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People who are in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, which I was in for many years of my life, where I'd get paid for my call center job, go and spend the money, and pretty much spend all of it within the first couple of days of getting the paycheck, and then I was just waiting the next three weeks for the next paycheck. What advice would you give them about getting out of that cycle, because you almost feel imprisoned by it if you're in it?
Absolutely. Before I give the advice, I want to explain to that person what's happening, because you are the prime customer for our economic system. Banks love you because they can sell you payday loans, they can sell you credit cards, they can sell you lines of credit, and they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life, which means you keep making the bank rich. Corporations love you because you're not going to think twice when we show you this nice bag or this nice vacation. You're going to want this stuff, so we love selling you this stuff. The government loves you because you're going to pay the highest taxes; employees pay the highest taxes. So when you're in that situation, you are making everybody else rich at your expense. If you want to break out of this, the first thing you have to understand is that you need to make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich, because when you're spending all your money, you are putting your money into their pockets, and you have to stop that. You have to keep that money for yourself.
Think of it this way: you're in a boat, and water is just flowing in, and you are sinking. You have to start by sealing the holes. You have to stop the water leaving, and you have to stop the water coming in. You have to stop the bleeding, and that means you have to stop the spending. If you are in what I call the financial danger zone, which is when you don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt, you are in the financial danger zone, and you have to make drastic changes. That means right now: no more eating at restaurants, no more vacations, no more doing anything that doesn't put money in your pocket, and no more Netflix. The reason I say this isn't because you're going to save $15 a month. It's so you can save two hours of your time a day. The average American is watching more than two hours of television a day, and if you don't have $2,000 saved up and you have credit card debt, you cannot afford to waste those two hours a day on TV. That means right now you have to go out and start using that time to learn, to work, and to make some extra dollars.
So what do you do? Start selling stuff. Stop spending money and sell the stuff you own. If you have a TV that you're not using, sell it. If you have a car that you can't afford, sell it. If you're living in a house that you can't afford, sell it, downgrade, move smaller, and then work to earn more money.
I have to say, a couple of things came to mind when you were saying that. Funnily enough, I put myself in the shoes of 18-year-old Steven Bartlett when I was in that small apartment with three or four immigrants in Moss Side. My rent was 150 a month, which I could not afford and could not pay. I was intermittently working between call center jobs, and whatever money I got, I spent. Part of the reason I spent it, just like many people watching, especially men who sometimes feel the need because of the way society is, was that I was trying to get laid at the same time. It's hard when you're a young man, and I say young men in particular because the statistics do support the fact that there is an expectation that men pay. When you're a young man, it's particularly difficult to do all of these things: to cut back and also get laid. What am I going to do, defer getting laid for 10 years? When I say laid, I'm really saying meeting someone, falling in love, and having a life. If I'm living in a shoebox, which I was, I can't bring anyone back there. I can't take anyone for dinner. I can't take anyone to the movies. So what do I do? This is why every Indian parent tells their kids to become a doctor so their son can get married. It's the same concept. But here's the thing: you have to pick. Either life's going to be hard now, or it's going to be hard for the rest of your life, and you have to pick what's more important to you right now. If we talk about balance, if you want to have a balance of everything, where you want to find a girl, make money, and stay healthy, you are dividing your attention everywhere. I'm not saying it's impossible, but very few people can actually do everything all at once. If your number one goal is to become wealthy, if your number one goal is to turn your finances around, you have to get serious about it, because where you put your attention is where you get the results. If you want a better financial situation, you're going to have to make sacrifices, and it's difficult. I can't come here and tell you it's going to be easy, because that would be me lying to you.
I have to be honest: I did make a sacrifice. For me, the sacrifice was that I started a business, and frankly, that meant I didn't have time to be going out, getting laid, meeting people, or socializing. My story arc ends with it going well and then the romantic situation taking care of itself many years later, once the business had gone well, because I was so focused on myself. It's funny: there's a bit of a paradox to life. The more you focus inward, the more you become a magnet. The more I focused outward, pursuing and chasing and neglecting myself, the harder it was to get people interested in me.
I also want to say that when I talk about building wealth, I'm not talking about becoming money-hungry or money-greedy, some evil person who just cares about money. That's not what I'm talking about, because I want you to live a holistic life. Money is just one part of your life. The second part is that I'm not telling you to never enjoy life. I'm telling you to make a sacrifice for a period of your life so you can enjoy the rest of your life and never have to worry about money again. It's hard for us to naturally see life as seasons, especially when we're looking forward. When we're looking back, it's very easy to say, "Oh, that was that season." I can sit here now and say that from 20 to 25 was my sacrifice season, where I put everything into making myself something. Then 25 to 30 was building and learning. Now that I've been through some seasons, it's actually easier to think forward in seasons. But for someone who hasn't been through seasons in life, it's hard to think about life in those terms. I now think of my life in five-year seasons, and that helps me even have conversations with my partner, where I say, "This is the season I'm in, and it will probably last roughly this long, and I'm going to sacrifice these things and prioritize these things in this season." But it's hard for people to understand this idea, and the sacrifice is difficult, especially during a time when everybody's showing off everything on Instagram. You look at your friends who have a crappy job, but they're driving nicer cars, going on better vacations, going to nicer restaurants, and you're thinking, "What did I do wrong?" Then, especially if you're a guy with a girlfriend or wife, she's going to say, "How come they keep getting to go to Cancun? How come they keep going to these nice restaurants? How come you can't take me to these nice places?" Now you feel like you're doing something wrong, because where is this discrepancy coming from?
The reason I call my show The Minority Mindset is that I'm a big advocate of not doing what the majority of people do. The first time I made a million dollars in a year, I was in my twenties, and I was driving a car worth $500. It didn't have a bumper on it, and it was not pretty. My wife sat in that car with me, and my employees drove better cars than I did. So you've got to be confident, and you've got to work for something bigger, and you want a partner who's going to understand that. That's my belief, and it's not the easy thing. It's interesting, because confidence is such an internal thing. I just feel like I probably didn't have it then, because I think I was scared for someone to know that I was broke. I was so scared of someone knowing I was broke that I just didn't entertain romantic relationships. That is the reason so many people will go into debt to buy vacations, to buy things, to buy stuff, to look rich. Ironically, that's the thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their lives: they're scared to look broke, and when they try to look rich, that's what keeps them broke.
There's another element to this. My life was pretty miserable. When you have a relatively miserable life, when you don't have many nice things because you're working in a call center, as I was, until night time, doing overtime every overtime hour I could get, and you're lonely, going home alone, walking home because you can't afford the bus, anything that gives you a little dopamine hit becomes appealing. Gambling is why all the gambling shops are in the areas that struggle the worst financially, because a lot of people are looking for that big payday, that dopamine hit from a payday. My TV in my tiny bedsit room was half the size of the wall. I was making reckless spending decisions because I think it gave me some kind of hit that I was missing in my life. It gave me a dopamine rush, and there weren't many things giving me dopamine at that point in my life. Here's the thing: during that time, you are making emotional decisions, as many people are, and it's very difficult to speak logic to emotion. But this is where you have to be able to understand the difference. If you're listening to this and you're in that situation, you have to understand that if you want to continue living that lifestyle, you're going to have to make changes today. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in this lifestyle for the rest of your life, and it's only going to get more difficult.
If you want to become wealthy, the first part is your own mindset and your own discipline. Until you can conquer that, I can tell you everything about investing. I can tell you different ETFs and index funds to invest in. I can tell you different investment institutions out there. I can tell you which stock brokerages to use. I can tell you to just invest 15% of your income for the next 10, 20, or 30 years, and you're going to become wealthy. But until you get over that mindset, you're never going to become wealthy, because when you're in that state of "I just want to look rich, I just want that dopamine hit, I just want some nice things because I deserve them, I work hard," you know what happens next. You're the one who gets caught up in all the get-rich-quick schemes, because someone's going to say, "Look, put $1,000 into this and you'll have $110,000 in the next three months," or "I'm going to show you how you can live the laptop lifestyle, work five hours a week, make $110,000 a month, $110,000 a week, and never have to worry about money again. Just buy this program." Now you're a prime candidate, because you're driven by the emotion of "I want that." You can't imagine having an extra $10,000 a month that you don't even have to work for, because you can't see past it. All you're doing is being sold to by an emotion. You're the one who's going to get caught up in the get-rich-quick schemes, and you're the one who's going to make the bank rich, because you're going to stay stuck in debt. Corporations are going to love you, because they can keep selling you the newest, nicest stuff, because you want to look rich, you want to show it off to your friends, you want to show it off to the girls, and you get stuck in that cycle.
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