I always hated the feeling of doing so much for so little.
Waking up at 3am for a morning shift at my minimum-wage job.
Going to school for 8 hours a day knowing in the back of my mind that I was spending all this time to make as much or less than the average person in my future.
Putting in my all for someone else’s company and making the same amount no matter how hard I worked.
I had this mindset early.
People tell me I was very observant as a child.
I could see that most people were unhappy, sluggish, and stressed about almost every decision they made. Especially financial decisions.
So my attention went towards the opposite. I spent much of my late teens dissecting what made successful people successful.
I always had this dream of becoming a “millionaire.”
It sounded so enticing.
Something about that label… millionaire.
The status. The freedom. The lack of stress.
But now, as a person who has become one, I can tell you that everything you think about becoming a millionaire is true.
I’m not going to downplay it. When I think back to when I was struggling to pay a measly $300 for my share of rent in a house shared with 7 other roommates, I’m grateful. It’s a blessing and a curse not to have to worry about what you spend on 99% of purchases.
Of course, just because you become a millionaire doesn’t mean your life is perfect all day long. Developing the financial domain of your life doesn’t mean you’ve developed the mental, physical, social, and spiritual domains.
In fact, if you look around, life is pretty terrible for most people who only focus on the money.
So, before we begin, keep that in mind.
I’m going to give you the exact steps to become a millionaire in your 20s.
But understand that making money will only solve your money problems.
And most of your money problems aren’t actually money problems. They’re psychological problems. Money isn’t going to do as much for you as you think it is unless you dedicate yourself to becoming the highest version of yourself.
What They Don’t Teach You In School
If you’re reading this, you were raised by people who lived and were conditioned by the old economy.
“Invest your savings in your 401k and the stock market,” said Mom.
“Real estate is how 99% of people become millionaires,” said the random wealthy old guy in Scottsdale.
“Be frugal. Save every last penny. Collect coupons. Don’t make impulsive decisions.” said the person with a boring life that nobody wants to live.
“Go to school and study something you don’t care about to get a job,” said almost everyone who doesn’t understand the model of our public school system was adopted from a Prussian military state — reflecting the education given to slaves — and was created to keep people narrow-minded and dependent on the dominant social system while discouraging generalism, exploration, and building toward a unique vision.
No thanks.
We are living through the second renaissance for heaven’s sake.
The new rich understand that ideas are the new oil in a world where anyone can learn and build anything (if you’ve been keeping up with indie hacking, you know non-coders are building MVP apps over a weekend with new AI tools.)
They understand that new generations are building wealth in the idea space, not the physical space (the physical space still matters, but it exists at a premium now reserved for those who have already built cash flow).
Digital space is infinite. Physical space is finite.
There are 3 things you need to know about this era where people become millionaires by posting memes and knowledge:
1) The Digital Landscape
It took a while for it to click for me.
I was raised to think that I should budget every penny and “get rich slow.”
But that never sat well in my mind.
Thanks to the internet, I was brutally aware that there were people making an income doing what they enjoy. I consumed their content every day. That was enough proof for me to try to achieve that reality by all means possible.
Before we dig into the details, this is what you need to understand:
1) If you want to make money outside of a job, you need to build and distribute the product.
I will continue repeating this until everyone and their mother realize how dependent they are on the dominant paradigm for their survival because they didn’t continue to learn after (or before) leaving the school system.
If you don’t create a product to sell, you will continue selling a product for someone else.
The only reason you are making any form of an income right now is because you play one specific role in a company that makes said money by selling a product or service.
In other words, if you want to earn your freedom, first, you need a business, and second, you need a product by which people voluntarily trade their money for the value encapsulated in said product.
Long story short, build something you can sell or your survival, and those stress and emotions, will be like uncontrollable waves determined by a company.
2) The internet made business and education accessible to anyone with a wifi connection.
If you are reading this:
- You can learn anything in 3–6 months (less time if you’re obsessed, I learned to animate this video in 2–3 weeks).
- You can write about your interests and attract an audience.
- You can teach your interests as a product or service with zero money to your name
- Or, you can freelance with a marketable skill until you feel the need to productize and teach.
If you want to become a millionaire, you can take the long route that your parents and teachers taught you, but most of them aren’t millionaires, so why are you listening to them?
Every single skill I use today was learned from a course, random string of articles from diving down a curiosity rabbit hole, and trial and error.
Every single penny I make is directly controlled by what I build, how many people see it, and if those people care.
If you aren’t learning and building on the internet, I implore you to look at what you are actually doing.
Audit your day down to the minute.
Are you doing the things that will compound into achieving your goals?
Or are you waiting around, hoping that it will someday magically appear if you scroll social media enough?
2) The Labor Theory Of Value Doesn’t Work
You can work hard at anything but that doesn’t mean it’s useful to the progress of humanity.
This is the delusion of hard work.
You can put 4 years of work into getting a degree.
You can put 10 years of work into climbing a corporate ladder.
And still, you won’t be paid anywhere close to what you want.
So, rather than taking your future into your own hands, you whine and complain.
“I deserve to be paid more!”
“I’ve spent 14 years working hard and this is all I get for it?”
“I barely have any time for my family. I don’t have enough to take a vacation. I slave away with no light at the end of the tunnel.”
The complainers of the world are missing one crucial piece of the puzzle:
The labor theory of value is that you should be paid for the amount of work you do.
To feel as if you have jumped through hoops.
To feel like you deserve something.
But that’s not how reality works.
Money is a unit of value.
Value is a measure of how much people care about what you do.
How valuable you are = the magnitude of problems you solve, the results of the solutions you create, and your ability to get people to care about your creation.
If you aren’t happy with how much you make, it may be time to take a brutally honest look at what you contribute to the world.
It does not make sense to pay someone based on the amount of work they do. It does make sense to pay someone based on the level of problem they solve.
Why?
I can work hard for 1 year at writing to become an author, but 1 year isn’t enough to justify $100,000 of compensation. Many times, that writing can be perceived as less valuable than a burger flipper making minimum wage. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, and who you do it for.
You only make as much money as other people care about what you’ve done within that year. That is, how your creation benefits them so that they use it to solve a problem, change their life, and bring progress to humanity.
Complaining about not being paid enough is not going to get you paid. In fact, it will probably get you fired or ignored. Or just hated by anyone you come into contact with because they are thinking, “Ok… what are you going to do about it?”
The only option is to take matters into your own hands.
3) Passive Income VS Cash Flow
For 99% of people, passive income is a pipe dream.
Passive income is built by investing excess and abundant active income from a cash-flow business like I teach in Digital Economics.
Most people aren’t going to outpace inflation by investing a few 10 thousand a year into the stock market or their retirement fund.
You need excess.
You either need a top 1% job (which, like getting into the NBA, the chances of the average person doing so is close to zero) or you need to build a business where your income is entirely dependent on your skill acquisition, personal growth, and ability to persist and iterate.
A cash flow business comes down to simple cybernetics and mathematics.
Cybernetics is that a system self-regulates to achieve a goal.
In other words, when you set your mind on a goal, listen to feedback, and correct your actions according to that feedback, you will achieve the goal. Cybernetics illustrates that low-intelligence systems (or minds) are the ones who quit rather than pivot. They aren’t smart enough to realize that any problem can be solved or diverted by evolving the goal they are pursuing.
With that, think big. Think digital. Think infinite. Give your mind room to connect the dots.
You only have so much time in the day.
Therefore, you will spend the same amount of time building a brick and mortar coffee shop (limited to a few hundred thousand dollars) as you will any internet business (with close-to-zero startup costs and income limits only dependent on your creativity.)
Mathematics is a simple understanding of the system itself and what you need to do.
If you want to make $1 million in 1 year, break it down.
$1,000,000 / 12 = $83,333 per month
$83,333 / 30 = $2,777 per day
Now, there are a few ways to do that.
- Sell 18 $150 products a day
- Sell 111 $25 products a day
- Land one $5000 client every other day
- Land one $10,000 client every 4 days
- A combination of both. 1–2 clients a week and a few product sales a day.
This alone determines a lot of your decision-making.
If you go the client route, you will probably need a team (or have the service so productized you can handle fulfillment yourself).
If you go the product route, you will need a lot of traffic.
Let’s assume you’re skilled at social media.
You can get 50–100,000 views per YouTube video or 1–5 million impressions on social media per month.
Of course, you’ll have the occasional anomaly of much more views or impressions.
To make 18 sales a day on a $150 product, you would need to send 720 people to a product page with a 2.5% conversion rate.
If you can’t do that with 4–8 videos a month or an active social account, skill issue. Get better. You’re in control of how many views you get and how many clicks result from that.
But how do we do this?
Pull 2 Levers To Make $1 Million In Your 20s
You need a product (or service).
You need distribution (an audience).
Beyond that, the entirety of your success comes down to experimentation and iteration. Trial and error.
You can supplement with courses like 2 Hour Writer for distribution and Mental Monetization for product, but courses are simply other processes for you to experiment with in a less error-prone direction. Courses don’t account for your state of consciousness and prior experience unless you are the perfect customer avatar, which you aren’t, because you are the only one with access to your mind.
1) Product: The Only Way To Make An Independent Income
To avoid confusion, I use the word product to define anything that you sell. That can be a service as well.
The other day in the Kortex community, someone asked a great question:
“I’m not confident in my abilities to sell a product. I have results, but I didn’t use a framework or specific steps, I kinda just did it, so I’m not sure how I could help someone else.”
This could apply to fitness, mental health, programming, anything.
Many people think they can’t sell a product because they’ve gotten results, but they didn’t use a specific process, program, or framework to do that thing.
What you don’t realize is that’s the perfect place to start with a product.
How does anyone create a product?
You don’t just plagiarize someone else’s framework.
You create your own. Creating your own requires real world feedback from customers after you experiment for yourself.
You create an MVP (minimum viable product).
You get a first round of customers or free users.
You listen to feedback and gauge results.
You implement feedback and attempt to make your product better.
Then, once you have solid results, you can market harder and be confident you are able to do this.
It’s the same as a beginner freelancer landing clients. They do it for relatively cheap until they are very confident in their abilities. They gain real-world experience as opposed to just theory they’ve learned about and personal projects they’ve built.
My entire product philosophy is:
- Build a product you’ve used before, but better.
- Solve your own problems and sell the solution.
- Build a product you want but doesn’t exist.
Most people should start with the first one, advance to the second, and once they have cash flow, move onto the third.
But you have to realize that you can create any product you want.
How many planners can you find on amazon? A billion.
You can create one too by:
- Purchasing 3–5 planners
- Using them and noticing what doesn’t flow
- Mapping out your own planner
- Using it and improving it over a week or two
Then, package it up and sell it.
Listen to customer feedback, make it better.
Simple. Now you have the ability to make money, but you need one more thing:
2) Distribution: How To Survive Going Into The Future
Build distribution, then build whatever you want. — Jack Butcher
Distribution is your potential to get what you build in front of people who care.
Now that we have a product we’ve built, we need to get it in front of people.
The most accessible way to get in front of people is on the internet.
The front end of the internet is media.
Legacy media is dying, so you have a few options:
There are 3 types of distribution:
Built, borrowed, and bought.
You build distribution by growing an audience with internet content. Then, you can (and should) take it a step further by “de-platforming” your audience.
You de-platform by funneling your audience to a community or newsletter. These can be free or paid.
Social media platforms can go poof at any time. Your account can get suspended, you can get canceled, or you may just hate social media enough to leave.
But, they can’t take an off-platform community or email list away from you. And, these are your most dedicated readers, so it’s better to give them the most value and attention anyway.
You borrow distribution by leveraging other people’s audience, community, or newsletter.
You can be hosted on their podcast and plug your offers.
Or, your ideas can be so unique that they mention you on their podcast without you being there. They can give credit to your ideas in their posts, newsletters, and even a full-fledged book at times.
This is the game you eventually want to play. Make your ideas so contagious that your distribution continues to grow without any manual effort.
Let your ideas live in peoples’ heads rent-free.
You buy distribution in many different ways.
The various options for paid ads are the obvious ones, but not the most powerful.
You can buy sponsorship spots on podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube videos.
You can also buy paid shares like retweets, Instagram stories, or even “watch next” slots on YouTube videos. I haven’t tried this one for those wondering, my recent YouTube growth happened out of nowhere (but I’m not opposed to testing it out).
The last one, paid growth, is my favorite because it usually results in a large number of engaged people following you. You don’t tell them to follow you, they follow because your content is good. This compounds with time and crosses over with “built” distribution.
The common objection to this is “cheating,” which is usually spouted by those who aren’t in the creator game. If your brand, content, or product suck you’re not going to grow, sell, or be seen as any kind of authority.
Bought distribution compounds the results, ideas, and time in the game you already have.
One thing that way too many people forget:
Your audience is not just your audience.
The Network Effect is extremely powerful.
I don’t only have access to my following.
I have indirect access to the followers of every person following me — many of those people being creators themselves or others with 100K+ audiences. I.E. Gordon Ramsey and John Cena follow me. I don’t think anything would come of that, but who knows.
I also have access to those that people share my content with digitally or by word of mouth.
And, I have access to the “followers” of everyone that follows me. To a lesser extent, of course.
The point being, my ideas have the small potential of reaching any of the 4.5 billion people on the internet if (1) I’m consistent (2) I prioritize creative ideas that stick.
With 3.2 million followers, I have indirect access to 10X more potential traffic. The same holds true for smaller followings, they just don’t realize it. A “measly” 1,000 follower audience can quite literally change your life, because 1 of those 1000 could have 1 million followers.
My Biggest Business Lesson: Imitate, Then Innovate
Whether you are building a product or writing content to build distribution, you only need one heuristic to guide your decision-making:
Imitate, then innovate.
Sell what’s already selling.
Write what’s already performing.
Add a dash of personal experience and perspective to make it unique.
Stick your hand in the attention that’s already flowing.
Learn what works. Learn the principles. Have another product or piece of writing open as you build or write. Pay attention to the structure, not the content of the product or writing. You aren’t plagiarizing a single word. You are emulating the essence of what works. You are abstracting the lesson from those things and trying to replicate it.
Once you see results — and if you are doing this correctly, with awareness, you will — then attempt to create something of your own.
That’s all for this one.
– Dan
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