Dear Reader,

Back in 2023, I put together a list of 12 lessons about money that I wanted to remember.

I went back and reread it recently.

And three years later, there isn’t much I’d change.

If anything, I wish I had learned most of them sooner.

If I could go back to being 20 years old – before the brokerage career, before starting my business, before I had any real money to invest – this is the advice I’d give myself…

And it’s something I will definitely be passing down to my kids.

Here are the first six.

I’ll cover the other six next week.

#1: You Can’t Save Your Way to Wealth – But You Can Outspend Any Income

A lot of personal finance advice focuses on one side of the equation.

Make more money – or cut your expenses.

You need both.

If you earn $1 million a year and spend $1 million a year…

You added exactly zero dollars to your wealth.

Sure, you may have had a much nicer year than somebody making $50,000.

But if both of you spend everything you make, neither of you is building a financial cushion.

This is how people can make fortunes playing professional sports, selling millions of records, or winning the lottery…

And still wind up bankrupt.

There’s almost no level of income you can’t find a way to outspend.

At the same time, there’s a limit to how far frugality can take you.

If somebody is barely earning enough to pay rent and buy groceries, telling them to stop buying coffee isn’t going to make them rich.

The real goal is to create as large a sustainable gap as possible between what comes in and what goes out.

So grow your income.

But don’t let every raise immediately become a nicer car, a bigger house, or more expensive habits.

Be sure to invest the difference.

Because that surplus is what eventually gives you capital to put to work.

And that brings me to the income side.

#2: Jobs Are for Learning, Not Just Earning

This is one I got wrong early on.

I spent way too much time thinking about how much the next job paid.

How much is the raise?

Could I get promoted?

Instead, I should have spent more time asking:

What will I know how to do after working here that I don’t know how to do today?

Economists call this human capital.

Your knowledge and skills are assets.

And early in your career, building those assets can pay you far more over the next 30 years than squeezing another 10% out of your salary today.

One job might teach you how to manage people.

Another might teach you sales.

The next may force you to learn marketing, hiring, technology, or how to communicate difficult ideas clearly.

Individually, none of those skills needs to make you exceptional.

But stack enough complementary skills together…

And suddenly there aren’t many people who can do everything you can do.

I had to find this out the hard way.

As a broker, I had learned how to manage money.

I could talk to people about finance.

And I knew how to sell.

Eventually, I started thinking:

If my company can afford to pay me around $250,000 a year, I must be generating more than $250,000 of value for them.

So why not do it for myself?

So I quit…

Then I spent about a year and a half barely making enough money to pay my bills.

It turned out the skills I had were useful…

But they weren’t enough by themselves.

My employer had supplied a lot of things around me that I had taken for granted.

And without those things, suddenly my skillset wasn’t quite so valuable (an extreme example is how even the best waiter in the world is nothing without a restaurant).

Once I was on my own, I had to learn a new, complementary set of skills.

How to make videos. How to talk to a camera. How to build an audience. How to market what I was doing.

Eventually those skills combined with what I already knew.

That’s when things started taking off.

I hadn’t been wrong about the skills I had.

But I had underestimated the skills I was missing.

So, especially early in your career, don’t look at a job as just a paycheck.

Ask what you’ll leave with besides the money.

And if I could choose one skill that transfers almost everywhere…

It would probably be the next one.

#3: Sales Is the Ultimate Safety Net

Sales gets a bad reputation.

People picture some pushy guy trying to convince them to buy something they don’t need.

But sales, done properly, is much simpler.

It’s understanding what somebody wants…

Then showing them how you can help them get it.

If you can do that, you can make money in almost any economy.

Imagine walking into a business and telling the owner:

“If I can make you an extra $1 million this year, will you give me $100,000 of it?”

Assuming you can actually deliver…

That’s a pretty easy deal for the business owner to say yes to.

And you can apply sales skills to almost any situation.

You can use it to get hired…to win clients…to negotiate…to start a company...to raise money, or to sell something you created yourself.

If everything disappeared tomorrow and I had to start again…

Being able to sell is one of the skills I’d most want to keep.

Because if you can help other people make money, there will usually be somebody willing to pay you.

#4: Take Asymmetric Risks Early and Often

Before I quit my job, I realized something about myself.

I had never interviewed for a job and failed to get an offer.

At first, I was proud that I was batting 1.000.

Then I realized I was only going after things I already felt pretty confident I could get.

I wasn’t failing because I wasn’t putting myself in enough situations where failure was possible.

If you’re batting 1.000, you probably aren’t taking big enough swings.

That realization helped push me toward leaving my job.

Now, I’m certainly not telling you to quit yours.

Taking risks does NOT mean being reckless.

The key is to take asymmetric risks.

I don’t want to risk something catastrophic for a tiny potential gain.

That’s picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

I want the opposite.

If I’m wrong, maybe I lose some time or a little money.

Maybe I embarrass myself and bruise my ego.

But if I’m right, the upside could change my trajectory.

And when you’re young, those types of risks are especially attractive because you have so much time to recover.

Change fields.

Take a job that teaches you something new.

Start the business.

Make the embarrassing first video.

When I started mine, there were people who genuinely thought something had gone wrong.

I had left a great career.

My early videos were rough.

People I knew were texting other people asking whether I was okay.

Some contacted me directly to tell me my titles were bad or that what I was doing wasn’t going to work.

And plenty of the criticism was fair.

I wasn’t very good yet.

But look at the trade-off.

If it failed, maybe I embarrassed myself and eventually went back to a corporate career.

If it worked…

The upside was far, far bigger.

That’s an asymmetric risk.

And as your financial position changes, the opportunities can change too.

Early on, your best asymmetric opportunities may be in your career because you have more time than capital.

Later, once you have a strong income, savings, and a real nest egg…

You may be able to put a smaller part of your capital behind asymmetric investment opportunities without jeopardizing your hard-earned foundation.

Either way, the setup is the same.

If I’m wrong, I can recover.

If I’m right, the payoff can propel me forward.

And there’s another benefit to taking a lot of those calculated swings.

People call successful outcomes “luck.”

And sometimes they are.

But opportunities are passing by all the time.

If you don’t have a line in the water, none of them can become lucky breaks for you.

The more prepared lines you have out there…

The more chances you give for luck to find you.

And one of the best ways to put yourself in position for that luck is lesson #5:

#5: Always Create Value

At its core, making money is not very complicated.

You have to create something somebody else wants.

That can be a product, a service, a skill, or a solution to a problem.

The other person voluntarily gives you money because they would rather have what you’re offering than keep the money.

And you would rather have their money than keep what you’re selling.

Both sides walk away happier with the exchange.

That sounds almost too simple.

But I think people lose sight of it.

They ask, “How do I make more money?”...

When the actual question should be:

“What can I do that other people will happily pay me more money for?”

Once you start looking at the world that way, problems begin to look different too.

If thousands of people are complaining about the same thing…

There may be demand for somebody to fix it.

If businesses are struggling with something…

There may be money available for someone who can solve it.

The marketplace is constantly telling you what people want.

Your job is to pay attention.

Money is often just the receipt you get for solving somebody else’s problem.

But early in life, you may not have many solutions to sell yet.

You may have only one thing – your time.

And that brings me to the final lesson for today.

#6: Your Time Is Priceless to You – But Replaceable to Everyone Else

Your time is the scarcest resource you have.

You can lose money and make it back.

You can lose possessions and replace them.

But you can never redo yesterday.

You get 24 hours today – that’s it.

But here’s the paradox.

Even though your time is incredibly scarce to you…

It can be extremely abundant to everybody else.

There are billions of people on Earth.

If a job requires no special skill and simply needs somebody to stand somewhere for an hour…

There are literally millions of substitutes available.

That’s why selling nothing except your time puts a ceiling on what you can earn.

Early on, that may be unavoidable.

Most of us begin by trading hours for money, and that’s fine.

But if selling your time is how you start…

You want to use those hours to become progressively harder to replace.

Learn skills. Build knowledge. Get experience.

Stack enough of those together and an hour of your time becomes much more valuable than it was before.

Then, as you start earning and keeping more money, you can begin building assets that don’t need you to trade another hour for every dollar.

Investments. A business. Products or systems that can keep producing after the initial work is done.

That’s how you gradually break the link between how many hours you work and how much money you can make.

And ultimately, that gives you more control over the one resource you can never replace:

Your time.