Do you want to hear something crazy? I went from 17-year-old addict straight out of prison to selling three software companies in 10 years and building my net worth to over $100 million today.

 What some people would call you money.

 Trust me, no one was more surprised than me.

 So, I'm going to share with you how to make so much money that if life was a video game, it'd kind of feel like cheating.

 The first way to make so much money it feels like cheating the game of life is to not chase money, but to build skills that attract it.

 When I built my first company, Spheric Technologies, I was working a h 100red hours a week.

 I was spinning plates, wearing things were going to blow up and then I sold it for millions of dollars.

 I did it the hard way cuz I didn't know any better.

 Today, I make a hundred times more money working half the time.

 How? I built the skills to unlock revenue.

 See, you don't create success by chasing it.

 You attract it by becoming an attractive character.

 You bring opportunities and money into your life by being the kind of person that easily brings those things into your life.

 So here's how you build a skill.

 First off, you got to be specific.

 I mean, most people value others that can save them money, make them money, or save them time.

 Those are the skills.

 So it doesn't matter if it's marketing, sales, tax preparation.

 Become world class at it.

 Ask yourself, who can you help? Who has this problem? What can you help them do? A lot of people right now are struggling to understand this crazy world of AI.

 And all the young cats out there probably talk and act this way naturally.

 You're growing up with it and people are struggling with it.

 That's valuable.

 That's a skill.

 Number two is you got to design the path.

 How do you learn a new skill? I like to ask GPT, but the key is in how you ask it.

 You got to be specific.

 Ask it to create you a 12-week course on building the skill you want to learn, including links to YouTube videos, 1 hour a day, maybe more if you want to be an overachiever, but have it tell you what to focus, study, and how to learn this skill.

 Let me just show you how I do it.

 Create me a very detailed course on how to learn AI automation.

 12week course.

 I want you to find the best YouTube videos I should study.

 put the curriculum together, link up those videos, and make sure you keep it to one hour of day because I'm going to do it at lunch because I still work a full-time job and maybe some extra stuff that I could do if I find some extra time at night.

 But I want you to make it the least amount of effort to become most proficient around the skill of AI automation.

 Boom.

 Watch this.

 Takes my voice prompt, transcribes it, starts building out the course.

 It's researching cuz I said some YouTube videos.

 Oh, I got to go find some YouTube videos.

 It literally says, "Here's the 12week AI automation course.

 Week one introduction.

 Week two, links to all the different videos.

 It built out the whole thing, the full detail.

 Do you know how many people are running around the world going like, "Oh, I don't know how to do that.

" No, it's been solved by thousands of people, documented, crystallized, and presented to you in a simple format.

 Guess what? If it's not simple enough, make it simpler.

 That's how easy it can be.

 Then the key is to execute.

 Learn that skill.

 The third thing is to master your craft.

 the top people that you want to collaborate with, that you want as clients.

 They want to be around the folks that have decided to become the best in the world at what they do.

 They don't want a dabbler.

 They don't want some people that are kind of interested.

 They want folks that can demonstrate to them that that is their mastery, their area of perfection.

 It doesn't matter what you decide.

 It's more important that you decide and go deep.

 And what's crazy is when I say that, I know that for a lot of people, they don't want to hear that because it sounds like work.

 It sounds hard.

 It sounds like it's going to take a lot of time.

 And the answer is yes.

 That's the point.

 You have to build the skill that other people find valuable.

 Nothing valuable has ever come easy.

 That's what makes it valuable.

 If I could buy any watch, any purse, any car, then it's not valuable because it's not hard to get.

 If anything, when I look at new skills I got to develop to get to my new level, cuz new levels, new devils, the harder it is, the more excited I get because it tells me how few people are actually going to do the work to learn that thing.

 If you want to make so much money that it feels like cheating, you're going to have to put a lot of time into the skill to master your craft.

 Which brings us to the second way to make so much money it feels like cheating.

 The game of life.

 Never charge for your time.

 Always charge for the result.

 It's interesting to me because people may pay me six figures for one hour of my time.

 They're not paying for the message I'm delivering.

 They're paying for the value that they'll get.

 They're paying for the brand association.

 They're paying to sell tickets for people in the room.

 They're paying for building the relationship with me, getting advice on their business.

 It's my 28 years of entrepreneurial experience condensed not only into the 1-hour keynote, it's the time we get to spend together working on their event.

 That's what I get paid for.

 Imagine you're a factory owner.

 A machine breaks down.

 You call an electrician to fix it.

 The electrician walks in, inspects the machine for 5 minutes, takes out a small hammer, and taps a very specific spot, fixes the machine.

 He hands you an invoice for $10,000.

 And the owner, your boss, is surprised.

 $10,000 for 5 minutes of work.

 That's insane.

 The electrician goes, "It's $100 for the time in the tap.

 It's $9,900 for knowing where to tap.

" See, the mistake is to have people pay you for your time.

 You want them to pay you for the outcome, the result, the impact of your work.

 If you're not getting paid what you feel you deserve, you got to go become more valuable.

 You're not solving big enough problems.

 If you charge for time, you punish your own efficiency because there's no incentive to get better or be more effective in that time frame because that's what I get paid.

 So, if anything, being slower means I make more money.

 That's a bad place to get to because I want you to consider, hey, how do I use AI to automate this? How do I hire better team members? How do I become a better leader so that I can get everybody producing more in a shorter amount of time because I'm getting paid the same thing and still get results for my clients? But how do you get people to pay for the outcome? First off, define a clear and specific problem.

 Ideally, helping them with one thing, not 10.

 Some people are like, I can do everything.

 I can be everything to everybody.

 The problem is if you're everything to everybody, you're nothing great to any one person.

 Pick one specific thing that you can do and knock their socks off.

 The second is design a process that guarantees an outcome.

 For example, when I coach people, I sat down and created a system where I asked myself if they only follow certain pieces, will they get results? And the answer is yes.

 I have this thing called the five daily non-negotiables.

 These five steps that if you follow, you guarantee to grow your business.

 Think of it this way.

 Ask yourself the question, if you only got paid if your client got the result, how would you design the process? Number three is you got to sell value, not the price.

 Value isn't always the cost.

 Okay? Value is the time invested from their end, how fast you can get it to them, how big of an impact you can have, the experience that they're going to have working with you, what it tells them about themselves hiring you if you've got a brand and a reputation.

 It's interesting how value is very subjective to the buyer, but you as the seller can position yourself to actually increase the perceived value.

 Which brings us to the third way to make so much money it feels like cheating the game of life.

 Cash flow is more important than cash piles.

 You know what's crazy is I know a lot of crypto millionaires that made a lot of money back in the day when they bought cheap and the price has gone up and it comes down and they're sad and they make more money because it goes back up again.

 But what happens is they created this cash pile that they think is going to make them happy, but now they are a prisoner of their own creation because not only do they not want to spend it because they're worried about what that's going to really be worth in the future, they haven't figured out how to develop the skill to become rich.

 This is not a moment in time where you just get an influx of money.

 Making money is actually quite easy.

 It's keeping it that's hard.

 And trusting yourself that you've become the person who can easily attract that kind of money.

 It's not about how much you made.

 It's about how consistently you can make it.

 If I've developed the skills to make money and you take everything away from me, I can get right back to where I was.

 I don't have to worry or be dependent on anybody else.

 That's why it's so important to focus on value creation over time, not these points in time.

 A lot of folks that can sell a thing once for a lot of money, they run to that.

 And I get it.

 Sometimes you need to do that to fund your business.

 What's more valuable when you think of business models is getting paid every month for long periods of time.

 Why? It creates predictability.

 I can predictably hire, predictably invest, predictively plan, predictively save my money if there's a subscription component.

 And that's my background in software taught me that at 17 years old.

 It taught me how to build businesses that I didn't know at the time that allowed me to create real value in the world, not just get one time rich.

 And that was the reason why I was able to sell those three companies in 10 years for so much money is because I understood how to create long-term cash flow.

 It's so crazy, but a business doesn't fail because of low profits.

 It fails because it runs out of cash.

 I can't pay people with profits.

 People talk about ibida ibida ibida ibid.

 Like literally, those are the private equity folks.

 That's their favorite language in the world.

 Why? Because they use that to fund debt and that's where the cash flow needs to be.

 And I'm telling you, you don't fail in business when you run out of profits.

 If you can't make your payments, then you're out of the game.

 What I found interesting about my billionaire mentors is that they think in flows, not totals.

 They could care less about total assets.

 They care about how much that asset produces in cash flow that they then can use and do other things with it.

 See, 100K per month is more impressive than a millionaire.

 Some people that made a million and just sitting on a million, they don't know how to spend a million.

 If you make a h 100,000 per month, you're making a million every 10 months.

 And if you know how to repeat that and create that, that's what made you a millionaire, not the money in the bank.

 Which brings us to the fourth way to make so much money.

 It feels like cheating the game of life.

 Stop counting other people's money.

 The kids these days call it counting people's pockets.

 Let's stop that.

 I remember one time I went to my buddy's event and I met a guy named Rob and it was like within 36 seconds he wanted to tell me about how much money that guy was making and that guy was making and oh did you hear about this person online? I heard he did this much in his launch and this person's making this much money per month.

 He knew more about how much money everybody else is making than his own freaking business.

 He couldn't tell me how much money he made that day, that week, that month.

 He wouldn't even be able to tell me what his trends line are for the year.

 Isn't it fascinating looking around counting everybody's success instead of asking how much did I make today? How much am I making this month? What do I need to do to increase my profit? The focus on your own financials is how you get rich.

 What's interesting to me is the people that you're jealous of that you're counting their money used to be just as broke as you.

 What changed? They decided to put their understanding of financials first.

 See, you don't win by wishing or hoping.

 You win by working.

 You win by doing the rhythm of success specifically when it comes to money.

 And the key is is don't compare your chapter 3 to somebody else's chapter 13.

 It doesn't matter if they're 20.

 They could have started when they were 10 and they got 10 years chapter 10 in their entrepreneurial journey and you're starting at 45 and you're 3 years in and you think that they're doing better than you.

 You're only three in.

 They're into 10.

 You can't.

 It doesn't work like that.

 So, if you want to make so much money it actually feels like cheating, check your own money.

 It's one, check your bank account daily.

 I get a daily cash email for every one of my companies into my inbox with the subject line telling me the cash position of where it's at, even my personal.

 I literally have somebody that manages I'm talking my home assets and revenue and in I mean, it works just like a business.

 And I track all of that so I know where every penny is.

 Now, I don't have to do it cuz I pay somebody to do it.

 But you want to make sure that you personally log into your bank account and look at the numbers.

 Look at the credit card statements, look at your cash position, look at your savings, and make sure that you can keep a pulse on what's happening.

 The second thing is you have to have weekly pillars.

 I measure myself every Friday on seven key pillars.

 One of them is money.

 What does money mean for me? I ask myself the question one out of 10, how did I do on the money side? Did I make some money? Did I save some money? Did I do some strategic planning around my investments? Did I look at a bunch of deals? feels like I just ask myself, am I at a nine or a 10 or am I at a four or five? And if I have a low score, I do one thing to increase my money score for the next week.

 And if you want to learn the other six pillars, it's at the end of my book, Buy Back Your Time in the bonus section.

 It's a weekly process that I've been doing for decades that helps me stay focused on the most important parts of my life.

 Number three is monthly P&L.

 Like actually sit down, do a profit and loss statement for your own personal accounts.

 It's not hard.

 You can Google a simple template, but putting everything in there and honoring that process of counting your own money, which sounds super not fun, is how you're going to get rich.

 Which brings us to the fifth and last way to make so much money it feels like cheating.

 Use money as a tool, not the goal.

 This one's fascinating.

 I grew up with a kid and his dad had a food truck and he did everything in cash.

 Now, he came from another country and he didn't trust the banks, but essentially he worked every Saturday and all week long for this food truck to make all the money to support his family.

 But he did this for decades.

 I think he's still doing it now 42 years later.

 He worked all week prepping, driving, selling.

 He hardly saw his family.

 He would drive 2 hours away, 4 hours away to special events just to sell his food.

 And I remember my friend telling me that all the cash, cuz it's a cash business, he saved in the house and he hid it all over the place.

 And he thought his dad was so rich.

 And I was like, "Oh no.

" The key that he didn't understand is you got to use money as the tool, not the point.

 It's not about saving a bunch of money.

 It's about improving your life and your life situation.

 It's understanding how to use it as a tool for leverage.

 See, he could have took that money and hired somebody to buy back some time so that he could start being more efficient and thinking through how he works instead of just creating himself a lowpaying job.

 If you actually look at the total hours he worked per week and what he generated, sure, he provided for his family, but he could have been so much further ahead if he understood how to use it, not just hoard it in his house.

 You see, money doesn't change you.

 It just amplifies who you are.

 And the truth is, if you're looking for freedom, freedom isn't found in your bank account.

 It's found in your calendar.

 The goal of money is to buy back your time so you can spend more time doing the things you love.

 That's why I spend so much money hiring people to support my life.

 I want to do two things.

 I either want to spend time with the people I love or create in a way that's unique to who I am.

 Anything else, I would rather deploy money to get leverage so that I can be more me.

 And that's why I have people like Ann and Betty and Sam and Todd.

 It's essentially team Martell that give me back literally 40, 50, 60 hours a week each so I can be here helping you.

 It honestly breaks my heart when I see really well-meaning entrepreneurs working themselves literally to death because they don't know how to have people support them.

 Especially the assistant role.

 They're like, "If I hired somebody, what would they do?" If you want my internal document on all the things, it's 42 pages of task and projects and templates and best practices for my executive assistant, just find me on Instagram, message me the word YouTube EA, and I will send you the direct link to that document.

 The only way you'll end up making so much money that it feels like cheating is by making the process fun and exciting.

 You have to do what feels like play that other people see as work.

 Feels like play, looks like work.

 Feels like play, looks like work.

 Do that and it'll change your life.

 Now, if you want to learn how to build a business that runs itself, click the video and I'll see you on the other