Latka - How to be a capitalist without any capital: the four rules you must break to get rich

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Unknown

Many folks think they arent good at earning money, when what they dont know is how to use it.

Frank A. Clark

As I began writing this book, my mom called. Youre making so much money, she said. Its going to cause havoc if you happen to die, God forbid, and you dont have a plan for your assets. Its funny. Three years ago she was skeptical when I chose to drop out of school. Her message changed from Stay in school! to Get a will! More on me later.... Lets talk about you first.

You know those people whose lives you just cant figure out? They travel the world whenever they want. They barely work. Theyre always with their family, or conquering the kind of grand life adventure youve reserved for... someday. Somehow, theyre happy with their life as it isnot just hiding behind a perfect life faade on social media.

Theres the kid from your college dorm who dropped out and has since raised $1M in start-up funding. The dad you see at your sons soccer games, or at your gym, who drives a Range Rover and is always around in the middle of the week when most parents are working. Your neighbor who quit her corporate job and now has her own business that you hear is making her $10K or $20K a month.

You know these people are average at best. Theyre not supertalented or smart, but theyre living like kings and queens and youre dumbfounded.

What they know that you dont is how to be a capitalist without any capital. There are four golden rules that the business world has sold us to keep us from being successful. Those rules must be broken. And the people youre thinking about have mastered breaking those rules.

Its easy to dismiss the superrich as trust-fund babies, or to assume their spouse is the breadwinner. Or we think maybe theyre not rich at all and just racking up credit card debt. These scenarios will be true for some people, but Im not talking about them.

Im talking about the people who are wealthy by their own doing. Their families have nothing to do with their fat bank accounts. You cant stand their weekday Instagram posts from their sailboat, or the sight of them on another overseas vacation, but as much as they annoy you, youre also dying to know how they do it. How are these people so successfuland freewhile youre withering away underneath fluorescent lights at your desk job 50+ hours a week?

Its because theyre part of the New Rich, as Tim Ferriss calls the segment of the population who have figured out how to maximize everything in their lifeeven if its not muchso it becomes an asset that works for them. The New Rich are resourceful with their time, their money, and their energy. They get what they want when they want it. They travel however much they want. They have blank calendars. And they have very, very few expenses.

Tim Ferriss introduced us to the New Rich over a decade ago in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, but a lot has changed since then. Today, my peers and I are getting rich not just by starting companies from scratch, but by leveraging gold mines like Instagram and Airbnb that didnt exist in the early 2000s. We drive wealth by taking advantage of new tools quickly and figuring out how to get those tools to work for us so we can work less.

When an average person sees a New Rich person, they assume that new rich person has some magical quality. Its not magic. The average person just doesnt understand how the rich person got so rich, so they explain it away as magical. A magician practices a series of moves or tactics behind a curtain so that when the trick is put together, the average viewer misses the sleight of hand. If you saw the magician practicing behind the curtain, youd think, I can pull that trick off, too! Building wealth is the same.

These magicians practice behind the curtain, but Im holding back nothing in this book. Ive been a wealth magician for the past decade, and despite my lawyers recommendations, Im sharing everything in this book so you can pull off your own wealth magic. Youll see my tax returns, my profit and loss statements, my email negotiations when buying and selling companies. Im sharing it all so you can study and get a very real sense of how Ive built my empire. Ill take you behind the curtain of the New Rich so you can become part of the inner sanctum.

The lifestyle you want is not out of your reachyou just dont know the moves yet. This book will lead you through those moves, starting with some I began making at the age of nineteen. Youll learn how to replicate the inner workings of more than twenty revenue streams I now have at twenty-eight years old.

If youre ready to join the New Rich, read on, my new wealth magicians!

There are a few things you should know about me:

• Im a college dropout.

• I started my first company in my Virginia Tech dorm room when I was twenty. Within four years I hired forty people and grew the company to $5M in sales and a $10.5M valuation.

• I walked away from a $6.5M acquisition offer for that company when I was twenty-two.

• I dont have a rsum.

• I bought my first piece of real estate on my own when I was twenty-four.

• I bought my first company when I was twenty-six.

• Today, at twenty-nine years old, I run my own private equity firm, buying and selling companies.

• I use patterns and data to drive my decisions.

That last detail is probably the reason Ive gotten this far, and its how Im going to help you get here, too. Im not going to waste your time with small talk and rah-rah positivity. If youre familiar with my podcast, The Top Entrepreneurs, you already know this about me. I have interviewed more than five hundred of the worlds top thinkers, disrupters, and CEOs in search of patterns that anyone can apply to gain wealth, work less, and get what they want out of life. I get to the data and I get to the numbers so you and I can learn from the real stuff. In fact, I pressure these CEOs so hard, they share secret strategies they wish they didnt share, and threaten to sue after their episode goes live. Their fault! (Your gain!) An unfortunate side effect is that Im the most sued podcasteryou should see my wall of cease and desist letters (a beautiful thing! I always win these contests!).