- All right, so obviously, there's a lot that goes into financial success, like luck and privilege
and unfair advantages. But because one of our
goals on this channel is to help you get to financial freedom, and because it makes for
a nice clickbait title, in this video, I'm gonna
go over eight habits that have helped me become a millionaire. Let's go for it. Habit number one is more
of a mindset shift really. And that is that most people
don't become millionaires or achieve large amounts
of financial success through their day job. Usually, if you wanna acquire wealth in a short amount of time, you have to, A, have
multiple streams of income and, B, have streams of
income that do not rely on you trading your time for money. I first came across this idea in Tim Ferriss's fantastic
book, "The 4-Hour Workweek," which is really all about how to build these
multiple streams of income in a way that doesn't take over your life. And since about the age of 17, when I started looking
at the world in this way and thinking that, "Okay,
I need to not be reliant "on my day job to make money. "I need to make money through
multiple streams of income." That habit, that mindset
change allowed me to see lots of different
opportunities in the world that I might not have seen otherwise. Habit number two I call
strategic laziness. And this firstly relies on us recognising the value of our own time. Time is our most valuable
non-renewable resource. It's the only thing we can't make more of. We can always make more money but we can never make more time. And that's why, again,
since I discovered this book and came across this idea, I've
been tryna do whatever I can to optimise my time as much as possible. And I call this strategic laziness, right? Because a lot of the time
there are things that we can do to automate processes that
we do fairly regularly, things that we can do to speed up or be more productive in our tasks. So people see me as someone who's completely obsessed with productivity. That's possibly true to some extent. But the reason that I
love productivity so much is because it ultimately
helps me save time. And so if there is an app or an automation or a macro that I can
set up on my computer that makes doing a repeated
task more efficient then I'll put in the investment
of time to set that up because I know it's gonna save me time further down the line. The other way in which
I use strategic laziness is to really ask, what is
the point of this thing that I'm trying to do? As I was going through university, as I was going through school, as I've been setting up my businesses I always have in my mind, "What
is the outcome that I want?" And for example, in my first
year of medical school, I wasn't thinking like this. I was thinking, "Hey, I need
to learn all of medicine "because that's what
makes me a better doctor." And I realised that that's actually, A, not what the exam's about and, B, being a good doctor is not about just learning the entire textbook. And so the way I was
approaching med school was in a very kind of
heavy-lift kind of fashion. I thought it had to be really, really hard to learn the textbook. But then for my second year onwards for the next five years, I
really asked myself, "Okay, "how do I be strategically
lazy about this? "How do I make sure the
stuff that I'm doing "is the most efficient
way of getting to my goal "of, A, being a good doctor, hopefully, "and, B, doing well in the exams?" And I think you can apply this habit and this general principle to
everything across business. Often when someone starts up
a business for the first time, and I was guilty of this myself, we spent absolutely ages making a website and making a business card and making sure the logo is legit, and spending hundreds of hours
on this pointless the stuff. Whereas, if we're being
strategically lazy, we recognise the end
goal is to get customers and to sell them something. And so, fancy website,
logo, business card, it really doesn't help with
that particular end goal. Habit number three is to develop an entrepreneurial diagnostic mindset. Now, this is the sort of thing that if you're interested
in starting up businesses, which you probably want to be because that's the
easiest and quickest way to get wealthy very quickly
in this day and age. Again, it's not gonna be through your job. But if you're interested in the idea of setting up businesses you need to have a decent idea
for what business to set up. And the thing that dictates whether something is a good business idea is number one, identifying
a problem that people have, and number two, figuring out
a way to solve the problem. And three, ideally people will wanna pay you money for the solution. And so the habit here is that as you're going out into the world and going about your day-to-day life, you wanna be recognising
whenever you notice that something really sucks or that there is a specific problem. Like for example, if at
one point you thought, "Oh, it really sucks
that to order a takeaway "I have to phone up a restaurant. "I wish there were a better way to do it." That might give you the idea for something like DoorDash or Deliveroo or Just Eat in the UK. If you had the idea that, "Oh,
ordering a taxi really sucks. "Why do I have to phone up this company "and be on hold for five minutes?" that might have given you the idea to start something like Uber or Lyft. And the more you approach life with this entrepreneurial mindset, you start seeing these ideas
in absolutely everything. And I get so many emails from people being like, "Hey, I wanna make money, "but I don't have a good business idea." And the reason you don't
have a good business idea is 'cause you're not looking
at the world from this lens of what are the problems? What really sucks out there in the world? And therefore, what are the problems that I can create solutions for? Habit number four is the growth mindset, which you might've come across. And the way I like to think of this is that everything is figureoutable. Often the
non-entrepreneurial-minded people will think about doing
something like, I don't know, starting a YouTube channel and think, "Oh, I don't
know how to do that. "That feels quite hard,"
and it will stop them there. Whereas the more entrepreneurial people will have an idea for, "I
wanna make this business "or this app or this YouTube channel," and instead of thinking,
"I don't know how to do it, "Therefore I can't," there'll be thinking, "I don't know how to
do it, but that's fine "'cause I've got the internet
and I can figure it out." Everything in the world is figureoutable. Stuff feels like much more of a black box than it actually is. If you've ever thought
about doing something but you've been stopped by this idea of, "I don't know how to do it," then the everything is
figureoutable approach is a great habit to adopt, which is that your default
is to Google something and figure it out because
literally everything on Earth is available on the internet and you can teach yourself
any skill that you want. That brings us on to habit number five, which is that although
everything is a skill and everything can be learned and you can Google
absolutely anything you want, there is a point at which you
can accelerate the process of learning or doing anything
by asking the right people. And there's a great book by
Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan called "Who Not How," which
kind of embodies this approach when it comes to business. Like when you have a
problem you wanna think, "Who can help me solve this problem?" rather than necessarily, "How can I solve this problem by myself?" If you're young and you're just getting
started out in business and you don't know many people, then you kind of do have
to do things by yourself. And that makes a lot of sense. Like you can figure out how
to video edit or podcast edit or make a website or learn to code or any of these things for
free using the internet. But when you get to the point where you have a certain amount of success or if you know people who are entered into this business thing as well, you can really start adopting
the who not how habit which will really help you
accelerate your results 'cause now you're taking
advantage of your network. For example, with me, a few months ago, I started out an initiative called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, which is a live online course
that I've been teaching for two live cohorts now. And I was reading the book
"Who Not How," at that time, and I really thought, "Okay, "I could try and figure
this out by myself, "but instead I'm gonna reach out "to friends that I've made on Twitter, "or people are part of my network, "and ask them how they've
done the same thing." And this massively
accelerated our learning curve for the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Our first launch was like $300,000. A second launch was like $500,000. It made a stupidly insane amount of money and got really, really good reviews. And I think a big part of that was that we got the right people involved, rather than me and my
team trying to think, "Hey, let's do everything ourselves." That brings us on to habit number six which is to make friends
with people in real life and more importantly,
well, not more importantly, but additionally, on the internet. And the single best way I find
for doing this is Twitter. Twitter is an incredible,
incredible, incredible invention that you can use to make friends with people all around the world. And the nice thing about Twitter is that it's different to Instagram. Instagram is very sort of visual and based on posting pretty pictures, but Twitter is very much
based on sharing good ideas. And if you are sharing interesting ideas and you're connecting with other people who are sharing those similar ideas, that automatically leads you to kind of becoming internet friends, and then they follow you, you follow them, you chat a little bit in the DMs. And over the last year, I've
met up with so many people who I initially met on Twitter. And I've got friends all around the world who I've never ever met in real life, but we've talked on Twitter. We know we liked the same stuff. We share the same ideas. And, A, this just makes
life much more fun. But if we're talking about habits to get to becoming a millionaire, I can point to lots of
these different connections that have really accelerated
the growth of my business. For example, me and my mate Thomas Frank became friends on Twitter
like two weeks ago. Thomas Frank then
introduced me to Standard which is the YouTuber
agency that I'm now part of and that completely changed
the game for my business. Secondly, there's two chaps,
Tiago Forte and David Perell who run their own online courses. We became friends on Twitter
after I took their courses and started engaging with them on Twitter. And then I DMed them when I wanted help for my own Part-Time YouTuber Academy and they really helped with that. And again, that really accelerated the growth of the business to becoming a $2 million business. And when it comes to this
making friends thing, it's one of those things
that's very hard to like, if you make friends with someone,
then it will lead to this. It's more like you have
this general habit, this general attitude
towards making friends with whoever shares the same ideas as you and just generally trying to
be a nice and helpful person, and you know that, eventually, that'll lead to really interesting things happening in your life
further down the line. On a somewhat related note, habit number seven is reading a lot. And just like we can get
wisdom from our real life and our internet friends via Twitter, we can get a lot more wisdom from people who have
written books about stuff. You know, if you speak to anyone who's successful in almost any way, they will almost always say
that they read a lot of books. And they will also almost always say that everyone else that
they know who's successful also reads a lot of books. So if you're telling yourself,
"I don't have time to read," then you're kind of screwing yourself because (laughs) basically
every millionaire you ask will have spent tonnes and
tonnes of time reading books. And again, the great thing about books is that you've got five,
10, 20 years of experience that someone has boiled down to a thing that takes you
a few hours to read. Like Tim Ferriss was doing
the entrepreneurial thing for 10 years before he wrote the book. That's pretty sick. That's 10 years of wisdom that
you can read in a few hours. And if you read lots of books
of this or entrepreneurship, like business, finance, basically anything you're interested in, you can just get a huge
amount of value from them. And it doesn't really cost very much. You can find PDFs on the internet for free if you're really averse
to paying for books if that's your vibe. And it's just such a great way
to accelerate your learning in almost anything. If you didn't know, I
am also writing a book, which is probably gonna
come out in two years' time. But I'll put a link to my
book mailing list newsletter, which is where I share my book journey and what it's like to
write and research a book and sample chapters and getting the audience's
opinion and stuff. So that'll be linked in
the video description if you wanna check it out. And finally, habit number eight
for becoming a millionaire is to acquire financial literacy. Now, this is one of those things that no one teaches us in
school or university or college, but it's just one of those things that you have to learn for yourself. And you can get it through reading books, such as, for example, this book, oh crap, "The Psychology of
Money" by Morgan Housel, which is now a little bit dilapidated. I read this recently. It's
really, really, really good. 20 bite-sized lessons about money. Gonna make a video about that. But also just generally
taking your financial life into your own hands. I know so many people who have sort of relegated their financial
life to, you know, "Oh, it's just something that
the government will sort out." Or "Oh, you know, my hospital "will figure out what taxes I need to pay "and then I'll just kind
of do it from there." Money is such an important part of life. It's one of the biggest sources
of stress in anyone's life if you don't have much of it. And so much of our life is
spent in the pursuit of money and financial freedom,
financial independence, that if we don't have financial literacy, if we don't understand the
basics of saving or investing or how the stock market
works or how taxes work, any of that kind of stuff, again, we are just screwing ourselves. Because if you wanna become a millionaire you have to have some
level of financial literacy to know what it takes
to become a millionaire and how that might actually work. So recommend reading a book like "The Psychology of
Money by Morgan Housel. Or, if you like, you can check
out this video over here, which is my ultimate guide to investing in stocks and shares. That's like a half an
hour-long crash course on everything you need
to know about investing. If you don't know about investing definitely check out that video. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you found this video useful. And I will see you in
the next one. Bye-bye.
