Hey, guys. It's Ezra from Grand Rapids. 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 what's 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, one question Friday. We are 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 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 are 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 destitute 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 had a number one each. We each got a big mac,

and we went back to his apartment and watched 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'll get historical average, ninety million at let's just round 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 a sure fire way more likely than not that you're gonna be a billionaire at some point while you're alive.

That was crazy.

So, that that's one story. Do you have 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 home page.

So

Alex too, who is a friend, and I I think you your friends with him as well, He,

I think he was twenty one years old, and he was, like, just, I wanna be a millionaire. I want a million dollars.

How do I, like, do this. And 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 ask. Nobody will teach you or recommend that you ask 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 he came up with, this is back in,

I don't know, when million dollars Maybe, like, two thousand seven or two thousand six.

Yeah. Something like that. So, basically,

two thousand five. He creates million dollar home page, 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 pixel 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's still up. You can go to 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 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 dumber. And so, like, you know, either way, it evoked a reaction out of everybody. And so you can go there right now and you could see all the pictures that pixels that sold, and basically companies would buy it because they thought, oh, if 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 since, but he made a million dollars in, I think, two months,

time period. And,

and then he went on to do something before it over the course.

He he blew all the money in the course of the next year just kind of having party bought it off bought a 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, I did it so easy the first time. I'm just gonna keep making hits. I don't have to worry about saving this. I can just blow

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 an amazing story on his part. I, what I did starting at age twenty

or I forget what 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's 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 manifestor.

I am. But you what do what? I think you 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 a I'm a manifestor.

You know? That's pretty good on the spot. Yeah. That's what I do.

No small voice stuff. I love that. Yeah. That's what I do. I am like 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 di difference that I felt life was when I hit 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 it feeling like between like,

five hundred thousand and, like, ten million, I kinda almost felt the same.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. The uh-uh, similarly, first jump was twenty five k.

We won it in 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 to forget getting super rich quick, which I think is a good exercise to do.

Like, what would I do? If I really wanted to, like, five x ten x, if I wanted to make a million dollars in three months, what would I do? And I wanted to do that, how would I do it?

Worthwhile exercise?

The other one is like

baby goals. So I heard Kevin Hart 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 had the your huge comedy specials, movies. You got it all.

Like, did you think that you could do this? He's like, he's 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, it just seemed too too,

different from where I was. It wasn't really even yet useful if I thought about I could say it, but, like, it 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 would probably be better off doubling down on a baby goal. 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 takes -- Business cars. -- a logo. People. Yeah. 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 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 sitting there with my buddy, Trevor, and we were just, like,

God, like, I feel like we're just, like,

acting business. We're we're 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 in bear it's a bear We had a binder of a business plan that was like three hundred pages. We used to brag about how well thought through our business was. Like, we've thought through every detail. What are Binder's full of them. But the uniforms will be what yeah. Binder's full full of plans in this case. 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 is like all this shit that didn't matter. And, like, again, twenty one years old too dumb to know that that wasn't what was important. Until we got we took it to a meeting and we got, like, sort of laughed at. But the guy was like, oh, like, this is your business plan. And we're like, yeah.

It's a and we thunk this binder onto the tech 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've thought it through. He goes, Debbie's are thinking about the wrong things. And we're like, oh, so it kinda we're getting we get this feeling like maybe we're doing this wrong. This is about nine months in. Maybe we're doing this wrong. So we're just sitting there one day. We're 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 learned more about, like, actually building a business in that forty eight hour thousand dollar challenge than 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're 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, and he was, like,

trevor was like, you know, you ever seen, like, every time we walk around campus, all the sorority girls and, like, frat guys, they all have these wristbands on, like, the Livestrong band, but they have this, like, stack of wristbands.

And he's like, you know, this is 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 to sell those. And we're like, oh, yeah. You could just, like, customize it. You could put, like, you know, the hustle on it, or you could put, like, milk road on it. You could put, like, your brand name or your your frat name or whatever on it. That'd be cool. 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 thought 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 wristband things? Let's call it the fat band. And then we create the fat band dot com, bought it on GoDaddy in five seconds.

Logo here. Let me just use Impact. They're 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. Is there just something on Alibaba? We had heard of Alibaba as, like, is there something on Alibaba or Ali 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. We're like, oh, dude. You just 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. We could do it. We'd only need to sell whatever it was. Like, we only need to sell seven hundred bands 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, like, you know, like, twenty four hours left. And so we just started, like, posting on our own Facebook pages calling, like, anybody who we could think of to be like, hey, oh, would you do you want this for your story? 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 And we, like, made a sale. And we're, like, yeah, just, like, read out your card, credit card. 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 on our other PayPalvis or something.

And, dude, that feeling of getting to a thousand dollars,

you can see the smile on my face. I still feel that how good that felt that weekend. And that was when I 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 thing 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 integrated. Well, I can see the client's hold history, calls, support ticket emails, and here's a test from three days ago, I totally missed.

Hubspot, throw better.

So I've built maybe

seven or eight different businesses. Whether that just be like a real estate thing or the hustle or a 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 la 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 a lot of this stuff. 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 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 addicting 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 address better.

And this guy who's got like a fashion Instagram thing.

What's it called? Like well built style. I've or something like that. He DM me and he's like, hey, like, look at my Instagram. Like, 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 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 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. And I said, Alright. Great. What's in it 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, is sick, man. I would have 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 paypal 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 it just worked. And, like, then you do that maybe ten more times. And then eventually, you create, you create a questionnaire on your website, and then you, like, do a pay half up front, and then you do this, and then 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,

that's typically how it works for me. And I think that's how it should work for most people in most cases. Not all the time. Some 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 that there is a benefit to 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? They're like, it's fine. And getting rich food kinda gets a bad rap, but, 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? 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 startup. 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 you won't end up like me with a three hundred page binder full of business plans. Like, It's almost like a caricature

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 experience did. It was like enough money to get like, a bloomin onion and maybe a steak dinner at Outback steakhouse. So I consider that a success. Right? That's all you want. Now we were big on that Fondeu places. You ever been to a fondu place? I feel like you're, like, one of those lactose intolerant. You're probably I could I could see that you're lactose intolerant.

Dude, are you no. You see, I look like the embodiment a glass of milk. Like, it looks like I just eat potatoes, milk, and corn all day.

Like, when you talk about that fashion guy,

He was like, you know, I I think you got potential. You, you, you, you, you're a tall, tall drink of water. It's like, you're tall glass of milk because that's the way I would describe

you. Yeah. I could have straight from the utter every morning. Yeah. I mean, look at me.

I'm like a melting bar of chocolate.

Fudge.

You're a tall drink of milk. Yeah. Yeah. If corn were a human, it would look like me.

Yeah. You ever thought.

About if a coin on the combat legs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Alright. That's the sign that we're done. See you.