How To Make $1 Million Per Year

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here. So, a few years ago, I had this insanely impossible goal to one day make over a million dollars in a year. At the time I made that goal, an amount like that just seemed ridiculous. I didn't have a plan to make that happen, I had no guide as to what I should be doing, and I had no idea if I would ever actually achieve it. But I figured I would just make an unrealistic wild goal, keep it in the back of my head, and then just see what happens.

Shockingly, less than two years after saying that, I ended up achieving the goal and making well over a million dollars in a year after expenses and after taxes. So, I felt like this would be the perfect opportunity to share exactly how I did it, the steps that you could follow as well, and everything that I have learned along the way to making that happen. Basically, this was the video that I wish existed two years ago because there are significant differences you must understand if you want to increase your income this dramatically.

Also, there are not that many real guides out there about how to make a million dollars a year from people who have actually gone and done it. Like, you hear all of these wild stories about startups being bought out, or people in CEO positions, or actors getting paid tens of millions of dollars to be in a movie. I am none of that. I'm just a guy who loves talking about personal finance and saving money in his garage, and tries way too hard to get people to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. If you have not done that already, yep, that's me.

Anyway, let's go over exactly what I've learned about how to make a million dollars a year and some of the strategies that you could implement as well. At the very worst case, if you watch it into the very end, you should be able to walk away with a better understanding of what you need to do to increase your income and make more money. Consider this video to be like the "how to make a million dollars a year" guide, except I'm not gonna try to sell you into a pyramid scheme. It's just a free video that hopefully you find helpful and valuable.

So, with that said, let's begin where most people start and how the majority of people end up making their money. It is this: first, it's important to understand that there are three stages to making money, and to understand exactly what the stages are, and then how to move past them. We need to begin where most people start their journey, and that would be getting paid for your time.

This is by far how the majority of people are paid, and subsequently how they think about money. They trade their time for a set amount of money every hour, every day, every week, and from that, their income has a ceiling. They can only work so many hours in a day and only make what someone else is willing to pay for their time.

In this stage of income, the only way you could end up making more money is to either work more hours, get a raise, get a promotion, or switch careers to something that pays more. However, the issue with this is that your salary is entirely dependent on how many hours you can work and who is willing to pay you the most for your time, and that is a problem.

First, time is a limited resource, and you can only work so many hours a day. Physically, you could only do so much until you dig yourself into exhaustion or you just run out of hours. So, that presents a problem because eventually, you're gonna hit a ceiling in terms of how many hours you could possibly work in a day, and when you reach that, your income is going to plateau. So, that's an issue that definitely needs to be addressed if you're expected to earn more because, as far as I'm concerned, we can't make it more than 24 hours in a day.

I wish we could! I would love to. If anyone figures that one out, let me know! But, as of now, there are still only 24 hours in a day.

Second, for most employers, there will be a limit as to how much they could reasonably pay you for your time, no matter what job you do. Of course, yes, there are some highly specialized careers out there in law, business, and medicine where they pay their employees over $1,000,000 a year, but besides those few outliers, the majority of the time you’re gonna get paid within a set range depending on the size and type of your industry, and also how replaceable you are.

As harsh as that is to say, the more competition there is between jobs, the more selective employers can be when picking employees, and therefore, the less you get paid. On the other hand, the less competition that you have, the less selective employers can be, and therefore they have to pay more to attract talent.

Of course, there is a sense of security that comes from knowing exactly how much you're getting paid every day, and I certainly understand that appeal. But that type of security comes at a cost of building wealth, potentially delaying financial independence, and also getting paid what you're actually worth.

For many people, eventually you’re gonna reach that plateau where you can’t possibly work any more hours, you can’t possibly make any more money in your field, and it’s at that point where you might consider moving on to the next stage of making money: getting paid for results.

This is when you get paid on your performance or by completing a task, regardless of how many hours it takes you to make that happen. When you're getting paid by results, you could expect to earn substantially more money by working the exact same amount of hours. This is how you have some people working less than 40 hours a week but somehow they're still able to casually make $500,000 a year.

They found a way to effectively manage their time and they're only focused on producing the best results. Because when you get paid for results, you could utilize your time however you like, and as long as you get it done, you get paid.

Doing this has several advantages. Number one being, you could work smarter and not harder. The amount of time that you spend doing something makes no difference whatsoever; it just matters that you get results. This is how I started my career as a real estate agent, knowing that the time I spent working with a client was totally irrelevant. All that mattered was that I was able to utilize my time effectively to get the home sold, and if I was not able to do that and produce that result, I didn't make any money.

That caused me to hyper-focus my time on only the highest yielding properties because I knew that I only had 24 hours in a day, and it was entirely up to me to put that time towards its best use. That meant that I was able to work smarter and not harder and make more money for the time I do spend working.

Secondly, by getting paid on results, your work becomes a lot more sustainable. You know, even though your income might fluctuate month by month because you’re the one in charge of your income, you have more control over the income you do make. You could choose to take on more or less work as desired, and you could make yourself less replaceable. If you are producing good results, that means that long term, you're gonna have way more job security because you’re the one in charge of how you manage your time.

Third, you're able to work less hours but still end up making more money. This is exactly where Pareto's 80/20 principle applies. This is a principle that theorizes that 80% of an effect comes from 20% of a cause. In other words, 80% of your income comes from the 20% of the time you spend on it.

Anytime you get paid on results, this is especially true. As a real estate agent, I found that 80% of my income was just coming from 20% of my clients. On YouTube, also the exact same thing applies: 80% of my income comes from the top 20% of my videos. However, that also means that 80% of the time I spend is chasing after the remaining 20% of my income, and as we all know, that's probably not the best use of time.

So, from that, I was really able to look at my business and out of my time and remove myself from the 80% of the business that was only making 20% of the money and spending more of my time on the 20% of the business that was making 80% of the results. This is exactly how I was able to grow my real estate agent business from $140,000 a year to $500,000 a year in gross commissions without really changing much or working anymore—in fact, I was working less and being more selective about the clients I was working with. Hence, the 80/20.

But, unfortunately, as great as getting paid by results is, and as much of an improvement as that is over getting paid for your time, the reality is that sometimes there’s only so many results you could possibly get in a day. Even if you’re the best at what you do, you still might reach that soft plateau where you can't seem to expand much further and you can’t seem to do any more results.

And that is where our third stage comes in: leveraging your results. If anyone wants the formula as to how you can make a million dollars a year or more, this is what I figured out: you need to learn how to leverage your results. Because, like I just said, beyond a certain point, sometimes there are just only so many results that you could possibly get in a year before you start to cap out.

That’s when you begin to leverage your results by doing one of two things. Number one: you can hire employees and have them work for you, thereby leveraging your results. For me, I was working as a real estate agent selling about twenty million dollars a year of real estate, and that works out to be five hundred thousand dollars a year in gross commissions.

However, there would be nothing stopping me from building out a small team of ten agents to work underneath me, and if each of those agents brings in two hundred thousand dollars in gross commissions and I collect 25% of that in exchange for bringing them on the team and introducing them to my business, that would be another five hundred thousand dollars worth of income in addition to the five hundred thousand dollars worth of commissions I was already making for simply leveraging what I was already doing and employing a team.

Think about that for a second! I don't need to work any harder than I already am. I don't need to go out and work any more hours. I could bring on other people underneath me who are also getting paid on their results, and we could each benefit collectively from our work.

This is basically business 101 in a nutshell. Like, you didn’t have Henry Ford out there just going in building every single car himself by hand. Instead, he hired employees, leveraged his results, created the assembly line, and then built an empire. Every single business out there does this exact same thing, and by leveraging your results, you’re able to earn substantially more.

The second way you could leverage your results is by building a business that has the potential to scale without any further involvement from you. This is the route that I ended up going that caused my income to skyrocket so dramatically this year. First, I'm paid by results as a real estate agent. If I sell a house, I get a commission; therefore, I am able to use my time very wisely, work less, but focus on the highest yielding business.

Then, to take it to the next level, instead of going in and building on a team, I decided I could teach other people how to grow in the business and leverage my results to create an additional source of income from that. I created a program on Teachable called the Real Estate Agent Academy. I went over exactly how I built up my business, the strategies that worked really well for me, and how I could teach everything in you to someone else.

Then, I packaged that as a program online. That meant that I would need to do a lot of work upfront, but once it's up and running, it would continue to sell regardless of any further involvement on my end. So far, that program has passively made me over $185,000.

The same thing also applies to YouTube. I'm able to make a video once, and that video will continue providing value and generating views without any further involvement on my end. Now, you can just imagine what happens when you have over 500 videos published on YouTube, and every single one of them is generating a small amount of views every day and generating a small amount of revenue.

For example, with Business and Finance channels, we have a really high CPM, and it's not unheard of for older videos to be generating an average of $5.50 a day. Multiply that by 500 videos, each earning an average of $5.50, and all of a sudden, you're over a million dollars a year just by leveraging your work upfront.

Then, I did the same thing I did with the Real Estate Agent program. I decided to put together a Teachable outline that goes over how I was able to grow a channel, the techniques that I have found that work the best, and then package that all together as the YouTube Creator Academy. That so far has done over $216,000 this year just with my upfront involvement from that.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from going from stage 2 to stage 3 and subsequently making over a million dollars a year is that you need to do something that is beyond yourself. You cannot just work for results without leveraging those results and finding a way for that to do all the heavy lifting for you without any further involvement on your end.

Finally, it’s incredibly important not only to leverage your results but also to leverage the money you make from those results so that way it can continue to grow and expand beyond the work you put in. You could leverage the value of your money by investing it, and we'll call that stage 4.

To me, this is the most powerful leverage you will ever have when it comes to making money. This is true passive income and true wealth building beyond anything else. For that, I'm going to put up a quick Photoshop I created just now, just right here.

You’ll see that in stage one, when you trade time for hours, you're limited by the amount of time in a day, and your income will eventually be capped.

Next stage: when you trade results for money, yes you work less and can make more money, but you need to continue producing results, and there’s only so many results you can reasonably get to on your own.

Then stage 3: when you leverage your results for money, you could work much less and potentially make an unlimited amount, but you need to maintain that source of income if it's expected to continue. Oftentimes, a seven-figure income isn’t the most sustainable long term.

But when you get to stage 4 and invest your money, it will grow long term regardless of what you do with your time. This means that you can earn money without having to work at all and with no involvement whatsoever on your end.

So, in order for this entire model to be sustainable and for you to use this income in a way that's not spending it on Lambos and mansions, you need to save as much of your income as you possibly can, invest as much of it as you possibly can, and don't go and buy designer clothing or Starbucks coffee. This way, you’re gonna be able to create a sustainable source of income from your investments that will allow you to work in whatever job you want, to walk away from anything you don’t want to do, to do whatever you want without money holding you back.

Oh, and one more thing I want to mention really quick, since it is Black Friday, in the spirit of saving money, if you do happen to be interested in either one of my programs, I will be knocking off $200 using the link down below in the description for this. Is it a holiday? It’s a holiday to me! It’s a holiday, Black Friday! I’m just going to be keeping that discount going for 48 hours, and then after that, I will swap it out for the normal price.

So, if you happen to see this shortly after I post, then there you go—enjoy $200 off! And if you see this video after the 48 hours, then what's up future people? The link is not going to be working, but I figured I would just mention it for anyone who is interested. If for whatever reason you don't like it when you buy it, there is a no-questions-asked refund policy for the first 30 days.

So, you just have to let me know within 30 days, for whatever reason, you're not happy with it; you'll get a full refund. But again, like I said, it’s just at 30 days; that’s the limit that Teachable gives me.

So, that’s what it is! So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it, as always. If you have not already gently destroyed the like button, make sure to go ahead and do that and subscribe and hit the notification bell as well while you're at it!

Also, feel free to add me on Instagram; I post pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there. Also, feel free to add me on my second channel. That is The Graham Stephan Show; I post there every single day I’m not posting here. So, if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, feel free to add yourself on that.

And lastly, if you guys want free stocks, just use the link down below in the description. Webull is holding a promotion beginning today where they will give you one free stock just for signing up on their platform and another free stock that's worth up to $1,500 when you deposit any amount of money on their platform. It's basically a free stock trading platform, like Robinhood is, except they'll give you two free stocks, and the stocks can be worth a lot of money!

So, if you want that, you may as well just sign up, put any amount of money on the platform, and you get two free stocks! There you go. And it’s free! I love free! So, there you go! And you could do that also on Black Friday!

So anyway, thank you so much for watching, and until next time!