How To Achieve Financial Freedom

How To Achieve Financial Freedom

Asked Warren Buffet, "What made you the wealthiest man in the world?" He smiled, and said, " three things."

I come from very poor background and we had no money for food at times, quite literally, and it was rough. So I wanted to make sure money wasn't an issue for my future family. So I figure out how to make money and I figured when I was 23, I figured how to make a million dollars in a year.

I went from US$ 38,000 to a million. You don't do that by some new strategy, It's a psychological shift, as well as the strategy shift. But then I made the same amount of money for 7 straight years even though I built a dozen more companies, have more people than ever, but it was like unconsciously.

Why do you want more than a million dollars? What do you, you know, you greedy? I finally decided to listen. If I could make US$ 38,000 to a million, it's not about money, it's like growth. So I went, I want to make US$ 3 million, but I wanna make more of a while I sleep. But than I really began to realize it doesn't matter how much money you make. It's really your capacity to take your creativity and stop trading time for money. It's the worst trade in the world, everybody's a financial trader. They don't realize they're trader, they trading time and you can't get more time.

So, when the first thing you wanna teach anybody, a child, a kid, anybody is as Warren Buffet said, "What made you the wealthiest man in the world?" He smiled, and he said, "3 things." 

He said, living in America is great opportunities, having good genes so I lived a long time. and he said, the last thing is compound interest. and we all know about compound interest, but I give an example the book of this guy "Theodore Johnson" worked for UPS. Never made more than US$ 14,000 in income in his entire life in a year. and in all the ages worth US$ 70 million dollars. and how did he do it?

All he did was he took a percentage of his income. his percentage was 20%, Now his family said you can't, we can't save any money. But he met a friend who said, "if you pretend there's a tax and the tax just took the money away from you, you never see it, the money just comes out of your account and goes an investment account, you'll be financially free."

So he was disciplined, he didn't look at it. It happened. US$ 70 million dollars by compounding. So, people's mistake is... and kids don't know this, adults don't know this, that you won't earn your way there but you can compound your way there. What I wanna do is say, where do you put that money?

The second trick is you really have to understand where you're gonna get hurt because (the fees), the fees  are just destroying people. 96% of all mutual funds never matched the market. I mean, they never beat the market. Look the statistics, Warren Buffet taught me this. He said, Ray Dalio told me this, David Swensen, who took Yale from US$ 1 Billion to 24 billion in two decades. These are the people telling me this.

Nobody beats the market expect a couple unicorns that nobody has access to. and I said, I didn't say you're not one of them. I said, here's the truth. 96% of mutual funds don't match the market. That means 4% succeed.

Now, what are your chances of picking the right mutual fund? People don't know what they're doing, they put their money in a 401K, they pick a mutual fund not knowing what it is. If you try to get a mutual fund, you got the 4% chance of winning. So what I show people is not only do you not get the result, thinking logically, If I hire someone else to do it they'll do better than me. But in addition, you pay around 2,000% more than it's worth. Meaning you get the same exact product, the same stock all in the index. You want a piece of all America's best companies, say the Vanguard 500 Index, I've their top companies, that cost 0,17%.

Like less than 0,2% versus the average mutual fund is 3,17%. Compounding overtime! and it's highway robbery. Where the world, would you pay 2,000% more for the same exact product. You can only do it because.. the financial industry makes things so opaque, so convulated, and people feel overhelmed. (and hard to understand) That's why I tried to come in here and go, look time to become the chess player not the chess piece. Let me teach you so you understand what's going on. It's not that complex, they use only big words. But when you know what's going on, you don't get screwed and more importantly you take advantage of the system instead of letting the system take advantage of you.

I have always looked for people that were playing the game at a different level than I am in and who are the road ahead. I always tell people, anticipation is power. So, my mentor have been people over the year, different people. My erliest mentor was a man named Jim Rohn. He was a personal development speaker just touched my life. Sir John Templeton is probably one of the greatest investors in history. People don't know his name. He started out with nothing and he decided that he wanted to understand wealth. So he saved US$ 10,000 dollars, huge amount of money in those days. and when Hitler invaded Poland, he developed a belief. His belief was.. you making money in times of maximum pessimism. If you were around in 2008-2009. You remember what it was like, right? You could have bought, you know the Sands in Las Vegas, you could have bought their stock for US$2,28 today at US$67 (Wow) It's a 3,000% return. So people in those times... He understood that, and so what he did was that everybody thought the world was going to end. He took US$10,000 dollars, he bought every stock on New York Stock Exchange.  It was a dollar or less including companies everybody thought were going bankrupt. But when things are bad, people think it's gonna be bad forever. When things are good, they think it's going to be good forever.

They're always wrong, life is cyclical. So, there's a season for everything. So once we got through World War II, and a few years later, guess what? Those same stocks made him a billionaire. So when I asked him, I said what's the secret to wealth? His response would touched me, he goes, you know, you teach it. I said, what's that? He said, gratitude. and I said, why do say that? He said, because if you had a billion dollars and every day you lived pissed off and frustrated, the quality of your life is called pissed off and frustrated. But if you have nothing, but you're euphorically grateful for whatever you have, you're the richest person that you're going to know.

He said, so it doesn't matter how much money you got if you dont have gratitude.

So I do the same thing by the way, I have a process I call priming where I get up every morning, I do mine in the morning. I just radical change to my body, kind of alter my state. and then I do 10 minutes I never miss, and my first three and a half minutes is what I'm really grateful for. and I make my self think of at least one of those three that's something really simplistic. There's something giant. You know, the wind on my face, looking one of my kids eyes, you know, something of the nature. and then I do three minutes of strengthening healing and three minutes of how I'm going to create my world. and I do that for a minimum of 10 minutes every day. Because I believe you have to condition it.

You don't just hope that stuff shows up. and I started reading and feeding my mind. and then I developed this little system, and the system was really simple. and I tell people now as I say, number one every single day, you got to feed and strenghthen your mind until you do that you're always going to be in fear because fear is automatic. Human brain is designed for survival, it's not designed for success. Your brain is not designed to make you happy. That's your job. and the only way you're going to do it is if you feed your mind. because otherwise weeds grow automatically, my coach, my mentor Jim Rohn used to tell me, so Iqbal, every day you gotta stand guard at the door of your mind. You gotta watch what's going in, because if you're not careful stuff will go in. So, every day I decided I used to go to the library because there's the only place to go. and I would feed, I read biographies. I read people's lives and it make me go, wait a second, as bad as I think it is. the greatest people in the world had it worse. So there's something here, so you feed your mind.

Jim Rohn used to say to me, skip a meal but don't skip reading, read 30 minutes a day, I don't give a damn what it is. and today, I don't mean internet crap, I mean.... read something that a biography, read something that's a strategy, read something that's gonna change your life.

Then the second thing I tell people is: feeding your mind is great, but you gotta also strengthen your body. and you do that as an athelete naturally. I learned to do that that because fear is physical right? you know where you feel it. and if you go work out, if you go lift, if you go run even if you're out of shape, you just go from an intense walk. That experience alone changes you.

Every year of my life, the first thing I do before I do my priming, if I'm at one of my homes, I jump in some hot water for fun. and then I jump in freezing water. and I have a river, in one of my homes in Silicon Valley and I've got cold punches everywhere else.

So I go in 57 degree water. Boom! and what it does is like it's teaching my brain. I do... I tell my brain what to do. and it does it. It doesn't feel like it doesn't want to do it. and every cell in your body is alive. So it doesn't have to be like two hours with something. It can be something to do for 30 seconds, but it's training your body to be strong because strong body, strong mind, and vice versa.

The third thing I tell people is find a role model. You know, it seems impossible until you see somebody's done it. So, Ray Dalio is one of the greatest Investor in history, the guy was a caddy, right?

You know, his dad was a jazz musician. His mom was a homemaker, you know, he's worth US$14 Billion dollars. and when you start seeing that somebody else can do it and you see they relly good. You start to believe, you start to get certainty. and then the fourth thing I tell people is massive action.

and constantly change your approach and lets find somebody worse off than you are and help them. Because when you do that, it gets your out of yourself.

WE GROW BY HELPING OTHERS

IQBAL MUSALIM

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