Top Money Expert: How To 10x Your Income & Turn Your Passion Into A Thriving Business | Daniel Priestley

May 26, 2025 1h 12m

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UK entrepreneur Daniel Priestley shares his military-inspired business scaling model and reveals why a Christmas Eve health scare forced him to restructure his entire approach to wealth and success. He breaks down the coming AI revolution that will split society into hyper-consumers versus hyper-creators and provides the exact framework for building businesses that scale without burning out.

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Welcome back my friend.

I have been quietly away for this past month.

I've been in Spain actually and I haven't been posting what I've been up to, but I'm going to be sharing everything I've been up to behind the scenes here very soon.

I'm going to be talking about it on social media, on Instagram, all my social channels, and I'm going to be launching a new YouTube channel to actually show kind of like a lifestyle documentary behind the scenes of a big dream that I've been working on and pursuing.

And I'm so excited about it.

There's been a lot of exciting moments.

There's been a lot of downs as well, some highs and lows all mixed up in this past month.

And I just wanted to remind you that whatever dream you have, it's worth pursuing.

It's worth going after.

It's worth taking the next step.

It's worth seeing how far you can take it.

And it's really not about whether you accomplish the goal or not, but who you become on that journey, who you're becoming through all the adversity and the pursuit of that thing.

And if you feel like you've just been kind of on this hamster wheel of doing the same thing over and over again, and you haven't been exploring the parts of you or the parts of your mind or your heart or your soul that are telling you to work on that art project that you have or create music or publish a book or whatever it might be or just go travel, I encourage you and I empower you to start taking those steps.

And a lot of times we feel stuck or trapped is because we're just doing things that we're we're not fully excited about.

And if you do those things all the time that you're not excited about and you never have time on the weekends or nights or take those

you know, holiday trips to actually pursue those things on the side, then you're going to feel like you're stuck and like you're burnt out.

So we need that time, that space to pursue those things.

And I get it.

A lot of us have responsibilities.

We don't have all day, all month, all year to do everything we want.

But you do have some time.

And when you start taking those action steps, nights, weekends, holidays, whatever it might be, on the thing that your heart speaks to you about, man, life just gets so much richer.

And I want you to live a richer life.

That's what this is all about.

It's about creating abundance in our life.

And we've got a powerful episode today with a wealth expert, someone who's lived a rich life.

And he's actually talking about that there's more to life than money and business success and how to really create a fulfilling life in an ever-changing world.

His name is Daniel Priestley.

He's one of UK's top entrepreneurs and successful business builders with seven thriving companies.

And he breaks down the myth that entrepreneurs have to be exhausting themselves and shows how following certain principles can dramatically increase your chances of success.

He also shares his strategic frameworks with a refreshing perspective on wealth and fulfillment from other areas of life.

Again, if you're trying to make more money, but you feel like, ah, this money has been stressing me out, or I'm just working so hard and it's so hard to make the money, this is going to give you tools and a different framework on how to scale that time that you're putting into your business, your career, and also make sure you're having a life worth living outside of money.

Because it doesn't matter how much money you have in the bank or how much net worth you have.

If you don't enjoy your life, you aren't living a rich life.

There's so much in this episode.

I hope you enjoy it.

Make sure to share it with a friend as well.

Tag me over on social media.

Let me know that you're listening to this or that you're watching it.

I'm so grateful for you, and I hope this has been a friendly reminder that you deserve a rich and abundant life.

And it just takes some shifting in the way you think, how you act, and how you feel about what you have and where you're heading.

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Daniel, welcome to the show.

Very excited that you're here on the School of Greatness.

Thank you for having me on the show.

Very excited.

You've got a lot of success as an entrepreneur, one of the UK's top entrepreneurs, money experts.

And I believe you have seven successful businesses right now.

I'm not sure how many unsuccessful businesses you've developed.

But for people in America, the stats are crazy with the failure rate around businesses.

Within the first year, I think it's over 20% of businesses fail.

By year five, it's over 50% of failure.

And it just seems really hard.

It seems really hard to launch.

It's easy to launch a business, but it seems hard to make a business profitable where you're actually able to save money, invest money.

And even the 50% of businesses that don't fail within five years, it doesn't mean they're thriving.

It doesn't mean you're not grinding 80 to 100 hours a week to just keep the doors open.

You're managing stress of employees coming and going, onboarding, training processes, products failing, all this stuff.

How can someone watching or listening right now who has no desire to be an entrepreneur or run a business be convinced that starting a business isn't going to exhaust or kill them?

Or if someone's not interested in starting a business, how can they double, triple, quadruple their income, whether through investing or in on some other element because there's a lot to unpack there yes and what you've said is true um entrepreneurship is really hard so like at the other end of the spectrum you know you talked about the failure rate uh only five percent of businesses hit a million or more of revenue uh

five percent yeah about

five percent in in america

in in the number one place in the world to be an entrepreneur only five percent have hit a million about five percent it might be six or seven percent but it's about five percent it's not um in the uk it's about five percent so five percent get to about seven figures of revenue or more.

So what you're saying is absolutely true that it's not something for the lighthearted.

And to be honest, I don't really convince people to do it.

I help a lot of people who are doing it.

And if they're already an entrepreneur and they want to be an entrepreneur, then we talk.

If someone says it's not for me, that's totally...

I completely respect that.

Entrepreneurship is a team sport, as you know.

And one role is the founder, the guy who starts it and takes on the most risk at the beginning.

And then another role is the people who come and be part of that entrepreneurial team.

And being part of an entrepreneurial team can be incredibly rewarding financially and intangibly.

And I think entrepreneurship, that shared experience of building a business is

for everyone who wants that.

That's definitely a thing.

Being a founder, not necessarily for everyone.

But here's what I'll say.

Have you ever built Lego?

Back in the day, yeah.

Okay, so get a box of Lego and you look at the front of the box and you see the front of the box and you see the picture and you go, ooh, that would be fun.

And then you tip out all the Lego on the table and it's just a big mess.

And you think, how on earth do I put this together?

Fortunately, they put instructions in the box and they say, put this one on this one, this piece by this piece, by this piece.

And if you follow piece by piece by piece, it's actually incredibly easy to build what looks like the front of the box.

Now, what happens with entrepreneurship is people see someone's life on Instagram and they go, oh, I want that, right?

That's the front of the box.

But then they look at all the things that you need to do for entrepreneurship and they go, oh, I've got to hire people and create products and have a website and set up a LinkedIn post every day and I've got to do all these things.

And then they feel like total overwhelm.

And what actually is needed is a piece-by-piece, step-by-step approach where it's like, okay, first do this, then this, then this.

And then you go through and actually you can build something that's on the front of the box.

To use another analogy,

We, you and I, we would jump on an airplane without even thinking twice about our safety.

But a hundred years ago, it was one of the most dangerous things in the world to do.

But they figured out the process, they figured out the aerodynamic principles, and the combination of knowing the principles and knowing the process means that it's the safest way to travel.

So, you know, I think entrepreneurship is the same.

There's a process, there's principles.

If you follow process, if you follow principles, you can actually safely build a business.

What's the mindset of someone who can succeed at launching a business?

The mindset is curiosity.

So it's all about conducting fast and cheap experiments.

So what you're really trying to do is you're trying to have a dance with the marketplace.

And you're trying to come up with a bit of a hypothesis like a scientist would and you see what the market, how the market responds.

And then if you get a good response, you double down on it.

And if the response is not so great, you adapt and you change.

So you've got to stay curious.

You've got to be a bit like a scientist.

I'll give you an example.

So about a year ago, my team came to me and they said, we want to build a new piece of technology as a product

and I said I don't necessarily want to launch a new product you know I'm spread too thin I don't want to launch a new business actually

and they said well can we test it and I said okay let's test it so we put up a landing page that was called a waiting list landing page and the waiting list is essentially we're going to build this product we mock up some designs and we say if you're interested in this join the waiting list and answer five questions to be on the waiting list for when it launches.

I put a post on my LinkedIn and I said to the team, if 150 people fill this in, then we'll explore this as if this is a good idea.

Right, but that doesn't mean they're going to give you their credit card.

It doesn't mean.

It's like they might say, Yeah, this is some cool, interesting idea.

Here's my email.

We just want to set a low, first test, fast, cheap experiment.

Because if they did give us a credit card, we'd have to do it.

So, like,

yeah.

So, we just asked five questions.

Um, and we said, you know, which best describes your current situation, which best describes what you're trying to achieve, what best describes your biggest obstacle, how much would you be willing to pay, and

what else do you want us to know about you?

So we asked those five questions.

750 people filled it in.

I was expecting 150 and I was like, oh, okay.

And not only did they fill it in, on the price data, we were expecting $29 a month would be the subscription price for this product.

And the price that came back most common was $59 a month.

So we're sitting there going, oh, okay, we're onto something with this idea.

Now, did you give them options for price?

Yeah, we did.

Okay.

Yeah, and of course I'm expecting that everyone's going to click the lowest price point.

$5 a month.

Yeah, yeah.

But no, $59 a month was, of course, the way we worded the question was, which price point best describes your budget?

Bearing in mind, lower price would be less features and higher price would be more features.

And how many price, what was the price point?

I think we did 29,

59, 99, and 129.

Yeah.

59 was the common.

59 was the most common.

Yeah.

750 people opted in as a wait list, said, I'd be interested if this product was out out there.

Yeah.

And this is a software.

Yeah, it was a piece of AI technology to help people write books.

So it acts like a creative editor and a creative,

it uses some AI tools to help you structure your thinking around a book.

So, you know, so that's called a fast, cheap experiment.

Launch a waiting list.

So a lot of people, when they think about launching a business, they think about huge commitments.

And it's like the stress and anxiety.

I've got to have an office.

I've got to pay a registration fee.

I've got to hire five people.

You know, I've got to do all these things.

And if it doesn't work out, I've lost $100,000.

That's not how I start businesses.

And six months of my life and time wasted.

I start businesses with lead generation first.

Can we generate leads?

Can we collect data?

And if we can't generate leads and if we can't collect data, then we just don't even make any progress with the idea.

Why when you have seven businesses, would you even want to launch new businesses?

Why not just say, hey, let's double down on the businesses we're making.

They're already making seven, eight figures.

Let's get them to nine figures as opposed to putting all this time, energy, resources, thinking, hiring, recruiting to say, let's launch some new idea and put out a

minimum viable product and scale it from there and then hire teams around the world and manage those teams and create processes.

Why not just 10x?

the businesses you have.

Well, the businesses I have are incredibly fast growth.

in software and technology,

there's a rule of 40, which is that your growth and your profitability should be above the number 40.

So 20% growth and 20%

profit margin would be 40.

So essentially, this is called the rule of 40 in software companies.

Our software company, scoreapp.com, is 127.

So we grow at 100% a year and we have 27% net profit margin.

So it's growing.

It's super fast growth.

And my other company, Dent Global,

15% quarter-on-quarter growth for years now, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing.

My core competency is getting things started and putting great teams in place and launching those.

Now, I'm with you.

I'm probably getting a little bit,

it's a little bit ridiculous.

The reason that I've got so many businesses is because AI came along.

And I owned a group of agencies, and I said, strategically, we're going to spin an AI product out of each agency.

So each agency has its own intellectual property.

Yeah, if you're like a design company, like how do we build AI within this exactly be a software or a tool that we could sell as a standalone product versus a service?

Yes.

So I owned a publishing company,

which was the one that did the book software that came out.

And then I own a PR agency and we're creating a piece of AI technology for PR.

So because of that technology that came along,

we said, hey, let's do it.

Let's lean into this and do it.

There are different ways to get businesses So a lot of my businesses I bought I didn't start them.

I bought them and we've started stuff out of off the back of them

So I have a lot of fun starting businesses and Pretty quickly I put a team in place and the team runs with it Yeah, and we got a we've got a game plan We have playbooks and we just execute the playbooks But how do you find great people to hire for your team?

Well, in the early days, you just work with whoever's there.

You make them great.

The commitment is not that you find great people, it's that you make great people.

When I first started my first company, I was 21 years old.

No one great was going to come and work with a 21-year-old.

So I had a spotty 19-year-old who came and joined the team, and I had a friend from school who came to join the team.

And we were not great as a team, and then we became great together.

So, you know, I'm a really big believer that when you start, you find whoever's willing to be part of the team.

You find someone, you know, you go down to Starbucks and say, are you ready to quit your job and come work with me to the person who serves you and see if you can do it.

If you could give an entrepreneur or someone that wants to launch a new business three pieces of advice and if you only did these three things

you could set yourself up for a lot of success.

What would those things be?

In the very early days,

I want chaos.

C-A-O-S, right?

So I want a great concept and I want to test the concept.

I want a really clear understanding of who this is for.

We call that an audience.

Whose attention do we want?

Who do we want to be the audience for this product?

Offer, how do we create something that really speaks to their needs and desires?

And then a sales process.

So concept, audience, offer, sales.

Those are my first four things that I want to get right when we're launching.

you know we can we can go through some of those but like uh concept is i want something something that you're passionate about.

I want something that solves a problem in the world, and I want something people are willing to pay for.

I want those three things to have a good time.

A lot of entrepreneurs launch something that they're not passionate about, but they see an opportunity to make a lot of money.

Yeah.

Is there anything, what's the downside of that approach or thinking?

Well, if you're chasing the money,

it's very hard to beat someone who's genuinely passionate about it.

So money will attract all sorts of people.

So if you imagine there's this big pile of money, people are coming at that from all angles.

The person who's ultimately going to win is the person who recognizes there's a lot of money and they're passionate about it.

They love it.

They've got an origin story for it.

They've got a vision for the future of it.

They've got a clear mission about what they want to do with it right now.

And it tends to be that people who are chasing the money, they don't have origin, mission, and vision.

They don't have a background that says this is what they should be doing.

They don't have a vision for the future as to what they want to do with it next.

And they don't have a clear mission as to the highest value things they could do today.

They're just captivated by the money.

And I get that, like money is important, but ultimately the best opportunities, you need all three.

You need a passion, you need a problem, a real problem that people want to solve, and people want to pay for that.

So those are the three.

It's sometimes the case that you can open any one of those three doors.

You can just spot a problem that needs solving and you can get yourself passionate about it.

You can cultivate the passion.

Sometimes you do notice that there's a new lucrative thing that's going on and you can, you know, you then find yourself like you get bitten by the bug.

And, you know, yes, you're excited by the money, but then suddenly you start researching it and you realize it really lines up with who you are and it really lines up with what you've been doing for the last 20 years.

And you go, this is the opportunity I've been waiting for.

you can enter the room through either of those three doors, but ultimately we need all all three of those doors open.

And what if someone's not looking to be an entrepreneur, but they want to make more money?

So I'm a big believer, as I said, that entrepreneurship is a team sport.

And in the first 10 people, there's a lot of magic and there's a lot of opportunity to make money, whether you're the founder or whether you're one of the first 10.

So sometimes you can get in an early stage team that has equity

that's being shared.

Sometimes you can get performance bonuses that are pretty high.

and sometimes the knowledge that you gain from being part of a small 10-person team can actually set you up for a lifetime of opportunities as well.

So for me personally, I was 19 years old.

I dropped out of university and I got invited to go knock on the door of this guy who's starting a new company.

And he's 37, I'm 19.

And it was the biggest house I'd ever been to.

And it was like this beautiful big house.

And

I knock on the door.

I've got a 30-minute 30-minute meeting, and I end up talking to him for three hours.

And he becomes my mentor.

And basically, I was employee number three, or something like that.

We're in the kitchen, we end up building 60 employees, we built, you know, multi-million revenue.

And those two years taught me so much about myself and about the realities of business and how to access resources.

And I got all of that.

And then at the end of two years, I went to John and I said, John,

I'd really like to get equity in this business.

And he said,

you know what he said.

He said,

if you want equity in a business, you go start your own.

He was like, I put up all the money.

I put up all the risk.

I put up.

You're a snotty-nosed 19-year-old kid when I met you.

So what was funny.

Is there something wrong with that mentality from him?

Nothing wrong.

No, it's totally his prerogative.

He was trying to sort of like say, hey, not yet.

That was his way of saying not yet.

But what I heard as a 21-year-old is, oh, go start your own.

I just start your own business.

So I actually did.

So at 21, I went and launched.

And because he had mentored me so well, we did 1.3 million in the first 12 months.

We did 10.7 million in the third year.

So it was just a

yeah, I built my own team and I'd learned a lot.

I learned about how to generate leads and how to make sales and all of those sorts of things and how to build a team.

So from being part of that small team,

that set me up.

The problem with being part of a large corporate is often you have no idea what that whole company does.

I don't know if you ever, you've never worked in a large corporate.

Never have.

No.

Yeah, I mean, I worked odd jobs like in college and after college, but I was like a truck driver.

I was like...

a bouncer at a nightclub and like me neither right i've i've not done it but i hear consistently that you work for a large corporate they shove you in a corner, they get you working on some spreadsheets, you have no idea how much you're charged out at or whether the company's making profit or how they won that client.

None of that.

It's just go do this little component.

So being part of a small business, an entrepreneurial business, gives you this complete picture.

Yeah.

So much better.

You do so many different jobs.

You see what other people on your team are working on.

You're collaborating a lot more and you hopefully become more resourceful.

Yes.

You become more entrepreneurial when you're in a smaller team.

That's startup.

Yeah, you have to.

You gain self-awareness, you gain commercial awareness, and you gain resources.

So those are good reasons.

Yeah, and usually, you know, the team is all talking about what they're working on together or like, hey, we're after this big project in the next few months.

So we've got this launch and we're all working on this together.

And what do you need?

It's more of like a team effort.

It's like a sports team.

It is.

And it's crazy how transparent small teams are.

Like it's often the case that you know the revenues, you know the profits, you know how many customers are coming through each month.

Like all of that stuff tends to be in full display in small businesses or a lot of it.

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So, how come someone you know who launched a business, let's say they get to 100,000 or they get to a million in revenue and after a few years,

how can someone think to themselves and act in a way where they can generate double, triple, quadruple the revenue without feeling like they have to do double triple or quadruple the work?

How can they really because what when we launch something it takes all of us.

But when we get to the next level, it takes a different part of us that we haven't developed.

Yeah, that's that's true.

There's two things that really change the game.

One is having a key person of influence at the front of the of the business.

So this is someone who is going to be the voice of the business, the face of the business, and obviously that should be the founder.

Why is having a key person of interest so important?

for a business okay because in the early days you pitch one-to-one

but then to scale you pitch one to many so like in the early days you might be doing sales meetings one-to-one.

And then there comes a point where the best way to scale is to put videos out, to put ads out, to do group presentations or events,

to create social media content that gets a bit of cut through.

So all of that stuff is massively amplified by a personal brand.

Online, we don't really pay attention to business brands.

So like Richard Branson has 12 million followers on X and only quarter of a million followers for Virgin.

Even Tim Cook has twice as many followers than Apple.

That's out.

Wow.

Right.

I think LinkedIn did some research and they basically found that if you were to start a business brand and a personal brand on the same day and you post exactly the same time, exactly the same day, by the time the business brand gets a thousand followers, the personal brand will have 20,000 followers.

So it's 20 times more powerful.

So when you scale up, you need to be one to many.

You've got to get your message out to a larger number of people.

And people underestimate, you know,

you need something like 2,000 to 20,000 people to really know what your business does in order for it to start that upward curve.

So personal brand is a huge growth driver, especially from six to seven figures of revenue.

You want to go from half a million to five million.

Personal brand, key person of influence brand.

You build that personal brand and you're going to see some growth because you're going to be hitting larger numbers of people who who know who you are.

The next thing is digital assets.

Digital assets means that you take all the stuff that's happening and you digitize it.

So if there's a happy customer, you get a video of that happy customer and put that on the YouTube channel.

If there's a system or a process that is your signature method, you create a diagram of it and you make sure people can see it and they can find it.

Like some of the stuff you have here in your books.

Yes.

It's like creating your own IP.

Entrepreneur, yeah, exactly.

So that's my entrepreneur journey method.

And,

you know, there's different ones here, like the entrepreneur sweet spot and all of that sort of stuff.

So everything that I talk about, I create digital assets like books, videos, diagrams, because

that's the stuff that scales on the internet.

See, we're living in this incredible time where the internet gives us access.

to 70% of the world's population who have fast internet, 1.8 billion English speakers.

So you only need the tiniest little fraction of people to discover you.

And if you've digitized what you do, including the value and the product and the delivery, you can have incredible scale.

We are living through the most unbelievable time.

this is the equivalent of

the agricultural age turning into the industrial age.

We're going from the industrial age to the digital age.

So, you know, this is where we start to surf these big trends that are happening.

But I've heard you talk about the dying economy versus the new economy.

What is the dying economy and what is the new economy coming?

The dying economy is the economy that you were prepared for in the schooling system.

So in the schooling system, they had this vision for you and they said you're going to work in an office or a factory or a construction environment.

And basically they said, here's our vision for Lewis.

Our vision is that you're going to do 15 years of school and then you're going to do 25 years as work as a worker, then you're going to do about 10 years as a manager, five years as a leader,

and then you're going to do 15 years of retirement and die.

Wow.

So that was the plan,

whether you were aware of that or not.

And for a long period of time, the industrial age, that was a good plan.

From 1850 to 2000, those 150 years, that was a pretty decent way to approach what was possible for most people.

But since 20 the 2000s, and especially since 2020 when we had the pandemic, the way that the world works no longer sits like that.

So we're now in this digital age.

So for example, geography is not a big dictator of value anymore.

So it was almost always the case that where you grew up was probably where you would work and live and

you would be basically within a 10 mile radius and that was you.

Now you could be contracting for a company on the other side of the world.

You could be selling to customers in 150 countries.

Your boss could be someone you've never physically been in an environment with.

Your best best team member could be someone who's in Brazil.

Like all of this, you know, all of this geography gets removed.

Physical products and directly delivered services used to be the main engine of the economy.

Now it's intellectual property, media, data, software,

and finance, main engine rooms of the economy.

we need to recognize that the future of the career looks very different to the previous one.

So what's happening for the future is we're moving into a very high velocity economy that is fast action loops.

And these little loops are you notice a problem, you put together a small team to explore it, you launch something to test it, you scale up the team, you scale up the technology, you formalize it, you exit it, you can move on to the next problem.

And

these are the kind of careers that we're seeing in the future.

I don't know whether you're seeing this as much as I am, but I might ask a high performer these days, tell me, like, what are you doing for work?

And they'll give me like five things.

They'll say, I'm writing a book, I'm doing some podcasts, I've launched an agency, we're spinning out an AI software product,

we're organizing a festival, we've got a live event that's coming up, right?

And you, you know, and you go, how many hundreds of people are on your team?

And it's like, no, it's just me and five other people, right?

We're just a little group of five.

And these fast, dynamic

value loops get created.

And you can have several of them on the go.

You can be a leader in one and a supplier to another.

You know, you might, on any given day, you might be a paid speaker at a conference, but also leading a team running your own conference.

Right.

You know, so.

Yeah, I mean, we have an annual conference called Summit of Greatness for the last nine years, but I also speak around and at other people's offense.

And you're writing a book.

And, you know, so it's this kind of like

plural career.

And I don't know, can you relate to this idea of these fast little loops?

Things happen quickly.

I mean, for the first 10 years of like

running my business or businesses, I guess, I was doing that constantly to the point where I had, I don't know, 15 different revenue streams within a business.

And it got to the point where about five years ago, I felt like I was a seven out of the 10 with everything

because I was doing too many things.

Yeah.

And it was almost like this fast action loop.

Yeah, everything was exciting and I took every opportunity, which led to me getting to a certain level financially and opportunity-wise.

But then I didn't feel like I was able to break through because I was spreading my time, bouncing around thing to thing every day to the next internal project.

Yeah.

That, wow, there's money here.

Let's go do this.

And people need, there's a need, there's a problem.

And it's something I'm interested in.

And I like this too.

And I like that too.

And I'm passionate.

So do it all.

But that only works for so long until you get kind of burnt out and resentful of your business.

Yeah, well, it's not a permanent state.

You feel that you've kind of like taken yourself and spread yourself too far.

So then you dial it back and you say, all right, I'm just going to focus on the highest value things.

But what will predictably happen with you is that

you'll get really strong at a few key things.

And naturally, that's going to exist.

I'm kind of at that point where I'm...

ready to attract the next bigger things, right?

It's like maybe it starts small and it scales, but i'm ready to take on and it doesn't mean ready in the next day it if it's a year from now cool i'm ready when it feels along like this is alignment and it doesn't mean it's going to work but it's like yeah this feels like it has the potential to really be exciting be sustainable energy renewable energy serve and impact people in a meaningful way and bring in meaningful revenue where it's like a win-win-win and it and it just feels like a perfect fit yeah and i'm like i'm right at that stage where

you know, I feel like we're ready to do that.

But it has to be the right opportunity.

And we're also, I mean, I'm turning down a lot of financial opportunities that are big.

It's not the right fit.

I'm like, it just seems like too much of my time.

Yep.

I'm like, that's not scalable.

And if I'm just doing it for a certain amount of money for the next six to 12 months, that's not where you're at right now.

So much of my time, I'm like, it just doesn't feel right.

Yeah.

Well, that's, you're doing the right thing.

And that's what, that's, that's kind of what's going to happen.

So contrast that with the old model of you literally just get put into a job and you just only do that job and then you've got a hobby on the weekend and like, you know, you kind of just on somebody else's path.

You know, so that was the old industrial revolution system.

In this digital system, you've got to develop a sense of feel as to am I taking on too much?

Should I dial it back a bit?

What should I say yes to?

What should I say no to?

So part of the new skill set that we need is the ability to be discerning.

In an AI-driven world where anything's possible, you can speak your ideas into existence at light speed.

You need the ability to have taste and discernment.

So you can say, that's not to my taste.

It's not to my,

it's not the thing that's the perfect thing for me.

You know, a big skill is knowing what to say no to now.

It's huge.

And it's hard to like turn down money.

You know, you don't want to turn down financial opportunity in a world of, you know, just money as a tool to support you in your lifestyle.

And there's different phases in life.

You know, so there are times in your life where you definitely wouldn't have turned down money.

And then there are times in your life where you have a bit more discernment, which is, okay, this is short-term money and it's not long-term scale.

And what I'm looking for is something long-term games with long-term people.

Yeah.

And listen,

I'm all for like creating incredible financial wealth.

I'm all for it.

Like if it comes to me over my lifetime, great.

I want to be like a steward of that wealth and I hopefully want to do the right things with it to serve in the right way with that money.

Not just for me alone and my family, which yes, I want to provide and create experiences that are unforgettable moments.

That doesn't mean you need lots of money all the time to create these unforgettable moments with family and to feel like you're living a healthy lifestyle with the right foods and having the right housing and you know you don't need

tens of millions of dollars to live a good life.

It's interesting because you've sat down with 1,700 people

who are living amazing lives.

So you've picked up on this theme that there's got to be a bit of balance.

Yeah, I mean, it's just kind of like,

what is the end goal?

You know, how much money will make you feel like you are enough?

And what number did you arrive at?

For me,

I don't think I've arrived at the number because it's not like when I'm a billionaire,

then I've made it.

Or when I've exited a company for nine figures, then I'll be enough.

Yeah, your enough is already.

The enough is built in I feel enough right now and I'm so grateful and blessed for the abundance that's come to my life yeah for the the peace I have internally yeah for the health that I currently have for my marriage for you know

everything that I'm creating yeah and the opportunity to wake up another day I'm blessed it's a great special and there's so many people that I've met or I've known who have struggled so much and they have all the money in the world.

So if all the money in the world isn't going to create inner peace and fulfillment,

then what's the point?

That's a great point.

I'm not saying don't go after building extreme wealth if that's something you're excited about,

but at what cost, what price?

And are you going to have regrets that like, oh, I wish I would have spent another 10 years building more companies to make more money?

and become a higher net worth millionaire instead of becoming a self-worth millionaire.

and how can I develop more love more peace more

inner expansion rather than focus on external expansion and there's again I'm not saying there's a right or wrong good or bad

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The one thing I would say is entrepreneurship is the most incredible personal development journey.

Like it really teaches you so much about yourself.

It challenges you.

It brings out your inspiration.

It forces you to explore,

you know, your edges and your limits.

It gets you to be creative.

So, entrepreneurship is personal development in motion.

It's like you can go from reading a book, which is academic, to I'm going to bring something into the world, which is like, okay, I'm riding, you know, you can't ride a bicycle.

You can't learn to ride a bicycle by reading the book.

You got to ride the bicycle.

So, I feel like entrepreneurship is just this personal development journey that is unfolding in real life.

It's a way of living a personal development journey.

It really does take you on that.

what's the number for you?

So for me, it's all about am I in line with my passion?

Am I in line with what I'm meant to be doing?

Like I see my work-life mission is to develop entrepreneurs who solve the world's most meaningful problems.

And what I want to do is I want to build out a community of people who are solving meaningful problems in the world, who are elevating the world, right?

They're standing out, they're scaling up, they're solving problems, they're having an impact.

And for me personally, I like creating businesses that help entrepreneurs to stand out, scale up, and make an impact.

So like, for example, the book writing software is

bookmagic.ai is a example of helping people to express themselves through writing a book.

Because that allows them to stand out, scale up, and make an impact.

So I'm very much like only doing things that are in alignment with my personal mission.

And I do stuff that's fun.

The crushing thing about having too much money is that

if we want to go down the

party what is the crushing thing about having too much money the crushing thing is that you go from being highly creative to being a money manager and this is a real problem because the thing that gets you the company exit is that you poured out creativity and it was all about expansiveness and it was all about building something that belonged in the world and you saw it before everyone else saw it and you just wanted this thing to exist so you almost willed it into existence.

You enrolled members of the team.

You took something that didn't exist and you brought it into the economy and you made it real.

And then someone else saw so much value in that that they buy it for nine figures.

The problem then is that if you do get a check for a lot of money,

you then become what's known as a wealth manager or a money manager.

By default, you've gone from this fully creative, expressive thing called your business to this thing that is all about risk and caution and not breaking it and not reduce it.

Rewarding it

as opposed to holding out to it and risking and

putting it out there.

How many people do you know who've exited

eight, nine, ten figure businesses that then go depressed within weeks after having all this money in the bank?

It's almost like you hear more stories of billionaires exiting companies who are depressed for two years than people who are like, I've made it and life's amazing now.

It's like there's almost a depression from it.

I'm not going to say that happens all the time.

I also know

Top Money Expert: How To 10x Your Income & Turn Your Passion Into A Thriving Business | Daniel Priestley

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