If I Wanted to Become a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This

What separates successful people from those who try for years and never really get anywhere?

Most people think it's IQ, talent, or some mix of strategy and luck.

But after studying people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, the only thing that actually makes them different is speed.

See, I believe that most people are on a path to be really freaking rich.

The challenge is that most of them are going so slow that they'll never get there in their lifetime.

And the most successful people have learned how to make that same progress way faster.

The good news is all the millionaires and billionaires I know follow the same seven steps to make progress faster.

It's how I made my first million by 27 and how I do over $100 million in revenue in my 40s.

But don't worry, speed doesn't mean working harder and it doesn't require you to already have money either.

So if you want to progress faster than anyone, These are the seven steps to do it.

Welcome to the Martel Method.

I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.

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Starting with step number one, burn the boats.

Most people struggle with making the right decisions because they don't have enough pressure.

Anytime I'm working with entrepreneurs, we always build a five-year plan.

And I just ask them, what would need to be true for you to get that done in one year?

And most people are like, well, it's impossible.

I say, well, what's your confidence score that you could get it done if you had to get it done?

And usually it's like two, three.

I mean, this is a five-year plan you're asking me to get done in one.

Then I invite them to consider this.

What if you knew at the end of the year that if you didn't hit the five-year goal, that you had to not only sell the business, you lose all your money, and you would only be able to work for somebody else for the rest of your life.

How likely are you to hit that goal?

All of a sudden, their confidence level goes to 10.

Most people don't create a scenario where they have to make it a must.

They give themselves an out.

They don't burn the boats.

The best entrepreneurs go all in.

My philosophy is I don't trick myself into liking to do things.

I create a scenario where I have to do things.

So I've discovered there's only three ways to burn the boats.

Number one, force a deadline.

I don't care if it's signing up for an Ironman, selling a product before you ever build it.

You have to have a timeline and a date.

The second is you got to put money on the line.

My to-do list is always prioritized based on where my money is.

Putting my money on the line is a great forcing function of focus.

Even if you don't have money, just make a bet to somebody else that if you don't achieve that goal that you set out for yourself, you'd have a big IOU.

Create the financial pressure.

It's okay.

And then the third is have a commitment that you make externally, a public commitment to your friends, to your coworkers, to your investors.

The truth is you'll do more.

for yourself if you're emotionally connected to the stakes to avoid the pain than you ever will to have a gain in your life.

So now that you have no way out, it's time to move forward.

Which brings us to step two, default to action, not preparation.

See, most people make the mistake of preparing for action instead of taking action.

One of my favorite recent stories about Elon Musk that came from his book by Walter Isaacson is that after buying Twitter that he renamed to X, he asked the team that was in charge of the data centers how long it would take them to consolidate and shut down some of these data centers.

And somebody on the team said six months.

And he's like, it doesn't take six months.

He says, says, it's going to take six months.

He goes, I don't think it should take six months.

And the guy says, it's going to take six months.

So Elon, after he visited the headquarters and he's flying back home, he's flying over Sacramento, realizes the data centers are there, lands the plane, and then goes and rents a U-Haul and starts cutting and starts pulling out these server racks and throwing them in the U-Haul.

What everybody else told him to take six months, he got it done in three days.

See, most people don't take action because they're worried that they don't make the right decision.

What I've learned is the richest people make a decision and then make it it right.

That's why JFDI is my motto.

Just freaking do it.

It's on my license plate.

It's part of my life.

It's essentially how I operate.

So these are the four ways to default to action instead of sitting around hoping you make the right decision.

The first one is the buy-where rule.

I can't tell you the amount of times I talk to people and I'm like, hey, when am I going to get this?

They're like, oh yeah, later this week or at the end of the month.

I'm like, no, buy when.

Like, give me a date.

Give me a time.

If you say Friday, I'm going to say, why not Tuesday?

Well, I won't have time.

What about Wednesday?

Well, that's a little aggressive.

How about Thursday?

I'll have it to you by Thursday, 2 p.m.

That's what I'm talking about.

If you allow people to just give you these arbitrary numbers, they'll just take that amount of time and you slow down your progress.

The other one is the two-minute rule.

This one is hilarious.

I see most people spend more time documenting the steps to do than it would take to just do the thing.

If it takes less than two minutes to get it done right away, just do it.

The other one is the 70% rule, and it's all about making decisions.

See, the definition of entrepreneurship is making decisions with imperfect data.

As long as I have 70% of the data, I make a decision.

It doesn't have to be complete.

It doesn't have to be certain.

I can always reverse a decision, but 70% is good enough for me.

The last one is the difference between type one decisions and type two decisions.

Type one is like a one-way door.

When I make that decision, it's one way.

Type two decision is like a revolving door.

It's a decision in and I can stay in and come right back out.

That's like hiring somebody.

I can always move on if I make the wrong hire.

See, most people don't hire folks because they're scared to make a commitment to somebody long-term because like, oh, that's an extra 50 grand a year or 100 grand a year.

No, it's not.

It's whatever they cost per month.

And if you make a bad decision, you can transition them off the team and call it a lesson learned.

Type one, like buying a company or raising money from an investor, that's a one-way street.

You want to slow down for those ones.

And that's what the most successful people understand is how to make a decision, even without the right data or without the confidence they can separate it and decide.

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But after you start taking action, you need to find ways to improve quickly.

Which brings us to step number three, model, then modify.

If you want to get on my bad side, ask me for advice.

I hand you the blueprint and then you take pieces that you like to do, you ignore the rest, and then it doesn't work for you and then you blame me.

I don't second guess.

When somebody gives me their blueprint, I go, I'm going to go execute this line by line to figure out if it works or it doesn't.

Tony Robbins has this great quote that says, success leaves clues.

If you want to move fast, you have to model people that are successful.

If you're smart about it, you'll be able to integrate their lessons learned as fast as possible to move quickly.

This is the way I think about it.

is that great artists know how to steal like an artist.

It doesn't mean you copy.

It means you take the essence of what they're doing, the principles, and then you make it your own.

So you want to copy the container, not the content.

By making it your own, it means understanding what's different about your market, the product, your own story, or the personalities in the business.

Each part is going to impact how you model what you see.

This is my philosophy.

I think it's very simple.

Every time I start something new, I ask myself, who do I know that's already done this?

Who out there has already been successful?

When I started coaching, I literally said, who are the coaches that have made over eight figures a year doing it in an ethical way that I can admire their brand?

I was very clear about who I wanted to learn from.

And because of that, I only found those people.

I got their playbooks.

I understood their models.

I made them my own, but then I was able to execute faster than anybody in the industry.

And the truth is, is if you're really stuck and you don't feel comfortable reaching out to people, which I get, then you should just ask ChatGPT.

Think about it.

The AI has indexed the whole world's information and it'll give it all to you for free without feelings.

So the blueprints exist.

I always love to ask people, what are you pretending not to know?

But the truth is, is the AI will give you the answer.

Then you have to take that and execute.

And the cool part with the right model and traction, this next step will multiply your speed, which brings us to step number four, fire bullets, then cannons.

Most people think the fastest way is to go for the biggest win as soon as possible.

But the reality is most people aren't ready.

If I showed up to your door right now and I said, here's a $100 million purchase order for whatever you're selling, you would probably crumble under the weight of that new opportunity.

So I learned this strategy from an incredible book called Great by Choice.

The author Jim Collins has a whole chapter on this section where his philosophy is shoot, shoot, shoot, calibrate.

Once you get shots on goal, then load up the cannon and put more resources behind it.

If you don't, you might come out way too fast, too strong, and then run out of time to actually figure out the business.

One of my buddies, Matt, who has this incredible product called Precision.

It's It's like a AI power dashboard for business and insights.

Most people, when they have these ideas, they're like, I'm going to go hire a bunch of engineers and spend $10 million and build this new innovation and not learn fast enough.

Matt said, no, I'm going to build one very specific use case, pre-sell it, go get 50 customers validated, get them using it, learning to love it, and then I'm going to invest more money in the engineering to expand what the product does.

That is the definition of peer peer.

What's funny is most people won't do this approach because they're worried about losing.

But what's true is winners lose more than losers ever will.

When I'm building a business, I always assume I'm wrong about some aspect of the business.

There's something about the business model that's wrong.

So what I do is I create my riskiest assumptions list, a list of all the things around the business of how it's going to work and how I'm going to build it that I then prioritize based on the riskiest assumption.

If the first assumption is wrong, then the second and third don't really matter.

And then I attack the first one.

I try to validate it.

So taking those little shots is how you eventually load up the cannon to make big progress.

But if you're not careful, you'll end up complicating things too much.

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Now, let's get back to the episode.

Which brings us to step five: simplify your business.

See, the easiest thing to to do is make things complex.

Every person on your team has a good idea, a suggestion, some feedback on how you can make things better.

The problem is if you say yes to every one of those suggestions, you'll wake up one day with SOPs out the yin-yang, quality issues, people confused, nobody getting any work done.

They're going to be buried under the load of complexity.

You cannot scale chaos.

I believe right time, right action, appropriate response to challenges.

So to really land the plane on this, I I want to share some complexity killers to keep things super simple.

The first one is simplify your goals.

Most people have too many things they want to do instead of picking the one thing, the leading domino, that if they got it done, everything else takes care of itself.

The second is simplify your decisions.

I wear the same colored shirt every time.

Why?

I don't want to burn brain cells making decisions around things I've already made the decision around.

The third is simplify your workflows.

If you do something once and you will be doing it again every week, create some automation so you never have to to do the same thing twice.

Simplify your commitments.

Design your calendar where you have a rhythm of success that you don't have to revisit every time.

If that's date night every Thursday, like it is for me, then that's when you do date nighting.

Lock and load and don't make those decisions every week.

The other one is regular pruning.

Understand that things will evolve and become complex and you have to deliberately prune the complexity in your calendar, just like you take care of a garden.

You gotta get rid of those weeds.

Which brings us to step number six, get obsessed with your progress.

I've got a confession to make.

My wife is about to kick me out of bed.

She's annoyed with me that every night all I do is watch YouTube videos on AI language models and robotics.

And why?

Because it's the thing I'm all in on.

And most people don't realize for you to win and do things that very few other people have done, it requires focus.

It requires intensity.

And the funny part is that if you're doing it right, listen to this, other people will be telling you, you're way too much.

You can't be a world-class friend, a world-class husband, a world-class entrepreneur, a world-class dad, a world-class everything, and actually be as successful as you like to be in life.

You're literally going to have to decide this is a season of no.

This is a season of obsession.

This is a season of focus.

And you're going all in on you.

This is my invitation for you to embrace obsession.

Number one is immerse yourself.

I think of it like standing in a waterfall.

Whatever you want to accomplish, you want to be drinking from the fire hose as if you were sitting at the bottom of a waterfall smashing you in the face and you're trying to drink as much water as you can.

Probably going to kill you.

You'll drown to death.

But on the other side of that, you will learn a lot.

Hang around with other people that are obsessed.

I have a weekly AI expert roundtable that I curate with all the top people in the world to learn as fast as I can because I can't possibly consume, read, understand, process what's going on.

So I use them as a way to get more feedback.

The other one is don't learn tactics.

Learn how they think.

Understand the principles behind their decisions.

That for me is my favorite thing.

When I go for dinner, I'm always asking people, what made you decide to make that decision?

How did you see that market that caused you to think about that strategy?

Learning how people think will help you think better.

Learning a tactic will teach you something short term that it would be obsolete in a month.

The way you should think about it is going all in.

And check this out.

The word calling.

the thing that everybody's trying to figure out what is their calling in life in the center of that word is the word all and it's required it's an ingredient before we get back to the episode if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies i buy and my family and just like how i make it all work go follow me on instagram dam martell2els and martel on instagram it's where i show the behind the scenes the real deal real time i'd love to see you there have an amazing day Which brings us to step seven, go find bigger problems.

If you want to compress decades into years, then you're going to have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

You see, life is just like a video game.

Every time you go to a new level, you have to be okay sucking again to get better.

So what got you here will not get you there.

And you should calibrate based on the size of problems you have.

If you have small problems, you probably live a small life.

If you have big problems, you're living a bigger life.

Do you want like oil change problems or do you want jet fuel problems?

I think you should always be on the pursuit to find bigger problems.

It's kind of like in math, there's this concept called the local maxima, which is essentially this equation to try to figure out where's the top of the mountain.

The challenge is that once you get to the top of the mountain, if you don't realize there's a bigger mountain, but to get to that bigger mountain, you have to go down through the valley and up to the next one.

You might actually be at the peak of the current stage of where you're at in life, but definitely not where you could possibly be.

But you got to be willing to go back to go up.

So wanting to find bigger challenges, bigger problems, to saying, please bring them.

Thank you.

Be grateful for your problems is how you continue that journey.

The other thing I encourage you to consider is to reset your vision.

Go bigger.

I don't care what your vision is, add a zero and ask yourself, why not me?

Why not you?

Like over the next 10 years, 25 years, I'm going to wake up either way and build something and create.

And the only difference on the size of the thing I build is my decision today on what I want to build.

Because if it's a million dollar business in 10 years, guess what?

I'll hit it.

If it's a 10 million year business in 10 years, you'll make a different series of decisions every time you wake up to hit that.

So why not you?

So those seven steps is how you achieve your goals even faster.

But the reality of it is, it's more than just achieving your goals.

It's about learning how to enjoy the journey.

My philosophy, if you ever have the chance to get to the top, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.

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