fbpx

Category : Money

Money

Six Unfair Truths About Money Most People Don’t Know

By Tim Denning

The truth about money and stocks.

Image Credit–Pexels/Axis

Those who have money think life is fair. Those who don’t have money think life is unfair.

What if, no matter which side you represent, there are other unfair truths? This question has kept me curious for 5 years. I’ve learned working in banking and as an investor that things aren’t as they seem. There’s more to money. A lot of the principles aren’t obvious.

Let me share a few truths I’ve found that affect you, and once understood, can help you be smarter financially.

Even when you make a bucketload of money, poor choices can ruin you

Mike Tyson made almost $700 million. Today, he’s worth about $3 million.

Lindsay Lohan earned about $28 million. Today, she has about $800,000.

Dennis Rodman made over $27 million. Today, he’s worth about $500,000.

Choices are more powerful than income — Steve Adcock

This is rarely spoken about. When you make a lot of money, life can actually become more unfair. Many of us are not psychologically programmed to manage millions of dollars.

The temptation to use money to inflate our egos, show off, or to use against our enemies is high. The truth I’ve learned is it’s not whether you can make money — it’s whether you can keep the money.

Money can make us lazy. Laziness can cause us to make stupid decisions. Laziness and too much ego are how Mike Tyson lost his fortune.

Inflation depends on whether you use the 80s, 90s, or 2020s calculator

Inflation is unfair. It’s a hidden tax many people pay without realizing it. I’m paying it right now. To sleep at night, I’ve kept some money in a savings account paying 0.3%. Inflation makes my money decrease in value faster than a balloon you pop with a pin.

The trouble with inflation is we’re told it’s 2% on average every year. Right now the official US data for inflation says it’s about 5.3%. Things get ugly when you question financial reality. Especially when you start to dissect how inflation is calculated.

There are many inflation calculators you can use to measure the annual increase in prices. A website called Shadow Stats has an 80s, 90s and 2020s calculator.

The 1980s calculator shows current inflation in the US is 13%. The 1990s calculator says inflation is more like 9%. That’s another tax you pay on top of income tax. The unfair truth is you can’t ignore it.

If you delve further into the Shadow Stats data, you’ll see that unemployment numbers, rent increases and US GDP calculations we’re given are way off too.

There’s a trend. Every year the economic stats get worse, the official data simply excludes more things to make the financial system look healthy. The world being partially shut down since March 2020 will have ramifications at some point. Until now the economic data cleverly papers over the cracks.

Why this matters

40% of Americans have no investable assets, according to research. With no tangible assets the average person is painfully affected by the high inflation numbers that dilute their purchasing power.

Over time this dilution creates wealth inequality. It’s the unfair reason why the wealth gap is widening. It’s also why financial education is now a survival skill, just like having an income to pay for food and shelter is.

At the same time central banks like the US Federal Reserve are creating a record amount of US dollars out of thin air to pay for the ongoing challenges of the global health crisis. All this freshly minted money helps to wipe out the middle class, who don’t have assets like stocks to stay ahead of inflation and money creation.

Financial education helps inequality go from invisible to visible.

A war between two currencies

The US dollar and Bitcoin are at war. The US government and regulators are trying to sort it out. It’s no easy task.

One is a currency backed by a powerful government. The other is a currency created by an anonymous person named Satoshi Nakamoto who hates what happened in 2008 — when banks got bailed out even though they were irresponsible, greedy devils. Crypto expert Balaji Srinivasan explains the difference between the two currencies perfectly.

If we think about it in terms of tradeoffs, USD has short-term stability and long-term depreciation while BTC has short-term volatility and long-term appreciation.

The battle between the two is unfair. USD allows you to transact. Bitcoin helps you store your wealth. End of story.

A new class of landlord has emerged. They want your home.

Airbnb started the trend of businesses buying homes to rent back to everyday people. First they bought hotels. Then they started designing homes. Now they’re building Airbnb branded apartments in Miami, Austin, Orlando, and Nashville. Yippee.

The enormous Lloyds banking group in the UK is tired of low interest rates that crash their profits. Now they’re buying up property from UK citizens with the goal of gobbling up 50,000 homes.

In the future, you better suck up to your bank or they could kick you out of their home. Writer Jarod Brock reported that Blackstone is specifically hunting single-family homes as a way to cash in on the boom. Financial firm Blackrock owns billions of dollars in homes too.

Owning family homes is a business now. It’s unfair but true that when you go to bid on the next home, you’ll likely have to outbid enormous banks and institutions that would prefer you to be their tenant, so they can control the price and maximize profits.

Homeownership used to be sacred. Not anymore.

The forgotten and deeply unfair truth of real estate

Crypto investor Michael Saylor slapped me over the face. He explained in a series of interviews that buying real estate has a huge hidden downside. I’d always been peddled the idea of owning real estate by the men in pinstripe suits, who swore on their mother’s grave it would make me rich.

Land tax of 1%-2% takes away a huge part of the profits from real estate.

Where I live in Australia, the government plans to increase land tax. Even if land tax is low now it can easily be increased. If you own land you’re forced to pay it even if your poor tenant has stopped paying rent because they lost their job. When governments need money to pay for a health crisis to reduce their debt, it’s a goldmine to tax landlords. It’s unfair but it makes sense.

These two investments have stupidly unfair gains

Many people buy real estate or the Vanguard US stock market index fund with the goal to build wealth slowly.

I respect that.

A low-paid school teacher I know has made millions of dollars in the last few years. He no longer works. How? Tech stocks. All he did was heavily invest — using debt — into high-growth US tech stocks like Amazon, Tesla, Shopify.

People like me have invested heavily into cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. I’m up more than 10X. It has made me a lot of money. It’s unfair that so much money can be made in such a short amount of time.

It upsets a lot of people. You could say it’s unfair, but we all had the opportunity to invest money into the technology that has and will continue to shape our future.

I’ve never been one to be upset with someone who has had financial success. Instead, I try to learn what they know, and more importantly, where they get their informational advantage from. That’s how I discovered phenomenal investing resources, like Real Vision on Youtube and Twitter.

Sovereigneur on Twitter explains why these two assets create such a huge advantage: “Tech Stocks and Crypto Projects can scale exponentially. And operate with maximum efficiency and low operating expenses.”

Investing money into a side hustle is the best investment

A finance TikToker argues for many people a side hustle is the best way to make money as opposed to stocks. I agree.

Stocks and crypto can be easy money. The unfair advantage of a side hustle is it builds your skills. Five years of investing in a side hustle every day will make you a lot more money than investing in stocks if you stick at it.

A side hustle is an investing machine that compounds exponentially over time. If you do it right you won’t have to work as many hours once you’re far enough into it. Investing in financial assets taught me to be lazy.

Investing time into my side hustle taught me skills I could never have imagined I’d acquire. At the same time, you can give yourself a pay rise by adding an additional revenue stream, instead of waiting for a boss at work to give you a raise (they probably won’t).

The unfair part about side hustles is they look stupid until you’re 5 years in and zoom out. Then the Matrix you’ve previously been living in is revealed.

Final Thought

Money is unfair unless you deliberately level up your financial education. There are so many counterintuitive parts to understand like inflation, real estate as an investment, the unusual gains of crypto and tech stocks, and the power of a side hustle.

Ultimately, when you invest money back into yourself and your skills, life improves. Life goes from unfair to “let’s make it fair.” That’s what most people don’t know about money. Now you do.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

Read More
Money

Seven Harsh Truths About Money That You Probably Don’t Want to Hear but Must

By Tim Denning

Tim Denning Money Advice

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Money is damn simple to understand.

The problem is the Dave Ramsey gurus of the world focus on what doesn’t matter. Money is counter-intuitive. I never wanted to hear as a young, gullible, workaholic millennial that financially savvy people simply invest their money.

I wanted to believe money had to be complicated and to have any level of wealth was a crime against humanity. That mindset kept me poor. Instead of doing work I enjoyed, I traded my time for money. I stayed back at work until 10 pm so I could look cool for the dictator bosses.

What changed was when my mentor forced me to understand money. Not to get rich, but to be free to do whatever the heck I want. These are the harsh truths about money that you can’t google.

The typical millionaire invests their money, so you can’t see it

If you can see money then it’s fake money. Took me years working in a bank with high net-wealth individuals to learn that. Truly wealthy people have ownership of their time and shut up about it. The poor people that came into my office didn’t have tatty clothes and an unwashed sleeping bag. No.

The poor people had keys to a Bentley and only 10 minutes to see me. They had a PA screaming at them on the phone to get back to the office and be ready for their afternoon of back-to-back meetings. These poor people with lots of money were like adult babies with PAs as mommies.

As soon as you see luxury possessions, you’re not talking to a millionaire. You’re talking to the fake rich who want you to notice what they buy so they can feel better about their broken lives. That’s not a rich life. That’s poverty.

Rich people invest their money in assets like stocks and crypto. You can’t see their money because it’s doing the hard work of compounding so they can have zero meetings in their calendar. Their goal isn’t millions of dollars. Their goal is passive income that pays for their living costs.

Great investors sit around all day reading

Investors make a lot of money. Those who successfully do it full time don’t sit around all day looking at charts and what CNBC says is going to happen in the markets today. They couldn’t give a crap about price movements in stocks or crypto for the next twelve months.

Great investors are long-term. The book “Richer, Wiser, Happier” showed me that the best investors like Warren Buffett don’t do a lot of meetings. They trade looking at prices and falling for hype in for reading. They read annual reports. They read the financials of the companies they’re interested in. They read a company’s new business strategy.

Get rich enough so you can read books for an entire day if you want. Now there’s a life goal you don’t see on Instagram luxury lifestyle pages.

Working hard is the least important thing

10,000 iterations not 10,000 hours — Naval

Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant tore Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour work hard rule to pieces with this statement. The idea isn’t to work 12-hour hard days at all. That’s the factory worker industrial age.

The idea is to put effort into your work and be open-minded enough to continually iterate so the work gets easier. As the work gets easier your results compound and you can reinvest the returns into a new area.

Doing the same hard work over and over until retirement is the definition of insanity. Work gets easier when you notice the nuances and experiment with them. I do it as a writer all the time with these questions below.

What if Substack is better for my newsletter audience? What if my website could be my main source of income? What if I suck at writing and would be better as a podcaster? What if I’m not an entrepreneur but a glorified amateur writer?

Questions lead to experiments. Experiments allow you to iterate. Iterations lead to superior results, that make you more money, so you can eventually work less.

“Success isn’t an end state. Success is having the freedom to pursue the continual grind you most enjoy.”

Julian Shapiro from Twitter said this quote and it taught me that the idea of financial freedom is messed up. We’re taught to believe there is an end state and we just work hard until we reach it.

You hear phrases like “escape the grind.” I love the grind, though. I like that feeling at the end of the day when I’ve created something I’m proud of and get to relax and reward myself with a movie on the couch.

Without the grind we’re broken.

Ask anybody who has sold their startup for millions of dollars. They’ll tell you without the grind life almost isn’t worth living. I met one entrepreneur who sold out to investors and made a fortune.

After 30 days and all the luxury car dreams he had since a child, he felt empty. He begged the new owners of the company to hire him back. They said no. So he went back out and started a brand new company from scratch to experience the magic of the grind again.

The crucial lesson is to find the grind you love doing. Then do it for the rest of your life no matter how much money it makes you. The grind is actually hard work you’ll look back on and be proud of when you’re at the retirement home on death’s door.

The person who is calmer makes more money

Calmness is a financial superpower. So much of our energy is wasted through anger and anxiety. It destroys our best work. It makes us have crazy people thoughts that write over our creative ideas.

Anxiety makes you go inward when the financial opportunities are outwards.

Pure motivation doesn’t come out of anxiety, according to Naval. Pure motivation comes from calmness that gives you energy to be creative enough to come up with the ideas that generate value (aka money).

“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.”

Singer Bob Marley has an unusual way of explaining happiness with this idea. He’s spot on though.

Meet a “possession chaser.” They’re miserable sons of guns. The pile of stuff and the numbers get larger and larger, yet they’re not happy. They continue to set the bar higher with bigger financial goals. There is no way to win the game. Numbers are infinite so the game is infinite. This is another definition of insanity that rots your insides.

For me, numbers don’t drive me. The main thing that makes me happy now is freedom. The rest is bullsh*t.

Make money while you have the energy. Not when you’re old and crusty and can’t enjoy it.

The final harsh truth we’re told is to work hard until retirement. Then we will have free time to spend the money we’ve made and enjoy ourselves.

The idea of conventional retirement is screwed.

When I retire at 65-years-old I will have a lot less energy than now. My body will have aged. My skin will be old and crusty.

I want to enjoy life while I have the highest levels of energy, which is right now. That means I need money to serve me now. That means I have to reject the “get into a lot of debt to buy real estate game” — that takes multiple decades — and live within my means now. It means I need to invest money in stocks and crypto that have decent growth and don’t take a lifetime to provide tangible results.

Frugal living, side hustles, and better investing strategies allow you to live life before the typical retirement age. Energy levels and money should be thought about in the same sentence.

Read More
Money

One of the Biggest Secrets About Money Is the “Accredited Investor” Qualification That Causes Inequality

By Tim Denning

Tim Denning Stocks and Money

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

The stock market is rigged against most people.

It’s not obvious.

Most of the money made from stocks happens before the IPO (Initial Public Offering). You and I can’t invest in a cool startup from Silicon Valley until this point. You can still make money as an investor after an IPO, but that’s not where most of the money is made.

The IPO is where the people who got rich off the company dump their stocks onto the public and realize their profit in US dollars. The rich people need someone to sell their overpriced stocks to. They use hype to increase their profits at the last minute.

Let me explain how this occurs and then how you can use it to your advantage.

I can’t believe this term hasn’t created another “Occupy Wall Street”

In 2008 the financial system nearly collapsed. The US investment banks that caused the issue got a huge bailout. This led to the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in America. In comparison, the problem I’m about to share with you is far more significant.

Businesses can bring on investors before an IPO. This is done through private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, and equity crowdfunding. There is one catch in countries like Australia and the US. According to the SEC that regulates the US stock market, you must meet these criteria:

[Have] a net worth over $1 million, either alone or together with a spouse or spousal equivalent (excluding the value of the person’s primary residence)

Let me translate: You must be rich already to gain access to investment opportunities that have the majority of the gains before an IPO. I learned the hard way when an equity crowdfunding platform came to Australia.

I worked in a bank at the time, surrounded by the world of investing. A business I liked listed on the crowdfunding website. I went to sign up to the platform and invest, only to be told “sorry you’re not an accredited investor.”

Another guy I met at a meetup, who drove a $1M Rolls Royce with his pocket change, got to invest in the same company. A few years later he made a fortune from it. He thought it was hilarious that I couldn’t invest.

Why the qualification is stupid

The idea of the accredited investor regulation all around the world is that it keeps Joe Citizen safe. They’re trying to protect us, people. Investing in businesses is risky. So is crossing a busy road with cars that can run you over.

I can’t invest in stocks before they go public via an IPO. But I’m allowed to walk into a casino and have them drain my bank account. That’s not illegal. Nobody is looking out for my safety in Las Vegas.

When a person magically passes the $1 million net-worth status nothing changes. They aren’t magically smarter than a person who has a $10,000 net-worth. They didn’t do some college course on finance to better understand the risks. They didn’t have to pass a qualification interview to protect them.

Nope.

They just need to be able to prove their net-worth. They could have inherited $1 million yesterday from their dead grandmother and now they’re miraculously an accredited investor.

This stupid rule makes my blood boil. Regular people can’t invest in good businesses until Wall Street has sucked all the value out of them so they can buy more overpriced yachts.

I don’t understand the logic for the accredited investor rule. But I do know that it conveniently stops large numbers of the global population from investing their money the way they want based on their own research.

The accredited investor rule causes inequality. The rich get richer faster because they can invest in a business and front-run the public before the rest of us can buy the stock on the US stock exchange.

Don’t cry “life is unfair.” Get even.

No point getting angry about it. Innovation eventually disrupts those who seek to exploit their power and benefit unfairly.

This bug in the financial system now has another avenue for the general public to be involved and balance the scales again. Let me explain. There is a new form of organization called a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation). A DAO is simply a fancy way of saying a startup in the new world of blockchain and Web 3.0.

Anybody can freely create a DAO for their new business and sell tokens. When tokens are sold by a DAO it’s effectively an unofficial capital raise to gain investment from anybody. It gets around the stupid accredited investor nonsense.

Now we don’t need venture capital vultures or angel investors. Nope. A startup can raise money directly from the public in the early stages.

The public can now beat Wall Street for the first time

DAOs are built on blockchain. You might be thinking the old world of finance and Wall Street will simply come to blockchain.

There’s one huge problem: They can’t do it easily.

If a traditional hedge fund or venture capital firm wants to invest in the blockchain space — with high-quality assets like bitcoin and ethereum — they need a product called an ETF.

An ETF acts like a regulated product that holds the assets Wall Street wants to own. This is crucial because Wall Street isn’t going to buy billions of dollars of ethereum and then store it on a USB stick somewhere. No. They need an ETF.

In America (and most countries) regulators haven’t approved ETFs yet. So Wall Street has to watch everybody else (the general public) make all the money on blockchain that will no doubt be the future of the internet.

This phenomenon in finance is called “front-running.” It means that you know information about an investment before anybody else does which can make its price go up.

Blockchain and Web 3.0 are now worth more than $2.02 trillion. Wall Street and traditional finance are still on the sidelines with drool coming out of their mouths, waiting for an ETF.

Gary Gensler, SEC chairman, has hinted that a US ETF for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum is coming. The finance world that has benefited from the accredited investor rule is about to enter blockchain. When they do, the money they invest will most likely cause the prices of established cryptocurrencies to go up. But in the meantime, and for the last few years, everyday investors have had an information advantage.

What I’ve just described has the potential to cause a massive transfer of wealth. Ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Raoul Pal, says this is one of the greatest times in history to be an investor. I agree.

Takeaway

The accredited investor rule has stopped normal people like us from investing money into internet companies and being part of the gains. We got the scraps from IPOs. We nearly got shilled IPO disasters like WeWork.

Blockchain changes everything. You don’t need to be an accredited investor. Nobody checks how much money you have. For the first time you can invest and do your own research. No greedy banker, like the ones in 2008, can bet against you.

What starts out as unfair eventually becomes fair thanks to human evolution. A decentralized world built on blockchain will crush traditional institutions like Wall Street, which have abused their power for too long. It’s an exciting time to be alive. Learn about Web 3.0 to take part in the opportunity.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

Read More
Money

Millennials Are Stressed out Because of the Pressure to Make a Lot of Money

By Tim Denning

Millennial Money Guy

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

We put so much pressure on ourselves as millennials.
We want a six figure income, the love of our life, a successful entrepreneurial side hustle, to travel every few months, a stable gym routine, 7–8 hours of sleep, work/life balance and mental/emotional stability.
By 35. – Hasani Henderson

Millennials like me are the miracle generation.

We’re supposed to have all the answers and fix the world in the aftermath of March 2020’s events.

Deloitte found that 77% of US millennials have financial anxiety. They also found almost half of Gen Z and millennials are stressed out all of the time, or most of the time. Like freaking hell.

What has caused this devastation? Let’s explore and look for another way so you don’t have to be stressed out about money anymore.

Our lives in pictures are messed up

I call it the “Dan Bilzerian Effect.” Unrealistic role models like Dan have overtaken social media and made us think we can have it all by 35. They pretend the nightmare of multitasking away at multiple goals simultaneously will work.

Any successful person will tell you they didn’t achieve ten big goals at the same time. It doesn’t work. That’s how people drop dead from a sudden heart attack.

To build a tribe these gurus post pictures of rich lifestyles, hot romance, a carefully styled office (no one knows if any work has ever been done in this fantasy office), pumping weights at the gym for four hours a day, Sigmund Freud-level psychological abilities, and endless world travel even when country borders in most places are closed.

No wonder we’re stressed out. What none of us who see these pictures are aware of is that the world around us has become a movie set. Anybody’s Lambo can be yours for 30 seconds to take a picture. You can literally walk through the gates of a mansion and snap a selfie. Or you can pay a person at a 5-star hotel concierge to snap a photo of you going to the presidential suite when you’re not even on holiday.

Hollywood fakery has become accessible to anybody with a dumbphone.

“I’m behind on where I should be at my age”

This is the catchphrase of the 2020s. I’ve heard this twice in the last week.

“But I need to buy this brand new crypto because I’m behind. When it does a 10X I can catch up to everybody else my age.”

I love crypto. But there are over 8000 of them and most, like startups, will eventually go to zero. Nobody is behind financially for their age. There isn’t some financial bible that tells you how much money you should have by a certain age.

I know people in their 40s and 50s who have lost everything and are starting again. In fact, the richest people I’ve ever met have been bankrupt at least once. None of them worried about their age versus their bank balance.

What nobody tells us is that a lot of people who are ahead financially for their age are miserable. They’ve given up all their time to be wealthy and missed out on life itself.

If you feel you’re behind financially for your age, I can guarantee you one thing: you will gamble. To get ahead you will take unnecessary risks. That risk will eventually cause you to lose even more, or wipe out your savings.

You’re not behind. You’re right where you need to be.

Good things take time to cultivate

Writer Sean Kernan points out a Navy Seal quote that says “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” This approach is how you stay in control and avoid succumbing to fear, stress, and adrenaline.

Millennials want everything too fast. In an online world where we get everything instantaneously, we’ve forgotten the power of patience. We’ve replaced patience with enormous stress.

Stress taints our actions. It causes us to adopt the “get ahead” mindset which turns fellow humans into warm bodies that must be crushed to reach a goal. This mindset explains a lot about the do-or-die army nature of the modern workforce, where wartime leaders think revenue will save the world.

My philosophy is any money-making pursuit takes at least 5 years to master. Not 30 days. Not one year. Even then you may fail. So at that snail’s pace the 35-year-old age to be rich is unrealistic for a lot of people.

Think in 5-year chunks and you’ll have less stress and more patience.

Debt and stress thrive off each other

To make a lot of money, often, the tool of debt is used. Just look at real estate. Us millennials are told we need to get rich. So we run to the bank looking for a pinstripe savior. The devil savior smiles.

“Come this way. Let’s see how much debt we can give you.”

Debt is stress.

Your ability to flex your lifestyle and be choosy about the work you do is abolished when you’re sitting on huge amounts of debt. You’ve got to stay stuck on the hamster wheel to keep paying the debt off. You’ve got to take less risks because you can’t afford anything to go wrong. Otherwise, you’ll have a banker on your back asking you why the loan repayments stopped.

I’ve demonized most debt in my mind. The bank says get debt. I see debt as handcuffs that rob everyday people of freedom, to reach a goal they don’t even understand the meaning of.

Making a lot of money has no purpose in itself. Without purpose you become pissed off when you reach your huge wealth goal and realize that a driveway full of Lambos is a snoozefest.

One area of life suffers when another one thrives

You can make a lot of money if you devote all your focus to it. The question that is missed is “what do you have to give up to do it?”

The person with the Lambo had to miss many social events, or get divorced a bunch of times, or miss their kid’s soccer games, or take advantage of someone, or tell a small white lie, or be at the office well past 5 pm.

When you exchange time for enormous amounts of money there’s always a trade-off. Work out the trade-offs to defeat the desire to be stupidly rich.

What does all this money buy you?

Let’s say you get all of this money that these gurus promise you by 35. So what? What does it give you? After your basic needs are met no amount of luxury items will magically make you love yourself and those around you.

Oh, and if you do make a lot of money you will piss a bunch of people off. They’ll hate you for your success because they don’t have it. So you could say a lot of money means stacks of enemies and critics. Do you still want the Lambo?

The best part about life is having the time to do whatever you want. It’s having the time to explore your curiosity and not be stressed out by silly money-making goals that please nobody.

The cure to this millennial stress about money: change the denominator. Measure your success in free time — not time you’ve traded for money that rots away in a savings account while inflation silently does its devil laugh.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

Read More
Money

Mr Beast’s Beliefs About Money Are Why He’s (Actually) Successful

By Tim Denning

Youtube creators by Tim Denning

Image Credit: distractify creative commons

I’m a pussy compared to Mr Beast.

Why? He’s the youngest philanthropist going around. It’s not fake either. The guy is the real deal.

Every year he spends $48 million to make Youtube videos. In the last 28 days his videos have gained more than 700M views. That is larger than the population of the US, Brazil, Russia, and Japan. The audience retention rate on his videos is 70%. Literally, people are statistically addicted to his content.

Here’s what counts: Mr Beast is the highest-paid content creator on Youtube. You’d think that would make him a 23-year-old douchebag with a Lambo and a mansion. Nope. The guy is a real-life beast you can learn badass lessons from.

“I’d rather be poor than do anything besides YouTube”

Mr Beast’s critics say he got lucky. He started on Youtube when you could build an audience. His first video went live as a teenager.

Success isn’t an accident.

He loved making videos more than anything. For the first five years he uploaded videos to Youtube and got hardly any views. His breakout success happened in 2017 when he made a weird video of him counting to 100,000.

See, the average person wants success too fast. A writer messaged me the other day. They had published their third article. “It’s only got three views. Why is this happening to me?” *Cries like a baby*

Mr Beast had no problems reaching hardly anyone in his first few years. I was the same with my writing seven years ago. Most articles got no traction. I’d check Twitter and see zero likes on my content. Every. Day.

The difference is your money mindset. Mr Beast was happy to be poor and make Youtube videos the same way I was prepared to write online for free and stay at my crappy call center job. The goal of making money is the worst reason to be creative. You’ll give up when you create solely for money. If you can wait five years for traction then you’ll be a future Beast.

He has put everything he has on the line and continues to do so today.

Hard work isn’t a unicorn fantasy

People hate when you mention success and hard work. They get real-l-l angry. They aim their cannon at you and blast you in the comments. Sorry. Nothing worth achieving comes quickly.

I woke up, I studied Youtube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life — Mr Beast

Mr Beast’s financial mindset was if he worked at his craft for long enough, eventually, something would stick. Who knew a video of counting to 100,000 would be the video that changed Mr Beast’s life.

Mr Beast was fully immersed in making videos. He didn’t dabble. He didn’t go and get a job. Youtube became an obsession.

When you’re possessed by your goal you’ll do anything.

That’s what true passion does. Passion makes you do dumb sh*t. I felt dumb when I quit my job earlier this year during a pandemic. People called me dumb too. “You’ll never work in corporate again, I tell ya.”

But I don’t give a f*ck about working in corporate. Writing is my dream the same way making Youtube videos is Mr Beast’s dream.

Find a dream that fits you then work your ass off at it. That belief about work transcends any silly little fantasy about Lambo money. As you work at this dream you’ll look possessed in the eyes of others. You won’t feel possessed, though.

Obsession is healthy when you’re oblivious to it. It becomes an unconscious, daily, flow state habit.

“I only want money so I can make better videos. I just want to make the best videos on the planet.”

This wild claim is backed up by fellow Youtuber Anthony Pompliano.

The word purpose is thrown around a lot like a rag doll. Anthony says after talking to Mr Beast it’s clear that making Youtube videos is his purpose. If we delve a little deeper we can find out why.

Mr Beast wants to make the best damn videos on the internet because he’s a secret philanthropist in the making. He thinks the best videos he can make will help a lot of people. That’s why he plays the Youtube game and makes every company in America look stupid at content generation and marketing.

When you focus on how your work helps people, it’s powerful inspiration that makes money motivation seem ridiculous.

From giving houses away for $1, to paying medical bills of the needy, to bankrolling homeless shelters — Mr Beast makes the best videos so he can collect the most money from Youtube ads and brand sponsors to fund his real passion: giving.

Make money to fund a purpose that helps humanity. You’ll be distracted by that instead of money when you do.

Quality over quantity

This Sean Kernan quality tagline applies to Mr Beast too. He only releases 1–2 videos a month. He believes quality will make his mission stronger, rather than bulk uploading videos to Youtube to collect a paycheck from mindless ads about Oreos.

Mr Beast can’t predict whether a video will make money and create a profit after production expenses, either. He doesn’t care because profit isn’t his goal. Many of his videos lose money. A small few make money which covers the losses of the unpopular videos.

The videos aren’t random either. Everything is pre-planned. The whole narrative is thought out. The videos are highly edited and keep a viewer’s attention right up until the last few seconds.

Like all good Storytellers, Mr Beast quietly uses the hero’s journey in his storyline.

The video starts with a perfectly normal world. Then a problem occurs. Then some weird events you wouldn’t expect, happen. Then the philanthropy message is subtly hinted at. Then a surprise ending is suggested. Then a big build-up at the end, where someone gets the help they need and an act of humanity takes place, plays out. You’re left better than when you found the video.

Be the Picasso of your own creative work by focusing on quality.

Reinvest in your art

Mr Beast spends $48 million a year on the creation of his Youtube videos. He could make huge profits from Youtube and then ride off into the sunset on a horsey. He doesn’t do that.

Like a good stock or crypto investor, Mr Beast lets his earnings compound by reinvesting them. It’s easy to make a tonne of money and then withdraw it to buy a Lambo. Don’t.

I just finished a project. It made a nice profit. I’ve invested most of the money back into building a new website, paying for high-quality illustrations, hiring an editor, and upgrading my writing software.

Treat your work like an investor. That’s how you make unlikely returns that look impossible to your critics.

What sucks about Mr Beast

Wait, what? Yep, the people you look up to are never perfect. Sorry.

One thing that sucks about Mr Beast is that he puts consumerism on a pedal stool. You feel in some of his videos like all you need is a home full of new furniture and all your problems in life will be solved.

I don’t dig it. Consumables and electronics won’t make us happy. The money from his videos could be put to better use — like buying those in need shelter, or paying for counseling, or funding a trip for a person to see their long-lost relatives in another country.

I don’t care about a new Dyson vacuum cleaner or a Nintendo with all the games you need to handcuff yourself to the tv.

I want to see money be used to promote messages of kindness, empathy, and hope. Maybe I’m a 35-year-old grandpa. (Entirely possible once I get my hearing aids in two weeks.)

It Boils Down To This

If your goal is to blow up on Youtube or social media to make a sh*t-ton of money, then you’re going to be bitterly disappointed. 1) Videos that are selfish perform poorly 2) Real success is doing work you’d happily be poor to do for the rest of your life because you freaking love it.

Mr Beast’s videos get more views than the Olympics or a Hollywood movie because the meaning behind his work acts like an invisible magnet. People love his videos yet, like me, they don’t quite know why. That’s what happens when your money beliefs are selfless.

Read More
Money

I Used to Be Impressed by People Who Had a Lot of Money - But Now I’m Impressed by People Who Have a Lot of Free Time

By Tim Denning

Finance and investing

Image credit: Valdemaras Januška/Unsplash

A Porsche used to scream “be friends with me!”

In my 20s, luxury and entrepreneur bullsh*t defined me. I chased success like a dog follows a shank bone. In my 30s, money became kind of ridiculous. A dramatic shift has occurred. The title of this story, which comes from a quote by entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano, helps to explain it.

Let’s dissect the real meaning of money so you don’t fall in love with it and accidentally discover a world of broken dreams.

The Idea of True Wealth Is Broken

True wealth isn’t luxury, millions of followers, or a fake ass Dan Blazerian life holding guns like Rambo and collecting exotic animals that are pleading to be released to their natural homes and take a break from phone cameras. This is what true wealth looks like:

A book a week

Books connect you to humanity. They take you out of your head and place you in the author’s head. Most of us get zero time to read. Books are long. Time outside of work is short. Impressive people have bought their time back so they can read a book a week if they choose.

A good night’s sleep

Ever met angry people at work? It’s either a lack of sleep or poor diet that throws their energy down the drain. Buying your freedom back gives you the opportunity to sleep more. Eight hours is recommended. Nine hours on some days is a real luxury. Add in afternoon naps and you start to feel like a different person. Energy is a better form of wealth than money.

No work on weekends

Your mind needs decompression time. Time to join the dots between all of the inputs for the week so you can grow as a person. When you’re a slave to money, work tends to creep into the weekend. Your mind can’t fully disconnect, so proximity to your goals starts to fade. Weekends are for play.

A clear conscience

I don’t know how certain people make it through the day. I’ve worked with some businesses that simply do evil so they can make a buck. They know what they’re doing is wrong.

They know they’re wrecking society for future generations. But they simply flick a switch. Prioritizing time over money has helped me gain a clear conscience. It makes day-to-day life less stressful. Less stress equals wealth.

A walk with no destination

Walking is better than a rushed workout at a packed gym next to your workplace, where the loud techno drowns out the potential for peace and quiet. Since I got a hearing condition called tinnitus, I’ve begun walking more.

Placing one step in front of the other acts like meditation. It’s why many entrepreneurs love walking meetings. You can walk along tracks that people from hundreds of years ago set foot on. You can ponder what life was like for them. Walking is true wealth.

A family who knows you

Those busy startup worshippers and those high-flying executives that all chase money hide the truth: their families barely know them. They’re never there. A birthday party for their kid is an option, not a priority.

They spend more time with “the business” than their family. So their business booms but their family drifts further apart. Often it ends in divorce or raising out-of-control kids. Time with family is wealth.

Gif Credit: Tenor

“I’m not money obsessed. I’m freedom obsessed.”

— Josh George, entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs or leaders who sit in back-to-back meetings all day just aren’t cool anymore. That’s so early 2000s. The new status symbol isn’t a Lambo or a Gucci handbag. Nope. The new status is freedom. Freedom equals free time.

A few months ago I cut the chains of my cubicle job. No more drama. No more politics. No more wondering who the next moron would be to throw some poor sucker under the bus and get a promotion.

It’s scary at first. A day full of zero commitments. A daily routine where you actually have time to goof off and do whatever you want. Now that I’ve had a taste of a calendar with zero meetings, I’m addicted.

I don’t ever want this to stop. That’s why I use whatever entrepreneurial skills I have to ensure my tiny side business stays alive. If my business dies it’s not a 9–5 job with a bad boss that scares me. No.

I’m scared I’ll have to hand over the keys to my calendar again and let corporate bros in pinstripe suits waste my day because they refuse to accept what the internet has done to business — and what blockchain is about to do to traditional businesses with their heads in the clouds.

Forget luxury status, “founder” and “C-level” titles, and throwing cash into the air on an Instagram Reel. Become obsessed with freedom. It will change how you work forever. You’ll stop chasing money. Anthony Pompliano is right. Time is the ultimate measure of wealth.

All that impresses me now is freedom. The rest is bullsh*t.

Read More
1 2 3 4 5 … 8