This is the ultimate advice for teens and young adults. I wish I had known this 20 years ago when I was a teenager. Despite the difficult economy right now, there is a way for teenagers and young people to get ahead, to start a business, to start investing, and to be able to buy their first house and even retire one day. Teen entrepreneurship is possible when a great idea is combined with hard work and perseverance. There are more teen millionaires and young millionaires under 30 who started businesses than there are from any other method. This isn’t just life advice for teenagers, this is life advice for young people, including advice for college students and advice for students in high school. This video covers entrepreneurship for beginners, investing for beginners, and general teenager advice for how to find success in life.
Some teens and young adults are becoming millionaires seemingly overnight, while most young people struggle. Most young people are struggling to pay their bills. They’re struggling with the rising cost of inflation and wages not keeping up. A lot of young people believe today that they will never be able to afford a house and never be able to retire. And yet, there are some young people that are becoming millionaires by the time that they’re 30 years old. What is the difference between most young people who struggle in life, and some young people who seemingly find success overnight? It all has to do with the mindset.
And I know circumstances right now are extremely difficult. This is probably one of the most difficult times for young people to find success that there has been since, probably in the last 20 or 30 years. Yet it’s not impossible. Obviously some people are doing it. And if some people are doing it, well, that means you can do it too, if you know how. So let me give you the advice that I wish I knew 20 years ago. There is one thing that you have that is a benefit, that I do not have, that people older than me do not have, and that benefit is your your youth. You have time on your side. You have time to build wealth. You have time to invest. You have time to become a successful entrepreneur. You have time to become a millionaire. Your youth is a blessing. It is the greatest blessing you’re going to have right now. And it is a blessing that you’re only going to have for a short period of time.
Time is going to go by no matter what. You’re going to reach 30, 40, 50, 60 years of age. It’s going to happen. And what you do today day is going to determine where you are 10, 20, 30 years down the line. So how do you get ahead? How do you go from struggling and barely getting by and not being able to afford your rent, to having more than enough money and being able to live this amazing life? How do you make that switch? Well, it’s actually a lot easier than you think, but it is going to require a significant change in the way that you think.
Robert Kiyosaki many, many years ago wrote a book called The Cashflow Quadrant. In that book, he explained that there are four types of ways to make money. Two of those ways are being an employee and being self-employed. Most young people, they just take whatever life gives them. Meaning, they get out of high school, maybe they go to a trade school, maybe they go to college, and when they graduate, they get whatever job they can find. And you probably know this, but a lot of people have to apply for 100 different jobs on Indeed. And they might, of those 100, get 5 or 6 interviews. And of those, they might get one job offer.
It’s a tough job market right now, especially for entry level positions. The reason for that is that there are a lot of young people trying to find jobs, but there are very few positions that actually pay well. And with so many people applying for those same positions, the employers are able to be very selective. They’re also able to reduce the pay because as it gets more and more difficult to find a job, especially an entry level job, employers are able to reduce the pay since they know people are going to take whatever the job pays. And this is the problem with being an employee, is you are forced to take whatever life gives you. You’re forced to take whatever paycheck the company wants to pay, whatever hourly rate they want to pay, or whatever salary they want to pay.
And and some young people say, okay, I’m going to avoid all of that, and I’m just going to become a gig worker. I’m going to go drive for Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, maybe I’ll do freelance work on Upwork, or something like that. And while that is slightly better because you have a little bit more time freedom, you can work when you want and where you want, you still have the same problem that an employee has. And that problem is you’re still trading time for money. In a lot of cases, being a gig worker, being self-employed, is actually worse than being employed, because you don’t get benefits, you don’t have health insurance, you don’t get paid time off, you don’t get family medical leave. You lose a lot of benefits when you’re self-employed that you get when you’re employed. So a lot of times being an employee is actually better than being self-employed. But either way, in both of those cases, you’re still trading time for money.
And this is the big problem. You simply cannot work enough to get out of your situation. Let’s say you make $20 an hour. How many hours per week can you work at the most? The answer is probably around 100 hours a week. Working 100 hours a week, you’re getting about 3 to 4 hours of sleep every night. You’re working from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. At 100 hours a week, at 20 bucks an hour, you’re making about $2,000 a week, $8,000 a month, or about $100,000 a year. And while that might seem like a lot of money to you currently, in today’s environment here in 2024 with inflation and everything, it actually takes $130,000 per year in most parts of the country in order to be able to afford a house and to be able to afford to put a little bit of money towards retirement.
In order to live a middle class lifestyle, you have to make $130,000 per year. If you make $20 an hour, you work 100 hours a week, getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep every night, you don’t even make $130,000 a year. And that is the problem with being self-employed. Your income is capped. There’s a maximum amount of money that you can make, even if you make $30 an hour, you’d have to work 100 hours a week to make 150,000 a year. It’s just not reasonable for people to expect to be able to get 3 to 4 hours of sleep every night for an entire year. It’s just not reasonable. There are so many health problems that would come along with that.
And a lot of young people get into this mindset, “My full time job doesn’t pay enough, so I’m going to go get a second part time job, or a third part time job, or I’m going to go do gig work on top of my full time job.” And no matter how many hours you work per week, it’s just not enough. You can never get ahead being an employee or self-employed. But luckily there’s hope. And that is making money the other two ways that Robert Kiyosaki gave in his book, The Cashflow Quadrant. And those two ways are entrepreneurship and investing.
Entrepreneurship, or owning a business, is the best way to make money. More millionaires have become millionaires through entrepreneurship than any other method out there. In fact, almost every single billionaire in the world became a billionaire through entrepreneurship. The difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur, is even though you might be doing the exact same work, when you are self-employed you are making money based upon the time you put in. You’re being paid for your hours. When you are an entrepreneur, you are now hiring other people to do the work, and you’re now making money from their efforts. Or perhaps you’re now selling a product, and because you’re selling a product instead of your time, you can sell an unlimited number of products to millions of people all over the world. If you made $1 profit per product you sold, and you sold a million products, you would make $1 million. That is something that a business owner is able to do that a self-employed person simply can never do. And that is why business ownership and entrepreneurship is the fastest way to wealth.
Every single young person, well 99% of them, who have become millionaires as either a teenager or anybody under the age of 30, almost all of them have done so through entrepreneurship. And it doesn’t require a ton of skills. Usually it just requires a great idea that gets executed. Now, don’t get me wrong. A lot of people make the mistake that they have a great idea, and that idea is going to produce them a ton of money. And unfortunately, that’s just not the way it works. There are millions of great ideas that have died because people weren’t able to put in the work to make those ideas reality. Ideas don’t make you money. Hard work does. So you have to take your great idea – and as a young person, I know you’ve got them – take your great idea and put it into practice. Get to work to make it a reality.
Maybe you have a great idea for a YouTube channel. You can’t just have the idea. You’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to grab your phone, you’ve got to start recording, you’ve got to edit, you’ve got to upload, you’ve got to promote, and you’ve got to do it every single day. Maybe you have an idea for a great product. Great! Get out there, set up a website, go get a Shopify account or something, go start advertising on Facebook and Twitter and X and wherever. Go out there, get the work done, make business cards, promote your business to your friends and family. I’ve actually had Uber drivers that have used Uber not so much to make money, but actually as a way to promote their business. Every single rider that got into the car, they would give them a business card, promote their business, whatever it is they were making, selling. You’ve got to hustle if you want to make it in this world.
Now the big difference between being a business owner and an investor, versus an employee or self-employed, is when you’re an employee or self-employed, you’re getting paychecks right away. You’re immediately getting money that you need. But that income is capped. When you’re a business owner or an investor, it takes a long time to start building up a decent amount of income, but that income is unlimited. It’s not capped. So as a young person who’s starting out, you’ve got bills to pay. You can’t wait for a business to be successful. You’ve got to get your bills paid. Now So the best thing to do as a young person is to go out, get that job that’s not going to pay your bills and not going to make you enough money, but at least it’ll bring in something. And while you’re working that full time job, go start a business. And that way, not only will you be taking care of your needs now, but you’ll be setting your future self up for tremendous success.
And ten years from now, when you’re running a successful business, you’re going to be in a far better place than your peers who are still working in that same job that you have right now. Maybe they got small bumps in pay. Maybe over ten years their pay has gone up by 20%. But as a business owner, your pay should have gone up by way more than 20%. You should probably be to the point where you’re making well over $200,000 to $300,000 per year ten years from now -if you stick to it and you continue to hustle and you don’t give up.
Now, what about risk? Let’s face it, a lot of businesses fail. In fact, 50% of small businesses go out of business within the first year. But the real question is why? Why are those businesses failing? Is it because it was a bad business idea? Yeah, maybe. But most of the time they fail because the owner did not want to put in the work. They had an idea that they thought was going to make a lot of money. They went out, got started, got a bunch of rejections, and gave up. And that’s why most businesses fail. It’s because people give up. They’re not willing to put in the work. So if you have that great idea, and I know you do, take that great idea, go start a business, and go put in the work, and don’t give up.
It takes about 5 to 10 years to find success in business. And usually somewhere between that 1 to 3 year mark, you’re going to have a lot of failures, you’re going to have a lot of times where you want to give up. And usually it’s right around that 3 year mark, maybe the 4 year mark, where things start to break, they start to change, where everything just starts to come together. And people that stick with it to at least 5 years are the ones that usually end up finding success. But a lot of people, they quit in the first 1 to 3 years because it gets hard, it gets difficult. They’re putting in a lot of work and not making any money, and they just feel like it’s not worth it. And very often they give up right on the cusp of success.
So don’t give up. You’ve got to stick with it. You got to believe in yourself, believe that God wants to bless you, and continue to fight, and continue to pursue, until you find that success 5 or 10 years down the line. It may seem bleak right now, but there is hope for the future if you put in the work and don’t give up.
What about investing? Investing is another wonderful way to make money. The one downside to investing is that you have to have money to make money. Now, luckily, you don’t have to have a lot of money. In fact, investing in the stock market, you can start with just $100. That’s it. Use the links here. Open an account with Webull or Moomoo or whatever. Deposit $100, go get some free stocks, and start investing. There is no reason for you not to invest in your future. There’s no reason for you not to start building up retirement savings right now, today. It doesn’t take a lot of money.
It might require you skipping eating out so that you can save $10 a day and put that into your investment account. It might require you making some sacrifices. It might require you skipping a party, not buying a little alcohol, or whatever it is you like to do for entertainment. You might have to skip that so that you can focus on your future. But if you’re willing to do that, you’re going to be a lot better off ten years from now than if you don’t invest anything. And if you don’t know how to invest, you’re not even sure where to get started, I recommend watching this YouTube channel and subscribing. I also have a course you can take. You can check out the course if you want. It’ll teach you how to invest. It’s not hard. It’s really easy. I mean really, to get started, all you have to do is open a broker account and buy a general, multi-stock ETF, like VOO or SPY. It’s that easy to get started. But the point is, you got to get started. You got to do something. So that’s what it’s all about.
You’ve got to get out of this mindset of it’s impossible, I’m not making enough money from my job, I can’t get ahead, I’ll never buy a house, I’ll never retire. And you know what? All that’s true if you only rely upon your job for income. Your job will never pay you enough to buy a house or retire. It’s just not going to happen. So you got a choice to make. You can either sit there and sorrow, and blame the government, and blame boomers ,and blame everybody for your problems. Or you can accept the reality of the world today and say “You know what?” I’m going to rise up. I’m going to be better than this. I’m going to go out and do what nobody else is willing to do, and I’m going to become one of those people who becomes a millionaire by the time I’m 30, or by the time I’m 40.
It doesn’t matter what age you are, anybody can start at any point. But generally it takes about ten years to make your first million. Ten years of hard work, perseverance, belief in yourself, and not giving up, ten years to make your first million dollars. Ten years is going to come no matter what. Where are you going to be ten years from now? Are you going to be in the same job, still complaining that you can’t get ahead, and nobody’s helping you? Or are you going to be a millionaire? What you do today decides where you’re going to be ten years from now. So get started. I know you can do it.
Let me know in the comments below what your great idea is. And if you started a business, if you’re young and you started a business, down in the comments below put a link to your website or a link to your YouTube channel. Whatever your business is, link to it. I want to see it. I want to see what you guys are doing. I am so excited for you. I wish you the best of luck and I want to see your success. So let me know in the comments below what you’re doing to break out of the rat race and get ahead, and to be one of the few young people that is willing to put in the hard work and the perseverance to become successful.