How to get rich without luck, talent, or a trust fund

Speaker 1 going to share with you all the rules of money that you can follow to get rich without talent, luck, or having a freaking trust fund.

Speaker 1 And once you learn these rules and apply them, you'll finally be able to stack cash.

Speaker 1 I'm going to tell you exactly what these rules are and how I went from broke at 24 to a millionaire at 27 and then being worth over $100 million today.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My best-selling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now.

Speaker 1 Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.

Speaker 1 Rule number one, the 4% rule. To get rich, you need to have a number in mind that if you saved up and you were able to live off of that, you would be able to live off the passive income.

Speaker 1 I know this sounds f ⁇ ing boring, but true rich means freedom. Freedom means you don't have to work.

Speaker 1 I'm talking safe, simple, guaranteed, no around, a dollar amount that you live passively off that. Once you get there, everything else is gravy.
The 4% rule, super simple.

Speaker 1 You take the number you want to make per year. Let's say it's $100,000, and then you just divide it by 0.04.
That'll give you the number you have to save so you can live off of that easily.

Speaker 1 Sounds crazy and like a lot of money, but it's not because if you invest your money and it compounds and grows and you start early, you can get to that place simply.

Speaker 1 So now that you've got your number, how much you need to save, how do you actually make that kind of money? Rule number two, master a high income skill.

Speaker 1 If you already knew how to make that kind of money, you'd be making that kind of money, which means you're going to have to invest in yourself to develop a skill that the world values.

Speaker 1 That's why it's called high income skill, meaning people are going to pay you a lot of money for your time to do that work. The best part is, is that everybody has access to the same tools.

Speaker 1 The information is out there. It's just most people pretend like they can't solve this problem.
You don't have to spend 200 grand to go to some fancy university to learn learn any of this.

Speaker 1 You can do it on your own. So here's how you simplify it.
All high income skills can fall into one of four categories. The first M is make, means you're a creator.

Speaker 1 Either edit videos, you create websites, you create video scripts, you create things that other people value. It sounds so simple, but most people never learn how to make a solution.

Speaker 1 They make a piece of solution, but not the complete thing. The second M is market.

Speaker 1 If you know how to get somebody to pay attention and redirect that focus to buying something, people pay you a lot of money to do that for their business, to get customers.

Speaker 1 Even more important than the next one, which everybody talks about, which is monetize or sales. Like the ability to talk to somebody and get them to part with their money, incredibly valuable.

Speaker 1 But if you're asking me which one's more valuable, marketing or sales, marketing is more valuable. Sales is just easier to learn.
And the final one is manage.

Speaker 1 People pay top dollar to have somebody come in and manage a project, manage an outcome, manage a problem for them.

Speaker 1 So the way I look at it is four components, and you can look up icky guy i-k-i-g-a-i what do you love what are you good at what does the world need and what can you get paid for if one of those four seems like a default for you maybe it's marketing or making or monetizing or managing stuff the key is mastery decide to be the best in the world at it and stick with it for at least a thousand days like go all in and find somebody to pay you to do that work but here's the deal even a high income skill won't make you rich if you don't own anything which brings us to rule number three Don't work for your money.

Speaker 1 Make your money work for you. This one's going to be hard for people to understand because the whole world is trying to convince you to do this, which is work for a salary.

Speaker 1 The only way you're going to get really rich is to own a part of the business. Wages might feed you, but ownership frees you.

Speaker 1 See, if the accountant, the lawyer, the doctor goes on vacation, guess what? It's not the cost of the vacation that's the most expensive thing for them. It's not working.

Speaker 1 The truth is, is those people are highly paid, but they're not rich because they don't have freedom.

Speaker 1 A business owner creates a machine or an engine that makes money and they get paid whether they show up to work or not because the machine runs. Owning a piece of a machine is how you get wealthy.

Speaker 1 But if you want to get there faster, you need to understand what I'm about to share. Phase one, you have to build cash piles with your high income skills.
You literally need to learn how to save.

Speaker 1 The more you can save, the more resources you'll have to do something with. You can't buy into a business.

Speaker 1 You can't invest into your business to increase your equity ownership if you don't have any cash.

Speaker 1 Phase two is reinvest in your best asset, yourself, because you will take you with you to every interaction for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 And you becoming better, meaning you communicating better, you persuading other people better, you getting other people to support you in your dreams, that investment will pay off dividends way bigger than any other business investment.

Speaker 1 Phase three is to invest those profits or that cash into assets. That's the ownership side.

Speaker 1 For most people, the simplest thing to do is buy a low-fee index fund, like a Vanguard for the S ⁇ P 500, something simple. My son, Noah, literally have 70% of his savings in an S ⁇ P 500.

Speaker 1 He's 12 years old. The reason I taught him that is because I showed to him that the money works for him whether he shows up or not.
He could sleep in till 10 a.m.

Speaker 1 and that money in that index fund did some work. So the best investment other than yourself is in your current business.
So that's where I would look first.

Speaker 1 Then you can look at things that you have an unfair advantage around, things that you know better than most.

Speaker 1 If you're into cryptocurrency and you're like super passionate and you get paid to help people build blockchains and you're like a nerd about that, go all in on crypto.

Speaker 1 Sticking in what you know is how you create compound and massive leverage. That's how I've built my company.
I'm all software all the time. For 28 years, I learned how to code.

Speaker 1 I build and exit software companies. I started investing in companies.

Speaker 1 Now I have a venture studio where I launch a new AI company every month because I understood a long time ago, me sticking in things that I have an unfair advantage of that I can look at deals and assess better than anybody else in the world is going to give me the returns that are above the market norm.

Speaker 1 So that's where I invest my free cash flow. And remember, the whole point is to invest into assets and ownership so that you can get to that 4% rule.
Then you don't have to work anymore.

Speaker 1 That's a beautiful thing where you can now choose what do you want to do with your days? What does your life mean? What is the work? What do you want to create? That is the true meaning of being rich.

Speaker 1 If you don't own anything, you'll be stuck renting forever.

Speaker 1 Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martel Method newsletter.

Speaker 1 It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at martelmethod.com.

Speaker 1 But even with your money invested, how do you multiply it even faster to actually get rich? Which brings us to rule number four. We have to use leverage, not labor.

Speaker 1 Leverage means putting a little bit of effort in and getting a massive result. So there's this guy called Archimedes, which is like a Greek mathematician.
He has a quote.

Speaker 1 He says, Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world. That is leverage.
This really hit home for me when I was 28 and I moved to San Francisco. I struggled, man.

Speaker 1 I like literally my company that finally made me a millionaire also cost me everything in my life. My relationships, my health, my mental sanity.

Speaker 1 And I almost decided to never start a business again until I met a guy named Naval Ravakan. And talking to him, he's the one that introduced me to these ideas of leverage.

Speaker 1 Every entrepreneur that masters these four areas have unlimited potential of creating in this world without creating massive pain in their life.

Speaker 1 If you master these four skills of leverage, then you can be as rich as you want to be. So the first C is code.
Think about software. Think about automation.
Think about AI today.

Speaker 1 If you can learn how to use technology to get things done, set it up, workflows, automation, you have massive amounts of leverage. A little bit of work today means that it gets done forever.

Speaker 1 The second is content.

Speaker 1 When I look at a playbook, a checklist, that's a piece of content, but that content can create a recipe that can have somebody else do something for you a thousand times, a million times without taking any more of your time.

Speaker 1 The third is capital. And capital is about how do I use my money to create more money.

Speaker 1 So if you think about it, if I have money and I can run ads, I can hire people, I can invest that into opportunities that's going to generate returns, and I can have my capital work for me.

Speaker 1 I can get massive amounts of leverage. And the fourth is collaboration.
It's how do you work with other people? You know, people want to see good people win.

Speaker 1 People want to help people where they can make money with them.

Speaker 1 So learning how to partner, learning how to recruit, learning how to manage people, the emotional intelligence of other humans, that skill creates massive amounts of leverage.

Speaker 1 Think about like all these luminary people like Gandhi and Oprah and The Rock even or Ronaldo, if you're a soccer fan.

Speaker 1 Those people, because they understand how to communicate, can get things done in the world that nobody else can. That's leverage.
It's so cool because leverage is like a volume knob for your skills.

Speaker 1 If you want to get more done, then you just have to like learn how to ramp up your skill and put the volume up. The more volume you go up, that's the effort that goes down.

Speaker 1 The bigger the outcome on the other side of that is going to be. And then, when it comes to hard work, the hard work adds, but leverage multiplies.
See, that's why I call them multipliers.

Speaker 1 Is that you can work as hard as you want. The guy that's changing a roof or digging a hole in the ground, he's working hard.
If he understands how to get leveraged, he's going to get more done.

Speaker 1 Your effort stops looking like adding, and you start multiplying your outcomes. And in fact, the biggest leverage for most people, and this is true for me, is hiring an executive assistant.

Speaker 1 Somebody that can buy back back 10, 15, 20 hours of your week doing mundane tasks, things that don't add value to your work, don't add your skill set, don't teach you how to invest your money.

Speaker 1 Most people struggle with understanding what to give them.

Speaker 1 So if you want access to my internal EA playbook that I use, it's like 27 pages of all the best things over 15 years of perfecting this, just click the link in the description.

Speaker 1 I'll send you a copy over for free. But multiplication is useless if no one sees you.
That's why we have to master rule number five. We have to get distribution over creation.

Speaker 1 Having a great offer, something to sell without an audience is just like having a secret that nobody knows about. You have to build the distribution engine.

Speaker 1 You don't want to be the world's biggest kept secret. You want everybody to know about you.
Everybody have the opportunity to buy your high income skill.

Speaker 1 One of my portfolio companies at Martel Ventures is called Precision.

Speaker 1 They have one of the best products in the world that helps a business understand their numbers and give them very tactical strategies using AI based on the best practices and the benchmarks to fix the business.

Speaker 1 But without a distribution engine that we built together, no one would know that. They wouldn't have any customers.
So just because you have the best product, it still needs a way to get distribution.

Speaker 1 So here's how you can build your distribution plan today. First, we have to pick one channel.
Everyone gets held up because they're trying to pick the right thing.

Speaker 1 I've learned it's not about picking the right one. It's about picking one and making it right.
Everyone you know that's one at the highest level picked one. Joe Rogan, podcast.

Speaker 1 Somebody else, LinkedIn. For me, Instagram.
Those are my platforms. Those are the places where I decided to go all in and be masterful and do that.

Speaker 1 And then with the resources, I could do other things. So you got to pick one.
The second is we have to make sure you post daily. Consistency becomes the foundation for growth.

Speaker 1 The thing that holds people back from getting an audience or building distribution is they're just not consistent.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to break your heart if you don't want to hear this, but I'm talking about for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 If you lead with free value, giving away your best stuff, I'm talking the best stuff because information should be free. Implementation is paid.
You get somebody a result in advance.

Speaker 1 They will trust you and they will buy from you. If you can solve their small problems, they're going to want to pay you to solve their big problems.

Speaker 1 The third is once you have that guarantee, build your list, your own media, meaning your email, your SMS. That's the difference between owned versus earned.

Speaker 1 Social media is great because you're using other people's platform, their audience to build your awareness, your distribution, but you don't own that.

Speaker 1 You can get your account canceled tomorrow and all of it goes away. I like to take that attention and move it to my email, move it to SMS.
You've probably seen me give out my text number.

Speaker 1 You've probably seen my email address to opt in. That way I can build a personal relationship with the audience where the platform can't take that away from me.

Speaker 1 And finally, number four and last but definitely not least, you have to integrate your promotion into the content. Meaning I need you to figure out what is the skill that you want to sell?

Speaker 1 What is the service you want to sell and integrate it into the value of your content? That feels great.

Speaker 1 That means that what you do and what you teach and the value you give and what you sell is aligned. Think about Mr.
Beast. He sells chocolate bars.
You're watching a Mr.

Speaker 1 Beast video and then he has an integrated play into the chocolate bar that usually is on the theme of the video that you're watching. It's not like he's like, hey, eat my chocolate bars.

Speaker 1 He's saying, and now they've got these chocolate bars that they can eat while they're stuck in this freaking hole for the next 60 days.

Speaker 1 And that way there's a promotion on the product that feels integrated into the content.

Speaker 1 For example, if you're teaching somebody like how to write great copy in an email or how to do a sales call while you're teaching them, you can just say, and for example, most people get stuck with these problems.

Speaker 1 If you want my help to overcome that issue, just message me. You literally go find me on Instagram and you'll watch me do this all the time.

Speaker 1 Most people just think it's content, but it's integrated into my value. Virality is luck, but distribution is a system.
This is important.

Speaker 1 Please promise me, you won't nuke your progress by trying to flex at every step.

Speaker 1 Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube.

Speaker 1 I'm Dan martel on youtube just subscribe to the channel turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time it'll tell youtube to tell you we got a new episode so you'll never miss anything now let's get back to the episode

Speaker 1 rule number six is don't finance your flex debt for assets that's called leverage debt for lifestyle that's a hole you'll never get out of one of my mentors a long time ago he said to me he said making money is easy keeping it is hard if you make a million dollars a year but you spend a million point one dollars a year you're always going to be backwards learning how to use your cash flow from your assets finance your flexing is the key and i get it everybody's like yeah but you're only young once i'm only talking about three to five years if you can just chill the out for a few years you can get it today versus wishing when you're 50 or 60 that you had the freedom and trust me when i was in my 20s i was making a lot of money and I decided to fly my little brother to the west coast and go on a snowboard trip for two weeks where I spent almost $16,000.

Speaker 1 000 i did everything i wanted and then i realized oh you didn't pay the taxes on that and i had to spend the next few months paying off the taxes because i didn't even know how to manage my money that lesson at 20 years old taught me how to set up my life so i never had to work ever again so remember there's only two kinds of debt there's good debt which i'm a fan of i'm not like an anti-debt like some finance people financing that makes cash things like financing inventory that you know you can sell investing in ads equipment real estate debt to buy assets or debt to invest in your business to generate more returns or buy a bigger piece of your business good debt and then bad debt i'm talking debt to finance toys or status or your vacation essentially that's cash on fire the money can't work for you anymore here's the rule that i live by if it doesn't pay you back make you money then essentially you're selling yourself you're the product when you buy something you're actually spending the time it took you to make the money to buy that thing rich people buy assets, broke people buy the applause.

Speaker 1 All right, if you made it this far, freaking awesome. You're on your way to get rich.
And the cool part is you don't need talent, you don't need luck or any of that other shit.

Speaker 1 But now it's the time to make some real bets. So rule number seven, use the money as a tool, not the goal.
The goal is freedom. Never forget that.
Money's not meant to be hoarded.

Speaker 1 Money is meant to be used. When I was growing up, I had one of my best friends' dad.
He owned a food truck. And that guy worked literally 60 hours a week all the time in his food truck to make cash.

Speaker 1 And all the extra cash, he saved it in his home. He hoarded it.
He put it in the wall. He didn't trust the banks.
It was kind of wild to figure this out. And then there was a fire.

Speaker 1 Watching the reaction of his family lose 30 years of everything they've ever done because he didn't understand how to take the money to invest in the skill meant he lost it all.

Speaker 1 I have a problem when people think money is evil. Money doesn't solve problems.
Money amplifies who you are. If you are a great person, you will have more greatness in your life.

Speaker 1 If you are an asshole and you're an evil person, guess what? That more money is just going to amplify who you are. There's only one really important rule.
Freedom isn't found in your bank account.

Speaker 1 It's found in your calendar. The goal is to use money to buy back your time.
That's leverage so that you can spend that time doing the things you love.

Speaker 1 Hopefully you fall in love with becoming better because God's not going to reward somebody to go get free and make a lot of money to go hang out on the beach.

Speaker 1 because he created you to go be a creator, go do stuff in the world. If your whole plan is to get free, to chill out and do nothing, don't be surprised if that opportunity never comes to you.

Speaker 1 That's why I spend so much money on hiring people to support my life.

Speaker 1 Not only does it buy back my time, having Ann, my executive assistant, Betty, my house manager, Sam, my creative director, Todd, who's my CEO, Roddy who's the CEO, essentially team Martel.

Speaker 1 It's I get to invest in those people, help those people create their dreams, create a bigger future for all of us to win in.

Speaker 1 That to me is the whole point about having money is creating richness, not only in my life, but in other people's lives.

Speaker 1 And by the way, speaking to my team member, especially my executive assistant, my admin team, if you want my playbook, just click the link below and I'll send it to you.

Speaker 1 This is literally 15 years perfected into the tightest, simplest format for my structure, my templates, my North Star metrics. It's all there for you.
Just click the link in the description below.

Speaker 1 Achieving freedom is the goal, but the real reward is actually not the money. It's who you get to become in the process.
You take all of this, everything I've built, all my companies away from me.

Speaker 1 I'm good because I became that person. I've got the skills.
I know how to do it. I could do it in a third of the time.

Speaker 1 Starting from scratch, knowing what I know, not making the same mistakes, boom, watch me.

Speaker 1 You could literally take people like an Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, plop them in the center of a country, come back in five years, and you would find a person is dominating in that country.

Speaker 1 It's just who they are. This process of wanting to be rich is awesome.
I want that for you. But what I'm excited about is who you get to become in the process.

Speaker 1 Then you get to this really cool place where the work feels like play. When you wake up and you feel like, I can't believe this is my job.
This is how I create. This is what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 And it feels so fun. That's when you know you become rich and you didn't need talent, trust fund, education, none of that.
Thanks for listening to Martel Method.

Speaker 1 If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom, and build their empire.