5 Steps To Getting Rich In Your 20's

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So there's a lot of videos out there about how to get rich in your 20s, and if you just do a search on YouTube for how to get rich, there's literally a new video posted every single hour. If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. But for real though, I've seen everything from social media marketing, Shopify, forex trading, cryptocurrency, Robinhood, 3% checking accounts, Bit Connect. The list goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those don't work because I know people who have done extraordinarily well for themselves in those businesses. But let's just take it a step further and go a little bit deeper, and discuss how you can actually get wealthy in your 20s. There are five universal concepts that will work no matter what business you want to go into, no matter how much education you have, no matter how much money you currently make. These will work no matter what you want to do.

As long as you just smash that like button and comment anything down below for the YouTube algorithm, it greatly helps out tremendously. And the best part about all of that is that if you like and comment, it's absolutely free. And as a thank you for doing that, here's a picture of a puppy.

Let's get into the video. Now, the first step to making money and becoming rich is to cultivate self-initiative. You need to be the type of person to actually make it happen, and I put this one first because it's the aspect that most people never seem to overcome. I can't tell you how many people I see that know everything but don't have the self-initiative to actually use what they learned.

There's always something that seems to be holding them back, and this is something I identify with all too well. There are so many things that I wanted to do, but somehow in the back of my head, there’s a little nagging voice just telling me, "Wait a second, Graham. Just don’t do it quite yet. You don’t know enough information. Maybe you should just wait." But let me tell you exactly what happens: that voice never goes away, and you will never be ready.

If you're watching this right now—and obviously, you're watching this right now—anyway, I recommend that you reflect on this and be super honest with yourself if this feels like you. Because the truth is, if you never start, you're never going to be successful. The rich people of their 20s don't sit around thinking that like, "Whoo, I'm not ready yet. Maybe I should wait." It doesn’t happen.

Really successful people don’t sit around all day getting hyped up and motivated watching GaryVee videos and then tell themselves, “I’m gonna start in a few months when the timing is a little bit better.” Literally everyone I’ve met in their 20s who’s become wildly successful has just had this self-initiative to jump in, start as soon as they could, and then figure it out as they went along. None of them ever waited just for things to fall in place and for the timing to be a little bit better, and to wait until they learned a little more.

They all just started, and learning the skill becomes priceless in terms of how much money you can end up making in the future. So if this all sounds like you, I want you to think to yourself: what is your excuse? As a fun exercise here, I want you to write this down in the comments below. First, I want you to write out what your goal is, and the second thing I want you to write out in that same comment is why you haven’t done it yet and what your excuses are.

Then I want you to click that submit button and post that comment. By the way, this exercise only works if everyone else does it as well, because the whole point of this is for you to read other people's goals and excuses, and then realize just how ridiculous it all sounds. And when you see all of that, you’ll realize that probably your excuse is just as ridiculous.

And this is going to help you cultivate that self-initiative to realize that your excuses don’t matter, and the best option to take is just to start. Also, just to smash that like button if you didn’t do it the first time, here is your second chance to get that done.

Now, once you’ve tackled that one and hopefully posted your comment down below, the next step, number two, is to become an independent thinker. Now, don’t mistake this one for thinking outside the box or having creativity, even though those are amazing qualities to have, and I always encourage people to have both.

But the truth is that many of the successful people that I’ve met have absolutely zero creativity whatsoever, and many of the ideas that they come up with that are successful aren't anything revolutionary. They don’t think necessarily outside the box; they just take other ideas that they see and simply just improve on them.

But instead, however, they all have this one thing in common, and that is that they are independent thinkers. These are people who aren’t manipulated by other people's opinions. They aren’t swayed in a different direction because of what someone said. Instead, they gather as much information around them as possible, they absorb up as much as they can and then—wait for it, get ready for this—they come up with their own conclusion with what’s best for them. Mind blown!

And when they do this, they're not making decisions out of fear; they're not making their decisions to try to please everybody. They’re making decisions by taking into consideration everything around them and then making the choice that they feel is best for them. And this is exactly why those people end up becoming extremely successful.

Think of this in your own life as well. How many times have you been swayed from doing something that would have benefited you because someone else didn’t like it? Or maybe even worse—and this is even more common—someone on the internet told you it was a bad idea.

Now, hear this part out because it's very important: there’s a big distinction here between hearing out honest constructive criticism, and then making your own choices and being blindly influenced in one way or another by what the loudest person has to say. And again, this is something that I have been through as well. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told that making YouTube videos was a total waste of time.

I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told not to buy real estate in 2012 because the second crash was just about to happen. I heard all of this from people that I really trusted, and this took me years to get to the point where I’ve learned to trust my own intuition more than I learned to trust anybody else and think independently of what everyone else has to say.

And it’s this skill that has helped me out tremendously when it comes to growing a business, making money, and investing: just trusting your own thoughts and coming to your own conclusions. Now, with that said, the next skill that you’re gonna need to learn after taking the self-initiative and learning how to be an independent thinker is understanding the power of persuasion.

When it comes to making money, you can pretty much suck in every other area of business, but if you can persuade people, you will do well financially. In fact, this is probably one of the most important things on this entire list just because of that—like persuading people to check out your store.

Grab StefanMarch.com because the 10% discount is only gonna be running for another 24 more hours, so now is your chance to scoop up some “Do I pick and dislike unsub” merch today. But anyway, jokes aside, just think about it, because nearly everything you do in life is in some way or another persuasion.

Even as a small child, maybe you were learning to persuade your parents into buying that toy you wanted or letting them give you junk food for dinner. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve learned just to continue annoying them—continue wearing them down—until eventually, you get what you want.

Also, maybe in high school, it’s learning how to persuade the teacher into boosting up your grade a little bit or maybe extending the deadline of a test. Or maybe when you’re interviewing for a job, you have to learn how to persuade that person into hiring you. Or if you're selling your own product, you need to then persuade people to go and buy it.

When it comes to persuasion, this applies to everything in business. A big distinction when I say this here: I do not mean manipulation. You should never coerce or guilt someone into doing something they don’t want to do—that's bad. Now, persuasion, on the other hand, is allowing the other person to see your perspective or point of view in a way you communicate that benefits them as well.

This should always be a win-win scenario; it should benefit them just as much or even more than it benefits you. And when it comes to learning all of this, the best resource by far is a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.

And also, I’ll share with you guys how to get this book entirely for free. All you need to do is go up to the YouTube search, type in How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the entire audio book has already been uploaded for you to listen to. So there you go; I just saved you some money so you can go and buy some merch instead. But for real, spend some time and listen to that book.

It's all about really understanding what the other person wants, truly listening to them, and then providing a solution to that person in a way that benefits both of you. If you show someone that they’re really being heard and understood, they will listen to you. And when they listen to you, they’re gonna be more receptive to what you have to say, so go and read that book or just listen to it for free. Enjoy!

Okay, so once you’ve done all of that, we’re going to get into the more difficult stuff. This is something even the best people could spend a lifetime learning and cultivating, and that is the skill of leadership. This is learning how to be an example for everyone else around you. It’s about having the conversations that most people put off and never want to have.

It's making many of the tough decisions that most people don’t want to do, and it’s also teaching by example. In order to really get this skill, it’s really about doing exactly what you preach, and that almost encompasses every other part of this video that I mentioned.

Just think about it too: when you’re in school and you were given a group project, usually one person steps up and kind of takes control of the entire situation. That person is the leader. They had the self-initiative to take control; they were an independent thinker because they didn’t wait for the approval of the entire group to go and manage the project.

And if they were successful at that, they were obviously persuasive enough to get everyone else to agree and go along with that. By doing all of that, they demonstrated leadership, even in a small context of a school project. But in the business world, when it comes to actually making money, it goes way beyond that, because it also encompasses having patience to work with other people.

It's also just as much about motivating other people to get on your team and work towards a unified goal. And lastly, it's really about encouraging other people to step up, not trying to push other people down. By doing all of this, you really cultivate trust with other people, and trust is really built on long-term action.

Chances are, if you get a successful leader like this, they also take responsibility anytime they make a mistake or where they mess up. They own up to it, and if you can learn those characteristics, it’s something that will follow you anywhere you go with absolutely anything that you do.

And finally, all of that would fall apart unless you cultivate this last little skill, and that is time management. This one is absolutely essential to getting rich in your 20s, or really any age for that matter. You need to have the discipline to know when to work, what to work on, and what you should work on first.

And if there’s anything that every single one of us all has in common, the one thing where all of us have the same level playing field is that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. But something I’ve noticed when doing this is that somehow Bob over here gets twice as much work done in a day than Jim, because Bob isn’t distracted all day by his Instagram notifications and really prioritizes his work to get done first.

This is exactly why you see some people just crushing it during the day and then having a ton of free time left over, while other people are running around like a chicken with their head cut off, posting about how hard they’re working until four o'clock in the morning. Come on! Like, if you really prioritize yourself without distraction, you would be surprised at exactly how much you can get done during the day.

And this part is absolutely vital for anyone who wants to get rich early in life, because time is money. So there you have it! Those are the five skills that you will need to learn to get rich in your 20s. Everyone that I have seen who has been wildly successful in their 20s has followed all of these.

And yes, I get it. This is a bit clickbait because it works no matter what age you are. So it’s not like if you’re 31 none of this is going to work for you. It’s just that the largest audience that I have on YouTube is in their 20s, so by putting “20s” in the title, I end up getting way more views than if I put any other age. Don’t hate the player, just hate the game—that's just the way YouTube works.

But for real though, those skill sets will help put you on the best path possible to making as much money as you can as early on as you possibly can. So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you made it to the very end and you haven’t already smashed that subscribe button, make sure to destroy the subscribe button!

Smash that notification bell so YouTube notifies you anytime I post a video. 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. Thank you again for watching, and until next time!