INTRODUCTION

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

—Unknown

“Many folks think they aren’t good at earning money, when what they don’t know is how to use it.”

—Frank A. Clark

As I began writing this book, my mom called. “You’re making so much money,” she said. “It’s going to cause havoc if you happen to die, God forbid, and you don’t have a plan for your assets.” It’s funny. Three years ago she was skeptical when I chose to drop out of school. Her message changed from “Stay in school!” to “Get a will!” More on me later. . . . Let’s talk about you first.

You know those people whose lives you just can’t figure out? They travel the world whenever they want. They barely work. They’re always with their family, or conquering the kind of grand life adventure you’ve reserved for . . . someday. Somehow, they’re happy with their life as it is—not just hiding behind a “perfect life” façade on social media.

There’s the kid from your college dorm who dropped out and has since raised $1M in start-up funding. The dad you see at your son’s soccer games, or at your gym, who drives a Range Rover and is always around in the middle of the week when most parents are working. Your neighbor who quit her corporate job and now has her own business that you hear is making her $10K or $20K a month.

You know these people are average at best. They’re not supertalented or smart, but they’re living like kings and queens and you’re dumbfounded.

What they know that you don’t is how to be a capitalist without any capital. There are four golden rules that the business world has sold us to keep us from being successful. Those rules must be broken. And the people you’re thinking about have mastered breaking those rules.

It’s easy to dismiss the superrich as trust-fund babies, or to assume their spouse is the breadwinner. Or we think maybe they’re not rich at all and just racking up credit card debt. These scenarios will be true for some people, but I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about the people who are wealthy by their own doing. Their families have nothing to do with their fat bank accounts. You can’t stand their weekday Instagram posts from their sailboat, or the sight of them on another overseas vacation, but as much as they annoy you, you’re also dying to know how they do it. How are these people so successful—and free—while you’re withering away underneath fluorescent lights at your desk job 50+ hours a week?

It’s because they’re part of the “New Rich,” as Tim Ferriss calls the segment of the population who have figured out how to maximize everything in their life—even if it’s not much—so it becomes an asset that works for them. The New Rich are resourceful with their time, their money, and their energy. They get what they want when they want it. They travel however much they want. They have blank calendars. And they have very, very few expenses.

Tim Ferriss introduced us to the New Rich over a decade ago in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, but a lot has changed since then. Today, my peers and I are getting rich not just by starting companies from scratch, but by leveraging gold mines like Instagram and Airbnb that didn’t exist in the early 2000s. We drive wealth by taking advantage of new tools quickly and figuring out how to get those tools to work for us so we can work less.

When an average person sees a New Rich person, they assume that new rich person has some magical quality. It’s not magic. The average person just doesn’t understand how the rich person got so rich, so they explain it away as “magical.” A magician practices a series of “moves” or “tactics” behind a curtain so that when the trick is put together, the average viewer misses the sleight of hand. If you saw the magician practicing behind the curtain, you’d think, “I can pull that trick off, too!” Building wealth is the same.

These magicians practice behind the curtain, but I’m holding back nothing in this book. I’ve been a wealth magician for the past decade, and despite my lawyer’s recommendations, I’m sharing everything in this book so you can pull off your own “wealth magic.” You’ll see my tax returns, my profit and loss statements, my email negotiations when buying and selling companies. I’m sharing it all so you can study and get a very real sense of how I’ve built my empire. I’ll take you behind the curtain of the New Rich so you can become part of the inner sanctum.

The lifestyle you want is not out of your reach—you just don’t know the moves yet. This book will lead you through those moves, starting with some I began making at the age of nineteen. You’ll learn how to replicate the inner workings of more than twenty revenue streams I now have at twenty-eight years old.

If you’re ready to join the New Rich, read on, my new wealth magicians!

MY STORY AND WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK

There are a few things you should know about me:

That last detail is probably the reason I’ve gotten this far, and it’s how I’m going to help you get here, too. I’m not going to waste your time with small talk and rah-rah positivity. If you’re familiar with my podcast, The Top Entrepreneurs, you already know this about me. I have interviewed more than five hundred of the world’s top thinkers, disrupters, and CEOs in search of patterns that anyone can apply to gain wealth, work less, and get what they want out of life. I get to the data and I get to the numbers so you and I can learn from the real stuff. In fact, I pressure these CEOs so hard, they share secret strategies they wish they didn’t share, and threaten to sue after their episode goes live. Their fault! (Your gain!) An unfortunate side effect is that I’m the most sued podcaster—you should see my wall of cease and desist letters (a beautiful thing! I always win these contests!).

This book is a natural extension of my podcast. I will present the secrets of the New Rich and feature real stories from twenty-year-old dorm-room CEOs, Airbnb millionaires, filthy rich software founders, and financial technology billionaires—all of whom are building their wealth every day, right now. We’ll get their stories, but just as important, we’ll look at the real numbers behind their businesses so we can understand how they make it work.

Then there are the patterns. In all my time talking to top entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that their execution plans follow similar patterns that counter conventional business wisdom. These patterns directly correlate to wealth, freedom, and a lot of winning—and they’ll surprise the hell out of you. Once you learn about them in the chapters ahead, you’ll realize building wealth is so easy it’s unbelievable, and you’ll join those rich friends whose success baffled you just a few months earlier.

My obsession with numbers is so fierce that it’s the reason I dropped out of college. That, and the money-smart mindset my mom has instilled in me since before my memories kicked in. She swears that during a car ride when I was five years old I asked her why we never went out to dinner anymore. She explained that she and my dad had to make choices. They’d recently decided to move our family into a new, big house in the country. Since making that choice, they had to choose not to spend money on other things, like eating out.

I sat quietly in the back seat for a long time. Then I said, “So, Mom, can I choose to get into my piggy bank and take us out to Pizza Hut tonight?” She didn’t take me up on it. Instead, she and Dad chose to take us out to dinner that evening, but the lesson was clear.

I have no memory of this conversation, but when I hear the story it says so much about how my parents raised me to think like an entrepreneur. Mom wasn’t talking about the family budget that day—not exactly. Her bigger point was that you have to make choices based on the life you want to live now—and the life you want to live in the future. It’s all about opportunity cost. Sometimes that means less pizza in exchange for the big country house (except when your five-year-old breaks your resolve in a two-minute conversation). Other times it means following your gut when you see a big opportunity in front of you, even if it goes against everything you’re told you’re “supposed to be doing” with your life.

That’s where I found myself when I decided to drop out of college. I stayed until my junior year, but I’ll never forget the moment I realized school wasn’t for me. It was during a statistics course very early on in my time at Virginia Tech. I should have loved this class, but the teacher was so boring and I had other things on my mind.

The midterm that semester was my wake-up call. I’d stayed up the night before preselling a Facebook fan page product I’d just launched. I was very tired, but I’d sent out $1,400 in sales proposals that night, so I had no regrets. I had set up a ping on my phone so it would make a sound every time a new PayPal sale came in. My phone was across the room during the test, but I heard it ping twice in the two-hour exam period. I was selling my product at $700 a pop, so I made $1,400 before the exam was done. I failed it, but that failure turned into unstoppable momentum to keep growing my business.

I realized I was a capitalist the moment I got those failed test scores. I thought, If I can fail this exam and make $1,400 while doing it, school is just not my thing. I stuck with it a couple more years but I knew I had to get out and build my company. If you’re a student reading this, keep going. It gets even better . . .

When I finally did decide to leave school, one of the first things I did was call Mom. I thought she’d be livid with me for wanting to quit—especially after she’d worked three jobs to pay her own way through college. Now my parents were paying my tuition, and there I was, throwing it away. But she wasn’t angry at all. She just told me it was my choice, but I should think about my options. It was the only time in my life when my parents would pay for me to go to college (I was fortunate and thankful), so she suggested I finish my degree in case one of my business ventures failed down the line.

She had a point, but I knew I’d never push myself to be successful if I had that safety net under me. I told her I just had to go. Mom said she knew she’d raised three stubborn, ambitious kids, so she wasn’t going to stand in the way of what we wanted to do. She just pushed me to consider my choices before jumping.

All I could think about were the numbers. I knew I could go way bigger than $1,400 in an afternoon if I put more time and energy into my business. Forget the rules, or what anyone said I should be doing with my life at twenty years old (thanks, Mom, for not being one of those people). I saw my opportunity and I was going for it.

MY INCOME STATEMENT AND WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME

When I was twenty-three, in 2013, that company I started in my dorm room (called Lujure, later renamed Heyo) passed $939K in annual sales. Politicians love tax returns so I figured I’d share mine:

Two years later, in 2015, my company passed $5M in total sales, and I’ve now bought four companies over two years to drive more revenue, faster and cheaper. I now make $100K in passive income every month, and I work about fifteen hours a week.

My point isn’t that dropping out of college pays (although it did for me). It’s that you, or I, or anyone can join the New Rich if we just decide we want to.

So, do you want to?

WEALTHY PEOPLE SOLD YOU THESE FOUR LIES

There’s a secret many of the New Rich don’t want me to share: You don’t need to be Ivy League educated, have money, be creative, or even have an idea to reach their level of financial success. You just need to be willing to break the rules and start looking in the right places.

To start, forget most of the business or money “rules” you’ve learned because they’re dead. It amazes me that a book like Rich Dad Poor Dad, which has sold twenty million copies, is no longer relevant. That book was my bible growing up, but it simply doesn’t work today because it gives old business advice that’s rooted in the old economy. One example: a big message in Rich Dad Poor Dad is that your home is a liability, whether you rent or own. Today, the New Rich would categorize their home as an asset because the few days they’re traveling each month, they can put it up on Airbnb and generate cash flow. When I was in college, I rented the most expensive apartment in town and lived there for free while earning $1,300 a month off the rental. Liability? My bank account didn’t think so.

The New Rich baffle so many people because they don’t play by the old rules of business that the masses follow. You’ve been sold these rules by “mentors,” but you must forget them to join the New Rich:

I’ll unpack each of these in the chapters ahead and arm you with this new set of rules for joining the New Rich:

RULE 1: Don’t Focus on One Thing. Your parents always told you, you’ve got to do one thing and do it well. College encourages us to do the same by picking a major. But this is a terrible strategy if you’re looking to build wealth in the new economy. Focusing on one thing gives you a single point of failure—whether it’s a job, an investment opportunity, or an entrepreneurial venture. When engineers design a bridge, they never want to have a single point of failure. If the wind picks up to two hundred miles per hour and a cable fails, the bridge still has seven other cables to back it up. Likewise, you’d never want to build your wealth around one endeavor. If that one thing fails, you’re destroyed, and you have to start again from scratch. Ignore the conventional wisdom that says it’s impossible to multitask. I’ll walk you through my Three-Focus Rule, showing you how you can always have at least three new ideas launched and brewing without spreading yourself too thin. (Most say “You’re doing too much!” because they’re jealous!)

RULE 2: Copy Your Competitors. Every. Single. Detail. Have you ever thought, “Ugh, I would be rich if I’d only come up with XYZ idea that is making that other guy millions”? Are you kidding? Copy him. You don’t need your own idea. Launching a new idea is actually a terrible approach to gaining wealth—you have to pay for all the mistakes yourself. Why?! The way to get filthy rich is by aggressively copying others and then adding your own twist. Facebook very publicly copied Snapchat. When Snapchat released Snapchat Stories, Facebook rolled out Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. When Snapchat released disappearing messages, Facebook added that to its messaging app. Facebook was ruthless—it went feature by feature and copied every one. Copying competitors isn’t revolutionary. It just seems outrageous because most people are scared to do it. In the late 1800s, newspaper tycoons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were in a raging circulation war to win over New York City readers. Pulitzer published his paper, the New York World, with zero competition for more than a decade until Hearst entered the market with the New York Journal and copied every single one of Pulitzer’s strategies. Hearst copied Pulitzer’s newspaper layout. He stole Pulitzer’s top cartoonist. Hearst copied, and then he pushed each strategy a few notches beyond what Pulitzer was doing. When Pulitzer charged $.02 for an eight-page paper, Hearst charged $.01 for sixteen pages. By the early twentieth century, Hearst had solidified his spot as the top newspaper publisher in New York City. The best (or worst?) part: Pulitzer was actually Hearst’s mentor before they became rivals. Hearst clearly wasn’t sentimental about that. You have to copy to win, but I get that it’s hard to know what to do, whom to copy, or where to start. The key is to analyze a business and pinpoint a need it’s not meeting for its customers—and then meet that need yourself. I’ll show you how. Let go of the excuse that somebody is already on an idea. Unless you’re Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or already a billionaire, every idea that you can launch quickly and commercialize has already been thought of. You’re going to build yourself rich by copying one, making it better, and creating momentum. You can go invent brand-new ideas after you have a billion dollars. But it’s not efficient to try doing that from the start.

RULE 3: Quit Setting Goals—They’re Keeping You Broke. Setting a goal is like saying, “I want that golden egg.” It can be a Rolex watch, Beverly Hills mansion, $500M private jet, $2K dinner at your favorite restaurant. Whatever. If you build your life around a goal, the second you achieve it, it seems like there’s nothing left to achieve. And you end up bored. You’ll have to remotivate yourself to come up with another golden egg to chase. It’s much better to invest your energy into creating, feeding, and nursing a system that pumps out golden eggs every day. That way, no matter where you are in the world, whether you’re working or not, whether you have twenty kids or no kids, you’ll have a golden goose that keeps making golden eggs for you. Systems make the rich richer, and goals make the poor poorer. Those are the culprits behind the saying you hear often: “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

RULE 4: Sell Pickaxes to Gold Miners. The essence of this rule is to let others cut a trail through the thick jungle so you can then peacefully walk in and capitalize on their hard work. That’s what people did during the gold rush. The gold miners went west, hunting, searching, sweating, bleeding, killing, and dying just to make it out there. After they arrived they realized they needed pickaxes to mine more efficiently. Well, then others just traveled over on the paths already created to sell those pickaxes to the gold miners. They got rich without any of the risk, sweat, or bloodshed. In today’s world this translates to siphoning revenue from a hot market that others put the effort into building. So if you’re creating a tool for people to use on top of Facebook, you’re essentially capitalizing on the money Facebook has already spent by selling into the market they created. Pay attention to what’s blowing up today. If weekly food delivery is big, don’t try to compete with HelloFresh and Blue Apron. Rather, figure out the infrastructure that those businesses rely on and offer it to them. Food delivery companies need last-mile delivery from warehouse to consumers’ homes. I’ll help you discover your own pickax to sell to your local gold miners—the people going after the hot thing in your space, geography, or niche. When you do that, your business is much more likely to succeed because you’re piggybacking off of a giant.

FAQ: WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR, AND NOT FOR

This book is for you—you with the debt, the four kids, the $1K to your name, and without any business ideas. Don’t worry if you’ve never launched a business, or if you don’t know the first thing about running a company. I’ll walk you through every step and system with real-life screenshots, tax returns, and email exchanges that landed six-figure business deals. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to:

But don’t worry about any of this yet. You’ll just start by turning every one of your liabilities into assets using the sharing economy, which will erase most of your expenses. This probably sounds impossible, but the New Rich found a way to do it, and I’m going to let you in on their secrets. Once the cash starts to flow, you’ll use that money to build, buy, invest, and sell your way to wealth.

Joining the New Rich has only two requirements: a desire for more free time to do what you want while making money on your terms, and ambition. I can’t teach ambition, so you’ll need to bring your own.

If you have these two things, you’re probably the type who does not want to cement your life to the “hustle 24/7, get no sleep, and work your ass off for the empty promise of retirement” mentality. Good. That will get you far. The motivation to design your own life—whether it’s a life traveling the world or building a log cabin in the woods—is all you need.

I also want to be clear about whom this book is not for. This book is not for you if you love getting advice like “follow your passion”—because that’s the most reliable way to stay poor. If you’re looking for someone to give you permission to follow your dreams, even if it means being too broke to afford health insurance, you’re not going to get that from me. Yes, you’ll be living your dream life if you follow my advice, but your dreams won’t make you money. Passive income first. Then you can dream bigger than you ever thought.

This book is also not for the person who is intimidated by those who love to compete. You’ll have to copy, negotiate, undercut, and outperform others at every turn. If the thought of doing these things doesn’t give you a thrill, you won’t last long.

Finally, this book is not for anyone who dislikes the 1 percent—because after you’re done following the advice here, you’re going to be part of the 1 percent, with an eye toward joining the .01 percent.

If all this sounds improbable, remember that the New Rich are people you hang out with every day. They’re the cube mate you sat next to for years who finally said, “I’m sick of working so much and only making $90K a year. I’m quitting.” Maybe your private reaction at the time was, “Oh my God, I could never quit my job. I have health benefits and security, and I have two kids to take care of. I’m never quitting.” Well, your coworker has three kids and was her family’s breadwinner when she quit. Fast-forward five months and you see her taking her family on vacation. You run into her at the coffee shop with friends and you overhear her saying she’ll pay for the whole order. She hangs out with whomever she wants and does what she wants more often. The next time you meet up, she’s telling you that her business is doing $30K a month. Guess what? She doesn’t have any more intellect, talent, or hustle than you do. Stop asking how she does it and start now, with the tactics on the next few pages.