- Should you work harder?
Is hard work the key?
Is hustle the key?
I hear a lot of different opinions.
I just wanna say this.
I feel like I live in a world that's the exact opposite.
I feel like I live in a world where millions,
tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
even billions of people are working their ass off.
I remember going to India in the Third World.
People wake up at dawn and work till dusk,
picking aluminum out of trash heaps.
Should they work harder to get ahead?
I'll tell you a true story.
Growing up, I played basketball at a school, inner-city,
95% non-white people, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Enloe is the name of the university,
and I had a friend who lived in the projects.
His name was Leon Champion.
Rest in peace, Leon; he died in prison,
after I got graduated high school,
but it's a sad story.
I've never, you know, I didn't grow up rich,
but we always had food, and I spent the night
at his house in the projects one time, and Leon,
I woke up in the middle of the night and I was hungry.
I was probably 17 years old and hungry.
I go down to his refrigerator and everybody's asleep.
I open it up; he had a single mom, and I'll never forget,
there was mustard and beer in the kitchen.
One beer, one mustard.
I said to him, I came back in the morning,
I said, Leon, where's the food?
He said, man, I don't eat on the weekends.
We don't have any money.
I eat free lunch as late as I can on Friday,
and then I go to school at six in the morning
to eat on Monday.
Sure, he had a little bit of candy
and a little bit of that on the weekend.
Wage inequality; his mom was working nonstop.
I never even saw his mom.
She was at a job every minute.
I don't even know when she came in to sleep.
So don't tell me, I shoulda just gone to her
and said to Leon's mom, "Oh, work harder, work harder,
"work harder, hustle, hey, you ain't hustling."
No, someone shoulda educated her.
Some entrepreneur shoulda reached down
from their multi-million-dollar empire and said,
"Lemme take you under my wing."
A guy came to me, a homeless kid, his name was Chris Lopez.
I put some videos.
This is about two years ago.
Showed up, knocked on my door, in my Hollywood Hills house.
He said, "Ty, everybody's dead in my family
"except my grandfather.
"I'm homeless; I walked from Compton, Long Beach."
He walked to Hollywood.
I said, "How long did it take?"
I think he said, seven hours,
so, I think he took the bus a little bit.
He said, "Will you help me, Ty?"
And I didn't know this guy; I didn't know
if he had a criminal record; I didn't know whatever;
but I thought, this dude's a hustler.
He showed up; he found.
I said, "How'd you find my house?"
He said, "I triangulated."
This is before Snapchat.
"Triangulated it; I walked for hours up here
"in the hills and I finally found it."
So, I took him under my wing, and he worked for me.
I told him at first, I'm just gonna hire you
for a little while; this is not a long-term thing.
I wanna test you and see if you fit in,
and he worked for me for about one and a half years,
one year, and finally I came to him and I said,
"I taught you a lot of stuff.
"You've saved a lot of money working for me."
So, he had saved up enough to get a motorcycle,
and have money in the bank.
He was taking care of his grandfather; he was 80 or 90.
They were no longer homeless, and this is not me bragging,
I'm just showing you what leverage can do when you reach out
and help people, all you entrepreneurs,
and Chris Lopez kinda disappeared.
Alright, it was the last day, we sent him off,
thanks for being here.
About six months ago, I was in the Las Vegas airport,
who comes around the corner when I get outa airport,
just walking by, Chris Lopez.
He came up to mel I recorded a video.
I've released it a long time ago.
He said, "Ty, you know, man, I wanna thank you.
"You showed me how to do real estate,
"give me some just general financial tips."
He was a Mexican.
He said, I went down where my grandfather's hometown
in Mexico, and we built a condominium building;
I can't remember how big it was, multi-unit;
and he said, "That thing pays me
"six or seven hundred bucks a month, profit now.
"That takes care of my grandpa here in Long Beach, Compton."
He said, "I now, I found a job."
He's got all these entrepreneur jobs.
He's up in Alaska, doing some fishing for a couple months.
He's doing all; he said, "Man, I'm financially independent."
I think he told me he's making four to six grand a month.
Now, that's not a million dollars,
but if you left that kid in the ghetto
and just said, work harder, work harder,
you know what happened to my friend, Leon Champion,
the other friend I was talking about?
Nobody helped him.
I was only 17; I didn't know how to help him.
My dad, we had a little bit of money.
My step-dad, very nice thing he did, when I told him,
"Man, I was just out at Leon's house; he had no food."
We went and bought a week's worth of groceries.
That's all we could afford, and we brought it to Leon,
but it wasn't enough.
His mom continued to work hard.
Didn't work!
I remember, as a senior in high school, Leon,
I stopped hanging out with him.
He started carrying a gun at school.
He started dealing coke,
and I was an athlete; I didn't wanna get involved in that.
We were acquaintances, but he was forced to,
because he was hungry, not because he was a criminal.
He was a good kid.
I left, I went to Joe Salitz's farm.
When I came back, first thing I did,
I called my friend, Lance.
I said, "Lance, let's catch up
"and play basketball with Leon."
He said, "Oh, you don't know; Leon's dead."
So what happened? He said, "Man,
"he got caught for selling drugs."
He got put in prison, and Leon was diabetic.
All that bad-diet stuff and not being able
to eat had made him a diabetic as a teenager.
I remember that; he used to have insulin shots.
He said, "They put him in prison and I don't think
"they gave him his insulin shots and he just died."
They just left him; he rotted in there at 20, 21 years old.
So, that's the world where you just tell the mom
to work harder and hustle.
Don't give me that fuckin' shit; it pisses me off.
Go out and teach people how to do stuff.
That's how you move the world forward.
Enough of this nonsense.
By the way, a little P.S.
I never saw Leon's mom, 'cause she drove a taxi,
did all this, but in his senior year,
she's the one who gave him a gun.
They both started dealing.
She said, "Forget this; we're hungry."
What I wish woulda happened is, one of these entrepreneurs,
just talkin' about hustle, just talkin' about hard work.
How about hard work, go help people,
and a lot of you are.
I'm not calling out anyone in particular.
I'm just saying, "Don't preach at people
"that need to work hard."
She would have come across one of these videos.
She woulda thought, "Oh, my God, I just gotta work hard."
Nah, that's not what she needed.
She needed guidance.
We live in the modern world.
She coulda, just like Chris Lopez, if I had been older,
I coulda taken her and Leon under my wing and said,
"Lemme show you how to make four to six grand a month,
"just like Chris Lopez."
I know single moms; my mom was a single mom.
All around us, families, single moms,
people trying to put food on their table,
working two, three jobs.
Is the answer for them to just work harder?
Or is it to work smarter?
Work hard or work smart, 'cause they're different.
I'm always reminded of this story that my mentor,
Allan Nation, told me.
He said, "Ty," and I don't know if this was a true story,
but it gets the point across.
There was a plane flying over South America.
It crash-landed and it was full of all these engineers,
all these hard workers, and the hard workers got out,
and there were some machetes and they all grabbed a machete
and they begin to hack their way through the jungle,
chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.
Flurries of activity, boy, they were working hard,
but they forgot something.
Don't ever confuse flurries of activity with accomplishment.
Activity doesn't always equal achievement.
So they were chopping through, and luckily for them,
one person got out of the plane.
Instead of working hard, went on, climbed up a big tree,
and looked out and surveyed the landscape
and yelled down to the group, and said,
"Hey, guys, you're working hard,
"but you're going the wrong direction.
"You're going deeper into the jungle.
"The city, for our escape, is the other way."
You see, what's moved civilization forward
is not just hard work.
Go to any hotel, go to any restaurant,
the hardest working people there are working their ass off
and they're still not getting ahead.
They're still not equality in pay.
There's still people making massive amounts
who don't work nearly as hard as the working class.
No, what's gets you ahead is leverage.
In fact, it's the exact opposite.
What you wanna do is figure out how to work half the time
and get twice as much done,
so that you could take a vacation,
so that you can paint a painting, and have some downtime.
So, you can go on vacation with your family.
So you can just lay out on the beach and just look at nature
and enjoy life.
You wanna just grind yourself into the ground, go ahead,
but the people that get ahead are not just grinders.
They're not.
The grind is necessary, work is necessary,
but it's never a goal.
It's a necessity.
The goal is very different.
The goal of life is not to breathe.
Breathing is a necessity.
The goal in life is to enjoy your life,
to do something important.
You breathe because you must; you work because you must;
but you never say,
"Well, you know why I'm here? It's just to breathe."
No, you're not here just to work.
Working harder doesn't always change the game.
Now, I will say, there's about five to 10%
of people I bump into that are just pure lazy.
You and I all know who they are.
They're just lazy, but those people are not gonna be helped
by this video or anybody's video.
If they're lazy, they're lazy.
For those of you, and if you're watching this,
I doubt you're lazy.
I bet you you work.
I bet you know how to put your head down and focus,
but maybe you look at your bank account and go,
"Wait a second; this is crazy."
Did you know that, I think, the top 10 people
on the Forbes list have more money
than the next 50% of the world.
Is it because those top-10 Forbes-list people worked harder?
Nah, let's be real here.
Is it because they grinded more
than the other 50% of the world?
I think that people saying this haven't traveled the world.
I've been to over 50 countries,
a lot of them third-world countries.
The hardest working people I've ever met,
and they're still poor, and it's sad,
and I'd like to figure out a way to change that.
I'd like to be able to contribute.
My best guess and my best hope for the world is
that we begin to have tools.
We begin to get electricity to places.
We get the Internet to places.
We get better education.
That's not just working hard, that's working smart.
This will change the world.
Now, I just wanna go on record, saying,
I have worked hard; I have; and I regret a lot of it.
I regret of a lot of it.
In hindsight, had I listened to more people,
and I had mentors, but even then, I wasn't listening enough.
When you get in a car, in a new city,
do you just drive, or do you look at Waze,
do you look at Google Maps, do you look at Apple Maps?
Because it'll tell you, don't go left.
We've already looked down left, and left is a dead-end.
Left is traffic.
Same way for you as an entrepreneur.
You need somebody, just like Mark Zuckerberg turned
to Steve Jobs and said,
"I don't know what to do with Facebook.
"It's not working anymore."
And Steve Jobs said, "Mark, you're in your 20s.
"I'm almost 50.
"Lemme share with you the mistakes I made
"in my 20s, in my 30s.
"Lemme guide you so you don't have to make those mistakes."
As the great Warren Buffet says,
once the richest man in the world,
"We only learn through mistakes,
"but they don't have to be ours.
"We only learn through hard work,
"but it doesn't have to all be our hard work."
Who do you think gets further in life?
Who do you think gets to the point A to point B faster?
Somebody who runs real fast, really fast?
Usain Bolt, he can run 28 miles an hour, I think.
Or an out-of-shape person who has a car?
One has a tool, one works hard.
Who would you bet on in a fight?
Somebody with a stick, or somebody with a gun?
Who would you want defending you?
One might be really strong with really big muscles.
It'll be like that Indiana Jones movie.
The guy had the sword, (whooshes)
and Indiana Jones watched the guy do all the sword stuff,
and then he just went, boop, because he had a tool.
What's your gun, and I'm not talking about literally guns.
Saying, what's your tool?
What's gonna get you ahead?
What's helped me?
I'm probably not smarter than you.
I probably didn't work harder than you.
I found some mentors, when the Internet first came out,
and they showed me how to use Google Ads.
I just sat in a little room in Raleigh, North Carolina,
and I reached the entire United States
from a little interface.
It helped me go from zero to six figures.
How do you explain that?
Was I working harder than you?
I don't think so.
I was working smarter than some people,
but it wasn't even my smarts.
I can't even take the credit.
I was taking the smarts from a guy named Corey Rudl.
Joel Salatin helped me; Gary Townsend helped me;
Allan Nation helped me.
Joel Salatin at age 19 changed my life.
Most important people in my life were not the ones
who made me work harder, although Joel did expect hard work,
but boy, it was also smart work.
If you just worked hard and did a flurry of activity
and he came in there and it was all falling apart,
he wouldn't congratulate me for my hard work.
Your bank account doesn't go up from hard work.
There's no rule that you work double the hours tomorrow
then you make double the money,
especially not as an entrepreneur.
If I could go back and be 19 again,
I would watch this video and test it,
and I'd go, "How can I work smarter?
"How can I take and download into my brain,
"through books, mentorships, conferences, YouTube videos,
"the accumulated body of knowledge
"of the wisest people in the world."
Gimme that; I'm gonna tell you, I challenge anybody.
You wanna try to outwork me and I do that?
You can out-leverage everybody.
Was it Archimedes, I think, who said,
"Give me a lever long enough and I'll move the world."
We can change the world.
We can create wage equality, or at least, much closer.
There will always be some wage inequality,
but it doesn't have to be
that the top 10 people have more money than the bottom 50%.
Those top 10 people, even if they worked 24 hours a day,
can only work 240 hours a day,
but three and a half billion people are working hundreds
of billions of hours a month, but they're not getting ahead.
It's a sad world, as it will be education,
it will be technology, it will be mentors.
This is what will move the world forward.
I'm not talking about personal wealth for me
or personal wealth for you,
even though that will be included.
I'm talking about wealth for the world.
I'm talking about a world where you can walk
down the streets and no one's shooting at anybody,
because everybody has enough.
The only people who shoot at people are people
who don't have enough for the most part.
There's a few psychopaths.
Almost all crime is rooted in not having enough.