5 Habits That Made Me a Millionaire in My 20s | Ep 19 12:39

Let's look at unsuccessful people. What do they do? They try something, it fails, and then they dwell on it. They don't try something new next. They don't try a different way of doing it. They dwell, they condemn themselves, and they dwell on the failure. And so what I learned to do very early on is not take failure personally.

How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build. Today, what I want to share with you are the five habits that you can build today to become a millionaire in your 20s.

So I want to acknowledge some of these are super traditional and I want to explain why I still believe in them and support them anyways. And some of these are not what you would expect. Regardless, all of these are actually happens that I accumulated my twenties because I actually became a millionaire by the age of 24 and I have a net worth of over a hundred million by the age of 30.

The first habit that you can deploy to become a millionaire early on in life is waking up early. Okay, listen, I know a lot of people say this, but I want to say I learned through experience. When I was 17, I worked at a cafe and because I took class later on in the day, I had to do the opening shift.

And I remember when she was like, okay, great. You're going to do the opening shift. So I need you at work by 445. And I was like, what the fuck? 445? Are you fucking kidding me? I was like, Jesus Christ. So I learned very early that getting up early was actually an advantage because at first I was like, wow, that's insane. I don't want to get up that early. That sounds ridiculous. I'm going to be exhausted. It's going to be terrible. Here's the thing. I didn't realize that this would translate to success later on.

Now, getting up to do opening shift at that cafe actually translated to fitness industry, which I then entered after that. So when I got into the fitness industry, I would have to run classes at 5, 6 a.m. And I would be at my last class by 8 or 9 p.m.

And so again, I got into this habit of getting up extremely early, like 3:45, 4 o'clock. Okay, I'm not saying you need to get up at 3:45 or 4 o'clock, but I think getting up before 6:00 AM is a habit that a lot of successful people have. Now, there are a lot of successful people that also stay up late. The point of this habit is that by getting up early, I was able to do more than most people did. Now for others, it might be that staying up late allows them to do more than most people do.

And so it doesn't really matter if it's getting up early or staying up late, it's creating more time in your day. And that time that we're creating by doing that is usually time that I then used in my 20s to have uninterrupted work times.

So when I was 22, 23, I still had the habit of getting up early from doing it to go to work. But instead I got up early to work for myself, right? To get work done before other people were awake. And that's what I see a lot of people do when they stay up late, right? Maybe they have kids that go to bed at seven and then from seven to 11, they work. And so the point is not, oh, I need to get up early to do all of these things. It's I'm getting up early to create time in my day that's uninterrupted, that other people aren't constantly paying me and I can actually move things forward.

Most people don't actually work that much. In fact, what they're doing all day is they're reacting to their environment rather than controlling their environment. And this is the first step in learning to control your environment. Create space that has uninterrupted time where you can actually focus and people aren't trying to take energy from you.

It's a lot easier to be successful if you learn how to create and engineer your environment rather than constantly fighting your environment, trying to be successful despite your environment.

The second habit that can make you a millionaire is taking walk or workout breaks. Okay. I started doing this in my twenties when I was like 23. And the reason for it is I felt like I had a lack of energy. You know, I would sit at my desk and I would try to work for eight hours or 10 hours or however long I need to work. I would just find myself feeling exhausted. And rather than chug energy drinks all day, because a lot of people assume that I drink a ton of caffeine when I don't, there's a lot of days I drink no caffeine.

Instead, I put intermittent breaks in my day so I can keep my energy up.

And so I call this the split shift. So essentially, if you're trying to start something, if you're trying to keep your energy up, if you're trying to make sure that you can work longer hours, what you could do is you could split your day with something physical in between. So then you're shifting your energy between mental energy and physical energy. And so that's what I like to think of. That I'm like, I'm using physical energy, then I'm going to mental energy, then I'm going back to physical energy. And because of that, I'm able to kind of replenish the opposite energy than the one I'm using at that moment.

So the best shift that, so the best split shift that I ever had was when I started gym launch and I was 23 and I would wake up and I would work from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. Then at 8 a.m. I would go for a walk. Then at 9 a.m. I would work again. I would work till 1 p.m. Then I'd eat lunch and I would go work out and I would go lift. Then I would come back around 2.30, 3 p.m. And I would work from 3 to 7.30 or 8 p.m. And then I would eat and go on a walk.

And that was my day. And I got so much done because I was constantly using different kinds of energy rather than trying to power through using one kind the whole day.

What's even better is if you're asking yourself right now, you're like, Layla, but I have so many meetings I have to attend or all these things I need to do. You can encourage other people to do this too. There's something that I like to do in my company. And if you're trying to start a company that you could do, which is I do walking one-on-ones, which is if I'm having a one-on-one with somebody or a meeting, I can say, let's make it a walking meeting. Let's make it a walking one-on-one. So I can encourage other people to kind of mix up their energy uses as well. And oftentimes people really appreciate it.

The third habit that can make you a millionaire in your 20s is pruning your circle. Okay, so when I was in my 20s, or at least in my very early 20s, I realized that a lot of the friends that I had, though I loved them dearly and they were great people, weren't necessarily aspiring to do the same things in life as me, right? They had different goals and their goals weren't ones that were appealing to me. I started listening to Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn. I heard them all saying, it's very, you know, you become who you hang out with. And then I thought to myself, why

Why would I hang out with anybody that I didn't want to be like, that I didn't have something I admired about them? And so I looked at how each of those people affected me financially, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Then I asked myself, I wrote their names down and I was like, how do they affect me in each of those areas of life? And I realized that a lot of my friends at that point in time were actually detracting from all those areas of my life rather than adding to those areas of my life.

So, ironically, without even them knowing, because their goals were different than mine, they were actually encouraging me away from my goals rather than towards my goals.

And so something that I've learned to do over time, and I've probably done, I want to say like four times in my 20s, is constantly prune my circle, right? Because what I noticed is that, you know, I had that group of friends and I pruned my circle. I got new friends that I actually felt like I wanted to be like. And then eventually within, you know, a year, two years, I realized, hey, maybe these friends actually, the friends that were good for me at one point, now aren't good for me at this point. And so as I moved through seasons of my life and the vision of who I wanted to be continued to get bigger and bigger, I

I had to prune my circle more and more. And so if you're trying to become successful, if you're trying to make more money, if you're trying to achieve a goal, if you're trying to become a millionaire, you have to look at the people you're hanging out with. And it doesn't mean you do it one time. It means you might do it every year, every two years, maybe even every quarter, depending on how fast you're growing. It's something you have to continuously do over time because you want to make sure that you're hanging out with people that you want to be like.

The fourth habit that you can acquire in your 20s to make millions is to learn from the mistakes of others. Okay. I once heard someone say, the only difference between humans and animals is that humans can learn from others' mistakes, whilst animals can't.

I remember that really stuck with me because I started thinking about it and I was like, what's the advantage of that? The advantage, if you can learn from others' mistakes, is that you don't have to waste your time learning a lesson. You can learn the lesson from them. They waste the time, you get the lesson. I remember thinking, a lot of people don't apply that. They have to learn for themselves. But what if I could just take the lessons that other people have, people that are more successful than me, and I could apply them?

Because the reality is we don't have time to learn all the lessons ourselves. So what we want to do is be selective about the people we learn lessons from and then take those lessons and assimilate them into our minds, into our bodies, into our belief systems. And so the way that I deploy this and that you can deploy this is that anytime I hired a mentor, I hired an advisor, I hired a coach, I read a book by somebody that's more successful than me that I want to be like.

Anything they said that was a big lesson, that was a turning point, that was a belief that they held, I just took it as my own. And so I think there is a good time to copy rather than create. And so it's copying others' beliefs, copying others' lessons, copying others' mistakes or avoidance of mistakes so that we can accelerate our learning process. And we don't have to take all that time learning lessons through mistakes, through trial and error. We can just learn them now and we can have the success.

One of the biggest examples of this is I had a mentor that when I was 23, told me that people were more important than anything in a business. And I had no idea what was really important. I knew I didn't want to manage people. I didn't really like the idea of managing people. And what do I talk about now? Managing fucking people. Because guess what? I took what he said to heart, that managing people was the most important thing, and it paid off dividends. I didn't have to learn it through trial and error. I didn't have to learn it through making my own mistakes. I

I just took what he said, I applied it, and it fucking worked. I didn't have to go through the 10 years of being an asshole, and I didn't have to go through the 10 years of employing people and them turning out and not being able to grow my business. I just took what he said, I applied it, it worked, and I moved forward faster. The fifth habit that you can have that can help you become a millionaire in your 20s

is not taking failure personally. Okay. A lot of people ask, they're like, I just want to understand how you and Alex have just done this so fast. How you, you know, at such a young age, accumulated so much success. And the reality is if I look at unsuccessful people, let's look at unsuccessful people. What do they do? They try something, it fails, and then they dwell on it.

They don't try something new next. They don't try something the next day. They don't try a different way of doing it. They dwell, they condemn themselves, and they dwell on the failure.

And so what I learned to do very early on is not take failure personally. So what did this look like? When I was building Gym Watch, we would fall on our faces time and time again. Something wouldn't work. We would try something else. Something else wouldn't work. We would try something else. What I learned is that dwelling on my mistakes was unproductive. It was literally stealing my future from me by keeping me stuck in the past, thinking about something that I couldn't even change.

And so I realized that I could take that energy from dwelling on the mistake or dwelling on the failure, and I could put that towards building a new future. And so every time that I make a mistake, that I do something that's stupid, that I mess up, I don't let that stop me from trying something else. Instead, my automatic reaction is go try something else. That didn't work, immediately try something else.

A good example of this is our first company, Alex and I would fly out to gyms and we would launch gyms ourselves. We would do the sales marketing and sell people into their facilities. We realized within just a few months that that was not scalable. So we immediately switched to hiring a team to do that. And then within just about four months, we realized that hiring a team to do that wasn't the right way. So we immediately switched to a licensing product.

And it was that ability to switch quickly without dwelling on the sunk cost and all the time and effort that we had put into that other thing that allowed us to move forward faster. And in life, the reason a lot of people don't have success early is they're so concerned with all the effort that they put into something.

But what you have to understand is that it's more important that you accumulate the character traits that allow you to accumulate skills than it is the skills themselves. Because a lot of people won't move forward quickly after making a mistake because they think, oh, what about all the time, the energy I put into this thing? And they're mourning the thing and the energy and time lost rather than thinking about what they have to gain if they take action quickly and move forward.

So bottom line, if you want to move quickly and you want to make more money faster than anybody else, you can't dwell on your failures and you can't dwell on your mistakes. It's not a good use of your time.