Jeff Lerner: People ask me all the time, Jeff, how do I get
started with no money? And I have some bad news. You have
to get some money. Get a job. Walk the neighbor's dog. Like
mow some lawns. You have to get some money. This video is
going to be about how to increase your ability to get
money if you have no money. We're going to try to get you
to a baseline where you not only have enough to live, but
you actually have some surplus so that you have some
breathing room so that you have some energy so that you
can actually go do the awesome things that I know you're
capable of.
Inside of my company ENTRE Institute where we teach tens
of thousands of people about entrepreneurship and how to,
you know, kind of move their life forward and move a
business forward in this world, we talk about something
called the three phases of legacy. This is a really,
really important concept to understand. It doesn't matter
who you are, what you're trying to do, you know, if
you're trying to move forward, and I think everybody's trying
to move forward in their life to build something of meaning,
create a life that they're proud of, leave a legacy, make
a mark, make a difference, do something that has some
impact, right? There basically are three phases that you're
going to have to go through. They are income, growth, and
wealth. And real quickly, I'll basically just sum them up
like this. The first phase income, which is where like
99% of people are in their life even people that have,
you know, some money a lot, usually in order to do the
things that they would like to do in their life, they need to
go back to the income phase and think about how to create
more income. But anyway, income is all about figuring
out how to create surplus income. Most of us have a life
that naturally adjusts to at or slightly below, or sorry,
at or slightly above our level of income. So we have, most of
us have a level of income. And if
you're watching a video about how to start with no money,
you may have no income or you may be watching this video
because, like I'm saying, you have an income, but you have
no extra money because your life matches your income. But
most of us have an income. And then we have a life that, you
know, naturally rises to the level of our income and we're
spending our money and we're paying our bills and we're
going out to eat and we're doing our stuff.
But we're always kind of looking for that little extra.
We always want a little more. We're emotional beings so we
kind of like have impulses and feelings that aren't totally
rational. So typically our life gets a little ahead of
our income. But anyways, the point is we're going to talk
about how to create surplus. Like I said, the two other
phases, growth and wealth, growth is about taking surplus
income and reinvesting it to create more surplus so that
now that you're using money as a leverageable tool to create
more money, and then the wealth phase is really more
about starting to diversify and reinvest some of that
income into something that isn't about using surplus to
create more surplus but using surplus to create stability,
to create security, to, you know, create predictability,
to create generational wealth, all the stuff that happens in
the wealth phase.
But like I said, for 95%, probably 95% to 99% of people,
it's all about the income phase. And I actually have a
pretty aggressive way that I like to look at this, which is
you need to figure out how to get your income to the place
where it is five times what it costs you to live. We call
this the Awesome Life Number. And it's basically saying,
okay, in order for me to live, I want to live where I'm
making, I spend this much to live, like and that much is
20%, one-fifth. Because by the way, if you're making enough
money that you're making five times what you need to live,
you're probably making enough money that you're going to be
in a high tax bracket. So you should just assume that
two-fifths of what you make, you're going to have to pay to
taxes.
And then the next two-fifths you're going to want to have
for, that's the surplus, right? That you're using to
create more income and ultimately to invest once you
get to the wealth phase too. And that 20%, that one-fifth,
that's what you need to live off of. And I know that seems
like ridiculously aggressive for a lot of people. But I
have found working with thousands of thousands of
people and looking at thousands and thousands of
life realities that for most people, if they don't have
that sort of aggressive shift in their mindset around
producing a lot more income and creating a lot of surplus
income, there's just not enough time. We're only going
to live to be 80 or 90 years old. And even across decades
and decades, if you look at the rate of savings and the
rate of inflation and the rate of return on most people's
savings and investments, like there's just not enough time
unless you really, really dramatically increase your
income to ever get into the phase, ultimately the phase of
wealth that you want to be. Right? So that's the context
for this. That's why the question of how do I get
started with no money, the only answer is you got to go
get money. You got to go get a lot of money. I would venture
to say that most of the people that I talk to in this world
about whatever their particular situation is, the
remedy is you got to go get a lot more money. It creates so
many options. And so what this video, what we're going to do
now is look at skills that you can use from wherever you are,
whatever place you're in to increase your ability
dramatically to get more money based on whatever circumstance
you find yourself in. But if you find yourself in the, you
know, any number of times zero is zero, right?
So if you have no money, like step one, get a job. Start
getting some money coming in. And then watch this video, and
let's talk about how to amplify that. Okay. So before
we dive into the actual skills, the actual things you
can do to increase your earning potential in this
world, I want to just kind of call out a problem that I see
so much. It's so prevalent, which is in the modern era,
the world of social media, you know, this day and age, we
live in an era of what I would basically call immediate
gratification. Like our, and there's all kinds of studies
about this. The human being's ability to delay gratification
has been dramatically reduced in the modern digital era, the
era of the internet. But it's also the single greatest
predictor of future success. Our ability to delay
gratification is the most significant or the most
predictive indicator of how successful we'll be in the
future.
And so you think about living in this era that we live in
where social media is always showing us the highlights of
people's lives. It's showing us, you know, what the really
successful person has to say from the hilltop of great
success about great success to all the little people who
don't have great success, right? Like we live in this
world now where we’re bombarded with this imagery of
success. And we never get imagery. You know, the
subconscious mind learns through pictures. That's why
it's so addictive to, or addicted to all this image
driven media, right? That's why video and pictures do so
much better than text. The subconscious mind is
stimulated and literally wired through imagery. In fact, the
subconscious mind has no processing center for
language. So we're seeing all these images of success in the
here and now, and we're almost never seeing images of people
before they were successful.
Like if you Google Oprah Winfrey or frankly, you Google
Jeff Lerner, like you Google any successful person, you're
going to find just image after image or if you go look at
their social profile of after they were successful or images
of them being successful or, you know, anyone you pick that
you want to learn about success from, it's very
unlikely you're going to see a whole lot of pictures, not
just words, not just stories, but pictures, images, videos
of what their life looked like before they were successful.
But in reality, that's what we should be trying to look at
the most is find people, I mean I guess you can't find
someone who's going to be successful before they were
successful. But this is why I love books. I love biographies
and autobiographies of successful people where you
really dig into what it took, what was their life like, what
was their experience like before they became successful?
You have to get obsessed with studying success before it
looked like success rather than just staring at success
now that it looks like success, which is
unfortunately what the internet presents us with. And
that's one of the reasons I think that consciousness has
been so skewed in the modern world where we just aren't
willing to do the long, gritty, painful work that it
takes to become successful like all the successful people
did that we're looking at. Okay? So that said, let's dig
into
the actual things you can do right now to increase your
earning potential in this world. First of all, whatever
environment you're in, whatever you're doing to make
money, I guarantee you somehow some way something is being
sold. There is no business that exists where people get
paid, you know, the employees, the owners, the shareholders,
whatever, where products or services aren't being sold. So
whatever environment you're in, I would strongly recommend
you find where is the money being generated in that
business and try to volunteer or train for or somehow get
exposure to or become a part of the part of the business
where it actually produces the revenue that everybody else
gets paid. This one idea of understanding that, you know,
in any business, in any environment where money's
moving around, there's a part of the business, call it,
think of it as the revenue department, right? It's the
part of the business where the money gets made. And then
there's all the other parts of the businesses where the
orders get fulfilled, the customers get supported, the,
you know, paychecks get cut, the legal and compliance
happens. Like, you know, there's all these different
moving parts in a company or in a business, right?
The closer you are to the center of revenue, the more
likely you are to get paid more, which means, you know,
starting to volunteer. Like ask your boss, ask your
manager, hey, how can I get closer to where the revenue’s
generated and what skills can I develop or how can I use my
skills to try to drive more revenue and more value for the
business? Typically those skills that are going to get
you closer to the value center of the business have to do
with three areas: sales, marketing, or I would say
finance, like strategic finance, right? Like basically
if you want to create more value and therefore receive
more value from the work that you're doing, it's going to be
about figuring out within the business that you're in how
you can help them market, meaning connect to more
potential customers and create more demand for the product
and/or sell, meaning convince more perspective customers to
actually take the action or make the commitment and
generate more revenue for the product or service and/or
finance, which is going to be, you know, finance and resource
management, which is going to be about creating efficiencies
in the business that allow the business to create more profit
even if they're not necessarily creating more
sales. If you're going in that direction, you're moving in
the direction of creating more income and generating more
money for yourself. If you're not moving in that direction,
you know, it's likely that you're going to be on the
cadence of getting that typical 1% or 2% per year
raise, which doesn't even keep up with inflation and
constantly feeling like you're behind.
Hey, sorry for the interruption. I just wanted to
let you know you can get a free copy of my book, The
Millionaire Shortcut, which will show you the fastest way
to become a millionaire in the new economy. And there's a
special link just for this episode in the description. So
thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the
episode.
The next thing you can do when you're looking at the specific
skills that you want to develop, and this is true
whether you're in a business or like you're in a job or
you're like, hey, I want to do my own thing, I want to start
my own business or go out and do a side hustle or whatever,
is to start to value the skills that you have and that
you want to develop based on three criteria. These are the
three criteria that determine how much a skill will pay you.
And again, this is true whether you're in a job or
you're out on your own. The first is how common is the
skill? And frankly, there are two ways to make a skill
uncommon. Either pick a skill that's already fairly uncommon
or become really good at that skill where even if the skill,
even if the thing itself is common, I would say like
sales, like sales is pretty common. There's a lot of
sales. But great salespeople are rare. So you can make it
uncommon by being really good at it or you can start with
something like, I don't know, I'm going to become a nuclear
physicist or something.
And then not just in and of itself is fairly rare. But the
point is, you know, part one of how valuable a skill is, is
how common is it or how rare is it? Right? But part two,
and the rarity couples with this because like I could say,
oh, well, I have a really rare skill. I'm a goldfish groomer.
I know how to get the fins on a goldfish to look just so and
be so perfect. Right? But part two is how essential is that
skill for the particular people who need it? So like
not everybody's ever going to need any given skill, right?
You're not going to find a skill that everybody needs.
But you find a skill and say for the people who need this
skill, how badly do they need this? Right? So as an example,
knowing how to repair a heart valve, there aren't that many
people that need heart valves repaired at any given time.
But the people that need heart valves repaired, it's really,
really essential to them that they find someone who can
repair a heart valve. So you might say, okay, repairing
heart valves, that fares well on the first two categories,
right? It's fairly rare, and there aren't that many people
that know how to do it. And it's extremely essential. The
people that need it, they have to have it. Now there's a lot
of specialized schooling involved when it comes to
becoming a cardiac surgeon. But I'm just using that as an
example. You could be in a business and say, okay sales
is a fairly common skill, but I know that businesses have to
have sales. It's frankly the skill that most businesses
need the most of, sales or marketing, because without it,
nobody can get paid. Right? And then I can look at the
business that I'm in and I can say, okay, like depending on
what type of sales it is, maybe it's retail sales, maybe
it's phone sales, maybe it's, you know, consumer-driven
sales where it's more marketing based like consumer
products or even like a restaurant, right?
Like it's not like you have to be. But even in a restaurant,
like depending on what kind of restaurant it is, you have the
wait staff that are, you know, they can do well based on
learning sales tactics. Did you know there's literally
specific questions that a waiter can ask that take like
five seconds per customer that they serve that can literally
double the amount of tips that they get? Like you can become
great at sales in any organization or you can
become, you know, more valuable in the marketing
department in any organization by understanding what drives
the demand for the customers or you can understand how the
business works in such a way that you can start to add
value by helping them optimize or be more efficient or, you
know, essentially figure out how to get more revenue
without spending more money or how to maintain the same
revenue while spending less money.
Like you can always be moving in the direction of that
center, that center of gravity within any business and
increasing your skills. And then the third criteria that
determines the value of a skill is actually what I would
call, how much value capital have you created with that
skill? So you take a skill, and you say, okay, you know,
part one, how rare is the skill? Part two, how essential
is the skill to the people who need it? And part three is,
how much value have I actually created with the skill? And
value is created through a skill through a combination of
two things, right? How good am I at it and how much have I
done it? So it's quality plus experience. So you find a
skill that's reasonably rare. It's not, or let's say it's in
demand in whatever organization you're in.
You find the skill that people in the organization or the
customers of the organization really, really need. And then
you become proficient at it. You increase your value
capital at it by basically doing it more and doing it
better. That's it. That's a simple analysis you can do of
your life, of your situation inside of any business, inside
of any life, inside of any circumstance. Say, okay, how
do I produce more skills that produce more results that
create more value capital that ultimately gets me paid more?
And then the final thing that you can do, and this is sort
of a little bit of a woo-woo metaphysical quality about it,
but it's just a proven fact is just becoming a better person.
It's literally proven that by becoming more, you know,
communicatively, empathetic, developing your emotional
intelligence, developing your soft skills, your people
skills, working on yourself physically, having better
health, literally like losing weight. It's not about being
vain, but it's about being healthy, being vibrant, being
energetic. Just working on those things in general
actually makes you more attractive. It makes you more,
it makes you not just more attractive like in the
superficial sense of it, but it helps you attract more
people, more opportunities, more money, more good things
into your life by leveling yourself up personally and
physically and obviously professionally in developing
your professional skills. This is why I always talk about the
three P’s: physical, personal, and professional,
that every single day, you should be doing something to
move yourself forward in these three areas of life. And if
you do that consistently over time plus you maintain this
value focus in the business where you're focusing on the
right skills and you're moving closer to the center of the
gravity where the revenue is generated, that's it. That's
like the ultimate formula for maximizing your income,
maximizing your value in the world as high as humanly
possible, and starting to create the surplus so that you
never again have to go out and watch a video called how do I
get started without money. Okay? So I hope that's helpful
to you. If you're coming at this from a place of not
having any money, I hope that wasn't discouraging for you.
It was meant to be encouraging and inspiring that there's a
lot you can do in your life to get more money. But the key to
getting started without money is to get out of the place
where you have no money, right? It's to abandon this
pie in the sky way of thinking that says like, oh, magically,
it's somehow just going to work. That's like, it's
literally like saying, well, how can I get started with no
oxygen?
Like you're sitting there like choking to death, going, how
can I get started with no oxygen? You have to breathe.
You have to be able to breathe, right? You have to
have oxygen to live. You have to have money to go out into
the world and do stuff and make an impact. Okay? So
thanks for your time. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If
you want to get more stuff like this, more stuff on how
to level up your life, how to increase your income, how to
unlock your potential across all areas of life, I'd love if
you'd subscribe to the channel. And definitely leave
me a comment or question below. I love interacting with
my audience. Thanks so much for your time. I'll see you in
the next video.
Hey, if you liked this video, then you're going to love this
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In this video, we're going to be talking about how to get
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