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

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) answer one listener's question: 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?  To submit your question and hear yourself on My First Million, go to MFMPod.com and click on the circle with the microphone in the lower right hand corner. ----- Links: * The Million Dollar Homepage * Calm.com * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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, 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. All right, we were asked, what's the, this is 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, we were asked, what's the fastest that either of us, Sean and Sam, how it felt, and or, for the same question, but for some of the people we know. You want to go first? No, you go. I think 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, all right, I think it happened. We went to the ATM. He previously had, like, $300,000. in his bank, which is not a little amount. So he wasn't, like, destitute at all. But he was 28, and we went to the ATM, and there was $90 million 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 watched TV. And 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 $90 million. But if you do the math,

of 90 million conservatively, if you look at historical average, 90 million at, let's just round it up to 100. 100 million at 30 becomes 200 at 40, which becomes 400 at 50, which becomes 800 at 60, which becomes 1.1 at 70, 1.1 billion. So you can see this, it's not just that they have 90 million dollars. It's like, well, it's like sure fire away more likely than not that you're going to be a billionaire at some point while you're alive. That was crazy.

So 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 homepage. So Alex, too, who is a friend and I think you're friends with him as well. He, I think he was 21 years old.

And he was like, I want to be a millionaire. I want a million dollars. How do I like do this? And he kind of asked himself this question, which was like, how do I make a million? 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 question answering machine. And so you ask 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 dollar maybe like 2007 or 2006. Yeah, something like that. So basically, 2005, he creates a million dollar homepage. And he's basically like, you know, just like, I don't know, he's 19, 20, 21 years old, something like that.

And he's like, okay, I'm going to make a website that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 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 internet history. And the site website's still up. You can go to a million dollar homepage.com and you can kind of, you can see all the pixels. And so basically he was like, if I sell each, you know, you know, if I sell each, you.

each of these squares for one dollar, I will make a million dollars. And sure enough, he did. January 11th, the final tally was $1,37,100 by the end of it. And so he literally made a million dollars. And I asked him, I was like, you know, how 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 dumber. And so, like, either way, it evoked a reaction out of everybody. And so you can go there right now and you could see all the pixels that sold.

And basically companies would buy it because they thought, oh, if this is going to 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, in I think two months time period. And then he went on to do something even bigger. And then he blew it over the course. He blew all the money in the course of the next year, just kind of having party,

bought a condo. You know, like he did what a 21-year-old would do. And he was like, oh, I for sure, I'm just going to, dude, I did it so easy the first time. I'm just going to keep making hits.

I don't have to worry about saving this. I can just blow it. And then I think it was 10 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 the meditation space so kind of an amazing story on his part I um what I did starting at age 20 or I forget which age I was like two years before my exit I use 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 $16 or $17 million. 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 kind of starts feeling real for a minute. And that's what I did. And so I put that my net worth was like $17 million, 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 20 minutes later, I was like, I'm kind of used to this now already.

Like I see that number already. And so I would say I'm still getting used to. You're a manifester. I am. 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 a manifester. You know? That's pretty good on the spot. Yeah. That's what I do. No small boys stuff. I love that.

Yeah, that's what I do. I'm not a businessman. 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 $20,000. The next big difference that I felt my life was when I hit $100,000.

This is all liquid net worth. The next big difference was when I was when I had $20,000. hit 500,000 and then the next one was 10 million. And I think that maybe, maybe like the 40 or 50 range will be the next one. And then maybe like the 100 range will be the next one. That's what I think. But I remember feeling like between like 500,000 and like 10 million, I kind of almost felt the same. Right, right, right. Yeah. Similarly, the first jump was 25K. We won it in prize money for 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 25K 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? like 5x, 10x, 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 Hart on some podcast and they were like, Kevin, man, you're now like the biggest movie star in the world. Like, you're up there, bro.

You have the 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. 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 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 then 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 need both they're both useful at different times but I would say most people would probably be better off doubling down on a baby goal. Let me give you an example. When I was 21, we were working on our business,

our startup, and we had a business plan, and we had an LLC, and we had all the, like, important sounding things that we thought it takes to do a business. A logo. We had business cards,

a logo. We had a website. We had a blog. We had an investor. We had like everything we thought it takes to do this. And so nine months, go by and we're like, this was the sushi restaurant chain, 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 kind of got to 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 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 embarrassing.

We had a binder of a business plan that was like 300 pages. And we used to brag about how well thought through our business was like we've thought through every detail. What our. Binders full of them. The uniforms will be what the, yeah, binders full of plans in this case. And we had like, here's how, here's how we're going to do employee promotions because we think that the way that companies work is like all this shit that didn't matter. And like, again, 21 years old, two. dumb to know that that wasn't what was important until we got we took it to a meeting and we got

sort of laughed at where the guy was like oh like this is your business plan and we're like yeah it's a and we thunked this binder onto the desk and he was like I'm not reading this and we were like oh yeah yeah that's okay but just we wanted to show you we've thought it through he goes that means you're thinking about the wrong things and we're like oh so we kind of we get it we get this feeling like maybe we're doing this wrong this is about nine months in we're like maybe we're doing this wrong. So we're just sitting there one day. We're like, all, why don't we just like, for the weekend, let's just make a business and like, let's just try to make $1,000. Like, can we make $1,000 in a weekend? 48 hours as a challenge to

ourselves, can we get to $1,000? And I swear, I learned more about like actually building a business in that 48 hour, $1,000 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? 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

live strong band, but they have this like stack of wristbands. And he's like, there's 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 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. Or you could put like your brand name or 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? Oh, let's call it the fat band. And then we created the fatband.com. bought it on GoDaddy for in 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 all we had heard of

ali baba as like is there something on ali baba 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 can just buy these for you know 17 cents and then if you include shipping it's only this much if we sold each one for a dollar 50 like that would work we could do it we'd only need to sell whatever it was. Like we only need to sell 700 bands in order to make $1,000. And hey, that's actually, we could even be profitable if we did it.

It's like, all right, well, how do we sell this thing? We only have, you know, like 24 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,

hey, do you want this for your sorority? Do you want this for 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 200 people coming, I'll take like 250 of them.

And we like made a sale and we were like, yeah, just like read out your 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 than PayPal to us or something. And dude, that feeling of getting to $1,000, like 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, it 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. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history.

Call, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed. HubSpot, grow 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 100,000 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 a lot of 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 addicting and you like taste you taste it and it works out amazing listen to this so there's this um so I tweeted out that I want to address better and this guy who's got like a fashion Instagram thing uh what's it called like well built style I or something like that

he DM me and he's like hey like look at my Instagram like I think it fits what you want And I go, yeah, this actually is great. He goes, tell you what, I'm going to 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 going to send you a PowerPoint with like image, like it looks for you. And then just a link to buy like all these clothes. I said, all right, great.

What's in it for you? He goes, if you like it, pay me $300. And so he spent like a week doing this. And he sent it to me. I was like, this is sick, man. I would have paid way more than $300. by the way. And I just, he goes, well, that's awesome. Here's my email. Just PayPal me 300 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 then you do that maybe 10 more times. And then eventually 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. All right. 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 question was about getting rich quick. And I think my takeaways are there is a benefit to actually thinking 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. Getting rich. It kind of 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? And 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 the stuff that matters and you won't end up like me with a 300 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 overplan and never like go to market. and actually try your thing. And the fat band thing that I did was by far the best thing I did early on in 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. That skill ended up helping me become wealthy, that experience did. It was like enough money to get like a blooming 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 fondue places. You ever been to a fondue place? I feel like you're like one of those lactose intolerant. You're probably, I could see that you're lactose intolerant. Dude, are 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 when you were talking about that fashion guy, he was like, you know, I think you got potential.

You know, you're a tall, tall drink of water. And it's like, you're a tall glass of milk. That's the way how I describe you. Yeah. I get it straight from the utter every morning. Yeah, I mean, look at me. I'm like a melting bar. of chocolate.

I'm like a milting piece of fudge. And you're a tall drink of milk. Yeah. Yeah. If corn were a human, it would look like me. You ever thought about if a corn on the combat legs? Yeah. Yeah.

All right. That's the sign that we're done. See ya.