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

hey guys it's ezra from grand rapids i was listening to the pod the other day and i remember you guys saying that getting rich quick is the best way to get rich so i'm just wondering was the fastest way you've had your life changed by money or what's the fastest way you've seen someone else's life get changed by money thanks alright we were asked what's the this is a one question friday we were asked what's the fastest that either of us sean and sam have jumped in wealth and how it felt and or the same question but for some of the people we know you wanna go first no you go i think you you might have a good story here i'll talk about a friend first so i was with a a friend that sold his company for close to a billion dollars and i was with him i was with him when the money hit the bank we at their apartment and immediately like he's like alright i think it i think it happened we went to the atm he previously had like three hundred thousand dollars in his bank which is not a little amount so he wasn't like des at all but he was twenty eight and we went to the atm and there was ninety million dollars in the bank account and immediately afterwards we went to mcdonald's and we got a number one each we just got a big mac and we went back to his apartment and watch tv and like we're like that's pretty cool isn't it and it was really cool like it was pretty crazy the crazy part is not just the ninety million but if you do the math of ninety million conservatively if you look at historical average ninety million at let's just run up to a hundred a hundred million at thirty becomes two hundred at forty which becomes four hundred at fifty which becomes eight hundred at sixty which becomes one point one at seventy one point one billion so you can see this it's not just that they have ninety million dollars it's like well you're it's like sure fire away more likely than not that you're gonna be a billionaire at some point while you're alive that was crazy so that one that's one story do you one i got a couple so we've told this one on the pod before people are sort of familiar but i'll do a fast version of it which is million dollar homepage so alex too who is a friend and i i think he your friends with him as well he i think he was twenty one years old and he was like i wanna be a millionaire i want a million dollars how do i like do this said he kinda asked himself this question which was like how do i make a million dollars in like the next like month or two you know which is not the question most people will ask nobody will teach you or recommend that you asked this question but he asked it and guess what the brain is a a question answering machine and so you asked that question the brain if you believe that everything is possible we'll start to come up with ideas and one of the ideas you came up with this is back in i don't know win million dollars maybe like a two thousand seven or two thousand six yeah something like that so basically two thousand five he creates million dollar homepage and he's basically like you know just like i don't know he's nineteen twenty twenty one years old something like that he's like okay i'm gonna make a website that's a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels each pixel is just like a little square and he's like cool every pixels is a dollar and he kind of made it like at the top it says be a part of it of internet history and the site website still up you can go to a million dollar homepage dot com and you can kind of you could see all the pixels and so basically he was like if i sell each of these squares for one dollar i will make a million dollars and sure enough he did january eleventh the final tally was one million thirty seven thousand and one hundred dollars by the end of it and so he literally made a million dollars and i asked him i was like you know how'd did you get like you know he basically he built something that was like designed to go viral so it was almost so stupid and so like either some people shared it because they thought it was fun funny and cool and other people thought it was dumb dumb and dumb and so like you know either way it evo a reaction out of and so you can go there right now and you could see all the pixels that pixels that sold and basically companies would buy it because they thought oh this is gonna get a bunch of traffic then cool i might get a bunch of clicks if i put my billboard here a bunch of people have tried to replicate this sense but he made a million dollars and i think two months time period and and then he went on to do something maybe he blew it over the course he he blew all the money in the course of the next year just kind of having party bought it bought condo you know like he did what a twenty one year old would do and he was like oh i for sure i'm just gonna dude it i did it so easy the first time i'm just gonna keep making hits i don't have to worry about that saving this i can just blow it and then i think it was ten years of like not having another hit trying thing after thing after thing after thing until he built calm and then calm took several years before calm became a thing and now calm is a i don't know two billion dollar company or something like that in in the meditation space so kind of amazing story on his part i what i did starting at age twenty or i forget which age i was like two years before my exit i used personal capital or and as well which is like mint dot com it's just like mint but different and you can manually add stuff and i manually added enough money that it said my net worth was sixteen or seventeen million dollars and so i had that on there and i just started like seeing that number because of course money you can buy stuff but in a lot of cases it's really just like this like number on a spreadsheet where like you know it just like a digital thing like you could put three zeros behind it and like it kinda starts feeling real for a minute and that's what i did and so i put that my net worth was like seventeen million dollars like two years or a year and a half before my exit and then when i got paid i remember thinking like this feels cool but then like twenty minutes later i was like it kinda i was i'm kinda used to this now already like i see that number already and so i would say i'm still getting used to oh you're you're a manifesto i am but you what are what i think what do we say we're the manifest cowboys baby i manifest stuff that's what i do i'm not a business person i'm i'm a manifesto you know that's pretty good on the spot yeah man that's what i do boys that no small boy stuff i love that yeah that's what i do i'm not a businessman i'm a i'm a guy who dreams and tries to achieve it it just so happens that it's in the form of business but that's what i did and it made a difference and i actually noticed that here but here's my i wrote this down so i felt a big difference when i had twenty thousand dollars the next big difference that i felt my life was when i had a hundred thousand dollars this is all liquid net worth the next big difference was when i hit five hundred thousand and then the next one was ten million and i think that maybe maybe like the forty or fifty range will be the next one and then maybe like the hundred range will be the next one that's what i think but i remember feeling like between like five hundred thousand and like ten million i kinda almost felt the same right right right yeah the similarly first jump was twenty five k we won it and prize money for our our startup like at a business plan competition and it was like oh sweet we can work on this for the whole year and just this will be here this is the money we need to live on and we need to so three of us lived on twenty five k for a year and a half or something like that it was amazing and that was a huge jump because it was freedom for a year and a half to not think about money to just try to build something cool i'll also share something that's similar so forget getting super rich quick which i think is a good exercise to do like what would i do if i really wanted it to like five x ten x if i wanted to make a million dollars in three months what would i do and if i wanted to do that how would i do it worthwhile exercise the other one is like baby goals so i heard kevin heard on some podcasts and they were like kevin man you've you're now like the biggest movie star in the world like you know you're you're up there bro you at the your huge comedy specials movies you got it all like did you think that you could do this he's like like well i never really thought about it to be honest like i just he's like i didn't think like this huge goal because that would almost like i just seemed too too different from where i was like it wasn't really even yet useful if i thought about it i could say it but like didn't matter because i was so far from it he's like so i just did baby goals like just here's a little baby goal let me get to this point and another baby goal another baby goal and i actually think that baby goals are a lot more useful and a lot less talked about than like having the big hairy audacious you know dream and goal you you need both they're both useful at different times but i would say most people would should would probably be better off doubling down on a baby let me give you an example when i was twenty one we were working on our business our startup and we had a business plan and we had a an llc and we had all the like important sounding things that we thought it takes this across we had a a logo people we had business cars people logo we had a website we had a blog we had investor we had like everything we thought it takes to to do this and so nine months go by and we're like this was the the sushi restaurant chain nine nine months go by and we're like we've been doing our planning and then we've been doing our like getting the chef on board and then we're trying to find a location and then we're were trying to figure out how much does it cost to build it out all the things you kinda gotta do to launch this thing and i remember one day just say there was my buddy trevor and we were just like god like i feel like we're just like acting business we're we're playing playing startup yeah you're playing house it's like you know oh come over let's play house let's play doctor it's like we're playing business because we got this like and literally it was it's embarrassing we had a binder of a business plan that was like three hundred pages and we used to brag about how well thought through our business was like we've thought through every detail what our buying of them but the uniforms will be what yeah binder is full full of plans in this case and and and we we had like here's how here's how we're gonna do employee promotions because we think that the way the companies work is it's like all this shit that didn't matter and like again tony one years old too dumb to know if that wasn't what was important until we got we took it to a meeting when we got sort of laughed at but they guy was like oh like this is your business plan and we're were like yeah it's a and we t to this binder onto the desk and he was like i'm not reading this and we were like oh yeah that's okay but just we wanted to show you we thought it through he goes devin are thinking about the wrong things and we're were like oh so kinda getting it we get this feeling like maybe we're doing this wrong this about nine months in maybe we're doing this wrong so we just said there one they were like alright why don't we just like for the weekend let's just make a business and like let's just try to make a thousand dollars like can we make a thousand dollars in a weekend forty eight hours as a challenge to ourselves can we get to a thousand dollars and i swear i learn more about like actually building a business in that forty eight hour thousand dollar challenge that i did the entire year of like working on the business because we were like okay how would we do this what's a product that we think people want we don't you know we instead of like being married to our current idea it's like well what's a simple product that like people want and my buddy was like oh we used to live in boulder he was like trevor was like you know you ever seen like every time we walk on campus all the sw girls and like frank guys they all have these wrist bands on like the lives strong band but they have this like stack of wrist wristband and he's like this new one that's like a really thick one it's like triple the size and it's like i don't know that seems to be in he's like what if we made those like that seems like that's pretty simple like to to sell those and we're like yeah you just like customize it you could put like you know the hustle on it or you could put like milk road on it or you could put like your brand name or your your fat name or whatever on it the debbie i think we could sell like a bunch of those and so we're like okay what should we call it and like everything that we had been super thoughtful through and thoughtful about we just like did in five seconds like what's a good name what's a good name for these like fat like wrist wristband things let's call it the fat band and then we create the fat band dot com bought it on godaddy for five seconds logo here let me just use impact the like thick font okay impact that's the that's the logo boom done product okay let's not try to have the best product like is there just something on oli we had heard of alibaba and i was like is there something on alibaba ali the express that we could just get these like made i didn't even know the word drop shipping but we figured out that same concept ourselves you're like oh dude because buy these for you know seventeen cents and then if you include shipping it's only this much if we sold each one for a dollar fifty like that would work well you could do it we'd only need to sell whatever it was like we only need to sell seven hundred bands that in order to make a thousand dollars and hey that's actually we could even be profitable if we did it it's like alright well how do we sell this thing we only have you know like twenty four hours left and so we just started like posting on our own facebook pages and calling like anybody who we could think of to be like would you do you want this for your sword do you want this for your your group and like we found one girl who he used to date who like basically she bought she was like oh my parents are having an anniversary party and there's like two hundred people coming i'll take like two hundred fifty of them and we like made a sale and we're were like yeah just like read out your card credit card but i don't even know how we took the payment like we didn't even have anything to take payment we just like took the payments of our their paypal or something and do that feeling of getting to a thousand dollars like you can see the smile on my face i still feel that how good that felt that weekend and that's all first was like oh this is what it feels like to do something real everything else we've been doing is fake and like i was so obvious to me and it changed the way we did our main business too and like that being paid for like you know a little bit of side hustle money as we went this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully into well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow adam so i've built maybe seven or eight different businesses whether that just be like a real estate thing or the hustle or court or just whatever i think almost all of them i got to a hundred thousand in sales before i filed an llc and the reason i do that is momentum and like people are like ben's laughing and people are like oh it's illegal first i don't think that's illegal you can use your social security number and like get you lot this stuff like you can like enter your social security number and second i have no idea it actually might be illegal but like i don't care because i'm willing to like sacrifice those things and get in trouble for the sake of momentum because momentum is like the lifeblood like when you're going because once you start getting sales it gets addict and you like taste you taste it and it works out amazing listen to this so there's this so i tweeted out that i wanna dress better and this guy who's got like a fashion instagram thing what's it called like well built style i i or something like that he dion mean and he's like hey like look at my instagram like i it might i think it fits what you want and i go yeah this actually is great he goes tell you what i'm gonna make you a presentation on all the things that you buy just send me a pinterest board of the people who you admire and like your personality and i'll study your instagram and study your twitter to understand your body and your personality things like that and i'm gonna send you a p like a powerpoint with like image like it looks for you and then just a link to buy like all these clothes i said alright great what's in for you he goes if you like it pay me three hundred dollars and so he spent like a week doing this and he sent it to me i was like this is sick man i would've paid way more than three hundred dollars by the way and i just he goes he goes well that's awesome here's my email just pay help me three hundred bucks and i did it and this is a beautiful perfect example of a person who just they just did it they did it the right way and they just worked and like then you do that maybe ten more times and then eventually you quit you create a questionnaire on your website and then you like do a pay half up front and then you do this and you do that and then you hire a couple more people like it turns into shit really fast we don't plan like well how many people would buy this you really just think like well how big do i want it to be and like would a million people buy this over the course of three years yeah maybe that sounds about right alright that's cool let's do it and right that's typically how it works for me and i think that's how should work for most people in most cases not all the time some i'm get guys are starting big companies like car companies and shit like that and that does require planning but for most people most of the time this works the the question was about getting rich quick and i think my takeaways are there is a benefit to actually think through how would i do it if i wanted to like let me not just be like pretend to be morally opposed to the idea of getting my outcome faster right i think it's fine and getting rid kinda gets a bad rap like i think we all would love to get to our dream outcomes faster if possible might as well ask the question could i get there really fast and what what does the brain come up with you don't you're not obligated to do it second thing is instead of focusing on getting rich quick i would say get revenue quick especially if you're kind of like early in your entrepreneurial career because getting any revenue quick will like make the whole thing real you'll stop playing start up and you'll actually be in the game you'll feel what's real it'll force you to focus on the only only the stuff that matters and he won't end up like me with a three hundred page binder full of business plans like it's almost like a car how dumb that was but it's like i took it to the extreme end of like the wrong way to build a business is like to super over plan and never like go to market and actually try your thing and you know the the fat band thing that i did was by far the best thing i did early on in my my kind of entrepreneurial thing didn't get rich off of it but in a way i did because i actually learned about how to do a business for real which is what ended up helping me become wealthy you know that skill ended up helping me become wealthy that experienced did it was like enough money to get like a bloom and onion and maybe a steak dinner at out outback steak steakhouse so i consider that a success right that's all you want we were big on that fond du places you ever a fond du place i feel you're like lactose intolerant you're probably i i could see that your lactose intolerant yeah dude you there you see i look like the embodiment of a glass of milk like it looks like i just eat potatoes milk and corn all day like what when you were talking about that fashion guy he was like you know i i think you got potential you you you're a tall tall drink water it's like you're yeah tall glass of milk because that's like yeah probably you yeah i get it straight from the other every morning yeah i mean look at me i'm like a melting bar of chocolate like a melting piece of fudge you're all drink of milk yeah yeah if corn were a human it would look like me yeah you ever thought about if for calling on the c legs yeah yeah alright that's the sign that we're done see it