Category: Dan Martell

What AI business has the highest income potential today? As someone who’s made millions with AI products in my company, Martell Ventures, I’m going to show you the five AI businesses I’d build if I was starting from scratch with zero employees. I’ll even show you how you can start any of these businesses with a simple four-step process. And at the end, I’ll actually pick one and walk you through the first step myself. I’ll also break down the cost, effort, and income potential for each one of them. This isn’t some get-richqu [ __ ] These are real money-making opportunities you can start today. So, let’s dive in. Number five, one of my favorites, the AI appointment setter. Essentially, businesses are going to pay you to take the inbound calls, put AI in the middle, and get them setting appointments so they can get sales. It’s such an easy thing to sell because essentially, you’re taking somebody that’s full-time that costs money to answer that phone for a fraction of the cost to actually perform better than they can. So, the coolest part is the cost is low for you to get started because it doesn’t cost anything. The effort is medium because you do need to learn some new skills like a little bit of sales and a little bit of configuration, but the potential is massive. Literally, you could be making $500 to $1,000 a day easily just by talking to businesses that want to make more money. Now, I understand this can sound a little bit crazy, but I’m going to show you through an example. Okay? So, there’s a company called youratlas.com, which is essentially an AI appointment setter. You can go to the website right now and try it out for yourself. When you come in, they actually prompt you to do a demo. Hey, let’s try it out, which I love. You just put in your information. I’m going to put Dan Martell. I’m going to give it my email address and I give it my phone number. And then I just say, talk to the AI. Now, it’s going to call me happen in real time. I accept. Listen to this. Am I speaking with Dan? Yeah. Hey, Emma. This is Dan. Great. Thanks for confirming, Dan. How’s your day going? It’s going amazing. Emma, I’m a little busy. Can we make this really quick? I just checking out the website. I wasn’t sure what it is, but I’ve got a small business and I need to automate my sales calls or honestly any appointment calls people call me. I totally get it, Dan, to keep this quick. Atlas is the world’s first AI revenue engine that ensures you never lose a lead to slow follow-ups that ad spend again. This is like yours spending at least $3,000 monthly on ads. Is Atlas to automate and drive more sales? Does automating your calls and appointments like this sound like the kind of solution your business could benefit from? Yeah, that’s actually why I’m calling. That’s fantastic to hear, Dan. Let’s get you connected with our founder for a quick demo. It’ll show you exactly how Atlas can work for your business. Would you prefer a time today or later this week? All appointments are in Atlantic time. I’m busy today. Let’s do it tomorrow at 4:00. Do you have an opening? Okay, I’m just checking on that. One sec. It looks like tomorrow we don’t have a slot free at 400 p.m., but we have availability on August 26th at 6:30 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. Atlantic time. Would one of these slots work for you? Yeah, that works. So, let’s do 6:30. That was all AI. Isn’t that freaking crazy? Like human level conversation. I gave it objections. I told it times. It confirmed the call and it’s going to send me a text message. I mean, it’s wild. There’s no way businesses don’t buy that. So, now I want to teach you the AI startup ladder because these are the exact steps you’re going to want to go through to actually start your AI company. Step one is validate. You have to pick a niche and outreach to them. It’s essentially a way to prove that the people want to buy what you’re selling. So, you might start with med spas or lawn care or maybe agency founders that are looking to book sales calls. Step two is you want to pre-ell. That’s where you sell and collect the cash before you ever build. It’s actually pretty simple. You just create a document with the offer of what you do. And in there, you have a Stripe link so that after you have the conversation about your AI startup, they just buy by clicking the Stripe link. If you don’t know what that is, it’s very simple. Just Google Stripe. Step three is deliver. As soon as somebody buys from you, put all things aside and go and deliver on that thing you sold. If you want to scale, you want referrals, don’t wait. Act fast. It may take some manual work at the beginning, but getting a customer a win in the first 48 hours is how you build your reputation. Step number four, now we build. That’s where we take what we’ve sold and productize the service so that you have some stability and when you sell, you can automate the deployment so that you could build the business in a way to scale it and to grow it. Before I share the second AI business, just to make it clear, if you want to try out any of the tools I mentioned in this video for yourself, the link is below in the description. But if you’re building real AI innovation right now and want to partner with me and my team at Martell Ventures, just message me ventures on Instagram and we’ll see if it’d be a fit. Number four, AI content repurposing service. Essentially, companies will pay you to take like long- form video content like podcasts or webinars or maybe some YouTube videos they’re doing and then repurpose them as short form clips on all the different platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube shorts so that you can get them more reach and eyeballs back to the long- form content to get them sales. So, the cool part is the cost is low because you don’t need a lot of tools to get started. The effort is medium because there are some skills you need to learn. But the coolest part is the income potential is $750 to $1,000 a day. It’s kind of crazy cuz there’s a freelancer I know that use an AI tool to scale podcast to shorts. That was their service and now earns $30,000 a month from only seven clients. We’re living in a world where the amount of content and the desire to get a message out there has just scaled. And we live where there’s this thing called interest media, not social media, where the algorithms are trying to find niche content to serve those people. And somebody that can take all that information a business is already producing. I’m talking like Zoom calls, podcast, long form, and trim it down into short form and manage the publishing schedule. They’re going to be in so much demand. So, if you’re in the content game in general, this one’s for you. Now, let’s get into the biggest opportunities of the next decade. Number three is AI sales chatbot. This is where you help somebody set up an AI chatbot that takes all of their chats, I’m talking social media chats, text messages, emails, all the platforms, and converts those conversations into sales for the business. It’s wild. I literally know hundreds of people that make tens of thousand dollars every month doing this for businesses. There’s so much content being created and it’s generating followers and even chats in the social platforms that most business owners don’t have the time to actually respond to people. So what you do is you create an AI chatbot that takes that conversation, turns it into a sales conversation and takes those follows and turn them into leads for the business. So now that we break it down, the cost is medium because there’s a little bit more tools and some custom coding involved to make it work for the specific business. The effort is also medium because there’s some skills you need to learn for sure, especially like how does a good sales chat go, but the income potential is even higher because of the volume. You could potentially be making $1,000 to $1,500 a day on the low end. The income is so high because it’s such a unique process. So when then you come in, it feels like free money to them. So they’re willing to pay more because they’re not replacing you for something else. They’re essentially starting to do something they weren’t doing. So, for example, there’s a product called Get Revio that went from zero to $60,000 per month in under seven months taking advantage of this chat economy. That’s $2,000 a day. You can use their product to serve your customers or build something custom, but this world is not going to go away and it’s an opportunity anybody can take advantage of right now. Essentially, to start, just go back and run through the AI startup ladder and it’ll crush for you. So far, we’ve covered calls, content, and even chat. Now, let’s talk about cleaning up the data and getting paid for it. Which brings us to number two, an AI data cleanup agency. Essentially, what you do is you offer the service to clean up the internal information within a business. Because right now, most businesses, they have like this messy, crazy collage of information. They have everything from their emails to the relationship software for their customers, spreadsheets that essentially running departments. Imagine if somebody could come in, clean up all that information, put an AI on top of it so that the business owner can ask a question about their business and get the exact quality answer. So the cost is medium because you are going to pay for some other tools. So, for example, not only do you have to like pay for the tools to clean up the information, then you’re going to have to pay for another tool to convert the information into a vectorzed database so that the AI can actually talk to it. Now, the effort is also going to be medium because you’re going to have to learn some unique skills to that kind of cleanup and processing for searching. But the income potential is really high, like $1,500 to $3,000 a day, because now you’re getting into the business consulting space where you’re helping a business owner understand their business where they can make better decisions. And those decisions could save them 50, 100, a million dollars a year. And the cool part is you’re also now starting to sell to like bigger companies that have more money to invest in making their operations better. And you are the expert. You might think everybody knows AI right now. Trust me, they don’t. And if they do, their number one bottleneck is having anybody on their team that knows how to do this stuff and they’re willing to pay top dollar for that. For example, my friend Matt built a company called precision.co that scaled from zero to $700,000 in 7 months using this process. And again, to be successful, run through the four-step process in the AI startup ladder so that you get paid upfront before you build anything. This one, I’m personally biased, but I think it’s the biggest opportunity of the next decade to unlock people’s productivity and make a ton of money. Number one, this one’s so fun. The AI inbox and calendar manager. Essentially, you’re going to get paid to build an executive assistant using AI to help these business owners manage emails and meetings. The last thing that entrepreneurs and CEOs want to do is manage their own freaking inbox in their calendar. It’s like having somebody come in and automate 95% of that is going to feel like the most powerful thing that’s happened to their life and you get to be the person to do that. Cool part is the cost is actually low because it doesn’t take a lot to set this up. The effort is medium because you are going to have to sit down and work with these CEOs to understand their workflows. But the best part, you could be making $3 to $5,000 a day helping these CEOs buy back their time. For example, there’s an AI company called Fixer that went from 1 million in annual revenue to over 10 million in just the last 5 months. That’s $27,000 per day. This opportunity is massive. Now, as I promised you at the beginning of this video, let’s do the first step of the AI startup ladder together. The business I would pick to start this year, drum roll please, the AI inbox and calendar manager. It’s a no-brainer. I wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. This one is the nearest and dearest to my heart. It’s also the thing that I recently paid for somebody to work with my assistant to buy back 92% of their time managing those two areas of my life. So, here’s how I would do it. I’m going to call somebody. I actually know they have an assistant. I don’t know how good they are. I don’t know if they’re happy with them. And I’m going to walk you through how I’m going to identify the pain, figure out the cost that they’re willing to associate to that pain, and then offer them a solution that costs less than what they’re paying for today. I’m calling my buddy Josh. Let’s see what he says. Hey Josh, how you doing? I’m good. How are you? I’m doing incredible. Quick question. You have an EA, correct? If you had to think about like the areas of working with them that doesn’t work the best, like if you could wave a magic wand and it would be like super awesome. What are things that are not like perfect right now with my EA? Yeah. Honestly, dealing with a lot of my household stuff with my rental properties and things like that being in different like I got some places in Mexico like remote gap has probably been the biggest challenge for me recently. And then is a lot of that stuff that you’re managing, does that come through your inbox? Like a lot of communication goes through inbox 100%. And if that was like absolutely dialed in and you could think about like what that future would look like, what do you think the gap in opportunity is? Not necessarily just the time, but just like having the time, the mental load not there like just what’s that worth to you? For me, saving 5 to 10 hours a week is worth. And so at least 10 hours a week of that stuff that I wish I didn’t have to deal with. Wow. So, if you’re saying 10 hours a week at thousands of dollars at minimum 10,000 a week, it would be the upside and the potential of what you don’t have today. Correct. Crazy. All right. Well, what I’ve got I’ve been working on this new offer that’s essentially an inboxing calendar manager that takes exactly what you’re saying is stress points and actually gets this automated for you so that you don’t have to think about it. And the coolest part is I train it off of you and what you know so that it acts just like you so that you don’t have to be involved but it does the thing the way you would want to do it. Does that make sense? Like it it deals with my ideas all of it. Yeah. Because it can learn everything from your inbox. Your calendar has all the data. I’m assuming you have things scheduled there. So it can learn from your calendar. It learns from your inbox. And then the best part is is that it doesn’t do anything until you train it. But once it’s trained, it actually works just like you would without you being involved. I know it sounds like magic. Here’s the deal. I’m just What I’m going to do is I’m going to schedule a call with you and do a product demo to actually show you how it works and then we can talk about moving forward then. Does that make sense? Cool. Let’s get a schedule. He actually thinks that I’m selling this. Here’s the big idea. It’s about doing the reps. It’s about picking up the phone. The first three calls are not going to feel good. Just get the calls done. Learn the pitch. Learn the flow. Learn how to speak to the customer. Learn to understand where their problems are. All I did is very simple. I nailed the problem and then I talked about the potential. I quantified it quickly and then I said I had a solution that would solve the problem the way they explained to me they wish it was solved for them. From that place, I scheduled the next call. It gives them time to think about it and I can come in with a demo just like the one I showed you and they go, “Wow, AI today when it works well, it feels like magic.” The customers won’t even believe it when you show it to them. But when you get that first customer, the second customer, the third customer, and you build that proof point and you collect those testimonials, it creates the snowball that makes you the number one person in your niche. And that’s how you build a business in this new AI economy. Now, I know this is a little overwhelming and there’s a lot of options on what kind of businesses to start, but the key is to look at your situation. Ask yourself like what business do you find the most fascinating? What do you inherently enjoy? And pick one and go allin. Follow the AI startup ladder. Validate. Pick up the phone. Call. Call. Call. I’m telling you that is the skill. AI can give you answers, but it can’t do the action for you. You need to be the one to find the customer, validate, sell, and use that money to build

These are 23 ways to use AI that you’ve probably never heard of because most people are only using a fraction of AI’s full potential. I’ve been in the AI trenches for the past 3 years running multiple AI companies and I can tell you most people are only scratching the surface of what’s possible. And in this video, I’ll show you 23 new ways that you can use AI to turn on easy mode in all aspects of your life. Number one, master prompts for your whole life. Essentially, we want to build a single life prompt, a collection of all your values, your goals, your weaknesses, your principles, your life, every detail. That way, every time you ask AI a question, it answers it through your lens. So, here’s how it works. You actually say to Chad GBT, “Help me create a master prompt for my life and ask me the questions to give you the context about my life.” And it’ll ask you the questions. You answer it and save it as a PDF. Now, anytime you ask AI or any other AI, upload the PDF before you ask her a question so it has all the context. That’s your master prompt. Number two, hidden truth mirror. AI’s number one opportunity for most people is to use it to uncover blind spots and traits that you don’t even realize about yourself. Here’s how we do this. I want you to open up your AI of choice. I like Chad GPT. Feed it your journals. Feed it your blog post. Feed it your content. feed it all the information, any patterns for context, but ask it. Tell me something unique about me that I don’t see yet. The truth is, if you’ve been using Tragic BT or other a lot, it’ll already know this stuff. Number three, write books that don’t even exist yet. There’s definitely people you admire that have talked about a topic that have never written a book on that topic. For example, Sarah Blakeley on parenting or Mr. Beast on how to scale a media company. So what you do is you prompt a Chad GBT to train itself on interviews, podcasts, any content they’ve ever written. Then prompt it to create a book using best practices about book outlines to write the chapters, the frameworks, and the checklist. Pull out all the quotes. Don’t hallucinate. And it will create that book for you. If you actually want the prompt that I wrote to generate books on any topic from any person I follow, click the link below and download it for yourself. Number four, decision-making journal. Essentially, you use AI to track the choices and review them later to improve your decision making based on the results they got you. Here’s how you do it. Log all your major decisions into Chad GPT with an expected outcome, whether personal or in your work, and ask it to challenge you on your thinking. See, most AIs are designed to be very agreeable, and unless you tell it to actually challenge you, it won’t. So, make sure that you include that in your prompt. Number five, the AI camcorder method. You can take a messy recording of you doing something that you want to create a repeatable checklist from or standard operating procedure or a playbook and you can get AI to do that for you. All you have to do is paste the raw notes or transcript from any video of you doing something and ask GPT for a one-page checklist with all the pitfalls and the reminders for whatever you gave it. It will create a better system documentation for repeating a task or a project in your life that you can give to somebody else to do for you. Number six, break down goals to actions. Most people have a vision for their life, but they don’t have a plan because they’ve never done it before. You can use AI to actually help you build a plan. Here’s how we do it. Tell Chad GBT what your goal is and ask it to design a 30, 60, 90day road map with action items and it’ll build that for you. Number seven, visualize your dreams. Instead of spending all your time finding images to download and spend hours in Photoshop, you can have AI create a vision board that has everything that you want to vision for your life front and center in that image. So, here’s how we do it. We take our goals from the last step and ask AI to generate images of what your life would look like once you achieve them and then look at it every day. Be in the energy of achievement. Number eight, automate savings and investment plan. Essentially, you want to automate your wealth building when your motivation isn’t there and you get AI to give you the plan. So, ask Chad GBT to draft a pay yourself first schedule and bankrolls for emergency fund, debt, investments for your specific situation. Most people hire these wealth folks that really don’t even have any money to build a plan for you. AI will give you that with more clarity, specificity, specific for your situation. Number nine, tax deduction finder. Right off the bat, talk to a professional, but having AI catch write offs, opportunities for credit, and grants where most people miss is a huge opportunity to get more money back. Upload all your expenses. Ask Chad GBT based on your situation. Flag likely deductions and build a monthly tracking checklist. And also ask it, “What are the grants that might be available that I might qualify for?” Number 10, personal board of adviserss. One of the most powerful strategies to progress your life is the concept of a mastermind or a board of mentors. The problem is a lot of these people aren’t available. AI can help you build that without them being in your life, even if they’re not alive. The first part is you can actually ask Chad GPT to tell you who’s achieved the goals that you want to achieve. So, they help you build that list. Then you can tell it to act like them in a custom GBT to answer any question you might have about sequencing or decisions or structure based on the AI’s best guess for how those people would have made those decisions in their life. Number 11, future selflet letters that rewire you. Essentially, you stay motivated by receiving letters from your future self. What you want to do is you want to feed Chad GBT your goals and your fears. Then ask it to draft letters delivered to you in 30, 90, or 365 days. You can actually send them every month if you want, but it’s going to write the letters that’s going to anticipate how you might be feeling based on where you’re at in your life around your goals, and it’s going to just keep you motivated. Number 12, contextaware memory vault. Essentially, you want to let AI become your second brain. To do that, we want to create project folders and dump everything into it. You could have a folder where you upload everything, your bank accounts, your current investments. You can even reference books that you think are kind of aligned with your values of how you want to live your life. You know, Die with Zero is a great book. And then ask it to help you make decisions based on the context of your life. That way, it acts as a second brain and it can recall relevant insights that it made based on what you shared with it. So, when you want to make new decisions, it has all the information about your current life and you give it the new information. And then you say, “Okay, now I’ve got a kid. How should I think about my investments differently?” And it’ll give you an answer. I use project folders for everything. My investments in my life, the individual companies that I run. I was buying a new piece of real estate in Cabo. I had that as a project folder. It is the coolest thing to have my second brain be in AI. Number 13, just in time. Learning paths. The ability to learn is a master skill. Too many people get busy learning stuff that doesn’t actually help them. So, let’s say you want to have Chad GPT teach you how to use AI. You can ask it to map out 20% of the lessons to learn how to use AI that matters most and skip all the fluff. That way, it’s just a punchy learning path that’s just in time based on what you’re dealing with right now. Number 14, meeting assistant. I wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. So, anything that talks about assistance, I get really excited. But what I do is I use AI to turn all my meetings into assets, not just a huge time sync. So for example, you want to give the call recordings that you have, ideally you’re doing them over Zoom, to AI and then have it pull the notes and tell you what do you need to do based on that conversation. This might sound crazy, but I have a guy on my team optin who wears a AI pin. It’s a necklace that’s always on. It’s by Limitless. And essentially that necklace is doing this in real time for him all the time. He’s in a meeting talking to somebody. It does a summary of the meeting and tell him what he needs to add to his to-do list. All real time, always on. A little advanced, but let’s just start with having you get the recordings of your calls and transcribe them through AI. Number 15, risk assessment. Essentially, you want to have AI assess the risk of your business or life decisions. I do this all the time. I like to use the voice app and I’ll go on a walk and I will talk through my earbuds to AI about my life. I will give it all the context and the situation. The other day I had a major business restructuring decision and I gave it all the people, the business size, the team members and it gave me back the decision that I was scared to make. I said chat GPT sell me on it and it said boom boom boom here are the pros and cons. That was the decision and the whole point is to use it to help you mitigate the risk. So then after it gives you ideas, then you can ask it. Tell me all the risk in that decision so I can understand what decision I’m actually making. Number 16, message sharpener. I have two people in my life. I have one person who doesn’t like to talk and I have another person who talks too much. I taught them how to create custom GPTs that they can talk to for it to either add stuff to the person doesn’t ask or ask them questions or to trim it for the one that just seems incredibly verbose. Here’s how you set it up. You open up GPT and you hit the little microphone button and you talk to it. Hello. Are you there? Hey there. Yep. I’m here and ready to chat. Let me know what you need. All right. I need you to take what I’m about to say, which is going to be a very direct and angry thing, and then take exactly what I said, but resay it in a way that’s kinder, softer, and more still direct, but not as harsh. Can you do that? Absolutely, I can do that. Just go ahead and tell me what you want to say and I’ll reshape it into something a bit gentler for you. Yo, bro, why didn’t you send me the 2026 goals yet? Got it. So, let’s soften that up a bit. You could say something like, “Hey, I noticed I haven’t received the 2026 goals yet. Could you please send them over when you get a chance?” Still direct, but definitely a bit kinder. Let’s go. I love it. Thank you. It may sound funny, but I know a lot of people that should be using that. Number 17, Travel Architect. Using AI to help you plan a trip is a master tool and you not feeling overwhelmed or confused. What you can do is give it the date, your budget, your preferences, and then ask it for a five-star plan with hidden gems and must sees. We’re currently on a 9-month world schooling trip, going to like 15 countries and 40 plus cities, and we’ve been using AI to help us design, follow weather, find games to go to, ensure the kids are always busy. All designed with AI. There is zero chance that we could have got to the level of trip planning without AI for our world schooling adventures. And if you use agent mode, all you have to do is give it your card. Number 18, an emotional debrief partner. Using AI to turn bad days or bad moments into lessons is one of the number one use cases for AI. Getting clarity around a situation, it’s so powerful. The easiest way to do that is go into voice mode and just vent and give it everything. Here’s the situation. Here’s what they said. Here’s how I felt. And then you can ask Shaj GBT to say sort through the noise in the signal and give me one lesson, one silver lining that I might be able to take on to shift my perspective. And it will give you that micro shift. Here’s why that’s powerful. If you stay in your head, you’re in trouble. If you get things out to talk with somebody, it helps. And look, it doesn’t replace a therapist, but it also is something that’s available to you right now in the moment. Don’t need to schedule. It doesn’t cost anything. It honestly has access to all the best therapy strategies to at least give you some direction better than just sitting there by yourself trying to think about it in your head. Number 19, content creator. This is not what you think. I actually use it to turn memories into content ideas so that I can share those with the world. The way you do this is you ask Chia GBT to ask you all the meaningful stories, moments, transformations you’ve ever had in your life and then you just answer it and then say, “Please reformat these into a PSL framework, essentially a point story lesson.” What it does is it takes all the stories that you’ve just like kind of rambled about and answered questions about this meaningful moment and then it rewrites it in a structure that you can then create content with that actually hits hard. Number 20, the contract translator. One of the ultimate use cases for AI is legal. Simplifying confusing contracts and financial docs is a must, but there’s a way to do it that most people don’t think about. What I do is I have my assistant before she talks to my lawyer upload every contract that comes into my life up to Chad GPT and then I ask it to rewrite the contract in plain English highlighting any of the riskiest terms that I need to know about. And then I ask it to tell me the three questions I should be asking about that contract. I can take my assistant who has no legal background and turn her into a parallegal next level ninja to prep all the contracts where I just have all my email drafts having the answers to those questions. Number 21, the contract creator. This one’s powerful cuz it will save you hundreds of dollars in legal fees instead of hiring a lawyer. It may sound simple, but let me give you the specific prompts. Essentially, you want to explain your situation in plain English, but also give it all the details about the city you live in, the country you live in, the situation, and then ask it to ask you any other questions it would need to draft a worldclass professional contract as a legal expert. Once it asks you those questions, you answer it, and you hit enter, it will draft you something that most lawyers do not know how to do. And again, you can also use it to evaluate pros and cons to see if it’s too one-sided for you, because it probably will be, so that you can find something that’s more fair. Number 22, tough conversation roleplay. Essentially, using AI to have a sparring partner to roleplay through tough conversations you know you should be having, but you might be avoiding. This could be maybe a parent you need to talk to. This could be your partner where you might have to have a really important conversation. And this could be somebody on your team that you have to give feedback to. It might even be going to the bank and asking for a loan and you’re really scared to do that, right? So, what I like to do is ask Chad GBT to act like a certain persona. Let’s say your boss, your manager, your employee, and then have it roleplay as that person with you. Then you can walk through the situation where you’re explaining your perspective and kind of what they made you feel and have it prompt back and forth to have that conversation before you ever have it. Using it to roleplay will make you feel way more comfortable when it comes to actually having the conversation. Number 23, the eulogy writer. A eulogy is an incredible way to have alignment with your life and actually see how you might be remembered through other people’s eyes. A while ago, when I was 23, my first business coach, his name was Bob, asked me to do something on our first call that had the biggest impact on my life more than anything else he taught me. And it was to sit down and write my eulogy. So here’s how you do it. Ask GPT to draft your eulogy based on your journals, your values, any other context or master prompt that you might have gave it. Have it focus on what would my family members say, what would my friends say, people I’ve worked with, and people in my community. And having those four areas, that’s what Bob did for me, allowed me to write and refine how I wanted those people to talk about who I was. And that gave me clarity for how I was building my life.

AI has completely changed the way I invest my money. And it’s not the way you think. I was voted number one angel investor in Canada and have personally invested in dozens of companies with founders of Google, even Jay-Z. And now with AI, I’m making way more money by investing in the right things and staying away from the wrong ones. So, in this video, I’m going to show you the exact playbook on how to use AI to invest your money. Starting with the very first move you need to make. Don’t preserve it, create it. Wealth preservation sucks. Wealth creation is super fun. Preserving wealth is like building a wall around your money. It blocks other money from coming into your life. Your dollars are like little soldiers that should be out there on the battlefield working to make you more money. Cuz when the money’s working for you, then you’ll get to a point where you don’t need to work for the money. Most people are stuck penny pinching and preserving and couponing. And I’m like, what? How about we go invest to create more? So once you decide you’re going to let the purse strings go a little bit and deploy your dollars, the next question is where do you actually deploy them? You got to spot what others don’t. You can use AI to find deals other people miss. Things that nobody’s talking about yet. You want to find the opportunities where everybody else is not even looking, but it makes sense. And that’s where AI can help you in a big way. The real wins are not in the stuff that’s obvious by Google. It’s asking yourself what’s the second and third degree plays that that unlocks. If you can figure out those two, lots of money to be made. I like to invest in real estate. So, I have an agent whose whole job is finding those hidden gems, running the whole financial analysis, and all I have to do is approve it. That’s how I use AI to find that other people are just too busy or not going to find because they’re looking for the easy [music] stuff. So, for example, I asked the AI to come up with the seven top research papers on where the world’s going. I then had it analyze the trends that it found that’s common across all seven papers. I then correlated that with my thesis in my current business of what I’m building and had it define the areas I should go invest in. That is how I choose the companies to invest in in my life. I just use the AI to do it for me. So, here’s how you can use AI to find opportunities to invest in. First off, open up your favorite LLM. I’m talking Claude, Gemini, Chad GPT. And then run these two prompts. These are things you can do. Just ask [music] it. I want to invest in this industry or trend that you like. Map out the second and third degree winners and losers. Who are the suppliers? What are the adjacent industries and the companies that are going to get disrupted? Now give me 10 names I wouldn’t think of. Prompt number two. Now run an analysis of recent trends and market signals around those names and show me the second and third degree winners and losers that could be real opportunities. For example, if you told it to investigate the AI industry, it’s not going to tell you to invest in Google and Nvidia. It’s going to talk about the energy use and the electricians that are going to have to install that. Let the AI keep doing the digging for you. The pro tip is only investing in what you know. If you don’t live in biomed engineering, then don’t ask it to do that research for you because you won’t have an information advantage. By the way, if you’re a business owner, you should already know your best investment is in your business. That’s why I built my full AI company operating system. It has everything you need. the master prompt templates, the workflows, the frameworks to integrate AI into every department in your business. If you want it, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube OS and I’ll send it right over to you. Now, finding great opportunities, that’s a great start. But before you put your money in, you need to know you won’t lose your money. You got to red team it with AI. AI, if you prompt it properly, is the best red team you’ll ever have. Red teaming means you purposely try to tear your idea apart. I want AI to have no ego, no agenda, and just tell me everything about my thesis that might be wrong. Cuz guess what? If I know everything can go wrong, then I can figure out all the steps I can make it right. And that way, I have a higher probability of not losing my money. So, we should always pressure test the deal before we put money in. Most people just skip this step and then they pay for it later. That’s how money gets lost on stuff that look great that you should have never touched. I was about to invest in a personal finance AI tool. Then the AI told me about two things. One, the GDP val for AI and two, the concept of economic value creation with tokens. So I found a great opportunity. I was excited about it. I actually know a lot about it. And then when I redteamed it, the AI explained to me, you could, but there’s a large probability that the big AI companies are going to launch something in that space. You might not want to compete. I literally could have lost millions of dollars making that decision. So, here’s how we use AI to battle test and redte team our ideas. First, just write this prompt. I’m about to invest into this company or asset. Let’s play out the worst case scenario and give me the 10 reasons why I would lose all my money. Now, be honest. Be brutal. Don’t be nice. Now, you take those 10 objections and ask yourself, do I have an answer for each? Right? They just become the hit list to make sure you overcome it. Cuz if you can’t with high confidence, then you pass. Do they have a low chance of happening? The AI doesn’t know this. You’re going to have to know this. You’re going to have to make a gut decision, but you can use AI to get you there a lot faster than trying to do it on your own. So, here’s a pro tip is run the prompt against two or three other top AIs. Different models catch different things. The best deals I’ve ever done are the ones I almost made but didn’t. It’s where I made the most of my money. So, now let’s say we red team the investment, it passes the test, and we decide to move. Now, what? Let AI monitor it. AI’s got this really cool ability of building dashboards for you and monitoring real time. And the cool part is kind of like set it and forget it. You just sit down, you build a stock portfolio, and then you have it monitor it. You can even say if it moves up or down 10%, send you an email. I do this for all my investments, all my real estate, all my vehicles, all my stock, all my companies, all the valuations. It’s all in one beautiful dashboard and it was built with AI. So instead of like calling people or jumping into one platform and another platform, it’s all over the place, you have it in one spot. And it’s fun because AI can pull all the updates and give you red, green, yellow for all your stocks, little spark lines to tell you if it’s going up and then even set up alerts in case you got to get rid of some stuff. Paying attention to where your money goes is how it grows. Long time ago, I was trying to teach this to my friend and I asked him, “Well, how much money do you have in your business?” He’s like, “I don’t know, about 70 grand.” I’m like, “About 70 grand?” Like I can tell you to the penny how much I have today because I monitor it. I teach this thing called the daily cash email that I now have AI do every day. So if you want your money to grow, have the AI analyze, monitor, and give it to you. It’s like Peter Ducker’s quote. What gets measured gets managed. If you want to make money, you got to manage it. So how do we do it? First off, we have to less every investment you own. Anything you have your money in, anything that has value, anything that’s an asset, make the list. Second is open up your favorite AI and prompt it. Build me a live dashboard that tracks paste the list for each one of them. Show me how healthy it is. Look for price movements based on the valuation or the market and then flag anything I should look at, right? Look at the market trends. Look at the key signals. And then third, tell it what matters most to you. You got to tell it your goal so it has a direction for how it should guide you towards those goals. And then last, pick a day where you sit down and you review it. I like to do mine every Monday when my mind is fresh and I’ve got all the data for the previous week and I look through. If everything’s green, I’m pretty good. If it’s yellow or red, I got to dig it in. And here’s a pro tip. If you’re using Claude, you can actually ask it to build an interactive artifact in the chat so it’s easy to visualize. All right, before you go out and spend money on a bunch of investments, I need you to hear this last thing because all this can go to if you don’t follow a simple rule. Stick with what you know. The richest people invest in things and people where they have an unfair information advantage. AI can change a lot, but it doesn’t change what humans know. And what you know AI can’t do. I’m an AI guy. So if I see some AI tool that I start paying for, then I go, hey, is this a public company? Is this a stock I could buy? You just have to go, how do I use AI to battle test my concepts? [music] I made the mistake 15 years ago to buy homes in Detroit. I spent $100,000 buying a bunch of homes for eight grand. And about 18 months later, I realized I was in a world of because these homes were literally ready to burn down. They had homeless people in it. The guy that I was working with never rented them out. They didn’t do the value ad. The whole concept didn’t work. Why? I invested in I didn’t know. If I had been a real estate guy, I probably wouldn’t have done the deal. Sometimes pain is the perfect teacher. I had a little pain. I learned a lesson. I’m going to teach it to [music] you. Stick in what you know. The biggest risk isn’t losing money, it’s wasting it on things you don’t understand. So, there’s only three filters. These three have to pass. [music] One, do I know about it? Do I have an unfair advantage? Is it in the information flow of things that I naturally pay attention to? Cuz number two, which is the filter, is will I pay attention to it? Often times, I won’t make an investment because if the amount that I got to put in is not big enough for me to care, then I know I won’t care, which means I’ll probably lose my money. So, I’d rather do less deals, bigger number, bigger focus, what I focus on expands than doing a bunch of little tiny deals. And number three is, will it be true in the future? I don’t want to invest in things that going to have high turnover because I want to invest in things that are aligned with where the world’s going long-term 10 years, so that I don’t have to always be redeploying my money. And AI helps me battle test my portfolio through that lens. One of the most recent investment I made is in a company called Hark Labs which is creating an embodied model. It’s this new AI to essentially power the robots of the future. The founder of Figure which is one of the top robotics company is the lead investor and founder. So do I know it? It’s AI. Will I pay attention to it? I wrote a big check. And third, do I think the world is going there? Uh yeah. The future is AI powered sensors. Everything that’s electrified will be cognified. And that model is literally going to power not Chad GBT. So yes, yes, and yes. Buffett doesn’t invest in tech and I don’t invest in oil. Know your edge and stay in it. And here’s the crazy part is the next 10 years it won’t reward the best stock pickers. It’s going to reward the system builders, the person that can collaborate with AI, can use it to track its money, to battle test it, to red team it, to ensure that it’s not just being forgotten about, but it’s focused

Chad GBT uninstalls spike 295% in a single day. Experts say OpenAI could run out of cash by mid 2027. OpenAI just honestly looks desperate. Meanwhile, you got Claude that has been on the rise. Claude has emerged as one of the most favorite AI platform. That guy Claude is very busy. Anthropic has updated its AI model. Claude Opus 4.6. It hit number one spot on the app store, dethroning Chat GBT for the first time ever. My team and I run AI across dozens of companies every single day and I see what works and what doesn’t. And that’s why I’ve switched everybody over to Claude. So, in this video, I’m going to walk you through what I found when I looked under the hood of both companies, the tools inside Claude that most people don’t even know exists. And if you stick around till the very end, I’m going to show you exactly how to make the switch from Chad GBT or any AI to Claude without losing your memory, your context, or your projects. Starting with why I’m betting on Claude in the first place. You got to bet on the right horse. Whatever AI tool I choose is going to be a massive part of my workflows, my team, my companies I’m involved in, how I freaking operate. So, I have to pick the right horse when it comes to AI. Open AI right now starting to run ads inside its product. If you think it’s free, it’s not. You know who’s paying? You with your data. They’re projected to do 14 billion in loss in 26. And a lot of the analysts are projecting that they’re going to run out of cash by mid 2027. They’ve got $1.5 trillion in financial commitments and they don’t have the revenue to back it up. And that’s not playing offense. That’s making moves out of pressure. Then you have Enthropic, the people who built Claude. Cash burns dropping every year. They’re on track to break even years before Open AI. And their revenues doubled in the last 12 months from 10 to 20 billion. It’s crazy because they’re a third of the size of Open AI. So right off the bat, they’re more efficient. And the most important part, the people that are at the edge of AI are picking Claude. Plus, Claude’s entire ecosystem is leading the pack in the whole AI space. They’re literally the innovators. Claude Chat, your best writing and research partner. Crazy. Claude Chrome, it does things in your browser for you when you don’t know where the thing is on the website. Cloud Co-work doing the work on your actual computer, refiling, restructuring, searching for stuff. And Claude Code, allowing you to write custom solutions, scripts, whatever you need without knowing how to write code. And that’s why I want to go into each one of these so you can see what I mean. Point number two, claude chat. Most people assume that it’s basically the same as Chad GPT. It’s not. First memory. Chad GBT holds a million token context window and you’ve got Claude saying the same. Here’s the deal. It’s not how big it is, it’s how it’s used. And Claud’s just stays sharper and more relevant where Chacht is just trying to play catch-up just throwing stuff at the wall. It’s like comparing engine types. You can have the same six liter engines, but they don’t work the same. The second is tonality. Just look at how chat GPT answers you. It’s literally like it just gives you an answer. Claude gives you something a sharp person on your team would have written. Why? It’s memory, its structure, the way it’s taught. For writing, it’s always been the best, but now it’s getting really good for framework strategy. Essentially, the voice control is on a completely different level for how it actually helps you. For example, at Martell Ventures, we have people applying all the time for investments. So, we have them fill out an intake form which has a bunch of data, revenue, team size, their struggles, their goals, everything. When we were using Tragedy to analyze that, all the insight was just surface level kind of stuff that any basic person could figure out. Claude found correlations between revenue ranges, pain points, and even brought up things that we didn’t even think to think about. A completely different analysis. And in simple terms, when you use clot versus GPT, it just feels more substantial, more polished, more more relevant. It’s like talking to a really smart person that can also explain themselves in very simple terms to make you feel smart. GPT just feels like it’s annoyed with you. And look, we’re going to dive into some really geeky stuff at the end of this video, and it can be a little overwhelming. So, if you want, I put together an AI cheat sheet that shows CEOs and their teams how to do twice the work in half the time. It’ll help you understand everything we’re about to talk about. So, if you want that, just DM me the word YouTube AI on Instagram and I’ll send it right over. All right, so Claude thinks better and it writes better. But what about when you’re working in your browser? That’s where Claude in Chrome comes in and it’s going to blow your mind. Point three is Claude in Chrome. Now, I know does it work in other browsers? They’re not supported yet. And honestly, Chrome’s the best one. So, just migrate yourself over to Chrome. This browser extension, which is very simple. Just go to the extensions, the browser, and just go install. Okay? And it’s going to ask you to connect to your Cloud account. Boom. You’re good to go. Essentially, this extension turns your browser into an AI powered workspace. Claude sits in this little tiny panel to the right and it sees what you see. It knows where you’re at. It knows what you’re doing. And you can ask it anything. You could have your email open and say, “Hey, process this thread of emails and tell me the TLDDR,” which means summary. You could be in Amazon and be like, “I need to turn on two-factor authentication cuz I heard security is a thing.” And ask it to do it. And it will navigate Amazon and do it for you. I even had it, this one’s going to blow your mind. Don’t tell my team. I had it go through all my Slack messages, find the ones I didn’t reply to, reply for me, save the replies in a spreadsheet so I could see what I said to the people because I was behind. I was gone for a week, but nobody noticed. Anything that’s in the browser, it knows how to do. Google Sheets, Google Docs, emails, notion, just watch it work. You want to do competitive research, it can do it. You want to pull pricing from other people, positioning, brand stuff, it can do it. Things, like I just said, used to be an afternoon worth of work that’s done in minutes automatically for you. They even have this crazy feature where you can record your workflow doing something. Let’s say it’s project management or it’s like managing your Slack channel or processing email and it’ll record what you’re doing and then it’ll document what you did into an SOP for other people to follow or you can have AI do it for you. And I’m going to show you visually in the teach section. No copy pasting, no switching apps. Now, let me show you how it works. So, let’s say you want to do some research on a competitor. I’m going to open up my competitor’s website and I’m going to click the extension icon and it’s going to show that panel. I’m going to prompt it with my voice because I use this tool called Whisper Flow because I like to talk to my AI. Pull the pricing, the features, and positioning from this page. Now, Claude reads the page, extracts everything, and organizes for you. What’s cool is you can even tell it to do it on two or more competitors, and then ask Claude to compile all three of those into a comparison sheet. You can even record the whole thing so that Claude knows how to do it step by step in the future, and it learns, and it repeats itself on its own. Can I just mention that that doesn’t cost you anything if you have an account? There are other tools you could use to do this. They’re going to charge you some money. This is free. Your team can use this. Imagine the productivity. If everybody used these kind of tools, they’d be what? Double more productive. Triple 5, 10x. It’s crazy. So, Chrome handles the browser. But what about everything on your computer? Your files, the apps, the workflows that happen off the web. That’s co-work. Claude chat is where you chat and it thinks with you, but it’s only going to reply if you prompt. Claude Co-works for you. It’s an agent that works on your actual computer, not in the browser, on your desktop. So that means it can open apps. It can organize files. It can pull information from multiple sources. It can open up a browser like I just showed you and get information, but pull all of that to then run that analysis locally. And they’ve even added a feature recently that lets you set it up on a schedule so it can run automatically. Think about all the work you do all throughout your day that you could just be like, set it and forget it. Have you ever seen that infomercial? the guy that makes the chicken with the air fryer and he’s like just set it and forget it. Set it and forget it. Set it and forget it. When I saw Club Co-work, I was like, “Oh, it’s like the chicken fry guy. Set it and forget it.” Boom. You’re going to feel guilty that you can take your whole afternoon off to go wake surf because you don’t have to do the work anymore. Let me tell you how crazy this can be. One of the things I do as a keynote speaker is create slides for my presentations. I have hundreds of slides I’ve done in the past. All I did was gave co-work access to that folder. It analyzed my slides and I asked it to create new slides for a new talk and all I gave it was the outline and it found the images and it put the words and it restructured because it had access to all my files. How much time do you spend trying to recreate systems, processes for your clients, for your team, when you have enough history for it to learn off of, and it can actually create a first draft that’s pretty freaking done all by itself. So, here’s a real example that you can do right now. Let’s say every Monday you’ve got to send a weekly update to your team, which most people have to do. You can tell co-work, I’m just going to use that little button here to listen to my voice, pull the latest updates from my project docs. And I let go. It knows how to read through your files. it can figure out what is a project doc and then you can tell it summarize the key updates and send a recap on Slack and then co-work writes the summary and just sends it. If you set it up in a schedule, that’s a 10-minute task that you never have to do ever again. You keep stacking those 10-minute tasks, all of a sudden you get 2, three hours back a day. Co-work. And here’s the big idea with AI. You don’t need to do the work, you need to direct it. Be the director, not the doer. All right, so this next one is for my technical friends, the people that like to be at the edge. For all the nerds out there, this one is insane. Point number five, Claude Code. Have you ever written a line of code? Cool part is it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to. Claude Code builds custom tools, websites, automations built exactly for your business. All you got to do to program it is describe with words what you want in plain English and Claude build it. You know how I said it was for the nerds? I lied. Anybody can do it. I’ve taught my 12-year-old son all the way to my 60-year-old CEO. He’s not 60. He loves when I say that. His name is Todd. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to a programmer to build these things that kind of fit and then you got to iterate and go back and forth, it just builds exactly what you need. And if it doesn’t, you just go, “Please change this. Please add this.” My favorite is, “It’s not working. Can you fix it?” And you’ll watch it debug itself. The crazy part is the people who built Cloud Code use Cloud Code to build itself. All my engineers that work for me at Martell Ventures, they’ve all chosen Claude Code. It is the best. It’s the cleanest. It’s got the best output, the best planning. You get to use the same power as my nerdy team to build whatever you want. And what makes this awesome is because they all live in the same ecosystem. You got chat in the Chrome browser extension and co-work and code. It all lives in that same place. So what I do is I go to chat for my ideation. Then I research stuff using Chrome and collect it. Then I execute any automation and co-working. Then I build custom tools in code. These are the foundations for you to have full autonomy to have it work for you so that you’re not doing this. I believe in this so much that recently I shut down my company for 2 days to teach everybody how to use cloud code. Literally a 100 people stopped working so I could teach them how to use this. I brought in people that could help them with the configuration. We built little teams. They chose problems in the business they wanted to solve. I watched every one of those teams build tools that almost automated their whole workload. The demos were crazy. The inspiration was high. And the best part is everybody left feeling confident that they were prepared for the future. And look, shutting down the company was a massive investment in time and productivity and just real cost, salary, labor, etc., and hiring people to come in and teach them. But I believe the output was massive, like a 3x improvement. Plus, we solved the biggest problems in the business in those two days. So, we get that benefit and we get the benefit of compounding growth over time. So, here’s an example that you can do right now. Let’s say you need a landing page. So, I just open up Cloud Code, which is another tab in the app. So, I’ve got chat, co-work, and code. So, I’m just going to hold down my whisper flow and I’ll say something like, “Build me a landing page for my coaching business. The offer is 12 weeks, and essentially it’s for business owners who want to buy back their time. Let’s say the price is $5,000. Include a headline, three benefits, testimonial section, and a sign up button.” Stop. Watch it cook. Claude builds a full page. And look, if I don’t like the way it looks, I just say, “Resign it. Make it look like Apple.” Enter. Now watch. It looks [ __ ] awesome. And you didn’t have to do anything. You didn’t have to mess with CSS and JavaScript and try to figure out how to host it or do any of that crazy stuff. And if you were to pay somebody to do this, it would cost you anywhere from $5 to $15,000. And the cool part is that if you’re like, what happens after the button they hit submit? You can just tell it, write the feature that allows the email to get captured and put into my email marketing tool. What email marketing tool? You tell me. Which one do you use? Do you want to use Mailchimp? It’s free. Cool. load it into Mailchimp. Learning to let go from the need of doing it and trusting the tool to go create for you is the opportunity for everybody. And if you still feel confused while it’s doing it, you can just tell it. Assume I am non-technical and I am confused, please tell me how you just did that and it will. So now you’ve seen the full picture. You’ve got chat, you’ve got the Chrome tool, you’ve got co-working code all there. But I know there’s something still holding you back. So, we got to fix that right now. Point number six, make the switch. You’re probably thinking to yourself, I have spent months in JBT. It knows my voice. It has my stuff. It knows my business. And I just don’t want to start over. Is it really that good, man? It takes 2 minutes to make that switch without losing any of that. So, you can just go into your settings, click capabilities, import memory from an AI provider, and hit start import. So then Claude gives you a pre-written prompt that you just got to copy. Then you go into Chad GPT or any other tool you’re using and you paste that prompt. So that’ll tell the AI how to pull out everything it knows. So then it’ll spit out everything about you, your preferences, your context, how you work. So you copy that output and then you go back into Claude and then you paste it into the text box and then you click add to memory. Done. Easy peasy. Everything your old AI learned about you, it’s all in there. And now you’ve got the power of Claude and all these tools at your disposal. So now you can start to use Claude without having to start from scratch. And if you want to see the power of Claude even further, here’s my pro tip. Just go to connectors, add your Gmail in Google Docs, and ask it to create a tone writing guide and save it as a skill. It’s this simple. Just write build a write like Dan. Insert your name skill from my last 50 cent emails and 10 recent Google Docs. Watch it do that. You’re like, “How does it know how to write like me?” It learned from your existing tools and then created its own skill. That’s a cla thing for another day. But just try it. Have some fun with it. It’ll change your

You’re procrastinating way too freaking much. You know it and I know it. So today we’re going to fix that. And look, it’s not because you’re lazy. It’s not because you don’t care. It’s because procrastination isn’t what you think it is. It’s actually two separate problems happening at the same time. And nobody teaches you how to solve either. I get it. I have pretty hardcore ADHD, which makes it pretty impossible for me to do anything without getting distracted. But despite all of that, I’ve been able to build a nine-figure empire and help thousands of other entrepreneurs do the exact same. And I can tell you, you don’t just beat procrastination with brute force. There are ways to hack your brain into being 10 times more productive, if not more. So, in this video, I’m going to show you why you keep getting distracted, how to eliminate those distractions, how to stay locked in once you’re actually doing the work, and how to permanently wire these systems into your brain so they run on autopilot. Starting with point number one, why you actually procrastinate in the first place. See, most people think distractions come from the outside. I’m talking emails and the pinging and the phone buzzing and Slack notifications going off. But that’s not true. The real problem is internal triggers. My friend Near Eel and author of Indistractible says that we reach for distractions to escape boredom, loneliness, fear, fatigue, uncertainty. We use these distractions that might make you think you’re productive, but you’re actually using them to keep yourself busy doing stuff that doesn’t do anything. People avoid things that might stress them out. But I remember Jeff Bezos said it. He says, “Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.” So the stress that you created by not doing the thing is where the stress came from versus just saying, “I got control over this. Let me do something with it.” So now that you understand the reasons behind distractions, we need to move forward. We need to figure out what all those distractions actually are so you can attack them. Which takes us to the next point. Point number two, signal versus noise. Steve Jobs used to talk about this idea of focusing on what really matters, which is signal, versus what really doesn’t, which is the noise. Signal in many ways follows the Prao principle, which is 20% of the work actually drives 80% of the results. The noise is everything else, and it falls into two categories. the busy work keeping you busy but doesn’t actually do anything or the distraction the vices the video games the talking with your friends for hours reading the news watching the sports games these are all things that just keep you distracted from actually getting the work done I remember I was running my first company I was busy working 100our weeks and then I hired a coach and my coach analyzed my calendar and when he looked at it he said hey did you know you spend 70% of your time in meetings that are just like getting updates and honestly you’re not producing any results. Sales, which drives revenue, was only 10% of my calendar. See, he could see the signal and all the noise, and I was pretending not to see it. But the truth was is that I was just allowing myself to be distracted because it felt productive. That’s why I always go back to a simple premise. If you show me your calendar and your bank account, I will show you what’s important to you. So, here’s what I want you to do right now. Go grab something to write with. It can be a blank piece of paper or pull out your phone and start a new note. But find something to write with. Number one, draw two columns. Just put a direct line down the middle of that page. One labeled signal, the other one labeled noise. The second thing is I want you to think about everything that you did in the last couple weeks and I want you to write it down on that piece of paper in those two columns. Is it either noise or it’s signal? So, what you’ll probably notice is you’ll have a lot of stuff in the noise column. And what you want to do is get most of your week to be in the signal column. I know a lot of business owners that are trying to scale past seven figures and they’re stuck in the noise. they can’t find their way out. That’s why I created my scale your business workbook. It teaches you how to buy back your time and get out of the noise. And if you want my step-by-step process, just find me on Instagram and message me the word scale YouTube and I’ll send it right over to you. So, now you know what you’re spending your time on when it comes to signal to noise. You can see exactly where you’re wasting time and you can probably diagnose some of the stuff in the noise column that you need to cut to get rid of. So, how do you actually do that? Point number three, eliminating distractions. The way we become more productive is first we have to make it difficult for you to get distracted and we have to break out the habits of defaulting to devices. So here are two ways you can do this. I call it the friction rule. Either we add friction to make it hard or we remove friction to make it work. So the first thing is we got to procrastinate the distraction itself. If you’re about to go open up Instagram and go doom scroll, I want you to at least make a commitment to yourself. And I know it sounds weird cuz you’re like, “Well, I was about to do it. How am I going to not do it?” I’m telling you, just give yourself 10 minutes. I’ll actually allow you to do it. If you can go, “Hey, I’m going to wait 10 minutes until I go and I doom scroll on Instagram cuz I really want to right now, but you put it off.” I guarantee you’re probably not going to want to do it. And the truth is, you’ll usually get back into momentum and you won’t even want the distraction anymore. You just got to create separation from impulse to reaction. If that doesn’t work, let’s add some friction. Let’s make it hard on yourself. It’s kind of like this fun game where I think about it’s easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it. See, most people are like, I’m going to have food in my house. And I’m like, well, then you’re going to want to eat that crap food versus if you take the food and you put it out of the house, then you got to get in your car to go buy the food you shouldn’t eat. That made it hard. See how that creates friction? I like to make it easy for me to make good decisions. So, I want to go to the gym in the morning. So, I prep all my clothes so that when I wake up, it’s sitting there. My shoes, my clothes. I pretty much told everybody, including my wife, I’m going to the gym in the morning, so there’s no way I’m not going to do it because everybody would see it. Everybody would know. You have to make it easy to make the right choices. So, the cool part is is now you’ve made it nearly impossible for you to get distracted or at least added some friction. But here’s where most people still get stuck. They sit down to work and nothing happens because they’re waiting for a spark of inspiration, something that might never come to them. Which brings us to point number four, building momentum. This is not what you think it is. See, first gear is usually easy to get into. Second gear is easier because you’re already in first gear. And then third gear is easier because now you’re in second gear and you have momentum. The higher you go, the smoother the shifts. Let me explain. When you’re driving a car and you got to put it into gear, there’s actually a lot of mechanical friction to do that, right? The first gear is always the hardest. Then you get going, the engine revs up. Second gear smoother. Keep going. The higher you go, the smoother the shifts. By the time you’re in third, fourth is way easier. If you go from zero to fourth, it doesn’t work. And then once you’re going fourth to fifth, you’ll barely notice because you’re already in momentum. And as a guy that literally drives his cars every day doing donuts, I know the power of mechanical momentum. And most people will wait until they’re motivated and inspired and feeling good about their situation before they even start and shift into first. You don’t need motivation. You don’t need inspiration. You don’t need to feel it. I say often times it’s feel the feelings. fly the plane. What you need is to start. And if you have the privilege of starting and being in momentum, and you know when you’re in it, stay in it. Fight to be in it. I think too many people give up their power of momentum to anybody that’s willing to distract them. They sell their dreams for cheap, cheap prices because they’d rather be distracted than be consistent. If you’re staring at a blank page, do anything. If you’re staring at yourself in the mirror, you don’t like what you see, go for a walk. You can start a diet halfway through a bag of chips and then you can build momentum. You can decide to start the business by calling anybody and ask them to buy something. That first sale means you’re now in business. Momentum is the key. The thing that stops people from winning in general is they don’t have clarity around what they want to do. So, step one, write down just the steps of doing what you know you’ve been avoiding. Even if you don’t make a commitment to doing it, try that. Then step two, pick anything that is a small task that you could do that takes less than two minutes. That’s called the mins, most important next step. Then if that felt good, do another one and then do another one and just start and build momentum and go from first gear to second gear to third gear. See, once you have clarity and you know what you could be doing and you take action and you get some results, then you feel good and you start to build and that is how we create and stay momentum. So oftent times I won’t even make a commitment to doing the project. I’ll just be like I’ll make a commitment to making a list of things I know that I got to do if I started the project. Then once I got the list I’m like okay maybe I can do one of those and then I do it and next thing I know I’m like I’ll do another one cuz that felt good. And then I do another one and then I’m like oo I’m getting some feedback. It’s feeling good. I can see where the finish line’s going to come from. And then I’m just like oh my gosh I can’t believe I thought I had to be motivated to even start. So now we got momentum. You’re in motion. But we got to make sure that you’re not just staying busy. We actually have to be efficient in what we’re doing. Which takes us to point number five, doing the work efficiently. That’s where I use Parkinson’s law, which states, “The work expands to fill the time you give it.” I can’t tell you how often people say to me, “Hey, man, I’ll give that to you by the end of the week.” And I go, “Why not Wednesday?” Well, I could do it Wednesday. All right. By when? End of the day. Why not noon? Yeah, I could probably do it by noon. Cool. what changed from the first time I asked for it to get done and me asking if you can get it done sooner. They’re like, I don’t know. It’s like, how about we do that to ourselves? So, I’m a big fan of saying, “What is aggressive but not impossible?” Because if you don’t, you will just take up as much time as you want to get the task done. It’s like when I go on vacation, the day before I leave, I get everything that are open loops done. Why? Because I know the next day I’m gone for a while. So, think about what’s the mindset you had before you went on vacation. How do you live your day that way? See, if there’s no date, there’s no priority. There’s no pressure. There’s no execution. So, what I’ve done is I’ve built a system on how to do that. And it comes in three parts. Here’s how we go about it step by step. One, we want to allocate specific amounts of time to finish the task and schedule it in the calendar. I’m talking a day of the week, a date in the calendar, and a time of day. This is called time blocking. And the reason I do this is that the more you do it, the more you’ll learn to estimate properly. Most people are always late because they don’t ever give themselves deadlines. So they don’t know if they overestimated or underestimated. The second thing is at the end of that time, schedule a meeting with somebody else or make a commitment to show somebody the work that you did during that time block. That’ll create a forcing function for you to get it done because you know right after you’re in another meeting or you promise to show somebody the work you’ve done so far. It basically creates a deadline you have to stick to. And then the third step is once I’ve committed to that time block, I like to break it into 25minute chunks which are called pomodoros. And then I have a timer that literally sits on my computer and it runs off every 25 minutes and I got to focus on whatever I wrote down I would get done in that 25 minutes and I get it done. This system creates a massive amounts of productivity and accountability because it gives you an efficient way to force you to focus to force you to stay in momentum to force you to get the thing done. So, now that we’ve eliminated all the distraction, we’ve built momentum, and we’ve learned how to work efficiently. Here’s the next thing. If you stop here, you’re going to have to keep fighting yourself every single day, forcing yourself to focus. It’s going to feel hard. It’s going to feel exhausting. So, the last step is to make it easy and permanent. Point number six, turning hacks into identity. I remember one time I was talking to Tony Robbins and he said the strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we’ve defined ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves is our identity. It’s our ego and us being consistent on how we see ourselves is crazy powerful. So the last step is to turn those habits into identity so you never have to think about them again. So for example, if I asked you how many times did you have to stop yourself from buying a vape when you’re driving home after work if you don’t vape? probably never. Why? Cuz you don’t vape. You have an identity of that’s not who I am. And eventually a habit like going to the gym becomes an identity. I’m an athlete and athletes go to the gym and athletes don’t order pizza for lunch and athletes are very consistent in their training and athletes have coaches. All of a sudden that identity drives your behaviors. And we want to do that for your productivity. When it becomes part of your identity, you don’t have to hack yourself anymore. I have an identity that I’m the kind of person that preps before a meeting, that gets done on time, that follows my calendar 100%. So, I don’t have to sit there and stress myself out trying to do these things because it’s who I am. So, here’s what I want you to do. First off, we’re going to write one sentence. I always And I want you to finish this with identity statements that essentially is empowering. If you think about the person who easily achieves the results that you do in your life, what do they always do? Do they always work efficiently? They always put stuff in their calendar. They always break things down easier. They always meet their deadlines. Write that down. And the second sentence is I never. And finish this with something that you no longer want to do or something you know that’s holding you back. Maybe it’s a vice. I never eat after 6:00 p.m. I never play video games. I never watch sports. I don’t know what it is for you. I know I just said some crazy stuff, but ask yourself, if I had to give up some short-term distractions for long-term dreams, what would those be? and write down I never and insert that there. What I always tell people is you have a 10.0 version of yourself that you could become and I think that person already exists. You just got to start acting like that person today. So the key is is to repeat those statements all the time until your brain believes it until it becomes identity until it becomes just who you are. So now you’ve got everything that I believe in avoiding the distractions to staying focused and building momentum. You just need to make a simple commitment. Just start.

I’ve spent over 1,000 hours inside Claude and I use it every single day to build tools, run workflows, and even launch million-dollar companies. And look, you might feel super productive using Cloud right now, but what if I told you you’re barely scratching the surface? In this video, I’m going to walk you through every level of Claude user from the amateur all the way to the one who builds fully autonomous systems that run without lifting a finger. Let’s start with level one, the amateur. See, the amateur treats Claude like a fancy Google search. One question in and a response back and then they close the tab. There’s no memory. There’s no projects. Claude has no idea what you’re working on and you’re using maybe 5% of what Claude can do. It’s like having access to a NASA supercomput and calculating 2 + 2. So, if you’re in this level, here are two pro tips to help you level up. Number one, make Claude interview you first. For example, you can tell Claude, “Before you answer, ask me any questions that you need to perform this task properly.” And watch it ask you the questions that provide the context that it needs to give you the best answer. The second thing is you got to make Claude check its own work. Watch it catch its own mistakes, which is annoying because you think it would do it in the first place, but it will give you a better output. You can use this every day by just saying, “Check your work.” Now, before we go to the next level, we have to stop working from scratch every time. So, how do you make Claude have persistent memory? Level two, the regular. The regular treats Claude like a workspace. They don’t just chat with it. They use projects, which is a feature within Claude, for their role. They use it per initiative. They use it per client. They’re using it per workflow. And what’s cool is Claude finally remembers who they are every time they come back. So, the work gets better. And this is how you set them up the right way. So, number one, on the left side, you will see create a new project. Click that and then name the project the role you work in. And in this example, we’ll just say marketing. Okay, that’s your role. Second, we need to build a master prompt for your role. So every time you chat with it, it knows who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish. Now, the cool part is you can ask Claude, type this in, interview me to build a master prompt for my role as a marketer. Watch Claude ask you questions, you answer it, and then you get a file. That is your master prompt. And what a master prompt is is a file of instructions that tells the AI everything about you. How you like to work, what your team looks like, what tools you use, everything about your role. So that every time it gives you an answer, it can use that information to guide its output. The third is we got to add the files. So now that we have the master prompt, let’s go back into the project, add that as a project file. than any other documents you have within your company. Maybe it’s sample data, maybe it’s examples, maybe it’s files, maybe it’s processes. Put that in the files directory with your master prompt. Now you have a customized space that has memory that has context and has your specific workflow for how you like to work. So for example, every time I sit down to create a YouTube video, I have a project folder to help me ideulate and give me outlines and strategies. In my files, I gave it everything that it would need. I gave it my voice document, my branding document, my examples of previous scripts that I like. It has everything that it needs to create outlines based on how I’ve done them in the past. And then I just direct it and then I hit enter and Claude gives me the outlines. Here’s a pro tip. If you want to take projects to another level, do this. Ask the AI to interview you to create a system prompt for a specific workflow that you’re trying to create with your chats. The master prompt is like your ingredients. That is everything about you, your context, etc. The system prompt is the recipe. It’s the instructions. It’s the process. So, you probably already have a process. You just never documented it. So, the AI can interview you so you get that as the output. So, once you get that, just copy and paste the system prompt into your custom instructions and watch this thing run like a machine. That way, you have the same quality, the same format every freaking time you use that project. And look, if you want to go even deeper on how to incorporate cloud or any AI into every department within your business, I have my AI company OS, the exact playbook I use to integrate AI into all my businesses, and I’m giving away for free. If you want it, just DM me, YouTube OS on Instagram, and I’ll send it over. So now your projects turn Claude into a workspace, like a desk with a process, and the whole thing’s automated. But what about everything else? Think emails, calendars, work you have to do in the browser. Level three, the integrator. The integrator plugs Claude into the tools where work actually lives. We use Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Slack, Notion. The integrator connects it to Claude, so they stop bouncing around from all these different tools and tabs. Why would I have to go copy and paste an email into Claude when I can just tell Claude to go get the email? The cool part now is that you can build an act inside Claude. The integrator doesn’t leave the tool. They do the work in the tool and then they send the information that the tool created to wherever it has to go. So here’s how you operate at the integrator level. Number one, we use connectors. Okay? So go through and connect your Gmail, your drive, your Slack, your notion, all the systems that you have. It has an ability for you to connect those data systems so that it’ll search those places next time you’re chatting with it. Two, build visualizations. This is my favorite feature in Cloud is that I can get it to visualize things. I can create graphs, bars, mockups all inside the chat. And even better, the third is build interactive artifacts. These are like little mini apps that you can have outputs that are clickable and sliders and buttons, and it makes learning or visualizing information or interacting with data so much easier. And here’s an advanced move that nobody talks about. You can actually paste text into chat and tell it to put it inside Composer, which is like a Google doc inside of chat. And then you can edit it and play with it so that it gets the output exactly like you want. My clock is connected to my Google Drive, to my Slack, to my calendar, to my email. So I tell it all the time, hey, look at my calendar. Tell me what I’m missing. Look at my email. Tell me what I need to know. I’m the CEO of my company. Scan Slack for the last week and give me CEO level understanding of what’s going on across the company. These are things that I run almost on a daily basis so I’m always on top of it. Now, if you want to level up with a pro tip, install Claude in Chrome. I use this all day long. Oftentimes, I’ll have a chat ask me to do something. I say, “Write the instructions for me.” I copy, I paste it into Claude inside of Chrome within some site, and I hit enter, and it goes and does my work for me. Now, this is all super cool, but the truth is Claude’s just helping you at this level. The next level, that’s where Claude actually does the work for us. Level four, the operator. The operator. This is where you stop being the doer and you start becoming the director. I consider this the human in the loop where the operator you are now setting up tasks that run on their own. You just review things and you approve it. This is where you stop using Claude and you start deploying it to solve problems for you. And these are three ways any operator can deploy Claude to do work for them. So number one is system prompts. Essentially, you want to have Claude interview you to create these system prompts for any type of output. So, I believe that the future of intellectual property and what makes teams or companies valuable is that they have system prompts defined for the things they create. Level two is skills. You will notice over time as you keep doing these things, these workflows, you can actually save them as skills. Claude has a bunch of skills that you can install. They’ve created hundreds, everything from financial skills and marketing skills, etc. But you might have some proprietary things you do inside your company. If so, you want to create a slash, name it, and run it and then make it a skill. My rule is if I’m doing it more than three times a week, I might as well have as a skill. For example, I’m always wondering what’s going on within my company. So, I created a company status skill that analyzes all the analytics and the metrics and the reports and everybody’s updates and then gives me a cute, concise little update on the company as it is today. So, I just type for/ company status and it does it every time. Third is scheduling co-work tasks. Now, if you haven’t heard of co-work, that’s an app that runs on your computer and it can literally take over your computer. So, you can get it to run a job like migrate from this system to another system, hit enter, go have dinner, come back and watch it get done. So, what a great operator does is he looks at his system prompts and he looks at his skills and he goes, “Hey, are these repeatable outputs that I can schedule and co-work to have it done every day?” So, for example, every night I get a message at 8:00 that shows me my following day and it looks at my emails and my calendar and lets me know everything I need to do as if I had a chief of staff and I do and she’s awesome. But I set it up cuz I don’t need her to do it. Then I know what tomorrow is going to hold. So, if I had to make any last minute changes, I can do it. I set it up once and it runs it every night and I never have to think about it. The operator realizes with AI, they direct the work. They don’t just do it. Now, this is a massive pro tip and it’s called chaining your skills. So, for example, you might have a copywriting skill that writes in your voice and then you’re writing emails, which is also its own skill, and it’ll use the copywriting skill. And those two skills might be called in a completely different skill that’s all about automating your inbox. And those skills are like separately packaged little genius agents that all chain together to create an outcome. The whole pipeline is chained skills. The operator is now really using AI. So, schedules and skills, those automate with your existing tools and connectors. But what if the tool doesn’t exist yet? Level five, the builder. Not too long ago, we shut down the company for 2 days. We held an AI hackathon. We taught everybody how to code. In those two days, everybody on the team became builders. Essentially, what you can do is use Claude to write code, build custom apps, dashboards, internal tools, all inside of Cloud Code. Now Claude isn’t just answering questions anymore or setting up skills. It’s literally shipping software. In this level, we’re introducing a new level of Claude called Claude Code. And just so you know, if you’re in this level already, you’re in the 0.04% of the population. Most people don’t know this. Inside Cloud Code, you can use three categories of building. The first one I called loops. These are reoccurring jobs that do work. They’re similar to co-work, but they run inside of a server and they can talk to other agents. They can talk to other systems, they can use other APIs, and they’re way more advanced, but they’re loops because they’re always running. Number two is tools. These are things you build for one-off situation. So, you might build a tool for a project. You might build a tool to help you accomplish something. It’s not going to be something you’re going to do forever, and that’s why I consider them disposable. The third level is apps. I’m talking real software. Everybody that was involved in that hackathon I talked about built real working production software. For example, I have this incredible person named Betty. She’s my house manager. She manages our lives for my wife and I. She built a system that manages all of our workflows, every aspect of my personal life, the cars, the real estate, the investments, the budgets, everything. And she’s not a programmer. In the world of AI, English is the new programming language. Now, if you want a pro tip, 100% of the time before I build anything, I use a feature called plan mode. Essentially, you hit forward/pl and then you just dump your idea. It hears everything you said and then it will ask you questions if it needs and then write a whole completed plan that you approve first before it writes any code. The reason why plan mode is so important is because people are always complaining, “Oh my gosh, Dan, it costs so much to do all these AI apps now.” It’s cuz they didn’t plan up front. If you do this, it’ll save you a ton of money. And another pro tip plus+ is cla code remote. And I use this every time I leave my laptop where in your terminal window where you’re writing code, you can say forward/ remote control and it will connect to your claude app on your phone. It keeps writing code. And I did this three or four times while I’m mountain biking on my phone. I’m writing code. And that is how I got this cuz I took a burm and my front tire washed out. Now, we just talked about how you build tools, but what if we could learn how to build team members? Level six, the agent orchestrator. The orchestrator is the agent you design that actually runs something. So now it’s a loop that keeps running a department, a process, a workflow, and you’re no longer involved cuz you took all these pieces we just talked about and you plugged it into the Claude agent. Now you’re the human on the loop, not the human in the loop. Claude stops being just the tool and it now becomes infrastructure. Now, there’s a million ways to build an agent, but instead of telling you how to build just one, I want to give you a framework to teach you how to think about building agents. First, you have to start with one main agent. This is your agent. It could be your chief of staff agent. It could be your admin agent. I’ve got a CEO agent. This is your orchestrator. Mine is called Kai. He doesn’t do anything really. He just directs the other agents. I know this is crazy. Next, you have to go and create specialized sub agents. And each sub agent owns a workflow. Your main agent communicates with the sub agents and tells them what to do. The third is you connect your telegram to talk to your agent through your phone. Reese is my real estate agent. He finds deals of investments that I can do. And Kai checks in with Ree every day and reports back to me because he does it with all my agents. All done without me having to do anything. The agents think, they decide, they execute within the parameters. See, we’re building the machine that runs the machine. Your main agent is that machine. Now, I use my own platform called Apex. You can go check it out, apex.host, but you can use Claude to do this. Actually, behind Apex, we use Claude as the main agent model. Apex just makes it more secure and way easier to interact with it. Now, here’s a pro tip. I have a critique agent that my main agent will ask to go and review things like copywriting or research or anything so that it’s done right. It creates a list of notes to make it better. Gives it back to the agent. It runs it again so I always get the best output. So now, do you see how I’m no longer involved in the work? I’m the human on the loop. My partnership with the AI allows me to do way more than if I was having to sit there and process information through a pipeline. And you can do this, too. Most people are just collecting cloud features. They’re like, “Oh, I use that. I use this.” But they don’t actually make it part of their habits. So, here’s what I need you to do. choose one of these features and make a commitment to do 30 days in a row of using it. Maybe it’s a cloud browser extension, maybe is advanced and say, “Okay, every day I’m going to work on an agent.” I don’t know what it is for you. Leave a comment below and let me know what you’re committed to. And remember, if you want my AI company OS playbook, the same one I use in all of my businesses, just DM me YouTube OS on Instagram and I’ll send it right over. And if you want to know the six most profitable AI businesses to start, click here and I’ll see you on the other

If you want to make real money, these are the four books you need to read. I’ve read over 1,900 books about money, business, mindset, and I’m also the author of a best-selling book. But these four are by far the ones that made me the most money. Now, before we get into the first book, we need a way to know whether a book is worth reading or if it’s just a waste of your time. I call it just in time versus just in case reading. I never read a book unless I know it’s a problem I’m having today. You see, rich people read the book that’s going to solve the problem that’s right in front of their face. Do you think Elon Musk is sitting there just reading books for fun? No. He’s like, “I got to make some new space material. I got to read all the books on just that topic. Stop reading just in case to entertain yourself. Start reading just in time to educate yourself. I study books. I don’t read them. I study a book. I get an idea. I apply it in real time.” See, studying means learn, do, teach. If you really want to study a book, follow that process. One thing that I learn and I apply is worth 10 times more than 10 books that I’ve read and finish and forget. So, now that we know how to identify a book and even assess if it’s worth reading, let’s get into book number one, The Goal by Ilia Goldrat. This is for the founder who has tried everything in their business to grow and still can’t figure out why their business won’t move forward. The theory of constraint is one of the most powerful frameworks to understand where the bottleneck is in the business. If you think of any process from left to right, you have things that are being done at each step. And if for whatever reason within that process there’s a bottleneck, there’s something that’s compressing the throughput, then the business can’t grow to its potential. Whenever I feel like the output, sales, customers, products, whatever I’m building, the output isn’t coming out as fast as I need it to, I always work my way up until I find waste. Because waste means there’s a lot of stuff happening before the people at the next stage can use that to actually move the throughput forward. What I love about this book is it argues that if you have a bottleneck, to increase your throughput, you have to take all your resources and attack the bottleneck. If I make cars and I have two chassis, 16 wheels, and one engine being made every day, what is my bottleneck? The engine. So, if somebody comes to me and says, “Hey, Dan, I have a way where we can double the wheel production from 16 to 32.” I would go, “Thank you. Not needed. Let’s make more engines.” Do you see how that works? The argument is that in any business, there is one problem, one bottleneck, one challenge that if you solve, it’ll increase the throughput of your business. And that’s what you should be focusing on. Focus stands for follow one course until successful. What’s the course? Theory of constraints tells you how to find it. If you haven’t heard of the algorithm by Elon Musk, he literally codified that into how he solves problems, how he builds businesses. Now, it’s one step within there, but the whole philosophy is that we have to figure out how to find where the limit is. The way you do that is you increase the amount of volume through the system to figure where the bottleneck is. And then it’ll make it obvious. Sometimes because a business is so small and things move so slow, it’s hard to find out where the real bottleneck is. You want to find it? Ask yourself this question. If I triple the amount of customers you have this month to next month, what breaks? Everybody that you know about in business uses this. Jeff Bezos makes this book required reading for all of his executives. It’s how they scaled Amazon Prime so that they could ship all these products for a subscription without having their whole operations collapse. With all that being said, here’s how you can find your bottleneck by using the theory of constraints. Number one, you got to map the flow of money in your business. Left side ideas, right side cash in your bank account. Think about that. And that is everything from an idea to build a product, to market the product, to talk to customers, to get them to give you money, to onboard the customers, to make sure they’re happy, make sure they buy more stuff. And that means money in your bank account. So map out all the steps. Now, I know most people watch this say, “Well, I have a marketing problem.” You may and you may not. You think that’s the bottleneck, but you might have a bigger problem. You might have an offer problem. And you’ll never figure this out if you don’t follow that step. Step two, find the steps where things are piling up. Like I said, ideas are a place where things pile up. If everybody on your team has all these awesome ideas, but nothing’s getting executed, then that might be where the bottleneck sits. dive into each one of these steps where you see things piling up and ask yourself, do I have a people problem, a process problem, or a profit problem? And then the third, most important, is you have to focus on this step until it’s fixed. Stay on the problem. Don’t move on the problem. Stay on it. I see people, they’re like, “I got a problem.” They muck around with it. They think it’s solved, and they move on. And guess what? Game of whack-a-ole. You’re playing a game of whack-a-ole in your business all the time. Bang, bang, bang. What’s broken? Can’t fix it. Why does it fix it? Stay on the problem. Operationalize the problem. Document it. Give it to somebody. Create a dashboard for the problem. Make sure it’s always green. Then you can move on from it. And look, I get it. You’re already like, “Dan, my to-do list is overflowing.” That’s why you need to have some support in your life. You need to get an executive assistant. And most people just don’t know what to give that person. So, if you want my internal playbook on how I manage my executive assistant and why I wrote my whole book, Buy Back Your Time, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube EA and I’ll send it right over to you. All right. So once you find your bottleneck, awesome, you’ve got a target. But most people start adding new things to try to fix the next bottleneck instead of removing the things. Which brings me to the second book, The Effective Executive by Peter Ducker. This book is one of my favorites. Yes, for entrepreneurs, but honestly, all executives, anybody that wants to be a high performer, anybody’s just trying to be more in their life. It is so good. It helps people that are ambitious deal with the world, the noise, the pressure, the distractions. As Ducker says often, effectiveness isn’t talent, it’s a habit. His core habit that he argues about non-stop in this book is you got to concentrate on a few things that produce outstanding results. Also known as leverage. And that means killing everything that doesn’t support moving forward. And that’s what Ducker calls abandonment. See, you can’t add focus. You can’t add more stuff. You will just get overwhelmed. You can only remove distractions. It stops you from doing the thing that’s going to get you results. The craziest example of this, I thought I was reading a typo when I read it, was when Elon decided to go allin on robotics and he calls up the team and says, “Hey, we’re going to shut down the Model S and Model X production line.” He stopped making a car to focus on what he knows is going to be the big idea. That’s crazy and awesome. So, let’s be inspired a little tiny bit by some of those brave decisions. Every founder I coach, I give them the exact same process. essentially make a list of everything you removed this year. Not the things you add. Everybody’s got that. It’s the business plan. They celebrate. The team knows about it. I’m curious. What did you stop doing? What did you say no to? What did you cut? Because I’m never impressed with people that just keep adding new ideas. I’m impressed with the person who says, “Hey, I think we should get rid of this because these things are actually not doing anything.” The person who can remove waste, subtract things from the business, and have the business continue to thrive, if not actually be more profitable and grow faster, that person in my life is highly rewarded. So, here’s what Ducker teaches in the book. Number one, we have to track our time. We got to figure out where are we spending our time. Most people think, “No, I worked on this all week. I worked on this all week.” And then it’s like, no. If you actually had a timer go off every 15 minutes and you wrote down what you did, you would forget that you spent seven hours mindlessly scrolling social media. Just saying. Once you know, you can’t hide from the fact of are you actually doing the work. The second thing is you cut ruthlessly. The 955 rule argues the same thing that Ducker talks about, which is that 5% of your activities are driving 95% of your result. Which means let’s find where are those 95% of the things that we just got to cut. And this is tough because people are like, “What are you saying? I got to say no to this person. I got to say no to that opportunity. I got to say no to having a coffee meeting or somebody picking my brain or a random introduction to somebody that I don’t know that a friend that I hardly know made an intro to me and I’m going to give up an hour of my calendar.” Yes, you’re going to have to do that. It’s not what you say yes to. It’s what you say no to that’s going to help you grow your life. Number three is now we have the big rocks. We have the big projects. Those are in our calendar. And I always say we got to honor that calendar. If it’s there, it’s for a reason. Do the work. Don’t get distracted. Turn off your notifications. Don’t let people walk by and do what I call gas meetings. Got a second meeting. Stop it. That’s why you have to batch your meetings of similar things or take like small tasks and put them into a block and really just execute against them. And the last one is asking yourself a powerful question. What’s the one thing and only the one thing that you can do today that actually matters? Now, I know you’re like, “But I got 14. What’s the one? But Dan, I can’t pick one. There’s too many. I got three. I got four. This is really important. No, there’s one one bottleneck. One thing. Do that first. That’s the 5% that’ll get you 95% of results. So, the effective executive will teach you how to remove things from your calendar. That’s awesome. Now you’ve got more time. The next book will tackle all the limiting beliefs that’s holding you back from starting the things you know you got to do. Book number three, Feeling is the Secret by Neville Goddard. Anybody in the mental, mindset, belief space knows this is the Bible. At least Neville. Neville is the OG. He’s written dozens of books. I’ve read them all. This for me is the one you got to read. His whole argument is that your income, your bank account, is a ceiling and it’s tied to your identity. And if you want to win, if you want to live up, you want your bank account to fill up, then you have to live in the feeling of what you want to show up in your life. Most people say all the things they don’t want. They don’t realize this. They’re like, “Well, I don’t have any money, and oh my gosh, I can’t pay for this, and this is costing too much.” And they don’t even hear themselves. If you can teach yourself how to rewire your identity, you will literally watch your whole life change around you. It’s wild to watch. I’ve helped so many people do this, and it all comes from Neville. You have to act like the person you want to be before you actually get any of it. I always tell these kids I mentor, you got Mr. Grumpy Face and you got Mr. Happy Face. Who do you think the world wants to see win? Grumpy Face. Happy face. Happy face wins. Grumpy Face is always wondering why Happy Face is doing better than him. In the book, there’s this great quote and it pretty much says, “The world is a mirror forever reflecting back to you that which you are within.” Goddard calls this framework living in the end. For years, I wrote down, I am an Iron Man. I am an Iron Man. I am an Iron Man. You got to understand when I was writing that 12 years ago, I hadn’t even ran a marathon. I couldn’t even swim. I never even went on one of them dinky bikes where you got to wear a bunch of spandex. But I just thought, what is the peak expression of health? Iron Man was that for me. I was trying to be the best version of myself. So, I wrote down I am an iron man for years before I ever even attempted anything that looked like a triathlon. But then one day, one conversation with my friend Nick turned my whole life upside down. And it started with a sprint triathlon to then an Olympic distance sprint to an Olympic distance triathlon. And next thing you know, I’m doing a half iron man to a full iron man. Now I’ve done seven iron mans. And it all started with the belief, the identity that I am an Iron Man. Can you make a commitment to who you are without any proof in the world that that is who you are? Some people will not understand this. People argue with me. Well, that makes no sense, Dan. That’s like that’s like you’re lying to yourself. People lie to themselves all day. All day. Notice that I didn’t say I will be an Iron Man. I wrote down I am an Iron Man. That I am statement is a powerful freaking tool. Cuz I know this. What you tell yourself in your mind, not out loud, will be what you live out in the real world. If you think you’re valuable, valuable things come to you. If you think you’re resourceful, you will be resourceful. If you think you deserve it, you will ask for it. Most people have no idea that the world isn’t as it is. The world is as you are. In his book, God calls this living in the end. And there’s six parts to it. Number one, we have to assume the feeling first. Everything is a byproduct of how we feel. If I told you there’s $10 million in your bank account, how you going to feel? Whoa, Dan just wired $10 million in my bank account. That feels great. That feeling, act like that today. The feeling comes first. The results come second. Second part, sleep is your most powerful tool. Now, don’t get me wrong, you lazy people out there, don’t go bed and be like, “Dad told me to go to sleep. I’m not going to wake up.” No. When you are about to fall asleep, your mind goes into this kind of like dream state. And I want you to plant in your subconscious before you pass out what you want. Fall asleep every night feeling as if it’s already done. Be in the energy. I visualize it. I know what I want to create my life. I’ve been there. By the time that future and my reality comes together, it will feel so familiar because I’ve been there a thousand times. Number three is you got to speak from the identity, not towards it. Drop the I want and I’m trying and start using language that says I am. We are not we will. It’d be nice. No, this is what I’m doing. Subtle, but it’s a gamecher. Not I want to be rich. Not I’m trying to be rich. Is I am rich. I am rich. You can decide to be rich right now. But I don’t have any money in my bank account. That’s okay. Rich is a feeling first. See how that works? Number four, your self-concept is the real lever. the outside world that you think is so important and other people’s opinion of you and how you’re living your life, those things are just a reflection of what you believe inside. So if you want to have the most power, the highest form of leverage, change that inner image first and the outside world will follow. Number five, the gap between assuming the identity and seeing the results is where most people quit. Most people try and try and try and after 3 weeks they give up. And then there’s the people that just seem to magically make things happen and people go, “Oh my god, they’re so lucky.” No, they won in the quiet battles. When nobody else was around, they won those battles those days. Think of it this way. Winners failed more than losers. They just tried one more time. You just have to persist without evidence. And the last one, number six, is live in the wish fulfilled. Don’t imagine getting there. Imagine being there. And how would you live in that energy? If you actually believe you have a million dollars in bank account, I guarantee you’re going to walk down the street with a little pep to your step. You’re going to be shaking people’s hand with a little bit more confidence. You’re going to be in meetings. I got an idea. Why all of a sudden you feel so confident about your idea? I got $10 million in my bank account, so I don’t need you to care about my idea. See how you will have this quiet confidence when you start acting from that place. If you do those, it’ll change everything external, but it starts internal. Now, these three books, they’re great. This will get you going. They’ll help you find the bottlenecks. They’ll get rid of the distractions, and now you start living from this like elevated identity. But I genuinely believe this next book might be the most important of them all. Number four, Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy. This is not just for business owners. This is for everyone who is wondering why things aren’t going their way. Murphy’s a cool dude. He reminds me of myself where he like did the business stuff but then studied the elite performers and started to find the patterns. When he studied 20 years of the top performers and he realized there’s some people that had all the skills, high achievers and didn’t win. And then there’s a people that had that and actually won at the highest levels. The people that failed, they gripped too hard on their life. The ones that won realized it wasn’t about that. It was about letting go. What Jim realized is that the harder you chase the outcome, the worse you perform. the more pressure you put on. You’ve probably experienced this, right? You like know you got to give a talk and you’re like in your head about this talk and you’re like, “Oh my god, if I suck, everybody’s going to know and then you like start stumbling across your words and you’re in your head and then you can’t figure it out.” And then all of a sudden whatever you were worried about came true. It’s kind of crazy. Versus when you go sit down and have a coffee with a friend, do you stress out? What’s the difference? I’m pretty sure you don’t put a lot of pressure on having a conversation with a friend. What happens is you got to focus on your inputs. What you put in, the intention, the prep, the doing, the practice, the outcomes, the results, those are the byproduct of the inputs. The private victories are what’s celebrated in public, but nobody sees the private victories. That’s what you can control. The fix isn’t trying harder and holding on and trying to control. It’s actually letting go of what you can’t control. When I think of that book, these are the three biggest lessons that I took away that’s allowed me to find another gear. Number one is know your ideal performance state, your IPS. This is knowing when you performed great, what was true, what state did you get in? You got to get clear on exactly how you want to feel, when you perform, and how you do it. Before I come in and I shoot, the team and I have a checklist. You think I just like come in here and stand in front of a camera and blah blah blah blah blah and I just mouth off? No. There’s a process. Turn our phones off. We talk about what I’m going to talk about. We get a pump in. We hydrate. We make sure that the energy is set way before I start talking. If you feel good, you will play good. Second is you got to train the heart, not just the mind. I learned a long time ago that your subconscious things you’re not even aware of. It runs your performance. Like, did you ask your heart to beat right now or did it just magically beat? You can have that same effect on your life. It’s not logic or willpower. It’s literally your heart. You can train it to be fully engaged in the process and at the same time be completely unattached to the outcome. As Rahm Doss wrote about often, it’s being involved and unattached. The third is you got to redefine success. Your only goal should just be about giving your best, being present, and being grateful and control what you can control. And everything else, let it be. If the weather changes, it is what it is. If people don’t show up the way you want them to, it is what it is. I can’t control how other people are. I just go, did I show up? Did I do the work? And then the scoreboard’s going to be what it’s going to be. Most people define their success and their worth on the outcomes that they create. What they should be looking at is the inputs that created those outcomes and celebrate those whether the outcomes come or not. You can’t control that. You can only control those inputs and that puts you in control. This is a total game changer not just for business owners, but anybody that wants to be an even higher achiever. So here’s the deal. I gave you four incredible books that impacted my life in a deep and powerful way. And all I need from you is one thing. I need you to make a commitment. I need to know out of the four which one are you most likely to read. I’m not even saying to buy it. I’m just saying which one speaks your heart the most and leave a comment below. Now, if you want to take it to another level, you buy the book, you start reading it. But again, just in time versus just in case. If it’s not the one you should be reading right now, stay with what you got. I care more that that is what you’re doing. that you just buy these books and collect them in some pile that you might be already doing. The winners aren’t the ones that finish the book. They’re the ones who apply what they read. They study the book. They execute against the book. I have a sign above my door. It says, “Default to action.” I don’t care that people just consume knowledge. I care that they take action.

I’m going to show you how to invest your money to turn cash into more cash. And it doesn’t matter how much experience you have, the rules are the same. After building and exiting three companies, becoming a multi-millionaire at 28, and voted number one angel investor in Canada, here’s what I’ve learned. Rich people don’t start with stocks. There’s actually two more stages before that that most people completely skip, and that’s what keeps them broke. Starting with stage one, trade your time. There’s only two things you can trade to get more money. Time and money. When you’re young, you invest your time. You got all the time in the world. You get around mentors. You show up. You work late. You stack skills. You build reps. Essentially, you use your time to invest in you to get a return. Time is the first resource you ever have. You can waste it or you can invest it. Dude, when I didn’t have all the money, I used my drive time to learn, listen to audiobooks. I got around other people that were smarter and I got curious and quiet and I executed so they’d want to pour more into me. I took on projects where I didn’t necessarily get paid a lot so that I could get exposed to bigger ideas. I took my time and I put myself in a place where the time got me a return. You can make decent money trading your time, but eventually you’re going to hit a wall because you won’t have a shortage of money. That’ll start to pile up, but you will have a shortage of time. Stage two, buy back your time. Think about it. When I hire a stock broker to invest for me, I’m buying their expertise to invest in a market that I don’t have to go learn so that I can get the return without doing the time. Warren Buffett is literally deploying billions of dollars into companies and he’s buying all that time it took to build that company using his money. One of the best ways to figure out where to buy back your time is using a process I call the buyback loop. The first thing we have to do is audit our calendar. We have to look at everything we’ve done over the last two weeks and really write it down. Then you highlight everything in green that lights you up, everything in red that takes your energy, and then yellow is kind of mediocre. And right next to it, I write down, is this a $1 sign cheap to pay somebody else to do for me, or is it a $4 sign if I had to pay somebody to do things at my level? Then you grab everything that is a$1 or $2 sign in cost that’s red or yellow and you make a bucket, and you put it in a bucket. What you do with that bucket is to transfer your task. Delegate the red stuff, the yellow stuff, the low value stuff to anybody else. So you want to invest your money to get all those things out of your calendar to other people so that you can go to three, which is fill your time with high leverage work. These are the things that light you up that make you a ton of money. For most people, these are revenue generating activities, things when you’re out there talking to people, talking to customers, understanding the product, the innovation. It’s not getting bogged down in emails and scheduling and purchasing stuff that other people could easily do for you. You see, in business, you don’t want to just hire people to grow your business. You want to hire people to buy back your time so that you end up not overwhelming yourself and you can make more money. I have two incredible people in my life. Ann, who is my executive assistant now chief of staff, she handles everything, my calendar, my appointments, my emails, all the interactions with different people in my life. She essentially manages the professional side. Then I have Betty who manages our house, all my real estate, all my vehicles, and she reports to Ann. Those two people buy me literally 100 hours a week that allows me to invest my time in things that make me millions of dollars. And look, if you’re hiring an executive assistant, but have no idea how to work with them. I have a complete EA playbook that teaches everything. It’s what I use with my assistant. Every template, every workflow, everything my EA uses daily. If you want it, just go to Instagram, Dan Martell, and DM me the word YouTube EA, and I’ll send it right over. People will say to me like, Dan, I can just do this better myself. I say, of course you can. The problem is is that you’ll always be stuck being the person that can do this. You never learn how to work through somebody. The next level for most people is actually learning to let go. See, most people like to spend time to save money. I will drive 20 minutes out of the way to save 3 cents on gas. I like to spend money to save time. And because I’m a good time trader, it’s why I’ve been able to create the wealth in my life. So, now that you bought back your time, we can move on to stage three. Let your money work for you. I just learned this simple concept when I was young that I need to get my money to do the work where it makes me enough money where I don’t have to work. See, most people start here cuz they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. And that’s why they stay stuck. They start investing in funds and stocks and real estate because they got a little extra money and they want to feel rich. So, now I’m investing. The problem is is they’re not good enough yet. And even if they’re good enough, they haven’t learned how to buy back their time. And that’s why they stay stuck. Now we’re ready to have our money make money for us. See, the 1% don’t get rich from stocks. They got rich from stage two. They got rich from understanding how to buy back their time so they can make more money so they have a lot of money to invest in things where they have equity, where they own things. When I was in my mid20s and I started to pile up my cash, I realized that I had enough money to invest in other businesses. And that’s when I became an angel investor. One of those deals, for example, was a company called Intercom. So, the founder shows up at our office. I’d met him at an event. He shows me this new product. I think it’s cool. I’ve got money saved up to make those kind of investments. He’s telling me he’s going to meet with Marissa Mayor from Google and Jack from Twitter. So, I invest. That company became a multi-billion dollar company. And when you ask me how much time I put in, the answer is none. I deployed my money, my money grew, and I got really good at making those investments. That’s why I became the number one angel investor in Canada because I bought back my time to learn the skills to find the entrepreneurs to invest in that allowed me to have my money work for me. I’ve learned that having money in a bank account doing nothing for me is not how I get my money to work for me. And what my job is is being a professional capital allocator. I got money. I want to allocate it. What do you got? Here’s my portfolio. Here’s what I know. I stick to what I know and I put my money to work. To me, dollars are like little potential workers that need to be put to work. If you leave them in your bank account cuz you’re like, “Oh, this feels safe.” They’re not working for you. There should not be money just sitting around waiting. Waiting, yes, to be put to work, but not just like lazily hoarding it up. When you get to this stage, here’s a few things that I think about to make sure I know where to put my money. First, I like to invest in what I know. My new philosophy is unless I have an unfair advantage investing in something because of my background experience, I’m not going to do it. I either put my money into boring investments like the S&P through an index fund with low fees or I invest in software in technology cuz that’s what I know. I remember one of my mentors said to me, he said, “Dan, making money is easy. Keeping it is hard. When you get a lot of money, take half, put that in the don’ting lose it pile and the rest of it, that’s what you get to reinvest in yourself, in your business, in growing things.” You know, you want to hear a good story? This is hilarious. I’m not an idiot, but sometimes I can act like one. Guy comes to me and he’s like, “Hey, I got this investment where if you invest in medical supplies through this nonprofit, we can give you a triple return receipt on your money to write off on your taxes.” And I was like, I hate taxes. Tell me all about it. And he even brought me to a seminar. And I went to this seminar and there’s 100 people in the room and they’re talking about this investment strategy and here’s how it works and then we give you this. So, we did it. Seven years later, I ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes because I listened to somebody explain something I couldn’t explain. So, make sure that you can explain your investments in one simple sentence to somebody that doesn’t know a lot. If it’s too complicated, stay away from it. The second is the investment has to always be true. See, if you’re always chasing fads, you will get burned by the fads cuz essentially all you’re doing is playing a lottery game. I’m a software guy. I’m an innovation guy. I look for where the future is going. But in my decisions to invest, I’m still following the human part of it. I’m not sitting here going like, “Oh, I think in the future humans won’t talk to each other. I think they’ll just beam things through their brain.” That might happen. But if I’m investing today, I’m not investing at that level. I’m investing in things that are aligned, right? What will humans always need? They’ll always need housing. They’ll always need food. They’ll always need experiences. They’ll always need clothing. These are things that will always be true. They might change in the vehicle that it’s delivered, right? It used to be delivered on a horse, then a car, and now it’s over the internet. But humans will always buy stuff. Those are like the fundamentals. And then the third is play the long game. If somebody came to me and said, “Hey man, I can make you 10x on your money in the next 6 months.” I say, “Cool, no thanks.” They’re like, “But don’t you want to know how to get rich?” Good news is I’m already rich by not playing that [  ] game. I like to play long games. If I’m going to invest my money, I want it to make me a lot of money over a long period of time. Why? Cuz then I’m saving my time. I know some people that actively manage their portfolio that do worse than managers and they lie to themselves and they’re spending all their times refreshing, checking the stock, doing this. I’m like, bro, why don’t you go do the thing that makes you the most money and put your money in this thing that averages 10, 12% a year and has for 100 years and go stock more cash into the vehicle. Don’t play short-term games, especially short-term people. All right, stage one is where you got your money. Stage two is where you bought back your time. Stage three is where you put your money to work. And stage four is where you build real wealth. Stage four, own the thing. One of my early mentors when I moved to San Francisco, this guy named Naval Ravocant told me this and was very clear. Wealth is created by owning things. Wealth is not created by working. You can’t work enough hours to create the kind of wealth that anybody in Silicon Valley was talking about. You have to get there by owning equity. Now, you either own equity in the business that you built or you own equity in other companies like we talked about in the last stage. The stock market may get you 10% a year and it may even make you a millionaire, but it’s not going to get you to the point where you can do anything with anybody at any time. That is rarified air and that’s what I’m talking about. How many people do you know that invested in the stock market and still aren’t rich, aren’t free, and many of them had to go back to work because the market went like this right when they’re about to retire? I know a lot of 70-year-old people that are still working because they thought the market was going to solve the problem for them. You can become a millionaire investing in the stock market. Cool. But if you want to get to a place where you have millions of dollars being generated every month when you’re not working, you have to own your own thing. You have to own equity in other people’s things. See, rich people don’t rent wealth. They own it. If you look at the Forbes list, 100% of them made that money because they own the business they were in and then they took the cash and they invested in other businesses that they also own. Because equity is the only asset where the upside is uncapped. Even in real estate, when people buy a building, they’re like, “Hey, I bought a 32 unit multif family building.” Cool. Guess what? You can’t make it do more. Sure, you can do some value ads. Sure, you can get some reasonzoning. Sure, you can try to squeeze as much as you can. Sure, there’s some tax benefit. But at the end of the day, a business that’s growing without you there can grow as big as it possibly can. My dad doesn’t understand why I still do what I do because his perspective is that if you show up, you work. He doesn’t know how I work. So every time I’ve sold a company, he thought, “Okay, you’re going to retire. Okay, you’re going to retire. Okay, why are you still creating?” Because he doesn’t understand what I just shared with you guys is that I’ve used my money to invest in people. So the companies I’m involved in, I don’t operate them. I’ve taken my money to invest it in things I know because I will bet on me every day all day more than some money manager in the market. So yes, 50% of my money. Don’t [  ] lose it. I have a great team. They battle test it. Legal, insurance, and infrastructure and all that stuff, tax, capital gains, awesome. Don’t [ __ ] lose my money over here. I invest in me. I invest in the people. I invest in my companies. I invest in things that I own where the equity continues to roll in and grow a lot faster. So if you’re good at something and you know how to do something, not investing in that more align other people around it, that ecosystem is a huge missed opportunity. And that’s why I’ve built Martell Ventures. Essentially, it’s a studio for me to build tools like Apex that helps me build other tools within Martell Ventures and the whole ecosystem of talent and people in my world. I get a place to go create with them. For me, that is my empire. When I wrote in my book, Buy Back Your Time, Build Your Empire, that’s what I meant. There’s a world where you could create for yourself that you almost feel guilty for how you interact and work with the people because everybody’s amazing. Everybody’s building something. And from an equity point of view, you have big pieces in each one of those. If you haven’t watched my video on how I’m building a billion-dollar company, go check it out. I show you the people, the process, the whole thing. I’m building it in public. The best investment I’ve ever made wasn’t a stock. It wasn’t real estate. It was building a company I could sell. Even if I never wanted to sell it, a company that I could sell is a great company to run. And maybe your next stage is hiring that person to help you run it so that you can go work on bigger things. So don’t just graduate from one stage and get really good at making money or the next stage and buy back your time and then chilling out on a beach. Stack all four. Each stage feeds the next one. And the higher you go, the bigger the swings. Now, if you’re still trying to make some money, let me share this with you. Your bank account is a lagging indicator of who you are, what you believe you’re capable of, what you believe you’re worth, right? And you’ll never get what you want. You get who you are. And if you don’t realize that you got to become the person first, the person that believes it, then the money will never catch up. So understand these are tactics and strategies, but the best way to invest is by looking at the person in the mirror.

The top 1% don’t build wealth by waking up early or working hard. They build it by having a completely different mental model that allows them to turn cash into more cash. I became a multi-millionaire at 28. I’m building a venture studio on track to be worth a billion dollars. And these are the exact strategies that have helped me build real wealth. Starting with number one, change your identity. If you have two people in the same scenario, one believes they deserve, the other one doesn’t. This one asks for opportunity. This person never speaks up. This one gets opportunity. This one never does. It’s that simple. It’s how you see the value you bring to the world. And do you feel worthy of it? And that is identity. No amount of tactics, strategies, courses, podcasts, YouTube videos is going to fix that. The 1% know they deserve to be rich. Have you ever met a rich person that didn’t have some level of confidence? And when you realize that you don’t get what you want, you get who you are. The whole thing unlocks. This is the foundation. But now we need to build on that. So you have to unlearn the things that have killed wealth for 99% of the people. Number two, stop hoarding cash. Most people hoard money. They’re like professional collectors. And I can speak cuz I used to be one of those. Remember one time I woke up and I realized that even the coffee points that I had collected going to the same coffee place, I never used them. I never traded them in for free coffee ever. I like made it a game and I just like save it and save it. Money should flow into you and then back out to do things that help you improve your life. Buying back your time, investing in your business, saving your money in stock so that the money keeps growing. If you act like you’re protecting your money as like this sacred pile of cash, then there’s no room for more money to come in. And I’ve seen this over. People are so stingy and they don’t realize that stingy mentality is telling the rest of the world they’re not ready to receive more. Once you decide to stop hoarding and start deploying it, you then have to ask yourself the question is, what task should I deploy dollars to? And the best place to start is what I call the buyback rate. First, you need to take your yearly income, how much money you make, divide that by 2,000. That will give you your hourly rate. And it’s 2,000 because that’s the average amount of hours a person will work per year. Second is we divide that number by four because we want to make sure that we get a four times ROI on our dollar deployed, right? So we don’t take how much we make because that doesn’t make sense. Instead, we divide it by four so that if I pay a dollar for something, I’m getting $4 back worth of value. That’s your buyback rate. And the final one, number three, is anything underneath that amount, you should delegate it immediately. The other day, I was working with my buddy Jake, young guy, super motivated, one of my companies, and I was like, “Hey man, let’s meet up in a couple hours and we’ll talk through that.” and he’s like, “Hey, I kind of get home. It’s 3 weeks now. I haven’t done my laundry and I really got to get some stuff done.” I didn’t say anything, but the next morning I said, “Hey, bro. Can I remind you that you make a couple hundred thousand a year and that you should probably be doing wash and fold instead of not meeting with me to move your dreams forward?” And then the next day, he not only found somebody to help with the laundry, he found somebody to help with his house and all of his errands because he knew the best dollar to deploy was in those low value things that other people could do. So, he had the time to actually do the things only he could do. It reminds me of my best friend growing up. His dad grew up with parents that taught him that cash is cash is cash is cash. So what did he do? He built a business that was all cash and then he hid the cash in the walls of his house. He put the money in the wall because he thought that’s the best place to save his cash. Then one day my friend calls me to tell me that his house is on fire. Yes, his dad lost all that money. Now, this has nothing to do with hoarding cash, but it has to do with the mentality around money. I look at it like this. You want to have your money out in the world doing things for you, like little worker bees trying to go and collect more for you. And look, 90% of the time, the first task that you’ll get off your plate are admin tasks. The problem is is most people don’t know what to give to an admin. So, if you want my internal executive assistant playbook, it has every template, every SOP, every workflow that my EA uses daily, it’s all in there for you. Just find me on Instagram and message me the word YouTube EA and I’ll send it right over to you. Okay, so now that you’ve bought back some time, awesome. But we got to take things to another level. Which leads me to my next point. Number three, expand your time horizon. The big thinkers, the real wealthy people, they think in long periods of time. You can actually audit yourself. Listen to the conversations you have. Do you talk about what you’re creating or what you’re doing? And unfortunately, most people never think about this because real wealth doesn’t get built in one-time shots. They get built in a way that it compounds. And compounding only works if you look at things over a long period of time. See, most people quit after 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years. The top 1% are in this game for a decade, 15, 20 years. That’s the gap. The other day, I was talking to a new friend named Peter. He’s 88. I’m 46. Peter has built an incredible life and a career and a just a resume that’s impressive. And I’m thinking to myself, hey, if I only get to 88, I got another 42 years of building. Do you see how different that is? In 42 years, what could you create? If you gave yourself a time horizon that was 10 years, 25 years, 42 years, how big of an impact could you have? And now we know how to focus on the right things. We have to do them for longer periods of time. It’s like my YouTube channel. Over 11 years ago when I started, I made a commitment to myself to do this for a decade. So when people look at my YouTube channel today and they see almost 3 million followers, they think, “Oh my gosh, you grew so fast.” They don’t realize that this is 10 plus years of effort and focus and dedication. And the crazy part, it was kind of flat for the longest time, 8 years. It was only in the last 3 years that it went pew. So here’s what you can do to start practicing thinking in longer time horizons. First thing you have to do is write a 25-year vision for yourself. The challenge most people have with this is that they feel greedy wanting more. They feel that having a vision 25 years that is massive means that they can’t appreciate what they have. That’s not the case. I want you to pretend like you couldn’t fail. I want you to pretend like you had all the resources. I want you to pretend like you could wave a magic wand and get whatever you want. What would you want to commit, dedicate, invest 25 years of your life to? My rule is if you can’t describe your future to the same level of specificity as you can describe your current reality, the room you’re in right now, then you don’t really have a true vision. And the good news is is you don’t have to be right. You just have to have one done so that you can have direction. Then we have to build what I call a work backwards plan. We go from 25 years to 10 years to 3 years to 1 year to this quarter. And each thing points and builds upon itself. So there’s some level of sequencing. the end of the day, if you want to be worth a billion, you got to first start by being worth 100 thousand and then a million and then 10 and then a 100. But if you actually stack it that way, it doesn’t seem so daunting. Step three is we got to pick our mins, okay? Which stands for most important next step. See, everybody gets overwhelmed. I got too much to do. I don’t even know where I’d start. How about we just start with one single action that unlocks everything else? Like if you wanted to start dating, maybe the reason you’re not doing that is because you don’t have a haircut. So maybe the first thing you should do is go schedule a haircut. Maybe you’re like, I really want to start being an entrepreneur. What do I need to do? Maybe you go ask a stranger to buy something from you. Maybe you have some services you could offer. One customer getting you paid starts the process. That could be the most important next step. And finally, we have to do it in the next 48 hours. JFDI style. Just [  ] do it. Above my door in big letters, it says default to action. My rule is if it speaks to your heart and your soul, don’t let your brain over complicate it. take action before you commit yourself not to do it. And the people that win in life just stay with things longer than they think they should. They don’t give up. They don’t pretend like, “Oh, it’s not working after 7 days.” Do you know that most podcasts only have nine episodes? Nine episodes. Their dreams were bought from them from a lack of discipline with nine episodes. They did all the heavy lifting to start. They actually got to three episodes and six episodes and then nine episodes and then just decided at 9, oh, this feels like work. No [  ] and they stop. And then they see the Chris Williamsons and the [  ] Cassidy Warren and the Joe Rogan’s and they go like, “How did those people build these brands?” They didn’t stop and they went longer than they thought. All right, so we’ve rewired our identity. We’ve deployed dollars to buy back our time. And now we’ve also stretched our time horizon so we start operating like the best in the world. But there’s one final shift that matters more than anything we’ve talked about so far. Die empty. When I say wealth, I actually don’t just mean money. I mean rich. I mean a rich life, rich relationships, rich environment, the whole thing. So what’s the point of having money if it dies with you? Why wouldn’t you take the money to invest it in the experiences into the people in your community while you’re alive? Some people go on this like legacy thing where they’re like, “Yeah, when I die, I’m going to give all this money to people. [  ] that.” Why wouldn’t you want to be there when you give the money to the person? Why wouldn’t you want to commit yourself, your time, your energy, your resources, your relationships to the people you want to help? I feel like I am the steward of a resource. It doesn’t matter if it’s money, time, or people, their attention, your attention. And it’s my responsibility to deploy it, to give it back, to use it in a way that helps other people. If you stop making it about yourself and hoarding and you start making it about other people, your whole life will change. Most people will never get truly wealthy because they don’t want to see other people get wealthy. It’s like one of my clients I was coaching one time, this guy named Tom. I said, “Tom, go out there and build that 25-year-old vision. Make it a picture. Show it to me. Be detailed.” And he brought it back and here’s a photo of all the stuff, the yachts, the planes, the cars, and no people. What the Tom? Where are the people? Where are the bazillionaires that you made? Well, what do you mean? If you’re worth a billion, there’s got to be people around you that are worth 10 million that you help create that for because if not, you’re always going to be the person working so hard. So, it’s actually really smart to think to yourself, how many people can help get rich. I always say that I want to die empty. And what I mean by that is that when I’m done, when I take my last breath, I want to know that I use the resources I’ve accumulated to live the richest life possible. When I think back to when I was 14 and I need to get a haircut and my dad gave me 20 bucks and instead of going and get a haircut, I walk by a homeless person. I give him the 20 bucks. And my dad watches me do this and he goes, “Why would you give the money to the person? I just gave it to you to get a haircut.” And I said, “Because dad, I know you’ll give me another 20 bucks.” That person needed it more than I did. And that for me always felt like the right thing to do. If I’ve been gifted with skills and the ability to generate income, then I should take some of that to help other people around me. Other people showed up in my life, they didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to show up and support me and and put up with my [ __ ] As a teenager, I wasing wild. If I didn’t have that 20 bucks when that was all I had, I knew I wouldn’t give more when I had more. See, most people are like, I will help other people when I have more to give. And I’m saying, you got stuff today. And if you don’t help when you got a little, you’re not going to help when you got a lot. And for me, I just honor that. I honor the people that wake up every day to help other people. And if my contribution to that is my time, my influence, my income, then so be it. But I will tell you, you will live a rich, a wealthy life if you build that habit. So here’s how I recommend you build a habit of giving away from the beginning. Pick a number. I don’t know if it’s 1% cuz you’re feeling a little scared or it’s 10% because you’re feeling brave, but some number of your monthly income should be given to other people. and not the extra cuz you’ll always spend the extra of the topline number you take in. And then two, pick a specific cause. And again, if you don’t have money, you can show up with your time, but think about the people that are serving the folks that you once were. If you came from a place where you had challenges, who are the people that are helping those that were essentially you when you found yourself in your darkest times? People always ask me, Dan, how do I find my purpose? I’ll tell you where it is. It sits right next to the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through in your life and it’s uniquely yours. And if you wake up every day committed to giving whatever you make a percentage to people or organizations are helping those folks that was once like you, you will see yourself light on fire to go accumulate and create more because now you have more to give those people. And number three is you got to give before you’re ready. Don’t wait till you have. You have to give when it feels hard, when it is scary, when people are like, “Oh, I don’t know why you involved yourself in that organization.” No, I’m doing it today because I’m starting. I’m building the foundation for the future. And it also tells yourself that that’s just proof that you’ve built that new identity. Right? If you don’t decide you’re a giver and when you give, you get back and you start doubling down on that identity by your actions, you’re just never going to build the abundance mindset that’s needed to actually create real wealth. See, 99% of people that just get rich, they wait to get rich before they give. The top 1% become rich because they give. Whatever you want out of life, if you help other people get it, you will get more of it. Okay? If you want more money, help other people get more money. You want more health, help other people get healthier. You want deeper loving relationships, guess what you should do? Help other people find get deeper loving relationships. Die empty by giving everything you have. The reason I’m so passionate about this topic is I learned a long time ago, you weren’t born broke. You weren’t born blocked. When you came into this world as a little tiny baby, you came in with this like you were created from a creator that had access to all things. It’s your birthright to become and actualize everything that you are. And most people say, well, no, to be rich, you have to be smarter. To be rich, you need to have relationships. Or to be rich, you got to be this. No, you don’t. You have to make a decision. You have to decide who is that person that becomes rich. Am I showing up as that person? What are the habits I need to change? What are the vices I got to get rid of? And who are the people I need to spend time with that encourage me continuously to go for my dreams? Because if you keep showing up here, you keep investing in yourself, you keep coming back right here to this channel, I’m telling you on the back side of that commitment, I will convince you to win. I will pull you across a finish line to win. I will be the person that’s the front showing you the way to it. The wealth was always yours.

AI just changed how you can get rich forever. And it’s not just buy this tool or try this prompt or sell this AI course. That’s kitty poolool stuff. I’ve built and scaled AI companies past a million dollars in under 6 months through Martell Ventures and I figured out the exact formula on how you can make a lot of money with AI. Starting with stop using AI like a toy. I get it. AI is fun. We sit there and we’re like look a new website, boom, a new app. Boom. Built a new dashboard. That’s not work. That’s just using it like a toy. Rich people put AI to real work, real tasks, real outputs, realing problems, big stuff. AI is selling. It’s delivering. It’s running their business 24/7. It’s not just making them feel good about using AI because it’s like outputting things that is like neat to show their friends. It’s actually doing work. Like the work you’ve been avoiding, but it makes you money. That’s great work to do with AI. So, how should you use AI? Give AI a real target. Before you buy a single tool, figure out where to point AI towards. AI makes all the problems no longer problems. So the problem to solve is figuring out what is the problem to solve. And there’s always one problem that’s way bigger and way more important than the rest. And that is called the bottleneck. So we got to point the AI to where you can get the most leverage. That’s why I always say buy back your time. The more time you get back, the more time you can do things that make you more money. It could reduce waste by having better reporting so you don’t make mistakes. It could help you multiply your output. If you know there’s a bottleneck around some kind of process that if you unblock it, you can increase your revenue. That is a great place to use AI. So before you go out there and upgrade your Chad GBT or cla account to the $200 a month cuz you’ve been hearing me talk about clock code and you’re like, I’m going to go clock. First start by figuring out what bottleneck you got to go solve it and then find the right AI solution to solve it. So, for example, your atlas blew up after we featured them in a video. And the founder, Omar, was flooding in calls and bookings and couldn’t stay on top of it. So, what did he do? He didn’t go around and buy a bunch of AI tools to like solve this problem in his development or do this other thing in customer success. He looked at the problem. He figured out what the bottleneck was and he realized that his own tool was the best tool to solve that bottleneck. So, how do you find out where you’re blocked in your business? The way I think about it is that every business runs on the same chain. First, you have attention. Do people know you exist? Then you have leads. Okay, they like what you got and they give you their contact info. Then there’s sales, which is a conversation to purchase. Then they buy, so you have to deliver. And then finally, it’s retention. Do they stick around? So now that you understand the chain, here’s what you need to do. First, look at each stage of the flow. Second, we have to ask at every stage, if I 10x this tomorrow, would my revenue actually go up or would I create another bottleneck? essentially in theory that if you have perfect business, so you got leads go in, you have really happy customers on the other side, but at some point as you’re going through each stage, there’s probably something that’s going to stop the flow of the customer, the flow of revenue. For most businesses, they don’t have enough attention or they don’t have enough leads. Just start there. That’s your bottleneck. Not enough leads means not enough sales means not enough cash collected, means not enough money to invest in the business. And the truth is is you probably got opportunities and leads that are just falling through the crack. So where’s the money leaking? And look, I built an AI company OS playbook that goes through the whole process in way more detail. It guides you through the audits, the workflow templates, the AI tools I actually use in all my businesses. If you want it, just DM me, YouTube OS on Instagram, and I’ll send it over. So let’s say leads is your biggest bottleneck. You need more revenue. How do you get AI to solve that? Get AI to generate revenue for you. Starting with leads and sales. That’s where the money enters every business. AI doesn’t feel rejection for trying to close a deal. AI doesn’t worry about emailing somebody and the person doesn’t reply. Humans get burnt out on sales because they feel the rejection. AI doesn’t care. The same effort from you built on the system. AI executes it 10x the output. AI can do everything. It can generate leads. It can automate follow-up and way more. And all you do is close. And that’s why in Martell Ventures, we have tools like Get Revio and your Atlas that we use, real AI tools that automate the lead scoring, the qualifying, booking of calls, and way more. And if you combine those tools with Claude Manis, you have a whole sales engine where you just come in and close. So, how do we get AI to help us find deals and sell? Think of these different levels. Number one, you have prospecting. AI builds you a lead list. Use tools like Manis, Claw Code, or Apex to scrape socials and find new people every week based on your criteria. And I’ll link all of these up in the description below, so you can click them and go sign up for them if that’s what you want to do. Next, qualify. AI can filter out all the tire kickers. Yesterday, I was having a conversation with one of my companies because they had a bunch of leads, 20,000 leads sitting there and they’re like, I don’t want to talk to everybody. I want to talk to the best people that are ready for this product. So, we analyzed their lead list, did some data enrichment using AI, and found the signals that told us that these people would be perfect for our product. Like I mentioned, there’s tools like your atlas so they can call and qualify. Revio that does this in the social DMs. And what you do is you give it three must haves for each prospect. It asks those questions to make sure you don’t get on the phone with tire kickers. Next, we’ve got pitching. AI writes hyperpersonal, very specific messages to your buyers. In many of my companies, AI will look at past messages to the buyer, look at their current situation, what they’re sharing on social media, and write wildly personal messages to each one of them specific to their situation, their industry, and even their stage in the buying process. Next, we have follow-up. An AI can literally run the whole sequence. If someone doesn’t respond, he messages them, email trigger, automatically hyperpersonalize. How do you do that? Using AI automation. And finally, upsells. At the end of the day, it is seven times easier to get a current customer to buy more from you than get a person that doesn’t know you to buy the first time. So using AI, you can analyze your customer base and figure out who’s bumping up to usage or maybe they’re up for renewal and actually tell you and craft a message and send it to them. That’s why we build another product called Latch who does this automagically for us. And look, if you want to get nerdy and get into the specifics and the prompts and the setup, I actually did a whole video going indepth on all the things that you need to learn how to use a tool called Manis to set this all up. If you want to go deep, I’ll link it up at the end of this video. So, now you’ve got AI doing the whole sales process. But once you sell, who’s doing the delivery that AI just helped you sell? Here’s the cool thing. AI delivers. Most businesses can actually deliver sales, can do really well, but then they drown in delivery and humans hit capacity. And the cool part is AI doesn’t have a capacity problem. It literally can keep doing it. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get upset. Doesn’t talk back. It’s happy all the time. It literally wakes up and it’s like, I just want to see you win. Help me help you win. AI can already do at least 80% of your work. I know. Ouch. How could it possibly do this? This hurts my feelings. I’m such a creative. It’s very important that I’m involved. Let me show you how. So here’s a perfect example. We have an internship program called Young Guns. They hired a bunch of people. They got bottlenecked at onboarding a bunch of young guns. So our default is use AI to solve the problem. So they went to it. It created a first draft of zero to hero in 14 days to teach them how to use AI. But it wasn’t perfect. So they massaged it and then they implemented it and all of a sudden the bottleneck was no longer bottleneck. And it got the young guns ready to hit the ground running to act like season pros even though they didn’t have the life experience to be ready yet because they were using AI. And that all comes because we continuously train them to default to AI every time. Don’t do anything without first consulting AI because I guarantee it’s probably going to give you a good first draft that you wouldn’t know because you don’t have the life experience. Now, if you are somebody that has the talent, the knowledge, you’re an artist, the deep domain experience, I’m going to show you a way to get out of it, but still feel like you have a fingerprint on the creative process. So, the first 10% is what I call the ideation. This is where you open up a chat and you start talking to it about different ideas and opportunities to just even get your bearings straight. What are you trying to accomplish? What are some concepts? Work with it. You have expertise, you have ideas, give it to the AI and have it come back with some other options. This is where you create the definition of done. What does done look like? The second part is the middle 80%. This is what’s called execution. This is where the AI actually executes the plan that 10% that you negotiated with it for it to actually help your customers onboard, support them, track them through the process, create a dashboard, create a whole automation, the whole thing. Let it figure out how and have it check its own work. That’s a pro move. asking the AI to check in on itself to make sure it’s moving towards the right direction based on the first 10%. The final 10% this is integration. This is where I like to add my human touch. This is where I review the work. I add the personal calls. I add the strategic advice. I make sure that things work and feel and look the way I want them to look. In many ways, the AI is no different than a person that’s helping you do the work. You just give it to the AI instead so you don’t have to pay them and you don’t have to wait. I mean, my favorite thing is waking up every morning to work done for me while I was sleeping. This is my favorite part is that 80% done by someone else or by AI is 100% freaking awesome. It’s already giving you a bunch of time back. So, now we’ve got AI selling, we have AI delivering, but there’s one bottleneck left in your business, the most expensive one, and that’s you. Now, you want to replace yourself before AI does. This is the future that I see. There’s only two scenarios. Either you end up working and creating with AI or you’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to be working for it. So, whatever business you have today, if we don’t learn how to use the AI to do the work for us, trust me, somebody’s going to come in and they’re going to build an AI and they’re going to take your job. You’re going to feel the same way the newspapers did back when the internet came. People aren’t getting rich by doing more. They’re getting rich by doing less. They’re saying, “Hey, AI, you take that on. I’m going to take that time to go work on things that only I can do. A few months ago, I decided to shut down my whole company for 2 days to do an AI hackathon where I put people into teams and encouraged them to build tools that would replace their work. And what happened is at the end of those two days, everybody came back 10 times more productive. They built the tooling to replace their work that they didn’t want to do in the first place, following the 108010 rule. And now using cloud code at the command line is now mandatory for everybody. Scaling your business is making yourself less necessary every quarter. So you know you’re doing this right as the business grows and you’re less needed. Now it’ll feel guilty at first. Lean into it. Allow yourself to breathe for once and have the AI continue to support you in your work. So here’s how we make this brain dead simple. I have a process called the camcorder method that I designed originally to hand over things to team members. But today I use the same process, but I hand it over to my AI because it’s doing the work. So the first thing we have to do is record ourselves doing the task. My favorite way is just get on a Zoom session by yourself. Share your screen. Record it. While you’re talking, you record the screen. See, the AI can actually take snapshots of what you’re looking at so it can build context. And while you’re talking, it’s taking the transcript so it knows exactly how you’re thinking. The whole idea is you want everything recorded or documented in every shape or form. Two, make sure there is a transcription. So most tools are doing this today. If not, guess what? The AI can do it for you. Third is feed that transcription, that recording into the AI and now it has the full context to actually repeat and execute the task that you just talked about. And finally, iterate and refine until AI can do 80% of it. You’d be surprised how many very complicated steps that AI can do, especially with these multimodals where you can feed it video and images in text. Eventually, it can find the pattern in your process and teach you how to do it even better, but get AI to do that middle 80%. I would suggest doing it at least three meaningful times to give it to the AI to see if it can figure out how you do what you do. Do this with every task until everything is replaced. I’m talking finance. I’m talking followup. I’m talking hiring. I’m talking all the business stuff, the bottlenecks that would make you more money if they were solved. You need to be replacing yourself. The window is open, but it’s going to shut down. In 18 months, it won’t be there. So, the people who move first won’t compete with the rest. They’ll literally lap them. You don’t have to be an expert at any stage. You just need to be first. Right now, it’s time to take action and not overthink it. The best skill you can learn is how to unlearn the beliefs and relearn how to activate the AI. I know AI is cool and there’s parts of the business that you wish somebody else would take care of, but there’s a fear because if it’s doing that and you don’t know how it’s doing that, then maybe it’s going to do it wrong. I would rather you try and have moments where you might have to get involved and fix something to not even try at all. If we don’t create bigger problems, we’ll never live a bigger life. How about we go out there and say, “Nah, let’s try. Let’s figure out what breaks. Let’s use AI. Let’s be a little crazy in how we think about it. What if it could literally edit a video here? What if it could do a whole sales call for you? Yesterday, I’m talking to one of my founders and he’s telling me how he has his whole sales process automated, selling $700 a month subscriptions where he has a whole team that’s still taking calls and now he has an AI doing the same calls and eventually the AI is going to do it better than the team and then he’s going to flip-flop them and redeploy those people on separate things. That is a now thing. So either you’re like my founder who did it to himself or somebody else is going to come into your market and just take all of your customers.