It wasn't school that gave me my education about investing
My teacher was the roller-coaster of life
It came to me one day when my boss asked if someone wanted to help install a staircase.
When we got to the house I was shocked he had it all
Granite counter tops Persian rugs and a collection of super-cars
I'd look out the window and see the owner relaxing or practicing his golf swing
When I talked to him he only chatted about his hobbies and never his businesses
I asked him what's the secret to your success He tapped me on the shoulder and said Mark if you can't make money while you sleep you'll work until you die This is now known in the modern day as passive income That was the moment I decided I needed to join the top 1 percent of men I'd like to retread my journey with you today
It's very clearly broken into five different stages just like a video game and at each stage, I learned something imperative to my future success
You'll learn what I focused on as a hard-nosed businessman what I obsessed about in the world of investing and most importantly the many mistakes I made along the way that have made me the successful person I am today
the awakening
This is when I went from zero to twenty thousand dollars.
My journey started as I emerged from my mother's womb and my first words were about which stocks I should buy.
Just kidding
Like most people, I was pretty clueless about financial education as a kid but I had the spirit of hustle in me.
One of my earliest memories of entrepreneurship is when I was selling fish door-to-door.
Just imagine wiping the sleep dust out of your eyes at four in the morning heading down to a freezing pier and sitting for hours until you'd caught enough mackerel to sell for a profit.
Not only that but grabbing a slimy fish from a bag ringing a doorbell looking a person straight in the eye and pitching to them
Key Skills
This built up my confidence and sales skills two of the earlier skills I needed to learn to be successful
As I earned I soon found that any money I made wasn't mine
Instead, it would go places like McDonald's and the girl I happened to be dating
I always seemed to have just enough
This is called lifestyle inflation, the tendency to spend more as you make more.
Whatever you earn
The Trap
it becomes your new baseline and that's the trap
But being a car fanatic I've always dreamed of owning a Ferrari
I felt as if they sent such a strong signal to others that you've made it
I'd often speak to my friend Paul who worked as a valet parking cars for the rich and famous
He once told me something that changed my perspective on luxuries
He said when people would drive up to the hotel in their Ferraris they would watch me gawk and love every moment of it
I'm sure they felt admired important even respected but you know what Mark I didn't care about them or even notice them
Instead, I thought wow if I had that car people would think I'm cool
And I wonder how many people buy these cars without realizing that people rarely give the driver a moment's thought
Gaining Respect
I learned that no one would be as impressed with my possessions and luxuries as much as me.
People want to be respected and admired by others but competence intelligence and kindness will bring you so much more respect than horsepower ever will
With all the information out there on the internet about how to make money or get rich quickly, it can be hard to separate the truth from the marketing.
Internet gurus have been getting wealthy for the past decade telling other people how they can get rich and there's a whole industry out there based on fantasy but the truth is wealth is not always what you see but what you don't see.
Budgeting
Little by little and for the first time I started seeing my savings account go up
I. started building an emergency fund money for a rainy day
I didn't know exactly when or why it would rain only that one day it would
One day my boss approached me and ordered me to start making wooden trash cans
I made trash can after trash can the hours would crawl by so slowly
I went to my boss and asked him how long I'd have to keep doing this
Until the order stopped coming in which is probably never what he said and I felt so deflated
Although I was saving money I didn't feel passionate about what I was doing but I wasn't thinking big enough
After all, I didn't care about luxury so why would I need more money
Then it hit me
Time equals power
I realized that control over your time is the greatest thing money can buy
If I had a passive income I could spend my time doing the things I loved
The problem is it takes a lot of time or money to start making enough passive income to become financially free
We spend thousands of hours every year working in the pursuit of money
So I asked myself what was I truly passionate about
I had a burning passion for radio control models and I noticed many people in this industry were making a lot of mistakes
I saw the true potential and the ways that I could improve on what had come before me
Find a problem
I once read in a book that if you could identify a problem and you had a better way of doing things you could turn it into a business.
Stage two the hustle
This is when I went from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand
So I got to work
I was so excited about my business plans that I shared them with a close friend and confidant and to my shock the unimaginable happened.
He stole my idea and set up my entire business for himself
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Anyway back to the story
The reality is that I needed some money to pursue my dream but my savings just weren't enough.
I wasn't about to give up
I drew up a business plan went to the bank and applied for my first loan
It wasn't easy and I had to visit multiple banks
However, eventually, I secured the money I needed
While some people were in their wealth investing in the stock market I reinvested the earnings from my businesses to open more stores and even buy back my original idea from my old friend.
Networking
I started to know more and more people in the business world
A lot of these individuals became my mentors and would teach me things like how to build a business that scales how to improve sales and how to manage people
As my income grew and I solved problems I was not only growing my net worth but becoming a top one percent man as well
As the good times continued I increasingly bet on them continuing which led to one of my most significant life crashes and moments of despair
I remember it like it was yesterday walking into the shop where I had initially started to give my father a job in his later years and instead of being greeted by the magical emporium filled with all the toys that I could have only dreamed of having as a kid I was met with a smashed roof empty shelves and my products laying broken thrown across the floor
This hit me so hard that the memory has been seared into my subconscious and I sometimes still see it when I close my eyes
You may think it's all right Mark I know you I bet you had insurance everything was okay and you bounced back
Well in fact I'd grown so fast and I was making so much money that not everything was correctly structured within my business
Although we were insured I'd forgotten to update it with all the new stock that we'd acquired since the opening of the store but the disaster didn't stop there
It gets even worse
I got a phone call a few days later and one of my staff informed me that another two locations had been hit.
Luckily one of these attempts was unsuccessful in my flagship store as they couldn't break through the door.
However, they'd driven a truck straight through the side of the store that was responsible for serving the entirety of London and the damage was horrendous, let alone the stock that we lost.
Here's the revised text with timestamps and punctuation removed:
Risk vs Reward
That's when I learned about the balance between risk and reward
See making money requires taking risks operating quickly and putting yourself out there but keeping money requires the opposite
It requires humility and fear that what you've made can be taken away from you just like that
Once you lose 95 percent of your money you have to gain 1900 percent just to get back to where you started
Taking too much risk can bury you so deep in a hole it can be nearly impossible to get out of
I even started to move my operations online to adapt to the changing times
Stage three the trap
This is when I went from 100000 to 1 million
I realized that one of the biggest problems people face is when they turn their passion into a vehicle to accumulate money.
They are now reliant on it to fund their lifestyle.
Time Is Limited
leading to their passion becoming their prison
I mean the biggest bottleneck in my business was the business owner me.
As the business got bigger and as we tried to move it online so did the number of problems complaints and things to worry about
It always seems like as soon as I solve a problem another one would soon follow.
Don't get me wrong owning and running a business is great especially if you are passionate about it but it isn't as easy or as passive as a lot of people make it out to be
I've read a lot of books on investing, studied the techniques of Warren Buffet and come across John Ogle's book about common sense investing.
Wealth principles
It shocked me when I learned that 80 percent of active fund managers under perform the S&P 500 Index.
Diversification is important and by buying and investing in the S&P 500 which is a basket of 503 stocks I could earn a steady growth that grows along with the US economy.
My goal was to have enough money in the S&P 500 that in the worst-case scenario, I could withdraw up to 4 percent per year to live off my investments while still growing my portfolio.
Embrace volatility
By sticking to my guns I was able to avoid suffering from the internet stock crash of 2000
Early on in my journey, I learned that the losses felt massive whereas a profit seemed so slow.
There's an old saying stocks rise like an escalator and crash like an elevator and this couldn't be more true.
I kept dollar cost averaging and adding to my stock portfolio even as the dot-com crash continued.
I was getting more and more shares of the index fund at better and better prices.
As a qualified pilot, I draw this parallel hours and hours of uneventful flight followed by moments of sheer terror but it's these moments of sheer terror that make up the majority of your returns.
The way I conducted my finances during the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis gave me more returns than any investing I'd ever done before
Stage four the refinement
This is when I went from 1 million to 10 million
As my wealth grew it seemed like the matrix was creating more and more temptations to take my money away from me.
Having savings gives you a lot of options like going to a buffet where you can have every dish you've ever wanted.
In the previous stages once I'd surpassed 100000 in yearly earnings I was considered an accredited investor which is both an exciting and a dangerous place to be
I fell into the trap of investing in various penny stocks which initially was very successful however I went on to lose 30000 with a couple of bad trades.
After this, I created a rule for myself.
Do Your Homework
To only invest in things that I fully understand unless it's an experiment with a small amount of capital that I'm not afraid to lose
It doesn't matter whether you are investing in NFT stocks or a relationship I learned to always do my homework and take the time to understand every opportunity.
The thing I understood more than anything was my business
I wanted to push forward so I flew out to America on a bit of a whim to see a friend on the promise that he would help me restructure my business from serving customers B2C to servicing other businesses B2B as well
Double down
He taught me that by focusing on selling to businesses I could increase my numbers without having to deal with so many people.
This is known as the 80–20 principle.
I learned that I could focus on the 20 percent of things that produce 80 percent of my income.
I traveled abroad to China and Japan where I learned about the idea of lean manufacturing which I related to my everyday life.
I started cutting anything unnecessary out of my business and personal life so I could focus on what gave me the most meaning and results.
Through this, I'd finally achieved multimillionaire status but it felt kind of empty and that's when I had a revelation that changed my life forever.
Stage five the revelation
This is when I went to 10 million and beyond
This brings me to where I am today
I thought about which investments were most important to me in my life and I realized it was the relationships with my family and friends.
You'll be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.
I started thinking about how to pass the torch and I taught my son Curtis about finance.
We started this YouTube channel together as a way to educate the younger generation from the perspective not of some rich influencer but of a guy who did it with passion and a bit of elbow grease.
I started spending more time enjoying the little moments appreciating what I have and what I've worked for and fostering quality relationships.
The final stage for a lot of people later in life is philanthropy
Some people like Bill Gates start foundations others like Ray Dalio write books
This is my form of giving back
When I reflect on my journey getting here I'm proud of everything I've done.
I still hustle hard
Purpose
But what is meaningful to me is being able to share
My knowledge and inspires a younger generation
To go after their dreams and achieve success.
So I'm gonna leave the next video right up there.
But don't click on it just yet.
Make sure to Follow if you wanna grow your wealth.
Okay, I'll see you over there.