When you realize that "getting rich is essentially a technical skill", your life will be completely transformed.

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Editor's note: Stop comforting yourself with a fixed dead-end salary. After earning 10 million USD at the age of 27, he punctures the truth: Poverty often happens because you are skillfully playing the role of a poor person every day. This article is translated from foreign content.

When you scroll through your phone online, you see some people making huge piles of money. They can rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month as if it's no big deal.

You hear them say nonchalantly: "30,000 USD? I can make that in a single day." You think to yourself: What the hell are you talking about? Is that even real?

What the hell did they do right? How can these people make as much money as they want? Then you look at yourself, working your ass off like a workhorse, exhausted to death, and barely scraping a few thousand dollars together?

The reason this happens is that right now for you, making money is a "conscious effort". You have to force yourself to be disciplined, you have to show up on time every day, and every dollar you earn is exchanged for hard toil.

Then you see some young kid making more money than your parents, far beyond the range you thought was possible, and your pride gets hit. So most people will directly attribute this to scams, nepotism, or some bullshit privilege of "well-connected people". At the end of the day, it's just self-comfort.

I used to think the same way. You can tell that making money comes effortlessly to them. And I wanted to be that kind of person too.

Everything around you that you call "life" was created by people no smarter than you.

— Steve Jobs, 1994

It sounds incredible to say it now: Making money has become effortless for me too. Of course, I'm not at the level of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk who talk about tens of billions of dollars casually. But I am 27 years old this year, I have earned more than 10 million USD online, and I have had several days where my single-day revenue exceeded 100,000 USD. I can tell you that when making that money, I felt like I was barely doing anything at all.

This is what I call "unconscious wealth building".

To achieve "unconscious wealth building" is to internalize the identity of a rich person as part of yourself. You don't even need to make deliberate efforts, nor do you need to think. You just show up, do what needs to be done, no thinking, no forcing, and you make more and more money. Your daily state is: only keep an eye on the data of one business, ignore everything else, make a phone call, and then earn a doctor's salary every month.

At this stage, for me, making money is easier than not making money. I don't even know how to not make money anymore. I would have to hide under a bridge every day for six consecutive months, get wasted and indulge in debauchery, to not make six figures (USD) in a month.

When you reach that state, you are truly free. One of the questions I get asked most often is: "What do you do for a living?" I do nothing. I make a living by "living".

A rich person combines the following three traits:

• Good at seizing opportunities.

• Has excellent, solid capabilities.

• Goal-driven.

Once you cultivate yourself in these three aspects, you will make massive amounts of money before you realize it, make millions of dollars like printing money, and you won't even feel you are putting in deliberate physical effort. Then you can live a good life, travel, and go wherever you want.

Right now I am in Italy, overlooking the sea. I live out of one suitcase, and I feel like I will never "go to a regular 9-to-5 job" ever again in my life. Two months ago, my business hit a single-month revenue record, and I have been traveling full-time for the past year and a half. I don't have a fixed base camp. But I keep making more and more money, because I keep improving in these three areas, which doesn't require you to stay in one fixed place.

Turn off the temptation of dopamine, and focus the hell up. Because next, I am going to give you the real "secret recipe".

As long as you are willing to trust the experience in this article, your life will change. You will see the difference in life, and you will live a better life.

First off: I am going to be a little blunt with you in this article, because I believe in the power of calling someone out on their excuses face to face.

Before we talk about how to get rich (or what different practices rich people actually follow), you have to understand: The system we are told we should rely on to make money is fundamentally broken.

Every unsuccessful person I know thinks this game is rigged. And every successful person also knows the game is rigged, but they learned how to play it.

— Justin Welsh

The mindset model you currently rely on is designed to screw you over and keep you stuck in place. This confuses a lot of people, so let's break it down completely.

I. Why Most Wealth-Building Advice Is Total Bullshit

A lot of advice revolves around "getting rich slowly". "Getting rich slowly" is a euphemism for "being rich only when you are old" (someone had to say it).

"If you invest 500 USD a month in the S&P 500 index for the next 40 years, you will become a millionaire." That's right, mathematically that is true. But you also have to account for inflation. And you have to ask yourself, what kind of life are you living during that period? Sacrificing 40 years of your life just to finally be able to spend that money when you are 65?

"Purchasing Power of One Dollar", charted by Visual Capitalist (2021), data sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index (CPI). The 1 million USD you have when you are 65 years old is at the far right end of this curve.

This sounds too terrible, too stifling. I want to get rich now! I want to get things done now! I want to make money now!

Another piece of advice people give you is: Climb the corporate ladder step by step. Theoretically you will indeed earn more, especially after working in an industry for 20 years. Maybe you can reach a position like executive, with an annual salary of 500,000 USD. But that's nothing more than selling your soul, kissing ass, and compromising and barely getting by year after year. If you insist on taking this path, you might as well just go into investment banking. At least they pay well.

The last type of advice is that someone always tells you to get rich by "manifesting". Well, even if I keep chanting "I want to get rich, I want to get rich, I want to get rich" all day long, nothing in my life will change the hell.

Instead, you have to figure out how people actually get rich in this day and age.

They are building businesses that generate cash flow. They master high-income skills that allow them to build a business, or conjure money out of thin air.

So if you want to get rich, you have to switch to a better "vehicle". You have to throw yourself into a field that can really let you earn the amount of money you want. The problem for most people is that they are trapped in a career that will never make them rich. If you want to get rich before you are old, you have to find a much faster way to make money.

What are these opportunities? YouTube (by the way, I made my first million dollars this way); being a social media influencer (you can show your face or stay anonymous); starting a marketing agency; affiliate marketing, which means selling other people's products and taking a cut; day trading or cryptocurrency — I'm not saying this is the best way to get rich, because you are at the mercy of the market, but it is indeed a way to generate money out of thin air; and then there is running a "boring business". Landscape maintenance is a huge field. I have quite a few friends (surprisingly) making millions of dollars a year from landscape maintenance businesses, just by being exceptionally good at it. Of course, it took them seven years to get there, but that's still way faster than 40 years.

You can never get rich by renting out your time.

— Naval Ravikant

No one can achieve "unconscious wealth building" by renting out their time.

You need to take the initiative to make money into your own hands with the skills you have mastered.

Stop saying "I'm just being realistic". Say: "I'm in the wrong vehicle."

II. Why 100 Real-World Practices Beat a Four-Year College Degree

The better you are at being a YouTuber, the higher your views; the higher your views, the more money you earn; the more money you earn, the better videos you can make; the better the videos, the higher your views go again. This forms a continuous feedback loop.

The beauty of this type of business is that the feedback cycle on whether what you are doing works is extremely fast. That's why most jobs only give you a 9-to-5 salary: It's the business owner, the market, that gets to enjoy the feedback cycle; you are just renting out your time.

So if there's input, there's output. You need to shorten the time gap between getting the output as much as possible. That's what we call feedback. Once you see the output, you get feedback. The more feedback you get, the faster you learn, and the better you get at what you do. The thing between input and output is what we call your process, your system.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Input, process, output, feedback. This is the mechanism of the feedback loop, and the mechanism through which systems and processes keep getting better.

I can write 100 articles like this in the next two or three months, and the empirical evidence and marketing experience I gain from that will be more than someone who spent four years in college.

In school, the feedback loop is painfully slow. But when you publish your work, you get feedback immediately. I can see what the comment section is saying, what the view counts indicate, what the engagement curve looks like — where you swiped away, and at what moment you wanted to rewatch the clip.

These opportunities let you go through this feedback loop much faster, thus accumulating far more repeated practice times than ordinary people. And when your number of practices far exceeds that of ordinary people, you start to earn more money.

You have to see success as the ability to read data points and identify patterns. A graph full of random scattered points just looks like a bunch of random points. But if the horizontal axis is the money you earned, and the vertical axis is the videos you made, and you accumulate a large number of data points, you can see: which videos you put the most time into, which videos you thought the deepest about, which are more mature and more polished ideas, and which are made by imitating other people's successful experiences. Then you will think: Oh, so this type of video can bring such results. Then if I want that result, I need to make more videos that fall in this area.

Pattern recognition is what makes this happen. The way to get pattern recognition ability is to look at a large number of data points and get a lot of feedback. This is why some people can get so rich now. With the help of the internet, you can see massive amounts of data points extremely quickly. At a certain stage, you won't even think about how much money you are making anymore. That's the "unconscious" part.

Number of practices = Data points = Patterns = Money.

For this whole week, I want you to do this: Every time you pull out your bank card to buy something, ask yourself, how did they get you to buy it? Is it because of quality? Because of convenience? Or because it gives you a certain sense of identity? Every time you spend money, it is an opportunity to observe how they took your money, and how you can replicate that practice.

This is what a "person who is good at seizing opportunities" is. You have to dare to take action. You have to see the things that can really change your life, and be the kind of person who jumps on these "vehicles", instead of standing still and settling for the comfort of the status quo.

III. Getting Rich Is a Technical Skill

Next, you need to become exceptionally capable. The way to become exceptionally capable is to master the skills that allow you to make money. To be unconsciously good at making money, you have to become a master of money. To do that, you first have to understand the four tiers of money-making ability.

I call this your "stupidity curve".

Dunning-Kruger curve. The first tier is the "peak of mount stupid".

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

I don't want to burst your bubble, but if you are reading this article, it means you are really bad at making money. (Unless you are that type of successful person who also reads this kind of content.)

Right now you are at the first tier. At this level, you don't know that you don't know how to make money. You are "unconsciously incompetent". You have to leave here as fast as humanly possible, and enter the second tier.

Because once you enter the second tier, you know you are bad at making money. Reality hasn't changed, you just gained awareness, and entered the "awareness" level.

And this is the hardest stage for most people to get through. Most people, after realizing they are bad at making money, simply give up completely, stay stuck at the first tier, and refuse to face the truth. They would rather stay in this state of self-deception, because it's more friendly to their pride.

The reason this graph is drawn this way is that the vertical axis represents your pride. The moment you find out you are bad at making money, you feel terrible. But then you realize: you can finally get better.

So you read a bunch of my articles, watch a bunch of other people's videos about how to make money, and eventually reach the third tier, which is "consciously competent". And your real goal is the fourth tier, "unconsciously competent" — you don't even realize you are good at making money.

So at the beginning you are not aware that you are not good at making money, then you are aware that you are not good at making money, then you deliberately make making money your strong suit, and finally you get to the point where you don't even realize you are good at making money.

Stop saying "I'm not cut out for making money". Say: "I'm at the second tier."