I made my first million dollars by the age of 32 but if ID followed the advice in this video I probably would have gotten there much sooner so these are the six key lessons I wish I told my younger self if I were to start all over again and just in case you're thinking I had some special advantages over everyone else hold your horses because I actually started out $100,000 in debt so I wasn't even starting from zero I was starting from minus1 100,000 so all that to say if I can do it you can do it too so I grew up in a very traditional Korean family where we were all expected to work hard get into a good school then get a good job and just kind of follow this traditional life path but I was kind of a rebel so I got the idea in my head to take a gap year before college instead of going straight to college and jumping straight into building a career so at 18 years old when all my friends were going off to college I instead strapped on a backpack and with money that I saved up from waiting tables throughout high school I went on a gap year to explore Europe and Africa now during this Gap year I did a lot of different things I oped in Spain I backpacked in East Africa I took the euro train around Europe and had a lot of fun but by far the most valuable thing I got out of this year was really really learning in my bones the value of having Financial Resources so because I had saved up money and I had my own money I didn't have to listen to my parents advice I could go on this Gap year make it happen for myself and that's when I realized oh when you have money you have options not only that but I also met a lot of different interesting people that I never would have met if I just followed that traditional very sheltered life path so after my Gap year when I came back home to start college I knew very clearly in my mind that I wanted a life of Freedom just like the freedom I experienced during that Gap year and even though I didn't know how to make that happen I was at least asking the question and seeking answers to this big question of how can I create Financial Freedom so I can travel and do whatever I want this question guided every single life choice that I made from that point on including the mentors that I sought out books that I read and career choices that I made and this set me on a life path that was different from many of my colleagues because I was seeking out the answers to this big question so while I did follow the traditional life path for a while and getting a good job on Wall Street and making a high salary and doing all of that I eventually made decisions that really created the Financial Freedom that I have today and fast forward to today I have a lot more freedom than a lot of my colleagues and friends do which brings me to the first lesson that I want to share with you which is if you want to become financially free you have to first want to be financially free now I know that sounds obvious but a lot of people sort of just exist from dayto day without really thinking about what they want and being very specific about it as Keith farazi said in his bestselling book Never Eat Alone no one becomes an astronaut by accident and I would modify that quote to say no one becomes a millionaire by accident it really takes something to become rich to rise above what everybody else has so if you think somehow magically you're going to end up there by accident and just wake up one day financially free it's not going to happen so that's something I would definitely keep in mind is first set the goal to become rich and financially free so from there I had this goal to become rich and financially free one day but I got to tell you after even setting that goal it was not a linear Journey upwards by any means it really took me a while to figure out how to do it and because I didn't know any better I thought the way to get financially free is to do what everyone is telling me to do which is to get a really good job make a lot of money and somehow it's all going to work out that's why I paid a bunch of money got into a lot of student loan debt to get an elite degree from a really prestigious University thinking that that would be the magic ticket so I graduated college I got a really good job but because I didn't know how to manage money how to make money work for me or how to work smarter versus harder I was actually stuck in the rat race in a bunch of debt living paycheck to paycheck working really hard but having nothing to show for it and it was really disillusioning basically the problem with traditional education is that school trains you to become an employee and if you're an employee and you don't know how to get money to work for you or to work smarter versus harder you're essentially always going to be stuck in the rat race living paycheck to paycheck cuz the thing is there's actually three types of income and not all income is created equal the first type of income which most of us know about is earned income this is money from your paycheck and it's money you get when you work at a job the second type of income is business income which is money you make from a business that you own the third is investment income which is money from dividends capital gains and interest and other investment income now nothing wrong with getting an education and going to college but the problem is schools in traditional education really only teaches you how to go for the first type type of income earned income and teaches you nothing about how to make business income and investment income and unfortunately earned income is the worst type of income to go to because it is taxed the most and it also gives you the least amount of freedom because you have to keep trading your time for money and showing up to work otherwise you don't get anything back so there's no leverage in that on the other hand business income and investment income you get more and more freedom the more and more you build or buy assets when you have a business you're building an asset eventually you have systems and other people working for you and there's basically no ceiling on your income potential and you can get more and more freedom and as for investment income every dollar that you put to work for you is a dollar like working for you as if it's an employee and making you money in your sleep and of course last but not least business and investment income are the least taxed forms of income and so the next lesson I want to share with you is to spend time and money acquiring the right type of skills and I'm talking about the skills and the knowhow that's going to actually make you rich not make you a really good employee for the rest of your life these are very different skills School teaches you how to be good at your job get good at something so you can work for somebody else and make a salary but outside of school you can learn things like how to build a business financial literacy how to manage your money well and make it work for you how to invest how to build businesses how to sell and market so you can charge top dollar for anything these are the skills that are going to make you rich and financially free whatever I learned in four years of college and got myself into sixf figure debt to learn that is not what made me Rich so if I were to start all over I would definitely not have spent 4 years getting a degree I might have actually spent four years trying to get more work experience or learning from a mentor who was a millionaire and just trying to see how they think and live and I definitely wouldn't have gotten into debt for it but hey you can't undo the past that was my path so continuing on with my story I eventually quit my job on Wall Street which was extremely hard because everybody I knew was against it and nobody I knew was doing anything similar and was actually really scared to kind of go against the herd and a lot of times on your journey you may have to make similar decisions like that and just sort of take a different path from what everyone else is taking however the question I want you to really ask yourself is would you rather fit in and be like everyone else or would you rather be free and Rich As for why I quit my job on Wall Street even though it paid a nice cushy paycheck something I realized is that I'm someone who works really hard at whatever I'm doing so I was giving my job my all even though it was really stressful and really demanding I would give it my best and literally my life revolved around my job however a couple years in I remember sitting down for that big bonus talk when they take you into a room and tell you what your bonus is for that year and also what raise or promotion you're going to get and I remember them telling me that I got a $2,500 raise for the year to help with inflation and my bonus was I don't even remember it was like 20 or $30,000 and of course that's a pretty good amount of money but given the amount of effort the amount of My Life Energy I was giving to my job it just really felt like an insult and that's when I finally realized that my job would never make me Rich it was never going to compensate me for as much effort I was putting in which is why the next lesson I want to share with you is that if you want to become rich and you want to do it while you're still young then you really need to think about starting your own business it's just the way the economy works right if you're working in somebody else's business then you're just helping them build their business but people start business to make profit they don't build businesses to make their employees Rich right they build businesses to make themselves Rich so if you are an employee in somebody else's business you're never going to make as much money as if you started your own business of course if you get some crazy high-paying job at a super young age like you're a heart surgeon or a rocket scientist I don't know then you might be able to become a millionaire in your 30s just from your job alone but in my experience people who managed to do that are few and far between as for what type of business you could start there's only three options I'll make it really simple for you so there are service-based businesses which is say if you're a graphic designer a dog sitter a virtual assistant or a personal trainer or a coach this is where you're trading a service in exchange for money and then there's product businesses where you're selling a physical or digital product this could be things like selling jewelry or you're selling online courses clothing or maybe an app and then the third type of business is a Content business this is where you create content so that you can get eyballs on your content and then in turn advertise to the people consuming your content and the way you would make money with that is by getting paid for brand deals and advertisements an example of how you might do this is say you are an influencer with maybe a YouTube or Instagram following and you make content and then in your post you promote a brand and in turn that brand pays you a chunk of money to promote their product also if you're on YouTube you can make AdSense money because ads are placed on my videos you have probably seen some of the ads on my videos so that's another way to mon now I really think the key to starting a business successfully is to first start with what you're good at and what you're interested in because if you're not interested or passionate then it's going to be really hard to motivate yourself to see it through until your business starts being profitable so when you are trying to narrow down onto a business idea that'll work for you I like to think about this vend diagram what are you passionate about what you love doing two what are you really really good at and then three what would people actually pay for so whatever is in the intersection of these three things is your sweet spot business idea and then from there you just choose one of the three types of businesses service product or content and you go from there and then once you start that business the next step is to think about how you're going to scale because a business is great but you also have to grow it to a certain size to really make a difference in your finances so for example if you start as a service based business maybe you are a graphic designer and you're doing one-on-one Services now that's not really scalable because there's only a certain amount of hours in your day a certain number of clients you can ever take on so the next step to scale that would be to think about how you can go from a onetoone model to a one to many Model A couple ways to do that as a service business is think about doing one to group coaching instead of one to one or you can also think about growing into an agency maybe instead of doing Graphic Design Services yourself you build an agency and you have graphic designers working under you and then when you get a client you can contract out the work to other graphic designers and you take a cut but in that sense you could take care of a lot more clients make more Revenue while doing less of the work yourself this is actually the way I did it I started out doing one-on-one coaching for people who wanted to improve their finances and then I went to a on to many model by teaching people in classrooms instead of oneon-one and then finally I scaled the ultimate Way which is productizing my service so then I created an online course about how to invest and become financially free and once you productize your service now your income potential becomes theoretically infinite so you definitely want to think about how you can become a product-based business at some point because with that type of business there's no limit on your time so theoretically there is no limit to how much you can earn now of course I also have a content-based business where I create YouTube videos and I get AdSense money so that's one way to do it and I like that cuz it's super scalable the more content you make the better the content is the more eyeballs you get on your content and the more add money you can make so bottom line is think about what kind of business you can start because it's virtually impossible to to become a millionaire in your 30s unless you have a super high-paying job really starting a business is the way to go and then once you come on a business idea execute on it and then think about how you can eventually scale it today my business is quite successful but obviously that didn't happen overnight a lot of people don't know this but before I ever saw any success I spent an entire year doing everything myself making my videos uploading to YouTube and getting pretty much no views so week after week just grinding with no results that took a lot of faith and patience and persistence and as hard as it was I knew it wasn't reasonable to expect instant success just cuz I started posting videos I knew it would take some time and the problem these days is so many people have such a short attention span because we get instant gratification anything we want we get it right to our doorstep as soon as we want it it's almost like we feel entitled to get results right away and we no longer want to put in the work and time it takes to really see success with something but after about a year of working really hard at it that's when I really started seeing exponential growth and my business fin started taking off and really sticking with it even through that hard period is why I was able to build the freedom that I have today so that brings me to my next point if you want to become a millionaire you need to increase your ability to deal with uncertainty cuz the thing is in order to become rich you need to either buy Assets in other words invest or you need to build Assets in other words build a business owning and having assets is what will make you rich but none of that happens overnight so let's say you are buying assets often in the beginning as you invest into to maybe the stock market you'll see very slow growth but because of the power of compounding returns if you stick with the investment long enough you will see exponential growth especially towards the end so it takes a lot of patience to not jump ship to not lose faith and to deal with the uncertainty of what the final outcome is going to be long enough to reap the Ultimate Rewards it's the same with starting a business people who have successful businesses definitely enjoy a lot of Financial Freedom and of course they'll show you their lifestyle on social media but you got know that none of that happened overnight so everything you see about my life publicly that's all well and great but what people don't see publicly is all those nights and weekends that I spent just building and building and dealing with the uncertainty before anything ever paid off now this attitude of dealing with the uncertainty for that ultimate big payoff at the end is completely opposite from working at a job the thing about having a paycheck especially if it's a a nice fat paycheck is that it's so stable and it's basically instant gratification you put in the time you get the money you put in the time you get the money and that kind of cycle becomes almost addictive cuz you know if you just work you get the money and that lulls you into this habit of being used to certainty but really the people who make the big bucks are the investors and entrepreneurs who are able to deal with a period of uncertainty something else I don't share much about my journey is how much of an inner game and inner struggle it was because I had a ton of self-doubt and limiting beliefs and just low confidence I actually took a really long time to ever even start my business and even when I did start my business I spun my wheels and struggled for a long time not to mention along the way I was also slowed down by toxic relationships a lack of boundaries and some and mental health issues and looking back I realized it's because I was definitely good at learning about what I needed to do what actions I needed to take to make more money and have more money and invest like all of the skills and head knowledge but what I hadn't paid enough attention to is more of the work on your inner self on managing your emotions on having a better relationship with yourself so you can have a better relationship with others so yes even though my action taking certainly got me to a certain point I was way too focused on actions and what I needed to do instead of who I needed to be because I thought in order to have what I wanted I had to First do and then be and then have but really the order is you need to First be be the type of person who can do the things that you want to do that will get you to have the things that you want to have be do have instead of do be have so take it from me cuz it would have saved me a lot of time and a lot of Tears if I'd known this sooner is if you want to be more financially successful than the average person you're also going to want to work on yourself more than the average person personal development learning coaching therapy investing in books and mentors and trainings otherwise all kinds of Insidious forces like procrastination toxicity in your life low self-esteem and limiting beliefs all of these are going to stop you from achieving your big goals so work on yourself to increase your ability to create ambitious plans execute on big goals and ultimately achieve them now since this video is about what I would have done differently if I were to start all over and if I wanted to do it faster one thing I really made a mistake on is in the beginning I really thought I had to do everything myself especially because finances were limited I didn't have much money to pay people I also grew up with this very individualistic mentality thinking that if I can do it all myself I'm like a superwoman and that must mean I'm really good and awesome and I get any points for that but the reality is we all only have 24 hours in a day and given our skills and abilities we can only ever do so much on our own and so the last key lesson I want to share with you is to not do everything yourself really learn the skill of delegating to others and leveraging other people's time and their talents you can go aund times faster towards your goals if you just get the right people around you and stop trying to do everything yourself so for example when I was starting out I was editing my own videos I was doing my own accounting I was doing my own cleaning cooking literally everything in my life I was doing in addition to running the business but over the years I've learned how to delegate all the tasks that don't make me happy that suck my energy and don't directly relate into making more money so for example I have someone who comes to my house two times a week to help me with all of the home and pet care and sort of housekeeping things that I need in order to be wellfed and at my best self to show up in my business now regardless of your financial situation we can all think of ways to be more clever with how we use our time and to get the help of other people for example we all have access to these grocery delivery apps that'll save you a ton of time shopping for groceries every week you can also get creative and maybe have a college student or a niece or nephew come to help you out with a few things like laundry or maybe even meal prep even if you're not working with a huge budget there are ways to delegate certain things and be creative about it even with just $50 a week you can still get 5 to 10 hours of quality help from a virtual assistant in the Philippines because of the global nature of the workforce today and the Arbitrage we have between countries there are lots of ways to get help and it won't even cost you that much bottom line is maybe you have a full-time job and you're trying to build something on the side then really you've got money from your job but time is your most precious commodity so learning how to Leverage The Power of a team and other people's skills and time is really going to help you move a lot faster so these are all the things that I learned along the way and honestly getting to this point is something that happened that was beyond my wildest dreams but maybe with the advice in this video you can make it happen for yourself even faster than I did now if you liked the tips in this video you might also really enjoy my weekly email newsletter call to Freedom this is where I share the behind the scenes on everything it takes what it really takes to create a life of Financial Freedom I share a bunch of things in email that I don't share anywhere else so definitely consider signing up if you want more from me that is it for today you are so capable just a reminder that you you can do it and if you just set your mind to it you might be amazed at what you can achieve in just a few years thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye [Music]