The middle class is a story. Wealth is a strategy.

Hey, welcome to the Cardone Zone, my newest podcast where every week I'll bring to you a new celebrity artist, athlete, some of the top people in their field CEOs from around the world running the world to give you their insights, their knowledge and their breakthroughs. Look, these people came from nothing just like I did, so get ready with punkled G. You're in for the ride of your life where we're gonna 10X everything you think, the way you work, the way you act, and the way you roll every single day. Make sure you subscribe and comment, love to see what you're talking about and get ready for today's show. Everyone uses the word wealth. Most people say they want wealth, but do you actually know what wealth means? If you want wealth in your life, you have to know what it is. Wealth is having more than enough by definition, more than enough abundance of everything that is vital to your survival. Wealth is not dependent upon one thing, the limit of a bank account, a car, a house, a job, a relationship, your income. It's having more than enough of everything that you want and need. It's abundance and affluence. Wealth is different than rich and certainly different than the millionaire next door. Notice that wealth does not include worry. The millionaire next door is all about worry. It's buy, use, car, and don't go to Starbucks. It's what not to do, not how to create abundance and prosperity. 76% of Americans today are living paycheck to paycheck in the richest country on the planet. Maybe you're worried about whether you can afford $5 coffee, picking up a check at the restaurant, about your student loans, or maybe you're worried about paying the 30-year mortgage off, or about paying your kids school tuition. Chances are you're reading this book because you're worried, or because you're just not where you know you could be, or maybe because you, like me, know you could be wealthy. You're just trying to figure out what's holding you back. Here's the truth. You cannot worry your way to abundance. You cannot worry your way to wealth. The truly wealthy do not worry. I'm not talking about your 80-year-old neighbor who finally had a net worth of a million dollars after 79 years of worrying, saving. He's not in this book. I'm not talking about him. Today I'm talking to you about the truly wealthy. It said that Jeff Bezos is going to spend $600 million on his wedding, on his second wedding. Now that is crazy and insane and bodacious and ridiculous and so bougie and I would never do it. But see, he's not worried about money. He's worth $250 billion. $600 million is nothing. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jay-Z, they ain't worried. And they have total freedom and massive impacts on billions of lives. But the millionaire next door, let me tell you that dude is worried. Why? Because he's obsessed with controlling his cost instead of creating his wealth. Listen, what I just said. The millionaire next door is obsessed with controlling cost and lowering expenses instead of creating wealth, abundance, prosperity and plenty. You probably know I wrote a book called Be Obsessed or Be Average. Well, the millionaire next door is obsessed with being average. Just so that some day, decades later, or maybe 50 years later, you could reach this mythical status called millionaire, only to find out when you get there that you still have money problems. An obsession with worrying is not the kind of obsession that I'm encouraging in my book, Be Obsessed or Be Average. I'm encouraging you to be obsessed with success, with production, with creation, with abundance. Obsession with worry is the millionaire next door trap and you might be in it. If you're a saver planning your 401k, your IRA, maxing out your contributions to your retirement plan, paying your house off, listening to Dave Ramsey stay out of debt, you're trapped into worrying over the wrong thing just to reach some arbitrary status called the millionaire next door. True wealth is the absence of worry. Can you see how solely obsessing over controlling costs is a losing formula? It'd be like playing defense the entire game. All of life is just costs. Imagine spending all your life always worried about costs. Everything that you buy with your money, the things that you do with your time. Constantly measuring everything you do, everything you spend as to what it costs you. Now, take a piece of paper out and list out every single thing that you did today. Make the list as exhaustive as you can. This should take about three minutes. When you're done, list out what each activity costs you. You went to Starbucks, what did it cost? You went to the fuel station and filled up your car. What did it cost? You cut your lawn today. What did it cost? Or you had somebody cut your lawn, what did that cost? You drove your kids to school. What did that cost? You went to work today. What did that cost? It cost you something. It needed to cost time. It cost energy. It cost resources. Or it cost all three. What you'll quickly see is that every day your life is made up of cost. There's an old saying that you might have heard before. Don't sweat the small stuff and it's all small stuff. Well, that saying could be don't sweat the cost. And by the way, it's all cost because if you're constantly nitpicking and second-guessing cost and measuring the cost of everything, you're second-guessing your whole life. Does that sound like the American dream to you? Does that sound like prosperity or affluence, abundance, a life of total and constant, measuring of cost, worry? Look, worry comes naturally to most people. I get it. But you should welcome the cost. You should want more cost, not less cost. I had a person call me once and said, "I can reduce your Facebook ads." And I'm like, I'm not interested in reducing the ads. I'm interested in increasing how much I spend, not lessening what I spend. See, the trick is to being able to properly pay for your cost, which we're going to cover at length later. Since all of life is just a cost, everything you do costs something. Being able to handle more and more costs in your life by getting your money right, by creating wealth means you could actually live more. I'm speaking from experience here, even while I sit here and talk to you, I still measure the cost of everything and there's a price to that. I watched my mom as I was growing up. This is how I grew up, measuring the cost of everything. I remember when I first read the millionaire next door, I was attracted by the idea of worrying my way to wealth. I was actually attracted to it. I was miseducated, indoctrinated like you were, to be stuck in the middle class, the millionaire middle class. And for the next five years, I spent my time worrying and saving my way to millionaire status. And by the way, I achieved it. Some would say, "Well, the book worked for you." Yeah, maybe. But I was pinching pennies. If I traveled, I was sure to stay at the holiday in. I would always fly coach. If they didn't give me an upgrade, I sat in the back. And yes, I did hit my goal, but I was miserable along the way. And let's be real. Once I hit the goal, I actually realized I hadn't hit my goal. Because millionaire was not the target. When I hit millionaire status, I realized I still wasn't rich, much less wealthy. Let's be real. Would you rather stay in a holiday in or a ritz? And let's be even more real, where would I have opportunities to meet new clients at the holiday in or the ritz? Look, even if the millionaire next door worked for me, you'd still be millionaire staying in a holiday in. And I know plenty of them. These are frugal people, mezzers. How many of you know a rich uncle that is a mezzer? They won't pay for anything. You go to dinner with him. And there's 12 people and everybody's got to throw a credit card in there. And he could buy this meal a thousand times. Meanwhile, being truly wealthy would allow you to stay wherever you want when you want and not worry about how much you're spending. I don't want to slowly and gradually spend time and energy saving small amounts of money. That is not the way to wealth. I don't want to hope that one day after 80 years of suffering that I finally, if the stop market didn't go up in flames, I might scavenge enough money to, by the way, never enjoy it. Let me ask you this. Are you buying used cars and avoiding $5 coffee at Starbucks because you believe you're going to save your way to financial freedom? Are you worried about saving enough? If you are, you're right to be worried because it's not going to happen. This is where the millionaire next door doesn't work and failed so many people because the target was wrong. You have to shift your mindset on the target. Look, I don't want to be scared, angry, mooching, miser, saving every penny, chasing nickels and losing dollars while your life passes you away. That's why I say never get advice from a millionaire. Get your advice from billionaires. Now why ask for the view from someone only halfway to wealth creation? The millionaire is not the right position to give advice. A person with a million dollars, even though that might sound unbelievable to you. Trust me, a person with a million dollars in net worth is not financially secure. They have not financially arrived yet. They only think they have until they haven't. They're one emergency away from being broke again. Too many people take one of two attitudes toward growing wealth. They model their financial life after the millionaire next door. Maybe they're rich uncle, like I did. Rather than studying people who have indestructible nine and ten figure well, are they simply think becoming wealthy is not even possible for someone like them. They believe that becoming wealthy is for the Lucky Spurm Club, business owner, gold diggers, lottery winners, athletes, rappers, or tech innovators. Both of these are symptoms of the same problem, thinking too small and studying the wrong people and setting the wrong target. Look, I used to think too small for emancipating myself of this middle class trap. In fact, it's the biggest financial mistake I made in my life was thinking too small, not doing too little. These are the two biggest financial mistakes I've made in my entire life. Listening to the wrong people and not thinking big enough. There's no shortage of money on this planet, only a shortage of people thinking big enough. The formula just simply doesn't work. Small think, it's you small think. There is no cost to thinking big. It certainly didn't work for my mom, who thought small constantly. Clip coupons. She worried about every thing we ever spent. And by the way, she did a good job of worrying, and she made sure we never went broke or bankrupt, but she was always worried. She chose the worry mode of wealth building and paid the price and never ever had the wealth. Millionaires in the super rich come from all walks of life. In fact, just to debunk one of the myths, I'll tell you that 4 out of 5 millionaires today worked for someone else. Did you know that? Here's the truth of the matter. The possibility you becoming wealthy is not just a fantasy. The reason most people never create true wealth is that they never considered it possible. You just simply didn't go for it. You went for a millionaire and became worth 3 or 4 million. But you didn't create wealth because you didn't go for the right target. They're convinced on the start of their plan to wealth creation, that by the close, simply be satisfied with their financial situation. Oh my god, if I could just be a millionaire, then I will make it. The destination you have set for yourself is incorrect. The other reason is that people fundamentally do not understand money. Remember we're talking about traps here. Do you want just enough? Or do you want so much abundance and prosperity that can never be destroyed? You can pass it on to your next generation. We fundamentally do not understand money. Even as simple as how much is there. Very few people know how to get money. Most people don't know how much money there is. Even fewer people know how to keep money and almost no one knows how to multiply. Just look around and you will see signs of this everywhere. The only reason to be obsessed with controlling and cutting costs is that you actually believe there's a shortage of money. Hey, looking back, I realized that my parents were constantly worried about money. It took my dad 10 years to firmly secure our family into the middle class, maybe 20 years. Then his heart exploded in his chest. It's my belief that it was his obsession with worrying about making it that eventually killed him. As I say this to you, I realized I suffer from the same thing. Overcontrolling cost, reducing the cost of everything, the house, the bicycles, everything that we ever spent we were worried about. After he died, we went right back to worrying again. My mom didn't know how to get income. She didn't have any income generating skills that she could use in the marketplace and didn't know where the money would come from. Didn't know what to do with it and do it. I was surrounded by this every day. Turn your lights off. Don't waste anything. Eat all your food. If you're reading this right now, you might be living paycheck to paycheck. You might be suffering from the same things I did, the traps. Maybe you're doing better than this, but still constantly worrying. The question is, could you ask yourself, how do I get to a place where I'm not worrying? What is that number? See, you need a formula to create wealth, not a formula for getting by. It doesn't matter who you are. Look, I was broke when I was 25. I hated my job. I had no brand. Nobody believed in me. I didn't believe in myself. I had no dad, no money, no name, no skills. But I knew I wanted to be rich. The millionaire next door route didn't make sense to me because I knew it wouldn't make me rich. I'd done the math. 25 years old and you get a million dollars. You got to live 50 years on a million dollars. That's what? 20,000 bucks a year, 1800 bucks a month. You can't live like that. Something else freed me from those traps. And I'll be sharing that formula in the following chapters. Thanks to my approach, though. I now own, I don't know, $5 billion for the real estate. We do about a billion dollars for the new revenue every year. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charities. And I know you can do all this too. And more. Man, if I had started just a little earlier with the right mindset, I want to show you exactly what I did to turn my life around going from broke, but not broken. I hadn't quit through millionaire status, deck of millionaire, and all the way up the food chain. If you want affluence and wealth in your life, you have to change your obsession with worry, a trap, into obsession with wealth success. I look for the opportunity everywhere I go today, everywhere I go, I'm looking for who can connect me with wealth and prosperity and affluence. And I'm not always talking about money here. Who can just simply make life easy for me? You might be in a place in your life today where all you see is scarcity instead of abundance. You're told to eat all your food like my mom told me to save all your money like my mom told me to be happy with what you have like my mom told me because sun, you're better off than everybody else. Statements like these might be well intentioned but they come from scarcity. Look, you need to flip that and develop a wealth creation mindset. If you're committed to a wealth creation mindset, hit me on X, just post some grant card on at grant card on I am committed to a wealth creation mindset. I'll find you on X and I'll follow you. Start seeing wealth everywhere in everything and every relationship. Instead of looking at someone being frugal and wondering if there's a secret millionaire next door, look for signs of confirmation that there's abundance everywhere in the world. Look for the private jet. Look for the yacht. Look for the big houses. How do they live? Who are these people? Why aren't they worried while I am? Reinforces by looking at the cars that you pass on the streets. Look at the 70,000, the 80,000, the 120,000. Look at the 400,000. Look at the million dollar cars. Look for prosperity and abundance everywhere you go. Fill your eyes with wealth. Realize that it is abundant. It is everywhere. Be open to seeing how much money exists in the world. There's $350 trillion where they're real estate on this planet. There's $120 trillion where the stocks. There's another 80 or 90 trillion dollars where the treasury you build is just in America. Look for anything that will substantiate prosperity. Ask yourself, who's a big and abundant thinker in my life? If you don't have anybody, let me be that guy. Become obsessed. Remember, because obsessing over wealth costs, the cost to get there, is just as much as obsessing over worrying over having too little. But one obsession leaves you miserable, miser, the millionaire next door, and the other obsession leaves you wealthy. With more than enough, what's vital for your life and those that you love? Think hard to find someone in your life. It could even be a virtual mentor. If you watch my videos, read my material, listen to this over and over. I can be that person for you in your life. Let's face it, most of us are surrounded by people that have limited thinking because they're worried and have been told their whole life that scarcity is a reality. Not everybody can be rich. You'll be told you have to make a decision that wealth is for everyone and certainly it's for you. Someone out there will become wealthy. The question it is, could it be you? When you decide to become wealthy, when you make this commitment and reinforce that decision every day, I promise you, if you don't quit, you will get there. Say to yourself, I am going to create wealth in my life. That's right. I am going to create wealth in my life or even better. I am wealthy. When you say I don't need money or money won't make me happy or money's not that important, you're basically pushing money away from you. What you're actually saying, you're telling yourself there's not enough money to go around. I'm certainly not lucky enough to have it or I'm not worthy to have it. You're telling yourself you need to primarily focus on the cost of everything. Inflation will be the devil. You're worried about governments and taxes and the cost of everything going up. You're hating life because you're quitting on life and understand that you will need more money to create wealth in your life. Remember wealth is prosperity and abundance of everything and overflow with if you will. Maybe you don't need more money now, but your family and your church probably need it. And when you say you don't need it, aren't you being selfish, only thinking about yourself, you're actually being selfish when you settle. If you commit to being frugal instead of committing to getting more, once you've committed to making more of life and opportunities and more money, you need to change how you start talking about money. Don't talk like a miser. How do you talk about money? How do you think about money? Are you negative or are you positive? People who are obsessively worrying about money demean it by saying things like, I don't need money. I don't care about money. Money doesn't grow in trees. Money doesn't make me happy. Money changes people. Only greedy people think about money and money is the root of all evil and bad people and terrible things in the world. I used to think all these things about money. Every one of these I had gone in my head. How you think and talk about money will tell you if you've given up on the money game, much less the wealth game. Listen to what you say, then change it. Listen to what you think and change it. I would never say money is bad or evil. Money is a piece of paper. Can't be evil. $30,000 is just a bunch of paper. How can it inherently be bad? It's like saying sticky notes are bad. That sounds ridiculous, right? If I gave you one million sticky notes right now, would that change you as a person? Of course not. But it gives you plenty of sticky notes. So what conversations you're having about money with your friends and family over Thanksgiving or Christmas when you're hanging out on the weekends? What are you saying to your friends and family? You know, I wasn't allowed to talk about money when I was growing up. I was actually told you don't talk politics, you don't talk money and you don't talk religion. It was this private topic money. I had to change what I was saying to myself before I could actually get myself in a financial situation. The super wealthy, trust me, when they're having drinks, they're talking about money. It's poor people that don't talk about money. The very people that don't talk about it don't have it. How can you expect to get the very things you need in life that you want in life that could actually benefit your life if you don't talk about it and if you're hating on it. If you're telling yourself I don't have money or I never have money, it's going to limit your ability to ever have money. What's going on in your brain? You probably have a bunch of voices in your head right now telling you, "Grants wrong. Money's not good. Money is the root of all evil. Money won't make me happy." You ain't never had enough money to know a fellow make you happy or not. And it's definitely not evil. The person might be evil. The money can't be. Remember, the 7.6 people out of 10 that you're surrounded by may be more have problems with money. Listen to what I just said. 76% may be 90% of the people that you hang out with have problems with money. How you talk about it is how you think about it. How you think about it determines what you say about it and what you say about it. about it is what you end up doing about it. Think it, say it, do it. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and personally given tens of millions of my own money. Was that good or bad? You decide. You decide if being able to get enough money to give away that much money is good or bad. Audit your thoughts and your language about money in the next 72 hours monitor what you're thinking and saying about money. Every time you have a negative thought about money, I want you to write it down. Every time you say something negative about money, I want you to write it down for the next 72 hours. Obsess over income, not expenses. See if the millionaire next door trap is focused on cutting expenses that builds your worries. The antidote is generating more income. That is, I've become obsessed with generating more income and that will build my confidence. Worry makes you doubt yourself, which makes you want to cut back even more. Confidence in creating new income helps you realize wealth is possible, which makes you eventually generate even more income and more income helps you realize your wealth. I can tell you the most important money that I've ever earned in my life was when I went from $3,000 a month in income to $4,000. At the same job by the way, doing the same work, I was simply paid more because I was more successful at the things that I did. Making that extra $1,000 was the most important money I ever earned in my life and I would earn billions more after this. But it was the first $1,000 that extra, the gamey, the confidence and the momentum and most importantly, this showed me I was in control of my ability to produce new income. I have never created more confidence because I saved money. It taught me that I could do more and that I could do more and should do more to produce more income. Today, my single purpose and mission on this planet is to show everyone how to get out of these traps that you're living in and for free yourself from these traps so that you can hit levels of life that don't just produce more money for you and your wife and your kids and the people you love but also creates more confidence for you to be a creator, not a saver. Some people suggest that everyone can't have money. They're myzers. Look, some people claim that everyone can't have money. I actually had a reporter tell me this, well, what are you saying, Grant? Everybody can be rich? Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying, misreporter. Everyone can be rich. And then other people suggested that rich people are myzers in cheap and they are, by the way, okay? But not the super wealthy, they're not myzers and they're not cheap. See, they think like a millionaire or someone even poorer. You understand what I'm saying? Millionaires are myzers, they're savers. They have to protect and defend. They have to bury money. They have to, what's the word on Wall Street? Spread it out over many, many investments because they don't wanna heaven forbid, lose anything. They believe there isn't enough money on the planet for you to have a loss or to spend too much. Look, take it from a billionaire. If you ask billionaires instead of millionaires for advice on money, you'll realize there are no shortages. The Warren Buffett's, the Bezos's, the JZ's, if you will. Okay, these people, the Elon Musk, they focus on earning money not saving it. That doesn't mean by the way they're out blowing money. In fact, the billionaires probably spend less on their t-shirts and their shoes and their cars than others, but it's where they spend most of their time on earning new income, making new investments, and scaling their operations. It's about expansion, not contraction. Now look, we'll cover how to do all this in due course. I've spent the last 30 plus years trying to figure out how all this works. What's duplicatable, what's simple, and how long does it actually take to create wealth? I wanna educate the planet about wealth and abundance, but first you need to make sure you're thinking big enough, or you're targeting it's big enough. Are you thinking about wealth or money? Everything you do. And every dream needs to go bigger. If you thought you had a good idea, 10x that idea and think bigger. If you wanna throw a party, do a big party. If you wanna bigger problems, trust me when I tell you, you want bigger problems, not little problems. You want bigger problems with money, not lower cost. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the interest should be. America, one of the richest countries in the world. If you're not where you wanna be, you haven't thought big enough and didn't produce enough each day to get what you want. Look, the bigger the challenge, the bigger your interest should be. America's one of the richest countries in the world where you live has tremendous unbelievable prosperity and abundance. You just gotta go find it. If you're not where you wanna be, the cold heart fact is, you haven't thought big enough, or you haven't been thinking big enough, and you're not doing enough each day to produce that. This thinking is hard for those of us who are brought up in poverty and scarcity. I mean, it's a big deal. You think small. You were made to think small. You were made to save. You weren't made to believe you could accomplish anything. Most people would resent bigger problems. I want bigger problems. Most people resent bigger costs. I want bigger cost. Most people don't want employees. I want more employees. Most people think employees are a problem because you don't have enough. Look at the billionaires of the world instead of the millionaires of the world. And what you're gonna see, billionaires are happier to work more or not less. They want more employees, not less. They wanna spend more advertising and more investments, not less. They're willing to take losses along the way. They're not thinking the same way, the millionaire thinks. Millionaires begrudgingly work. They dream of retirement. They complain about how many hours they work and how hard they work. Stop it. Quit talking like a poor person. Quit complaining about working. Start bragging about it. Somebody told me they worked 40 hours last week. I said, "Are you complaining or bragging?" He's like, "I'm complaining." I said, "Bro, I worked 100 hours and I'm bragging. You wanna work more. You wanna do more. You wanna produce more because you're gonna win more. Because there's going to be a day when you can't work. You would love to go work for someone. You're gonna wake up one day and say, "Damn, I wish I'd have gone to work more often." And I wish I would have thought bigger. And I wish I'd have gone for it bigger. And I wish I'd have taken more chances. Look, every super successful person that I have studied talks about 100 hour work weeks, not four hour work weeks. You read stories of billionaires like Elon Musk burning the midnight oil, work in 80 and 100 hours. He talks about taking breaks to grab something to eat and then fall asleep. What was he doing? He was at the plants being the engineer. It's what he did. He ate slap work. That's because billionaires are happy to have higher costs, not less. The millionaire next door is trying to avoid and cut costs. Twitter costs Elon, $44 billion. He invested $44 billion for the world to have free speech. And he believes it's going to work. His goal was not to minimize his costs. His goal was to create free speech. And if it costs $44 billion and everybody, the whole world said he made a bad investment. Guys worth $500 billion today. And he was worth $80 when he did it. The super successful. The goal is how can I have more costs so I can do even more in my life? They pay for more things. At higher prices, more often than almost anyone else on the planet. I can guarantee you the millionaire next door was it spending or investing the time and energy and efforts to having or creating that kind of impact? The millionaire next door, poor boy, poor girl, trapped in their use truck in their little house that's paid for with no mortgage, anonymously worried about their costs, flying under the radar, talking about how unfair everything is and how they work so hard. The card owns zone. Get ready with Uncle G. Make sure you subscribe and comment, and we love to see what you're talking about. The card owns zone. We're going to 10X everything you think and the way you roll every single day. Have you ever noticed that? How the people who make decisions and have the power of choice all seem to be the people with the money, not trapped, they're free, they're not complaining, they're creating. That's what we're working on here. That's what you're thinking about. You could be one of these people, listen to me. You can be one of these people. One of these people that is living tremendous prosperity and affluence. You don't just want money for the sake of money or for the sake of calling yourself a millionaire. You want money to be able to have the power of choice. Freedom. Which would you rather be? Trapped your whole life with a house paid for, maybe because you can call yourself a millionaire. You send your kids off to school, you have a couple of cars paid for, maybe you belong to a country club or do you want to be truly wealthy with a freedom of choice to get rid of the country club, get rid of the cars, get rid of the house and go where you want to do what you want and give all your money away to the next generation. Take a moment to answer the assessment questions. The millionaire next door. The millionaire next door, trap assessment questions. One, how worried are you about expenses compared to income? Two, who is the best person you know to mentor you about wealth creation? Three, do you currently believe it's possible for you to become wealth? The misinformation trap. In this chapter, I'm going to unpack for you. The misguided ways of thinking that so many people pick up from their sources of information. One, the real reason you're not wealthy. Two, why your daily cup of coffee is not your enemy. And three, the only path to becoming wealthy. By the end of this chapter, you'll be set to rewire your brain so it's primed and prepared to accept wealth and all areas of yourself. It's time to get un-miss informed. The real reason you don't have money. I remember that stinging feeling in my throat as I opened my eyes after my third drug overdose. That's right, three of them. As I thought about how I ended up there on a wet floor, stained with my own vomit. It was a terrible lifestyle. And it wasn't a lifestyle at all. It was an addiction and I regret it. Then I remembered the time before that when I was young and innocent, kid who everyone loved, I went from being my mother's most trustworthy son, someone she dored and admired to the black sheep of my family. I was definitely at the end of my rope, five years into addiction that almost killed me. I tried to get clean, I tried every day for five years and I couldn't. Ten years I spent in a terrible addiction. Strongly recommend if you're using any drugs today, get off of them as fast as you can. No one beats the drugs ever. I was at a place in my life where I was complete wreck, ten years wasted, slurring my words, bloodshot, pupils dilated most of the time. I was broken in every way a person can be. I remember my mother telling me one day, I'm done with you. My mom finally did what she had to do. She stopped me and said, "Get out, stay away, don't come here again. I'm done." As I stood stunned believing, maybe I'd miss herder. As I stood stunned believing, maybe I'd miss herder, she walked over to the door and held it open. I'll never forget the look of anger and hopelessness she held in her eyes, motioning for me to exit. Get out and don't come back. As she closed the door behind me, something inside of me suddenly switched. A few days later, I checked myself into a treatment center. See, I needed my mom to say no. I needed the one person who believed to me the most to lead me, no option other than to change because that was the problem I'd been because that's what the problem had been the whole time. I went on to successfully complete the treatment program and immediately in the first 30 days, I felt better about myself. But it took some time for me to start really believing in me. The truth is no amount of drugs or money or sex or status or whatever you're doing is going to ever make you feel better about yourself. And that includes wealth. There's no drug in the world that's going to make you more aware, more powerful, more confident, nothing. Nobody in history of the world has ever escaped drugs. Once it becomes a problem, it's a problem. Elvis, Jackson, you name it. Drugs take them. I would not be where I'm at today if I was still using drugs. For those of you who think, "Oh, that's what made you." No, wrong. That's what wasted 10 years of my life. I've got an unbelievable life today that I would not have and the drugs set me back. My whole life turned around when I changed the way I thought about myself to get off of drugs. But that's not the only change that I've made in my life. The rebuilding after that of everything that got me to this place had to be confronted. And that's what this chapter is really about. Not about drug addiction. The drugs were one thing. It's what got me there. Thinking less of myself than I could be. The things you believe based on your history and the things you've learned up to this point is what is going to get you where you're at right now. The reason you don't have the money you want, the life you want, the success you want is because of what you've learned thus far. Let that sink in. You are where you are because what you know. You've been taught wrong. That's not my mom and my dad's fault that I was on drugs. Okay, that was my fault. What I'm saying is I was not being busy enough. My biggest problem was not being busy, not being creative, not doing stuff. Look, we've all been taught wrong. How can you live in the richest country in the world and have 250 million people that are almost broke? Because we've all been taught wrong. Most people stuck in the middle class are stuck only because they have the wrong belief about themselves, their abilities, and have been indoctrinated about money and wealth. If you're having a money problem, it is not necessarily because you're stupid, lazy, or have the wrong job. Could be, but I doubt it. It's more likely that the real reason for your struggles relating to money is nobody ever showed up to show you to be an example of what your capable love. No one ever showed you then taught you how to get enough money to have prosperity and abundance. No, they taught you how to save money, how to cut back or how to spend money and fake it till you make it. What did you learn about money? What did your parents and teachers tell you about money? Did they teach you how to save it? Did they teach you how to create it? Did they teach you how to spend it? Did they teach you how to invest it? Did they show you the way? Did they show you what they were investing in? Did they show you the difference between a long-term investment, a short-term investment? Did they teach you how to buy real estate? Did they teach you to be careful with it? Did they tell you to spend it wisely? Pay your house off? Did they teach you? Oh, don't rent by your house. Yeah, that's all the stuff that I was taught to or in this case not taught or indoctrinated to do. See, none of them told you how to get rich, much less, create wealth. They concentrated on spending and reducing and not doing. I remember hearing my uncle say, "Don't be a renter." Okay? Be a homeowner. He's like, "You know, the landlord makes all the money." And when I heard him say that, I'm like, "I'm going to be the landlord. I don't know why. I don't know how, but I saw through what he was saying." He was suggesting I buy a house, and I'm suggesting that buying a house is a crazy thing to do if you want to stay stuck in the middle class. No, no. Owning a bunch of properties that you can rent to others and renting where you live and earning income from where other people live is a much smarter investment. See, I heard this over and over from people when I was growing up. Thousands of times. Don't talk about money. Money won't make you happy. Penny saved is a penny earned. All these crazy things that we never challenge. Everyone around me was brought up to believe exactly the same thing so we all were indoctrinated. This community of people like-minded that we're thinking about scarcity. Most of us were brought up to believe that save your money for the purpose of buying a mythological American middle class dream. Oh, you're going to own your home one day. Oh, like that's the end all. I've talked about this several times already in this book. A home will never create wealth for you. Living in one place, one address will never create the wealth freedom that I'm talking about. I heard this response time and time again. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Saving is not your problem. Income is your problem. You do not have a spending problem. You have a income problem. You cannot save anything if you don't make anything. People are living paycheck to paycheck. How are they supposed to save more? Do you understand? If you don't have any money left over, how can you save more money? How can you reduce your bills below zero? Now my question is how high can you take your income above zero? The only way to increase improve your situation is to increase your income from multiple different sources. Million dollar math. You've been taught your entire life. Cute little money quotes that are completely false and almost never challenged. Want proof? Answer these questions. A penny saved is, yeah, you got it. A penny earned. Money doesn't grow on. Yep, you got that one right too. Trees. Yep. We've all been indoctrinated. You become a robot automatically answering this before I could answer it as if it was truth. It is indoctrination. It is mind control. The truth is a penny saved is a penny. It's just a damn penny. That's all it is. Oh, yeah, actually money comes from a cotton bush. It's manufactured. It used to be in plants printed in abundance. Today, it's not even that. It's just a digit entry into our treasury. And money won't make you happy. Oh, yeah. Who's telling you that? People that aren't happy with their money. That's why they're not happy because they never had enough money to actually even understand whether it would make them happier or not. And you'll never find a millionaire this happy with their money because they don't have enough money. Anybody that tells you money won't make you happy. Let me tell you what I know about them. They've never had enough money to have an opinion on it. Number one, and number two, people that have big money don't talk about money and happy in the same sentence. They have nothing to do with each other. See, you've been taught wrong. But now what? We both now know how to become a millionaire isn't taught in school. How to become a billionaire or create real wealth? It's not even a concept. Isn't it funny that schools teach you how to read and write, how to do math, how to know history and geography, how to pass a test, but they never bring up the subject, how to get wealthy. Look, becoming wealthy seems to be a topic deserve for fantasies, movies, and drunken what if games. Wealthy people come from all walks of life. In fact, just to debunk one of the other myths, I'll tell you that four out of five people, technically considered millionaires, work for someone else. That's right. They work for someone else not for themselves. The possibility of becoming wealthy is not a fantasy. The reason most people never become wealthy is they never even considered it a possibility. How can you get a red car if you never look for a red car? How can you become anything if you've already given up before you started? They were convinced by the man, the media, your teachers, the educators, your mom, your dad, your uncle, all those of which who gave up the misinformed to be satisfied and to settle with whatever your financial situation is. The other reason that people fundamentally do not understand money is very few people know how to get money in the first place to get it, not to make it. How do I get it? Even fewer people know how to keep it, where to store it. They're trying to save it. By the way, that's impossible. You cannot save money. You can store it someplace, but you can't save it. And almost no one knows how to multiply money. Not add increments, but to multiply a thousand times 10 times 10 times 10. That's how you grow money. Almost no one knows this. Just look around and you'll see signs of this everywhere. America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but 76% of the people live paycheck to paycheck. Over 50% of Americans have no money for retirement. 47% of Americans don't have 400 bucks for an emergency. And you're like, oh my god, it's so bad here. No, it didn't. Not for the people that understand the money game, the wealth creation game. If these statistics were true in a poor country, it would be one thing. But America is a wealthy country. So how did this happen to so many people in indoctrination? Don't drink that coffee. It's not just schools that have taught you bad ways of thinking about wealth. Turn on the television or go online and you'll see endless, ridiculous financial advice being given by financial pundits, suggesting saving tricks where your path to wealth is finding the lowest price for a product or putting more error in your tires to save gas. It's crazy. This piece of advice always cracks me up. If you don't drink coffee, you'll save yourself 700 bucks in a year. Like 700 bucks in a year is going to change anything. Let's keep it real. You can save 700 dollars a year for the next 50 years and you still will not be wealthy. You'll be old. Another pundit preaches all debt is bad debt. Trust me. Stay away from it. It's the devil. And by avoiding debt, you will somehow be financially free. Never bar money under any circumstances he says. The previously bankrupt advisor from debt promotes never going into debt. While the station that distributes his information had to go into debt in order to have a station, he overlooks the reality that almost all super wealthy people have used debt to multiply their wealth. Flip the channel and you'll see fancy graphics making the case that you should turn your money over to the boys on Wall Street, invest in stocks, bonds, diversifying and financial instruments that they can't even explain. Ask your parents for money advice and they will recite their path, get a good job by house, contribute to your 401k and be grateful that you have more than most and pray everything goes right. And all that advice every bit of it is what is keeping you trapped in the flawed mindset of the middle class poor American dream. You've received bad financial advice from others your entire life. Now you need to be introspective and study that. What have you been taught? Most of these people never created wealth, let alone discovered the formula for doing so. In fact, most of these people that you've taken advice from quit on the wealth game, they got satisfied. The first thing you need to do is escape it is pretty simple. Whatever happens though, don't skip over this. It's important and lays the foundation for everything else that follows. Decide to become wealthy. That's right. Decide right now to become wealthy. Did you notice I didn't say decide to become rich? I said decide to become wealthy. I am wealthy. Repeat after me. I am wealthy. I am wealthy. There's a big difference in this mindset. I don't want you to shoot too low here because the truth is getting rich can happen quickly for anyone. The ball player, the lottery winner, both can become rich and still end up broke and becoming rich is a step between middle class and the wealthy. Do not stop at rich. The thing is you ask most people they'd say that being a millionaire means you're rich. The reality is this is in 1970, inflation in taxes is eroded to value the dollar for decades. Quite frankly, a million dollars is not that much money anymore. If you want proof of that, let me show you with a million dollars what you can buy today. You can get an old run down looking tiny house in San Diego for a million dollars. It won't even have an air condition. You get two bedrooms, 840 square feet, looks like an old barn. That's your millionaire home today. And it comes with insurance forever, maintenance forever, property taxes forever, possibly HOA fees. It probably doesn't even fit your idea of living the lifestyle of the rich and famous does it. And that's not only a San Diego thing, it's a New York thing, a Miami thing, San Francisco, Denver, you name it. I mean, you want to go to Mississippi, you can buy a house for 28,000, no jobs, no infrastructure, no opportunities. In all those cities, a million dollar home in the big price homes, 10 of the 15 most expensive cities in the country or in California. In any of those cities, a million dollars is simply a starting price for a home. Did you know that 8.3% of all millionaires today are renters? If you need more convincing, let's do a little math. I'll show you a million dollars isn't enough to comfortably retire, much less retire with ease. 10 million dollars is the new one million dollars. If you retire today at 65 with a million dollars in cash after taxes and no new income from any source, you'd have to live off of 40,000 a year or 3250 a month for the next 25 years without any inflation and without any new taxes. And that's before you run out of money. That means you'll be 90 years old and broke zero. Consider that assisted living by the way could be 76,000 bucks a year or $126,000 a year and you'd be out of money in eight years. Those 25 years are cut down to 12 if you have to end up with assisted living, which means you're broke at 77. Assume that you live another 20 years, you're homeless. All this assumes no inflation, no critical life events, no lawsuits, divorces, no college for the kids, heaven forbid, even one serious situation like a cancer or car accident or family member in trouble, the death of a breadwinner, economic downturn or even the loss of a job. Look, I know the idea that a million dollars isn't enough may be hard for you to swallow, but your opinion of it doesn't change the reality of the math. A million dollars regardless of how you feel or what you think is not what it used to be. I know firsthand how fast an emergency can devastate a household. Look, my dad died at the peak of his earning years from heart disease. My mother immediately had to sell the house it was paid for. Manage five kids, downscale everything, live off the insurance, life insurance benefits. And I watch my mother live in fear every day not knowing how long the money would last. As I graduated college from Macney State University in 1980s, becoming a millionaire was almost an iconic and unachievable status and fantasy. Today, billionaire Peter Teal recently suggested that single-digit millionaires can't even afford access to proper legal defense in America. That's right. One million dollars is fine if you have one year left to live. If you got 30 years left to live, you got a problem because you'll be worried about your pile of depreciating paper running out so you'll be forced to live frugally pinching pennies every day for their next 30 years. Does that sound like wealthy? To make your money last longer or really to make other people's money last longer because the money you have was other people's. To make money last longer than your clock, you need to a lot more than a million dollars. You need more zeros than minutes as the problem with money. If you're in poverty 30 years from now, it won't be because you bought a latte every day or you bought a used truck rather than a new truck. Again, tea is going to be because you didn't think big enough and you didn't produce it every day. So my question to you is simple. And this determines everything about your odds of escaping the middle class traps and creating true wealth for yourself. Do you believe 10 million dollars is possible for you? You have to decide that you will become a Deca millionaire as the first stop and that you must reinforce that decision. If you're listening to this right now, your first target should be Deca millionaire 10 million dollars. Just do the math. Don't give up. Look for how could I. What would I have to do? What would I have to become? Put a stake in the ground right now. Trust me on this. I am going to become very, very wealthy or better. I am wealthy. I am very, very wealthy. My net worth is over 10 million dollars. Don't give up yet. Oh, you're like, how can I do that? I'm a waitress. I'm driving Uber. I'm an engineer. I'm a car tractor. How can I create 10 million? Don't say no before you say, what would I have to do? Who would I have to become? Let me just change your mind first and then we'll show you how. Although some people will judge you for making this decision. Just remember that nobody who has ever created wealth will frown on you or judge you negatively for creating this decision. In fact, they will patch you on the back. I was with a guy last week in the first three minutes of the meeting. He says, if you want to get truly wealthy, if you want to amass tremendous amounts of wealth, I felt so safe in this guy's presence. He wasn't telling me that money was bad. He was talking to me out creating tremendous amounts of wealth because you can see the super wealthy will always patch you on the back and say, yeah, you can do it. You should do it. Those who have created wealth understand that creating financial freedom is a worthy adventure. It is truly possible for you and anyone. Remember, most rich people today are self-made. What's called first generation, meaning they created their millions without inheriting money. They started from zero. And before that little automatic voice in your head says, for the millionth time, I don't want it. I don't need it. I just want to be happy. Oh my God, I don't need all this. I'm sick of listening to this guy. I understand two things. Somebody's going to get wealthy. This isn't about you. It's a question. Will it be you? And number two, limiting yourself financially invalidates you. It invalidates your abilities, your self-esteem, your potential, your Godworthiness. Most of us have been convinced to settle for basic necessities. You're giving up before you even start. Close house transportation, time off, a couple days a week, maybe an upper management position, some money in the bank. If you're a country club rich, oh, I got a country club membership. I got two cars paid for. I got two kids. I sent them to school. You're still giving up. You're giving up on where you're at. This is the trap, the opposite of the wealth creation formula. This is the status quo formula. This is where you settle for a little bit. This is what my daughter said. Oh, so the middle class are basically poor people who think they're rich. The middle class trap is for the people who settle for just enough. I got mine. I got enough. They're not striving for wealth, which is prosperity and abundance and affluence. This is where the charitable people live. The middle class trap is a compromise. It's selfish. When you compromise your finances, you become unable to help anyone else other than yourself because you're struggling to say take care of yourself. The other part of this is the constant invalidation of your potential. I don't know what you think about potential, but I think potential is my God. It is my godliness to reach for my potential. You're capable of more than you know. So why set reasonable, financial goals on who you are when you don't even know what you're capable of? For my entire life, I've had this constant knowing in me that I can do more, achieve more, create more, give more, help more. Do you have that? My entire life I have known I can do more, achieve more, create more, give more and help more. But enough of the esoteric look if you can earn 80 grand a year, you can earn 800 grand a year. In fact, you can earn 800 and still struggle depending on where you live and your responsibility level. Now if you have a high responsibility level like I do, then it's going to take more money for me to help more people. Just because someone makes more money than a person born in some starving village in a third world country doesn't mean they're much better off. I know people that make $400,000 a year that can't pay their bills. The argument is you have a cell phone, internet access, running water, electricity. Be grateful. That's what they tell you. Be grateful. You have so much more than other people. You have a toilet. Be grateful. That's code for make sense of your situation and settle. A man wants to tell me how do you make sense of insanity? The answer is you don't. And not having enough money is insane. Not having wealth is insanity. Why not have it when you can? The idea that someone would only have enough money to be comfortable or satisfied or to have more than others as a way to justify his or her condition is insanity. It's ridiculous. The middle class are hundreds of millions of people convinced by the man, the media, education and the misinformed to turn your money over to those smarter than you. Diversify your investments, they say. Just settle down in a nice house and be a civil law-abiding taxpayer who's grateful for how much better off you are than those who have less. So your idea success is I'm better off than my neighbor, so I should be grateful. All of this is designed to reduce your ability to move for the next 30 years. Become a Deca millionaire. So make a decision right now to become a Deca and debunk all the ideas that idolize the mythology of the middle class. 10 millions gotta be your first stop. And look, by the time you hear this it might be a hundred the way they're going into government. The temporary comfort provided by the house, a good school, a couple of BMWs, a 401k and two weeks off per year is nothing compared to creating indestructible wealth. That would not be 10 million dollars. You have to make the decision now to drop the small defensive take no risk thinking. The Cardone Zone. We're gonna 10x everything you think and the way you roll every single day.