The Millionaire Skillstack:
(3 Skills Guaranteed to Make You More Money)
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
May 1, 2023
Read time: 18 minutes
I recently ran a poll asking the question:
Would you rather have a million dollars today or the skills of a billionaire in 5 years?
Over 3,000 people voted… and the results kind of blew my mind.
33% of people opted for the $1,000,000 right now.
This is crazy to me, because in my experience, if your goal is to achieve a life of financial freedom where you own your time and can do what you want, when you want, and with who you want…
Then there’s really only one choice:
Ya gotta go for The Skills.
Now, there were two main arguments I heard from people choosing the money:
With $1,000,000 invested correctly, I’d never have to worry about money again.
Or
With $1,000,000, I could just pay to get the skills of a billionaire and then I’d also have a $1M!
Okay, to understand why neither of these scenarios are likely to play out, we have to look no further than a study done by the National Endowment for Financial Education which found that 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt within only a few years.
Here’s the harsh reality as Jim Rohn put it many years ago:
“If you took all the money in the world and divided it equally among everybody, it would soon all be back in the same pockets.”
See, money is a tool.
And just like any other tool, it’s usefulness depends on the skill of the person wielding it.
Which is why, 70% of people, if given this powerful tool of $1,000,000, will simply lose it.
On the other hand, if we develop the skills of a millionaire, then not only will we have the ability to go out and make $1M whenever we want… but we will also have the knowledge of what it takes to keep that money.
Skills are the most valuable thing you can acquire in this lifetime because they keep compounding until the day you die.
But here’s the problem…
Well, actually, there’s two problems.
And I personally ran headlong into both of these when I started my wealth building journey over a decade ago:
First, what are these mythical “Millionaire Skills”, and second, how do we actually acquire them?
Well, read on, because this week we’re going to learn:
- The Easiest Way to Become a Millionaire
- The Difference Between Tactics and Strategy
- Three Foundational Skills of a Millionaire
So let’s dive in…
The Easiest Way to Become a Millionaire
I believe you can accomplish pretty much anything you set your mind to with the right Skills, Strategy, and Resources.
That is, if you know What To Do (strategy), How To Do It (skill), and have the Ability To Do It (resources/opportunity).
There are countless strategies for making a ton of money, but in my experience, the easiest and most consistent way is to Build a Business and Invest in Real Estate.
I’ve already done two videos laying out different strategies you could employ in building a million dollar business, so I’m not gonna cover that here.
But once you finish this article and have a firm grasp on the skills you’re gonna need, I recommend you go watch How to Become a Millionaire on a Low Salary and 4 Passive Income Ideas: How I Made $125,000 in a Month to get the exact step-by-step blueprint to building a 7-figure business.
Now the reason I mention this here is because every business can be thought of as a stool with 3 legs. Once we understand those three legs, we can move forward to intentionally cultivate valuable skills that’ll serve the business.
Quick Side-Note: Even if you have no interest in building your own business, understanding the mechanics of these 3 legs will enable you to approach your W2 through a whole new lens.
You’ll easily be able to spot opportunities to add value to your organization which in turn increases the likelihood of getting a raise or promotion.
The 3 Legs of Every Business
- Marketing
- Operations
- Finance
Marketing is how you get customers.
Operations is how you fulfill customer expectations.
Finance is how you manage the flow of money in and out of the business.
Now, within each of these three legs, there are dozens of skills worth acquiring.
For Marketing, that might be the skill of branding, social media, paid advertising, copywriting, or sales.
For Operations, there’s product design, fulfillment, distribution, logistics, customer service, and human resources.
For Finance, you could dive deep into bookkeeping and accounting.
And of course, all of these skills are well-worth learning, but these are what I refer to as Tactical Skills.
Truth is, Tactical Skills are relatively easy to learn. As such, they’re also easy to hire out.
This means that these skills alone will probably not be enough to get us to our goal of a million dollars.
Yes, you should learn many (if not all of these skills), but more important, in my experience, on the path to becoming a millionaire, are what I call Foundational Skills.
The reason Foundational Skills are so damn important is because they allow us to operate on the higher level of Strategy, rather than just Tactics.
As former World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov said:
“Tactics is knowing what to do when there’s something to do… Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”
Now, in this article, we’re not going to focus on tactical skills like copywriting, coding, or sales.
Instead, we’re going to unpack 5 foundational skills that underpin EVERYTHING you do on your money making journey.
So, to build our Millionaire Skillstack, we begin by laying a foundation with these 3 Foundational Skills:
- Energy Management
- Creativity
- Judgment
Energy Management
I cringe whenever I hear someone say “Time is your most valuable asset.”
This phrase is like nails on a chalkboard to me, because it’s something that most people simply accept at face-value…and yet, it’s completely wrong.
Truth is, your time actually has ZERO value. To anyone.
If it did, you could just show up to work, pass out, and still get paid.
And since none of us are simply getting paid to show up, there must be something else at play.
Let’s do a little thought experiment to prove the point:
Imagine your boss or significant other walks into the room right now and asks,
“Hey, can I get a minute of your time?”
Now, unless you’re some sort of time-wizard, you probably don’t have a pile of time just sitting in the corner you can give this person, right?
So what is it they’re really asking for?
Well, it’s simple… they’re asking for your Attention which is a result of your Focus.
Now because of this, I used to say that Focus is your most valuable asset, but I was wrong…
I didn’t go deep enough and get to the true First Principle, which is a physics way of looking at the world that requires us to boil things down to their most fundamental truth before building back up.
And so, what is the fundamental truth of focus?
Well, it’s simple…
Our ability to focus is a result of our ability to expend ENERGY.
Energy, therefore, is your most valuable asset, and it’s the management of this asset you must first master on your journey to building a million dollar skillstack.
Here’s my 3M Framework to Mastering Energy Management: Measure, Manage, Maximize
1. Measure your Energy
Most of us are incredibly poor judges of how we spend our time and energy.
For instance, a recent study found that 78% of people underestimated how much time they spent on their phone each day.
When asked how much time they think they spent in front of a screen each day, the average guess was 3 hours and 42 minutes, whereas the actual average was 5 hours and 42 minutes.
That’s two entire hours of energy drain that people simply didn’t realize they were experiencing.
Becoming a master of your energy begins with first understanding exactly where it’s going which we do by conducting an Energy Audit.
Simply put, an Energy Audit is where you track what you did and how you felt every hour of the day for about two weeks. After about a week, you’ll start noticing trends in how your energy levels ebb-and-flow throughout the day.
There’s a bunch of softwares you can use to collect this information, but my two favorites are Rize.io or just a Google Spreadsheet that you update at the top of every hour with a note about what you did in the previous hour along with a rating of 1-10 for how energized you felt during that period.
With this information in hand, we move to the next step in the 3M Framework.
2. Manage your Energy
As they say, “That which gets measured, gets managed.”
Well, now it’s time to take the data we’ve collected and create a game plan for our day.
Interestingly, you might notice that this process is identical to the steps we’d take to get our personal finances in order.
First, we conduct a financial audit to see where our money is going, and then we create a budget to determine where we want our money to go in the future.
Pretty cool, huh?
Anyways, there’s something else I want to point out and it’s going to seem painfully obvious, but stick with me:
You are not a perpetual energy machine.
The truth is, you only have so much energy to expend each day before you need to recharge the system (which we’ll talk more about in just a minute).
Because we only have a limited amount of energy to draw upon, it’s imperative we spend what we do have on high quality activities that will move us meaningfully towards our goals.
The tool I use to ensure this happens is called Time Blocking.
Simply put, I sit down every night before bed and I plot out the next day hour-by-hour.
To go even deeper into my system of Time Blocking, check out this video called The Productivity System That Made Me A Millionaire in 3 Years.
Now, to use the information you’ve gathered during your Energy Audit to maximum effect, I recommend you pay attention to the times throughout the day where you appear to be at your best and worst.
For myself, I tend to be at my highest energy levels mid-morning around 9-11am, so I use this time to focus on the absolute most important tasks.
On the other hand, I’m at my lowest energy levels around 2-4pm, which is when I prioritize meetings, emails, or other mundane activities that don’t require me to be at my best.
By arranging your day with this sort of energy-consciousness, I think you’ll notice a rather quick, and incredible, boost to your overall productivity.
With that said, the biggest gains will most definitely come as the result of the next step in the 3M Framework.
3. Maximize your Energy
Here’s another interesting parallel with personal finance…
Many financial experts would lead you to believe that the best way to become wealthy is by forgoing your morning latte and instead, just save, save, save.
However, if you’ve been hanging around these parts for awhile, you know I have a different approach.
Personally, I think if your goal is to build wealth, most of your time should be spent on increasing your earning capacity.
And it’s the same with energy management.
The bigger your pool of energy to draw from, the more you’ll be able to get done, right?
Right.
So how do we do this? How do we increase our energy capacity?
Well, there’s only three ways of increasing or improving the quality of your focus, which I call the 3 Levers of Energy:
- Sleep
- Nutrition
- Exercise
This is a massive topic and I can’t do it justice here. I’m actually working on an article at the moment that deep-dives into these 3 Levers which I’ll be sharing with you here in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that!
Alright, so that’s Energy Management, and it should be pretty obvious how developing this Foundational Skill will help you in every aspect of building a business (not to mention your life as a whole).
This next Foundational Millionaire Skill is not only my personal favorite, but was also found in a poll of 1,500 executives to be the most important skill in the modern workforce: Creativity.
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There are over a dozen modules dedicated to leveling up just these three skills (not to mention countless other high level skills like Focus, Environment Design, State Management, Discipline, and Learning!).
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Creativity
When most people think of creativity, they think of painting a landscape, writing a book, or playing the piano.
But this type of artistic creativity isn’t what we’re talking about here.
See, creativity, as I define it, is:
The ability to combine pieces of disconnected information in new functional ways.
When viewed through this lens, we ALL have the opportunity to display creativity in our lives.
Now, the reason this is such a valuable skill is because creativity, by definition, cannot be automated or systematized. So, while more and more tasks will be outsourced to robots, AI, and cheap labor, the demand for true creativity will only increase.
So, if you want to level up your earning potential, then focus on becoming more creative.
Here’s how:
1. Curiosity fuels Creativity
I’ve hired hundreds of employees over the years and I believe that curiosity is a better predictor of success than intelligence, charisma, or even hard work.
Why?
Because the people with insatiable curiosity, the one’s always asking why and digging just a little deeper to find the answer, have a vast reservoir of inspiration to pull from which in turn leads them to being far more creative than their counterparts.
And this makes sense if we think back to the definition of creativity, which is the ability to combine disparate pieces of information.
Of course, the more information you have access to, the more likely you are to make novel connections.
So, we should aim to keep our creativity fuel tank full by becoming a sponge that absorbs information from as many areas of life as possible.
This could be in the form of reading books, listening to podcasts, watching videos, or whatever… in most cases, it doesn’t really matter what form the information takes just so long as you’re acquiring it.
2. Thinking Creatively: The 3Bs of Creativity
Alright, so if you’re like most people, you don’t really have a process for being creative.
Ideas just sort of pop up out of nowhere, which isn’t terribly helpful when we need to be creative on demand.
So an easy way to get the wheels spinning is by recognizing there are really only 3 things you can do with a piece of information…
You can Bend it, Blend it, or Break it.
And these are called the 3Bs of Creativity.
To Bend, we simply take an idea or product and modify it slightly from its original version or usage. For instance, a piece of driftwood that’s transformed into a dining room table.
To Blend, we smoosh two ideas together. Like combining a telephone and a camera to come up with a cell phone capable of taking pictures.
And to Break, we deconstruct something into its individual parts before reassembling to create something new. The perfect example of this is the work of Picasso whose paintings appear broken and then put back together from different angles and perspectives.
The 3Bs are a great way of priming the creative engines, but they aren’t the ONLY 3Bs…
3. Fostering Creativity: 3 More Bs of Creativity
The truth is, you can’t force the act of creativity. Just sitting in the corner and trying to “think harder” isn’t always gonna cut it.
But, there are some things we can do that create a more inviting environment for the muse to appear.
These are Bed, Bath, and Bus… which are inconveniently also called The 3Bs of Creativity.
(I don’t know why, but people in the Creativity community must love triads that start with the letter B. Hell if I know why.)
Anyways, these 3Bs stem from the knowledge that creativity tends to arise during states of relaxation which are preceded by long periods of focused thinking.
Bed is just another word for sleep, and it’s where we recruit our subconscious mind to get in on the action.
A quick 20-30 minute nap after a bout of intense focus or learning has been shown in students to increase retention and understanding of the topic being studied.
In addition, it also sparks imaginative leaps that the conscious mind had been struggling to make on its own.
Bath represents leisure or recreation. A place where the mind can just escape from the hullabaloo of life and, for once, just hear itself think. This could be an actual bath, video games, or mindless television.
Bus represents movement (though I personally think this one was a bit of a stretch by whoever first thought up these 3Bs).
With that said, this is possibly the most powerful of the three (or at least it is for me), because humans did not evolve to move and think separately. These actions are closely intertwined in the development of our species.
And this is why Nietsche said:
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree.
Now, Creativity is great and all, but I’ve discovered something interesting over the years…
You could be the most fantastically Creative person in the world… but if you lack this third foundational millionaire skill, then you will simply be an agent of chaos.
And there’s not a lot of money to be had there.
So, with that in mind, it’s imperative that in addition to cultivating Creativity, we also develop the foundational skill of Judgment.
Judgment
As Naval Ravikant says, “In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill.”
Now, in the beginning of your career, you’re not gonna have very much Leverage. So at that point your only job is to go out there and GET leverage whether that be in the form of Labor Leverage, Capital Leverage, Technology Leverage, or Media Leverage.
Understanding Leverage is another Foundational Millionaire Skill, but I’m not gonna cover it here because I already did a video on this called 4 Passive Income Ideas: How I Made $125,000 Last Month.
Don’t be turned off by the clickbaity title, that video is all about mastering Leverage.
But here’s the thing…
Once you acquire Leverage, you have to slow down and apply Judgment because the potential ramifications of each decision you make become amplified to a degree that carries a lot of potential consequences.
The problem for most of us is we weren’t ever really taught a systematic process for how to make good decisions…
And it’s interesting, because studies show we make over 30,000 decisions a day, so you’d think we’d get better at the process over time, right?
Well, not necessarily.
Because if we’re not practicing with intent, then we’re not really practicing.
We’re just going through the motions.
It’s the same whether we’re trying to shoot a basketball better, to type faster with fewer errors, or to make better decisions.
And the main obstacle I see that stands in our way of improving our judgment is the fact that we don’t really have an objective measure against which we can assess the quality of our decisions.
So, most of the time, we make a decision based on mostly arbitrary feelings that we will probably quickly forget as soon as the decision is made, and then at some point in the future we get the results of that decision, and then we think back and attempt to justify the decision.
At no point in that process is there an opportunity for reflection, iteration, or feedback, and therefore, our judgment doesn’t necessarily improve.
If you want to develop better Judgment and make better decisions, then you MUST create a system that allows for conscious reflection.
Here’s a 3-Part System to Making Better Decisions:
1. Decision Audit
Remember our Financial and Energy Audit? Well, this is no different.
To conduct a Decision Audit, at the end of each day just think back on 1-5 decisions you made and reflect on what drove those decisions.
For instance, often we make business decisions from a survival perspective thinking we’ve got to make money at all costs or codependency, because we’re afraid of letting people down.
The driving force behind YOUR decisions are probably different than mine, so I can’t give overly detailed advice here, but the key is to take notice of your patterns.
More often than not we make decisions based on emotions that we then justify with logic.
The big question to ask is:
What are the primary emotions driving my decisions?
Once you know the answer to this question, you unlock this magical ability to see that emotion cropping up at the moment of decision. And this is important, because it’s only in observing the emotion that we can then remove the emotion.
And that is the ultimate desired endstate we’re trying to get to.. We’re trying to remove emotion, as much as possible, from our decision making process because as Tom Bilyeu says:
“Emotions can make dots feel like they connect in your mind even when they don’t actually connect in reality.”
To make better decisions, we have to operate as much as possible in the world of objective reality.
Anything else is simply a recipe for delusion.
2. Decision Journal
It’s probably not an overstatement to say the Scientific Process changed the progression of human civilization.
At its core, the process is simple and yet the results are profound.
It starts with a Hypothesis, which is just a fancy word for an educated guess.
And perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but in my mind, the whole process hinges on this first step.. Because unless you have an expectation for what you believe will occur, you’re just collecting data and not necessarily getting any closer to formulating an explanation for why the thing did whatever the thing ultimately did.
This is vitally important to developing Judgment because most of us make tens of thousands of decisions a day, but we never stop to consider:
- What we think is going to happen
- Why we think it’s going to happen
- What else might happen
- Why we think THIS happening would be better than THAT happening
- What is the probability that THIS and not THAT is gonna happen
A tool I’ve found incredibly valuable in helping me systematically work through these questions is called the Decision Journal.
My team and I are actually working on designing a Decision Journal that walks through the exact framework I use to make life’s big decisions, and we’re hoping to launch it later this year.
If you have any interest in getting a copy of that when we release it, then you can use this link to get on a wait-list and in the meantime, you’ll get a free digital copy of my 1-page Decision Journal Template which you can start using right now to improve your decision making abilities.
3. Decision Commandments
The last tool I want to share with you on your journey to developing better Judgment is the idea of creating Decision Commandments.
See, the problem with decisions is that it’s often not a simple matter of do you want THIS or do you want THAT?
It’s more like… do you want this, this, this, this or this… or that, that, that, and also, that?
It’s nice to have options, but only up to a certain point.
Beyond that and you enter into the realm of overwhelm, and that’s never a good place from which to make a decision.
So to simplify matters, I find it helpful to first create boundaries, which you can do by creating your 10 Commandments.
These are your guiding principles about how you think your business or life should work.They are a litmus test which all decisions must pass.
And you’d be surprised by just how many decisions are immediately eliminated when put through the filter of your 10 Commandments.
As a result, you don’t have to waste mental bandwidth and energy sifting through so many options. Instead, you spend more time weighing the truly quality candidates.
For instance, here are some of my 10 Commandments:
- Lead with Value
- Overdeliver, Always
- Create More. Consume Less.
- Resourcefulness Beats Resources
- Vulnerability Requires Strength
Now, will each of these commandments apply to every decision? Certainly not.
The point of this exercise is to simply chalk the field and define how YOU intend to play the game.
It’s only once you’ve done this that you’ll be able to look back at your performance to judge whether or not you played well.
Because as Jean Luc Picard said to Data in Star Trek:
“You can do everything right and still lose. That’s not weakness, that’s life.”
The reverse of that is to recognize that you can make all the wrong decisions and still win.
Luck, afterall, is very much a thing.
But, if we want to increase the likelihood of achieving consistent success in life, we can’t rely solely on luck…
And at the end of the day, there is no greater counterbalance to Luck, than good Judgment.
Until next week…
Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend
AV
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