breaking that down. Now, it seems pretty simple, but here’s why it’s often misunderstood and maybe misuse. So, for example, in my niche, we’re creating content. I’m on YouTube. Maybe the biggest guy on the content game is this guy, Alex Hermozzi, if you’ve heard of him. And so a lot of people that are just starting creating content say, well, look at Alex Hermozy. What he’s doing, I’m gonna do what he’s doing. Or let’s say in the podcast game, sort of where I’m at as well, you have Patrick bet David. You know, he’s so big, I should do what Patrick bet David does.

See, this is where it’s wrong. You want to reverse engineer the clues they’ve left behind, and you need to do what they did, not what they’re doing. So I need to go back. If you’re starting out fresh, you need to go back and do what Alex Hormozi did. Starting down, very niche down in content, getting your reps in, then expanding your content, going to different audiences, then niching back down. And so it’s a predictable path. And so you wouldn’t go to the gym and look at some really strong guy lifting £400 and go, I need to go do what he does.

Lift £400 instead you’d have to start at £50 or £100 or wherever that is. But the fastest shortcut to success is to model to follow those successful steps. And this kind of goes into rule number two, which is something that you hear all the time, and that is smoothseas never made a skilled sailor. Well, maybe you don’t hear that all the time. I use it all the time. And really, it’s modeled after a quote from Nelson Mandela. And he said that I never lose. I either win or I learn. And that is. Success is a horrible teacher.

We learn from our failures. That’s why smooth seas success doesn’t make a skilled seller. We need the problems to get better at things. But the thing is, I never lose because even if I don’t achieve what I want, I’ll learn. And so what we want to do is in any situation, we’re not going to win 100% of the time. We’re going to have trials, tribulations, struggles. And what we want to do is we want to pay attention to what those are. We want to understand that. We want to reverse engineer those what went wrong, not so we can point fingers and point blame, but so we can learn from them.

My dad told me when I was a kid growing up that once is an accident, but twice as stupid. The sign of intelligence is how quickly we can change based off of new information. And we have to be able to do that. All right, now, that principle number two only really works if you understand principle number three, which is doing everything with the end in mind. You see, intention is everything. We always want to understand what exactly are we trying to do. For example, at one of my masterminds, I was coaching, I had somebody come up and we’re doing like the hot seat in the mastermind.

And he said, you know, I just feel like I working so much. I don’t feel like I’m spending enough time with my wife. And I said, great. How much time should you be spending with your wife? And he didn’t know the answer to that. And so he didn’t have any intention. What does a great relationship with my wife look like? How much time do we spend together? What types of things would we be doing? And so we want to think through intention of everything. Because if I’m just trying to win or learn, as we talked about, and I’m trying to learn from my mistakes, not every mistake that I learned from is good.

You see, only if they’re helping me finally get to the goal that I want. But if I’m not clear on what the goal is that I want, then no matter what I’m doing almost seems wrong. And so we get all types of false starts. We start something, we realize we don’t like it, we quit, we change our mind, and we waste a lot of time without being clear. And it kind of reminds me of this movie clip from Alice in Wonderland. Let’s just play that clip. But I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go.

Well, that depends on where you want to get to. Oh, it really doesn’t matter. As long as I can. Then it really doesn’t matter which way you go. So you see, she was given all types of options of what to do, and she didn’t know which one to choose or which way to go because she didn’t know where she was going. All right, now this also then goes into success. Principle number four, and that is lifestyle over retirement. Now, I like to say that everything you’ve learned is wrong. And this is something that’s definitely been taught wrong.

When I was a kid, it was like, you want to be, when you grow up, a fireman, a police officer, a doctor, right? And today you hear from your financial advisor in mainstream media, how much money do you need to retire? So think about this. How much money do you need to retire? 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, whatever that number is. But again, both of those are wrong. Lifestyle is greater than retirement. So it’s not what do I want to be doing? Policemen, firemen. And this is where people go wrong. It’s like, what do I want to do in a year or three years or five years? It’s not what you want to be doing.

It’s what is the lifestyle that I want to have? What is the lifestyle? Where do I want to live? How much time do I want to be outdoors? Do I like the warm weather, the cold weather? Do I want to surf? Do I want to ride mountain bikes, snowboard? Right? All of these things. What do I want my lifestyle to look like first? Then it starts helping all those other things. Now back to lifestyle versus retirement and how much money you need to retire. I would ask another question, which is, why would you want to retire in the first place? Now ask yourself another question.

Why do you think all billionaires still work? It’s because they like what they’re doing. They’re not trying to retire. If you’re dreaming of doing nothing all day, it means you really hate what you’re doing. So instead of thinking what you need to be doing or how much money you need so you don’t have to do that thing anymore. Think about the ideal lifestyle you want and build that, all right? That goes into rule number five, which is creativity is a skill. Now, this sounds kind of crazy. Most people think that people are born creative, but it’s not being born creative.

It’s a skill. And I believe that creativity is the single most important thing you need to be successful today. You see, it used to be being a technical and analytical worker. You had to be a good coder, a good engineer. But the Internet changed all of that. Now it’s made those commodity workers. And now with the rise of AI and things like that, especially with people thinking. And it’s true that AI might take a lot of jobs, but what I believe is that AI cannot replace is human ingenuity and human creativity. And so you need to develop that as a skill.

The exponential multiplier. About 15 years ago, maybe a little longer, I was going through Brian Tracy personal coaching programs, and he talked about that. What you need to do is every single morning, get out a piece of paper, like an actual piece of paper and a pen, and write down five ideas. Now, in the beginning, it’s very painful. You don’t know what you’re writing down, so you’re writing down stupid stuff. I want to go to the moon one day. I don’t want to work anymore, whatever it is. But over time, as you develop that creativity, that muscle gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.

And at the point now, you know, 15 years later or whatever, I can literally fill up. And I do fill up pages every single day. And people are like, mark, how do you get all these ideas? You’re so creative. I wish I had ideas like you. Well, it’s because I’ve been working on it for a long time. So start developing creativity as a muscle and develop it. Now, that kind of goes into number six, which is developing ourselves and becoming what I call superhuman, or let me give you what I call the superhuman protocol. Why wouldn’t you want to just be the best version of yourself? Why wouldn’t you want to be the best you could be? And so the superhuman protocol is E plus C plus D times F.

Let me break that down for you. Energy. The first thing is I need energy. Without energy, you’re dead in the water. You don’t have enough energy to go to the gym. You don’t have enough energy to stay up late and work. You don’t have enough energy to read the book. You’ve fallen asleep. You need energy. Without energy, you can’t do anything, then I need to have clarity. It’s not enough just to have energy and run around in circles. I need to have clarity as to what I’m doing. And then I need to have willpower to get myself to do the things I need to do or not do the things I shouldn’t be doing.

At the same time, if I can get energy so I have the energy to do them, the clarity of what I need to be doing and the willpower to do the things I don’t want to do. I have those three times the multiplier, which is focus. All right? Focus is the multiplier. So it’s not about the hours I work. It’s the work in my hours. Focus is the multiplier. That’s the code. Master those three things, and you will become unbeatable with the superhuman protocol. All right, jumping right into number seven. This one is lie about your future.

Now, what does that mean, lie about your future? Well, tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us. We can say we’re going to do XYZ thing today, tomorrow, next year, whatever. That’s not guaranteed. Anytime we’re talking about the future, it’s a lie, right? And so we can choose to lie about it, good or bad. I am going to be amazing. I’m going to make so much money. I’m going to be in great shape. Or I’m not good with money. I don’t have time. I don’t have good concentration. And we could lie good or bad about ourselves.

You see, it’s important to understand that your words are prophetic. What we say comes to reality, right? We’re made in our creator’s image, and he’s a creator. Our words say that. So what you put after I am, I am unorganized. I am not good with money. I am. Or it could be the opposite. So whenever we talk about the future, we’re always lying. So we might as well lie about good things. Tell yourself, be prophetic, that you are good with money, you are good with time management. You will be able to improve your health, you will be able to change your life, your future, family’s life, et cetera, and lie about your future in a positive way.

Now, this goes into number eight. And this is one that’s massive to understand and again, is often misunderstood. And. And this is understanding. Leverage. Now leverage. You get it? It sounds simple, but let me explain this to you in a story. So let’s say I was hanging out with Jeff Bezos. He’s one of the richest guys in the world. Founder of Amazon. And let’s say that we went out, we were celebrating last night. We went out and went out on the town all night, right? And we stayed up late and partied too hard probably and didn’t get enough sleep.

And in the morning, cause he’s Jeff Bezos. He laid around his mansion and laid by the pool and had his people bring him stuff all day. And I had to go work all day. I went and worked 10 doing, digging holes. Let’s say at the end of the day, he laid by his pool all day, being catered to and I dug holes all day. Who worked harder? Now when I ask this question, typically to a group, they say that of course you did. You worked digging holes for eight or 10 hours while he laid by the pool.

But that is only true if you measure the work by the inputs and not the outputs. That’s the difference of leverage. You see, leverage is getting more output for less input. So while I was certainly digging holes for eight or 10 hours, my input equaled the output for him. He laid by the pool all day, but he had tens of thousands of people doing work for him. He had millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars of media going out and talking for him. And so if you measure in output, you can see that he worked way harder.

He got way more output done than I did. And so you have to understand this core concept. This is leverage. And if you start to apply this to every area of your life, you’ll really start getting ahead quickly. How do I get more leverage now? We get leverage with more employees, right? We can get leverage with people, we can get leverage with money. How can I use my money to make more money? We can use things like content. How can I reach millions of people from one piece of content? I can write code. And those are types of leverage.

And start to think about every area of your life, how you can do that. Let’s go into rule number nine, and this is don’t drive with a flat tire. Now, you wouldn’t want to have a high performance car, a supercar with a flat tire. It wouldn’t work very well. But that’s what a lot of you are doing with your own lives. And back to the superhuman protocol. We should be treating our body better, our life better than we would a supercar. And so what is this flat tire? Well, I think about life being in balance like a tire.

And really there’s four main areas, three sub areas under each one, but let’s call it four main areas. So number One, you have your business or your bank account, right? You need to have some money. And so I have that. On a scale of 1 to 10, then my body, that’s my health, my energy, my focus, things like that. Then I have my being. That’s my spirituality. For me, that’s being connected with God. That’s for you, whatever it is, meditation or whatever. And then finally is balance. And so that’s like my relationships and things like that.

Those are the four areas that need to be in balance. Now, they don’t always have to be in perfect balance all the time. Sometimes your car tire gets out of balance, you take it to the shop and get it fixed. But you want to understand, understand where that’s out. And the more imbalanced that is, the more performance you’re going to get out of it. So if you’re only focusing on one aspect, like, I’m in the best shape ever. I’m at the gym five hours a day, but I have no money. It’s not going to be very good.

Or I work all the time. I have money, but I have no relationships and I have no health. And so you can understand that each one is going to build up the other. And if you neglect one, unfortunately, the other ones are going to get stunted as well. Now, if you’d like, I have a free download that you can get. I give this to my coaching clients. I’ll just give it to you free. I’ll link to it down below. Put a QR code here on the screen and basically you just answer the questions and it’ll create this wheel for you and you can quickly see which areas you need to work on.

It’s a free gift to you if you want it. For my coaching clients. All right, now moving into rule number 10, and that is speed to action. I like to say that money likes speed. You see, a lot of people, they spend way too much planning and not enough time doing. One of my favorite books I’ve read, which is called Ready, Fire, Aim, written by Michael Masterson. In there, there’s a line that I always use, and he said that obituary pages are lined with businesses that plan, and too many people are trying to plan and get more information.

Do I have the right website? Do I have the right business card? Do I have the right corporation? Whatever they think that there’s just one more thing they have to do or one more piece of information they need, rather than just taking what they have and going and doing it. So rather than focusing on the business, do I have the Right. Corporation, the letterhead, the business card, the website or whatever. Do you have sales? Right. And so if I can move quicker, I can outperform everybody else. So, for example, while a lot of people are still planning what they want to do, maybe months, maybe years into the future, most people, high performers, maybe like myself, could move in and get that done in days or weeks.

And so if you really want to have success, you got to be going fast. You have to be iterating. We’ll come back to that. Hey, small business owner, are you buried in all types of work keeping you from the real thing that makes you money? Well, that’s where justworks comes in. They’re the all in one platform that supports small business growth. You can get all their tools that help with benefits like payroll and HR and compliance with transparent pricing. Now they help you hire top talent internationally, enter new markets quickly, scale international operations without the workload.

And for every how do I do it? Question, you can reach out to their expert staff from sole proprietor or a team of 20. Justworks empowers all kinds of small businesses with real human support. So visit justworks.com podcast to join the thousands of small businesses that trust JustWorks to take care of payroll, benefits, compliance, and more. Again, that’s justworks.com podcast. Now, we’re about halfway through on these laws. We’re gonna go to number 11. And so I want to give you a twofer. These are going to be two different ones. I’m going to combine them together. And these are two laws from probably the smartest person in the world in history, and that is Einstein.

Now, 11.1, we’ll call it, is the eighth wonder of the world. Einstein said that the eighth wonder of the world, for those that know it, earn it, and those who don’t pay it. And what he’s talking about, he’s talking about compound growth. You see, if you understand compounding growth and how it works, you can earn it, you can compound your growth. If you don’t, unfortunately, you’re going to pay for it. So let me give you some examples of how you can apply this to your life. For example, on this video, if I put out a very good video, you’re much more likely to watch another video when you see it pop up in the future.

If I put out a bad video, you’re less likely to watch it. So that would compound. Now, if you watch the next one and the next one, my channel grows, I have more subscribers, more views, then more people are likely to come, right? And the opposite is Also true. It’s not just linear growth, it’s exponential because it compounds my health. If I go to the gym one time, it doesn’t do that much. But if I go to the gym consistently over time, it compounds. I can lift heavier weights, which then lifting heavier weights gets me more improvement, and then I get more heavier weights, which gives me more improvement.

Your relationships, your money, all of those ways. If I invest my money, I reinvest the profits. You know, I could put $10,000 on a house today. And if I just continually reinvest those profits, I could have millions of dollars of real estate in less than a decade. That’s the law of compounding. Now I want to go into Einstein’s second law, which we’ll call this 11.2. And this is the definition of sanity. Now, you might have heard Einstein’s definition of insanity. And that is that doing the same thing but expecting different results. Well, the opposite of that would be doing the same thing and expecting the same results.

Now why would I want that? Well, once I figure out what works for me, I should do that over and over and over. Consistency. Once I’ve found the perfect morning regimen that fires up my day and keeps me organized and productive, then I should do that same morning routine all the time. Once I’ve found the right diet that works for me, then I should do that diet over and over once I find the right format. And so we’ll get to how we do that in a minute in another rule. But once we find something that works, we want consistency.

Why wouldn’t I want to do the same thing and achieve the same results? All right, moving into rule number 12, I like to call this one zero based thinking, and it comes from a term called zero based accounting. And it basically is having a mindset that the answers change. What do I mean by that? So when you make a decision to take a job or move or enter in some relationship or whatever, join some program, you’ve hopefully used the best information you had available at that time to make the best decision at that time. But sometimes you get new information.

And so then you would ask yourself, knowing what I now know, I didn’t know it then, but knowing what I now know, would I have made the same decision? If the answer is no, well, then you need to change your direction as quickly as possible. So a lot of people have what’s called sunken cost fallacy. They’re like, well, I’ve already spent the time, the effort, the energy, the money to do this. I might as well see Myself through now, zero based thinking would be like, look, yeah, I did spend the money on it. The money’s gone.

Whether I sit here and do this or not, the money’s gone. So why would I put myself into any more torture? When I used to go to the movies a long time ago, I don’t go anymore. But once in a while we would sit down, my wife and I, we’d watch a movie, and I’m like, partway through, and I’m like, man, this movie’s terrible. I’m out of here or watching one at home. My wife, like, wants to stick to the end to see what happens, but I’m like, look, I’m not going to spend any more time.

I don’t care if we spent money to come here, whatever, I’m out of here. So zero based thinking, what do, what do I now know that would change my mind? And if the answer is something different than do it. All right, number 13, this is a paradigm shift. What’s important to understand about a paradigm shift is that we can see the same thing but think about it differently. We have to understand that situations are neutral, but the perspective that we have is everything. So, for example, I could be stuck in traffic and Los Angeles traffic, Southern California is terrible.

I could be angry. I could be full of road, road rage. I could be, you know, whatever, mad. Or I could be hanging out in my car listening to podcasts, thinking that I’m in a university, on a phone with a loved one, having a great time. And so the situation itself is neutral, but how I view it, how I choose to react to it, and kind of going back to we either win or learn. Understand that I can learn lessons from this, and all of a sudden it can take something maybe that you view as bad and turn it around to something good.

All right, moving right into number 14. And that is that goals are just dreams. At least without this. Now, I told you I was listening to Brian Tracy programs. I spent like 10 years in, like, personal development going through that. I read a lot of books, probably dozens of books on how to achieve goals. This was something I wanted to do when I was young. I mean, I still do set goals, but I wanted to know, how do I set a big goal? And then how can I, you know, guarantee my success or increase my odds of achieving that goal? But the thing is, goals are only dreams without having systems in place.

And what you want to do is not focus on the goal, but what are the daily actions, the daily inputs that I have to achieve in order to get to that goal, not the end result. So, for example, if you wanted to grow a YouTube channel from scratch, you would say, well, my goal is to get the YouTube channel with, you know, some thousand subscribers or 10,000 subscribers. But that’s my goal. What do I need to do to achieve that goal? Well, I need to create videos. I should probably create two videos a week. Great. So then focus on the two videos per week, knowing that if you do that over a long enough period of time, you will have gained subscribers.

If I had a goal to put on, you know, 20 pounds of muscle mass, I would have to, one, increase my calorie intake. I would have to, two, probably lift heavy weights, you know, four times, five times a week. Now, if I ate 20% more calories every single day and I trained heavy weights four or five times a week, it would be impossible for me not to have gained the weight. So think about the goal. Yes, but without a system with daily inputs that you need and a way to track it, you’re never going to achieve it.

And it’s only a dream. I think about this quote from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. He said that you don’t rise to the level of your goals because those are dreams. You fall to the level of your systems that you have in place to do that. All right, let’s move on to number 15. And this one is one people love when I say it. And it really comes down to the quality of your life. If you want to have a better quality of life, it’s going to come down to the questions that you ask.

Now what I’ve found, unfortunately, is that most people ask horrible questions. They ask very broad questions, which then you get back very broad answers. So, for example, since I talk mostly about Investing, I get DMs and comments all the time. Mark, what should I invest into? Invest into for what? Like, that’s such a broad question. How can I even answer that? Or they’ll say, hey, Mark, what’s your opinion on this? You know, some, some broad question. It’s like, what do I even say? Like, why don’t you ask me something more specific? So, for example, hey, Mark, you know, I am this age.

These are my risk tolerances. My goal is to achieve this. I’m really looking for cash flow. I don’t like these types of cash flow, but I do like these. What do you think might be something else I should consider? Okay, so now I’ve gotten a much more precise question, and I can give you much more precise answer back and this is one thing that I’ve found with AI. Yeah, you know, I’m using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini in my extensively. I’ve gotten really, really good at using these prompts and it blows away, blows people’s minds when they see these prompts.

And most people think that AI is going to change everything, but the answer is the truth is it’s not. You see, if I ask OpenAI or ChatGPT, write me a book. A book about what? Write me a book about dogs. A book about dogs. But write me a book about training dogs. Okay, like what kind of dogs? Okay. Write me a book about training police dogs. Okay, Write me a book about training police dogs to do civilian life. And so the more precise question I can ask, the more precise answer I’ll get back and the faster the quality of your life will go up.

Alright, Moving into number 16, I think about three ways to wealth. Now, this kind of goes back into the rule about leverage. But when I want to build wealth, I have to. One, provide value. The only reason someone will ever give you money is if you provide value for them solving a problem. And I can do this three main ways. Number one, I can provide my time. I could provide a service. Now, whether you make $10 an hour or 10,000 an hour, like you’re a brain surgeon, it doesn’t really matter. You’re still trading your time. At the end of the day, you only have so much time.

So that’s leverage number one. Number two, then, if I want to get more wealth, I could scale that with selling products. So whether that’s like a retail store that sells physical products, I sell them on E commerce, something like that. That’s good. Now, when I’m sleeping, those products could be sold. Someone else could be there. When I’m not there, they could be selling those products for me. But I still have inventory, I still have to buy inventory, ship it, manage it, produce it, things like that. So the third level I think about is selling your creativity.

Now what’s interesting about this is when you’re trading time for money, if you’re making $1,000 an hour, you still attach a dollar amount to an amount of time. So my wife wants a new Louis bag. It’s $5,000. I work, I make $1,000 an hour. Do I want to spend five hours to get that bag for her? But when you sell your information, your creativity, then you have no attachment. How much does that Louis bag cost me? It cost me an idea. How much did that idea cost me? It cost Me, nothing. Now I had to get the idea through building creativity as a skill, which we talked about in our earlier rule.

But I can create a course, a digital course that can make me millions of dollars with just my ideas that I’ve collected, with no products I’ve had to buy or ship or manage and no time. And once you do that, you realize that your wealth is infinitely scalable. Now let’s go into number 17, which is relentless optimization. Now this one’s really important because all growth comes from optimization or really all growth comes from iteration. You might have heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, right? 10,000 hours of mastery. But that’s not really true. It’s not 10,000 hours of mastery, it’s 10,000 hours of optimization or iteration.

It’s how quickly you can optimize. So I don’t want Bruce Lee said, I don’t fear the man who’s done 10,000 kicks. I fear the man who’s done one kick 10,000 times. And each time has optimized, has improved. And that’s how we grow. Now think about if it takes you four months, let’s say one quarter to optimize a website, a landing page, an offer, then that means you get four cycles of optimization in a year. If I do it once a month, I get 12 optimization cycles. And who do you think will be better at the end? Someone who has 12 cycles of optimization or somebody who has four.

Now what if I do it every week? Now I get 52 optimization cycles in a year while you only get four. Now you start to get the secret here. Let’s move on to number 19. And this is die with debt. Now when I was a kid growing up, my parents used to say all the time, what do you think we have a money tree in the backyard. You might have heard something similar. Well, the answer is we sort of do have a money tree in the backyard. You see, we’re in a debt based monetary system that means all money is created through debt issuance.

So when I go to the bank to get a house, a car, a boat, business loan, that money is created into existence. That’s my money tree. So let’s say for example, I wanted to go buy a business, it’s a dry cleaner, a post office box, something like that. Those will typically sell for a three times multiple. So I buy a million dollar business, throwing off $300,000 of cash flow per year profit. I can go get a business loan for the million dollars. The bank will give me a million bucks. I have to give them 100, $150,000 for the debt service on that, but minus the 300,000, I’m receiving in profit and I’m walking away with a free and clear 150, $200,000 a year.

That money, that million dollars literally came from my money tree, from the bank. Now I know there’s lots of people like Dave Ramsey that tell you that never use debt. Pay off your debt as fast as you can and that’s one way to go. But if I have a money tree, why wouldn’t I use it in a debt based monetary system? If you want to scale your success and your wealth, you need to learn how to manage debt. Now that’s not to say that there isn’t risk, there certainly is. So you want to have good debt, not bad debt.

Good debt is productive debt. Good debt is using debt to get a cash flow and asset like the business. Bad debt would be using the debt to go on a vacation, take my family out to dinner. Don’t do that. Sticking with financial success principles, we’re on to number 20. And this is saving versus investing. Now, what modern and financial advice tells you is to save for retirement. Put your money into your 401k, your IRA, save for 40 years and hopefully one day your portfolio will be enough that you can start to live off of that savings.

And hopefully it won’t run out before you die. But we don’t want to be saving. What we want to be doing is investing. And so we want to think about instead of saving for 40 years and hopefully we have enough saved up to live off of. Why wouldn’t I just start investing into cash flow today? You see, I could save for 40 years and maybe have enough to live off for another 20 or 30. Or I could start investing in cash flow today and probably in less than 10 years have enough cash flow coming in where I don’t have to work anymore and it will never run out for the rest of my life.

Not only that, then I have assets to pass on to my kids and my grandkids that provide them cash flow as well. So it’s not about saving. Saving is for losers. Saving loses. That’s why. Right? Because of inflation, your saving is losing value. And even if you’re putting in the s and P500, it’s not going up at the rate of debasement. The saving is losing. I don’t want to say you’re a loser, but the saving is losing. Invest that money specifically in cash flow instead and let’s go to the last 1, rule number 21, and this is the big one, actually, I’m going to give you a bonus number 22.

But let’s. 21 is chasing antelopes. Now, I write this at the top of my board where I manage out my quarters and my weeks and my months. And I’m trying to always ask myself this question, am I chasing the antelope? You see, the story of a lion is the king of the jungle. And the lion could do whatever it wants. It could eat whatever animal it wants. It could easily snatch up a field mice and eat the field mice, no problem. But the problem is that the lion would literally have to be chasing field mice all day to get enough calories to sustain itself.

Or the lion could sleep around for a day or two and wake up and go get one antelope, eat the antelope and then go back to sleep for a couple days. And so the question I’m always asking myself, am I chasing the antelope or am I chasing field mice? That’s why I write it on my productivity board. And so think about that. What are the things that you’re doing and are they field mice or are they antelopes? And you should always be focusing on the one that’s the highest value test, the one that’s going to move you the furthest ahead.

Not chasing field mice, chasing antelope. Now I want to give you a bonus one, and that is a bonus rule number 22, which is play to win. This really summarizes all of these here. And it’s playing. Are you playing the game to play the game or are you playing the game to win the game? You see, playing the game to win the game is to follow traditional advice, which is go to school, get a good grades, get a good job, save for 40 years in your mutual funds and your 401ks. And maybe at some point in 40 years you might be able to retire and get a boat and sail around the world or get an RV and drive around the country.

Maybe if you live that long. And you may get to that point and find out you don’t even like it. But what is winning look like to you? And that goes back to trying to define your ideal lifestyle. You might winning for you might just be to live near the beach where you can fish every day and have some time to hang out with your wife or your spouse or in town with your friends. And you might be able to achieve that for $2,000 a month right now by moving to Colombia or South America somewhere for example, so what does winning look like for you? And then once you’ve been able to clearly define that, ask yourself, what is the closest way that you can get, the fastest way you can get to that goal? Now, if you’ve liked these 21 rules of success, you might like this other video where I talked about how to go from $0 to 1 million DOL dollars in 12 months in 12 steps.

I broke them down month by month by month. You can watch that video right here. Either way, I want to make sure that you have true wealth, which is time freedom, and you join the new rich. Who are those of us who value time and location freedom over just money? So go watch that video and I’ll see you on the next one.
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See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.