Badass Is The New Black (Season 3) Episode #10: How To Fast-Track Your Success Using The Power Of The Internet With Jeff Lerner

Although the road to success is certainly a long and winding one, entrepreneurs still want to find the fastest way to get to the finish line. For Jeff Lerner, leveraging the power of the internet and delving into digital real estate is one thing every business owner should take into consideration. Sitting down with Krissy Chin, the Founder of ENTRE Institute talks about his career shift from being a musician to an entrepreneur, how he used the online community to fast-track his success, the importance of focusing on value than on money alone, and finding a bigger purpose in running a business centered on connecting with your target market. Jeff also explains the three Ps of excellence and the three phases of legacy.

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Listen to the podcast here:

How To Fast-Track Your Success Using The Power Of The Internet With Jeff Lerner 

If you need some talent like it is tough love and a kick in the pants, this episode is all for you. Jeff Lerner is here telling us what it truly takes to build wealth and the fastest way to get there. He also gives us his secret to excellence and believe it or not, the first tip shed light on what I've been missing lately in my life.

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Let's welcome Jeff Lerner from broke jazz musician to $50 million in online sales, Jeff’s story and message are now inspiring millions around the world. He has built multiple online businesses to over eight-figures. In 2018, he founded ENTRE Institute where over 50,000 students have discovered digital business. He is regarded as one of the most inspirational voices online in business and personal development. He's an author, a speaker, married, and active father to four children, and still enjoys playing the piano as often as possible. Jeff, thank you for being here. I'm excited to chat with you once again.

It's my pleasure. This is going to be our third conversation like this and I'm ecstatic. They seem to get better each time, so thanks for having me.

You shared your story when we've chatted before, but I want you to dive back into that again for people that didn't read it because it's powerful. It inspires me every time that you share it. I want to have you share with the audience where you started. You've shared about how broke you were before, and that journey to how you've gotten to where you are now.

I was so broke that I made most broke people look fixed. I'll try to give you the big story in a small bite. I've been an entrepreneur since I was sixteen years old. I had one job the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school. I lasted three weeks before I got fired. It was like a mundane job. I was in the supply room at a big law firm. When the secretary ran out of paper clips, I had to run up for paperclips. There didn't seem to be any happy secretaries. They were all angry at the world and taking it out on me. I'm sure they got done being yelled at by their boss who's an ego-inflated attorney.

It just was a typical high-pressure, white-collar corporate environment, and I was at the bottom of the totem pole. It was all I needed to go, “I’m never doing that again. I will fend for myself or I will die trying.” I knew that as a kid. I became a musician. I dropped out of high school because I was like, “There's no point to school.” I had an early study at selling because I had to sell my parents on the idea, “Going to school is heading down a path that I have no interest in. Unless you want to have a neurotic son who ends up in a mental institution, I promise you'll be better off letting me go take my lumps and find my path.” I sold them. They withdrew me from school halfway through my junior year.

You sound like my six-year-old trying to convince me, “Why do I need school? I don't need it.”

Now I have four kids and it's hard for me to try to be a responsible parent. I feel like I'm always saying, “Do as I say, not as I do,” because the fact is, I blocked every norm. I fought every mainstream bit of conventional wisdom my whole life because I had this deeper, well-founded set of beliefs. I was always a reader of philosophy. I read a bunch of Ayn Rand. I read a bunch of Kierkegaard. I was reading Carl Jung. I didn't read normal stuff when I was a kid. I remember Eleanor Roosevelt says, “Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people.” I don't know if I was a great mind or I just wanted to be a great mind.

I'm like, “Ideas are where it's at,” but all the idea exploration I did led me to this inevitable conclusion of like, “The world sucks and I don't want to be a part of that matrix.” Not to sound too cynical, but I always went my own way. I became a musician, as a practical decision to say. At least musicians get to call their own shots. They get to play their own tune in this world. If I don't want to take a gig, I don't have to take a gig. If I'm good, there's always going to be work for me. I may never get rich, but I'll never starve and I can go anywhere in the world. There's always going to be somebody that wants to listen to music.

That's what I did. I did that all through my twenties, but I also quickly realized that for ideas to be more than just late-night coffee shop ruminations among musicians, there have to be resources behind them and that I was going to need money if I wanted to have an impact. By my early twenties, I was like, “I'm satisfied with the freedom that I have as a musician, but I'm not satisfied with the income that I have.” I started trying to start businesses but one after the other failed. I did MLM. I tried real estate investing. I tried becoming a loan officer. I tried investing a few bucks in a restaurant and a little sandwich shop. This was my first sandwich shop, not the later ones that almost dig me in, and a handful of other things.

If your money's not moving, you're not getting paid.

It is a failure, but as they say, success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. I was me. Once you burn your boats, you don't get to have a bad day and just boohoo about it because there's no boat to get back on. That's the choice I had made. It's the bed I had made and I had to sleep in it, whether it was easy or not. I started businesses after businesses. Finally, in my late twenties, I had accumulated enough money from my tip jar money. I spent $60,000 in tip jar money as the down payments on over $300,000 of bank loans to open up these two franchise restaurants.

I was good at sales. I went into this new startup franchise company that had come down to the US from Canada. I convinced them to hook, line, and sinker that 27-year-old jazz musician, Jeff, with no successful business experience. I was the guy that was going to take them into the massive market of Houston, Texas with its almost 5 million people. I got a ten-store license to be the master distributor of franchises across the territory. I borrowed the money to open the first two myself, and then the Great Recession happened. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went out of business. The mortgage bubble burst and the Icelandic Teachers pension fund went default. The ripple herd around the world.

Little old me in the middle of it now has $495,000 in bank debt. I have two stores that cost about $30,000 a month to operate and I'm trying to do that on $15,000 a month in sales. By the fall of 2008, I'm out of business and the total debt has ballooned to $495,000. You've got the $330,000 that I owe the bank and now the government because they were SBA loans backed by the US Treasury. I also owe attorneys and real estate investment. One was a REIT and one was a big commercial leasing company I owe. I had 4 years left on two 5-year leases and state taxes, payroll taxes, and unemployment taxes. I went on the internet and I'm like, “Offline sucks. Maybe online will be better.”

I saw these ads and stories and I ended up getting involved. I spent $395 one night. It was the week of Thanksgiving in 2008. I can still see it clear as day. I remember pushing the button. I was watching this video on the screen. I say this because we see these videos all the time. There's a video on the screen of this husband and wife and they were sitting there. The wife was petting her dog. They were good marketers and they did all the right things to make it feel personable and real, but they were real. They were real people that were multi-million dollar a year affiliate marketers saying, “We have a course and we'll teach you how to do it, too.” I bought the course and it was real.

Thankfully, I not only got real training, but I ended up involved in a real community that was at the time about 40,000 strong around 200 countries around the world. This was 2008. Within six months, I was 1 of the top 5 producers in that community of 40,000. By the end of the first year, I was in the running for the top three, month in and month out and I paid off that debt in eighteen months. I've been going and growing ever since. I've never looked back. I found that clearly, I do well when I'm sitting at keyboards. Whether it's a piano or a computer, that's just my jam.

I started ENTRE because I want the rest of the world to know that these types of things are possible. I've learned a lot and we can get through the story of all the twists and turns, but there's so much out there now. Frankly, it's a lot easier, bigger, and better now than it was when I started in 2008. It's sad that schools still aren't talking about it. Professional educators still aren't talking about it. Corporate recruiters are acting like the job that they're dangling is the only option to go have a nice six-figure life in this world. There's a whole other world out there. If you and I have our way, we’ll tell people about it.

What do you think the difference was between the things that you've tried before? It sounded like there was some online stuff, maybe, and the difference between this. What was it that allowed you to be successful in that opportunity?

There are two answers to that question that are both true. One is the opportunity itself. Bear in mind, I had tried to do real estate investing. I don't want to disqualify that because I still do real estate investing now. I own several dozen rental doors and I'm trying to grow that portfolio a lot because it has the one aspect that I love about internet business, which is leverage. When you understand value and asset value, you have to get past transactional business. You have to get into the value business. When I acquire a customer, what is the value of that relationship?

In real estate, when you acquire a customer, you think, “Who's your customer? Is your customer the buyer? Is your customer the renter? Is your customer the funding source?” There's so much value in those relationships because of the leverage that banks give you relative to the cash requirement because it's real estate. It's a high-value, low degradation property. It's not going to disappear next week. Banks loan a lot on it. Real estate takes money. I'm a much better real estate investor now than I was then because I have money. I can weather the storms. When I went on the internet, and this is why I'm such an advocate for this, I discovered the one place in the world that offers true leverage to the little guy.

You can scale without friction. Anybody can go out and sell a cookie, but if you want to sell a million cookies, you’ve got to have the Girl Scouts going door-to-door for you. You got to have the infrastructure and you got to have mass donations. You got to offer people health insurance and you got to have facilities, production, logistics, and distribution. You got to have Amazon where it's all distributed. That's a whole unicorn story. For the little guy who's got $5,000 to try to build a business and change the direction of his whole life, to me, there are two things you can do. One is you can get good at sales and you go sell that as a high leverage skill because people will pay you a lot for sales if you're selling the right stuff, or you go on the internet and get good at marketing.

It's always going to be sales or marketing. If money's not moving, you're not getting paid. Either get good at sales or get good at marketing and ideally, in the latter case, to do it online or frankly, even in the former case, potentially do it online. That's it. Stop trying to be the little guy and go hit home runs with all this other stupid crap that doesn't have an economic model to support the goal that you're trying to reach. As much as anything, that's the message I'm trying to get out to the world. Not just to tell people what to do, but I want to teach people to fish. I want to give people the filter, the lens to look through to be able to reject 99% of the crap out there that's masquerading as a solution when it's just a bigger problem.

To fish with a net, you can do that on the internet.

That's a big ocean that allows a good net.

Every time I talk to you, I'm just reminded about some of the strengths that you've had. Whether you knew them at the time, you've leveraged them to be successful. One of those is working hard and not caring if you have to put the hours in and dedicate the time. You're willing to do it and most people aren't. What I'm seeing more from our conversation so far is that you have this sales skill within you from a young age that however you developed it, that has probably helped a lot in getting you to where you are now.

I have always been a hard worker to the point of masochism. When you put the right stuff in, you get the right stuff out, but what comes out is the lagging indicator. You're going to have to eat, whether it's vegan, paleo, keto or If It Fits Your Macros, or whatever. You're going to have to eat that diet for a while before you see a lot of results on the scale or in the gym. It is the same thing with our minds. As a kid, I was reading books that shaped my view of the world that have allowed me to get on this path in a relentless way because my belief system didn't allow me any other option. A lot of people drink the firehose of social media, mainstream conditioning, and crap they learn from their teachers and their parents.

I'm not saying teachers and parents are all bad, but teachers and parents are teachers and parents. There's no additional real qualification. They're broad average sets of people. You take all that and then you go out in the world and you wonder why your life isn't manifesting as super special somehow. You ate a crap diet and now you're getting crap results. I mentioned, I read Carl Jung. One of the great takeaways I took from Carl Jung at a young age, and I remember thinking this is a teen, I was like, “This is why it sucks being a teenager.” Carl Jung said, “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

Life is meant to be hard. That's how you grow. It hurts in the gym. It hurts in relationships. It hurts in business. That's great. That's your indicator that you at least have an opportunity to get better. No pain, no growth. Most of us are riddled with neurosis. All these little mechanisms we put in place to try to either escape or substitute or medicate from the actual suffering that is meant to be at the core of your life. It's the nucleus of heat that drives you to improve and grow. Your suffering will end when you die, so don't be in such a hurry to get rid of it. I'm like, “I got to find legitimate ways to suffer rather than illegitimate destructive ways to suffer,” which is what most people's lives are burdened with, this neurosis.

I found a few things. I found working out in the gym and woodshedding the piano for thousands of hours. I am not a naturally gifted musician. I'm an exceptionally hard worker who enjoys the process so much that I'll do it way longer than most people. Ditto with business. This may sound insane, but I promise if you see it this way, you're 100 times more likely to be successful. Starting a business is a way to introduce legitimate suffering into your life so that your energy will be consumed with productive things rather than destructive things because you accept illegitimate suffering in your life in the form of distraction, drugs, affairs, and all the other crap that most people do to try to get away from the fact that life is hard. That's exactly how it's supposed to be.

It reminds me of when people say, “Suffering is inevitable, so it's up to you to decide what you're going to do with it, how you're going to deal with it, or what the next step is.”

There's that great quote that's circulating that's like, “Choose your hard.” Being fat is hard. Getting in shape is hard. Being divorced is hard. Having a good marriage is hard, and so on and so forth.

We've chosen entrepreneurship. That's our hard. Our audiences have chosen it. Some of them are probably deciding whether or not they're going to stick with it. Jeff and I are here to tell you, it is worth it. Keep tucking away.

When you put the right stuff in, you get the right stuff out.

Krissy, I'm sure you can speak to this and would agree with me. I've got the end result. I've got a lot of money. This sounds so flippant and almost irreverent to say. It isn’t that great. What I love most about my life is who I have been forced to grow into to frankly, be able to have the end result that most people are striving so hard for and not feel like an undeserving phony. Most people woke up tomorrow and suddenly, they had a booming business. My staff has grown. I have 120 people on payroll that essentially rely on me to wake up every day and be the best version of myself so that they can even get paid. I promise if you wake up tomorrow and you haven't done the work, and you haven't backfilled with all the effort and growth, you don't want that on you tomorrow unless you're ready for it and you feel like you deserve it.

Something that most people want is a quick success. Let's say people are starting a business because they want that financial freedom. They don't want that to be dragged out for five years. They want the money piece quickly and it takes work. You do talk about the fastest way to become a millionaire. What is that secret about?

I do, but notice, I don't say the fast way.

You don't say the fast way. You say the fastest. Let's talk about it.

A marathon is faster than an ultra marathon, but it's not 5K. People say they want it now. Here's the thing. Remember, I started by saying, “You have to look at business through the lens of value.” Wanting financial freedom puts you in a unique category along with 7 billion other people called humans. There's nothing unique about that. The fact that you want financial freedom doesn't entitle you to anything. It doesn't deliver any value to the world. It doesn't warrant any compensation. You go, “I want financial freedom and I worked hard on a business for six months.” Now you've reduced your crew from maybe 7 billion to 500 million.

There are 500 million other people that wanted financial freedom and they worked on a business for six months. We live in a free market. Thank God for that. It's a meritocracy. They want things to be fair and they want things to be redistributed, but why would we not want to live in a world where there's some additional reward for being the best? At the end of the year, they play the NBA Finals and all that and they're like, “You did good, but we’re going to pay everyone the same and we're going to give everyone a trophy because you all showed up.” No. What's the incentive to move humanity forward in that scenario?

What you've got to be doing is constantly understanding that money is attracted to a unique value. Value is always commensurate with some unique properties. The things that feel real and personal to you like, “I'm in pain. Life is hard. I want financial freedom. I want to take care of my family.” Those don't qualify you for any positive outcome because they're the things that make you like everyone else. The things that will qualify you for a positive outcome are going to be the things that make you unlike everyone else. You got to be reducing your competition. The concept of a blue ocean is to reduce your competition all the way to where it's just me versus me. There's nobody even in my sphere.

For that to happen, it requires an exceptional amount of drive, discipline, creativity, commitment to value, and ultimately, understanding what compensation is. Compensation is just a reward. Compensation is a marketplace democracy deciding what you're worth based on what you've already given to it. Nobody gets elected without campaigning. Nobody gets paid without delivering value. You have to convince the grand Athenian democracy of the market that you are valuable, unique, and special because of what you've already delivered to them. You get paid last. You have to have already delivered the value and the market eventually will go, “There's something special here. My money should go there and not there.” When you understand that, you realize that your own personal feelings, emotions, desires, drives, and artificial timelines mean nothing. You just love the process.

I feel like my GROworkspace brand was successful overnight, and then when I have to think about it, I'm like, “Krissy, it was five years of building this network, idea after idea, attempt after attempt, tweaking along the way, and then building a community of 40,000 unintentionally. Not even realizing it was going to be the catalyst for launching this business.” I launched the business and it was successful because of the five years of hard work, building the network that I enjoy doing, and I love doing it along the way. Even I have to remind myself of starting new brands and new businesses, like, “Why wasn't it as quickly as successful as fast as the other one? That one took five years of lead work up to it. We're only in year one.” I’m reminding myself of that and the hard work that it does take.

It comes down to the simple fact that you are the least important person in your business because you're the only person in your business that you're not trying to get paid from in some way. You're trying to get paid from your team and employees. You want them to pay you with their loyalty, commitment, effort, and willingness to produce more value than what you have to pay them because if you're paying them 100% of the value they produce, there's no profit in that. You're wanting customers to give their hard-earned money to you in exchange for something that you express or deliver.

You're the one person in your business that you're not trying to get paid from, so you're by far the least important to serve. When you realize that, you're like, “It should take five years. It should take twenty years. Maybe I'll die and never get there, but I'll still be more fulfilled than if I just sacrificed my humanity and my soul.” Not just a grunt who got pumped around his whole life and told he would retire someday, and then found out that was a scam like, “What are the options here?”

That's the other thing. It has to be this way for it to be worth it. No, it just has to be a little bit better than the alternative options which frankly, if we see the world isn’t that great. At least with this, you’re self-determined. You're on this personally driven crusade that every day you get to wake up fulfilled with purpose and with a mission and not just punching somebody else's clock and hoping there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that I promise you there likely isn't.

That's what makes the difference for a lot of people. When you find that thing that will give you fulfillment and give you purpose enough to wake up every day and be excited to serve the people, those are the people that end up being successful because they would do it without getting paid. That's the fulfillment and purpose they have with it. They're willing to stick with it. If you're reading and you're not feeling fulfillment and purpose with what you're doing, you need to reassess what you're doing and ask yourself, “Is this aligned with me, with what I want, with my purpose in life, and how I want to show up and serve?” If it's not, you better figure out what you want because you won't ever be successful at that and you're going to have to make that shift.

I'm glad you said that. I mentioned that great minds think about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people. I would add to that the smallest minds talk about themselves or obsessed with themselves. Yet, most people's drivers, frankly, are that. They're like, “This is what I want.” This is what was great about being a musician. It was never something to do for the money. I had to believe that there is meaning, significance, and impact in putting these twelve tones of sound together in creative ways to create a feeling in the world that could uplift. Otherwise, there's no point in being a musician. You're lazy because you don't want to get a job.

I had to believe that and I had to commit over a decade of my life to that and be like, “Why am I doing flashcards to teach myself the Lydian scale in all twelve keys? What's the outcome of that? It's not just some cerebral exercise.” I can produce a sound that when somebody writes the theme song to the Simpsons, that’s from the Lydian mode that lifts like that, recreating this feeling in this world in this effect and it lifts people. It does something for people. In that case, it supports humor. These things have to matter or else, they're pointless. The least important person is myself and the reason I'm saying this is we talked about the hard work, stamina, and sustainability of doing what you're doing.

A lot of times, people think, “I'm not fulfilled. I need to change.” I'm going to tweak that and say if you're not fulfilled, you might need to change. The first thing I'll tell you to look at is, “Do I need to expand?” If you're going to get up every day and live a life less ordinary and do the work, to swim upstream in this world and create something wonderful. If you're going to do the Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Oprah Winfrey work and all these titanic entrepreneurs that we look at, why would you do that work and not someone else? It's not because you're special or you have different wiring in your nervous system or something. No. It's going to be because you have a vision that is big enough and expansive enough to where it becomes a given that you have to work that hard. It's the difference between saying, “I'm going to go hike the hill behind my house,” and, “I'm going to go hike summit K2.” The expectation of the work and training required to summit K2 makes every complaint about how hard it is ludicrous. You're trying to scale K2. What the hell did you expect? Either shut up and do the work or set a smaller goal.

This is what Grant Cardone talks about in The 10X Rule. People think, “Grant Cardone told me not to work ten times as hard.” No. If you read the book, he's telling you to think ten times as big because then, working ten times is hard will be the natural consequence of the vision. Maybe you're trying to start a business selling women's clothing. That’s great, so are 7 million other people taking 400 other Shopify courses online or whatever. Maybe if your goal was to completely redefine women's relationships with their own bodies through fashion, you would complain less about the fact that it was hard because it would be a mission that was more worth working hard for me.

That was such a good example. I want to cover before we have to get off of here the 3 Ps Of Excellence that I know you talk about. I want to cover that and make sure that the audience gets to know about that a little bit.

If there's an abrupt transition, that's a good sign because it means there was nothing else to say about the previous thing. I'm a simple man and I need things to be easy because I was an only child. I never learned to deal with the chaos of life. I was left alone with my books for a lot of my childhood and playing with my Legos. I didn't have little sisters trying to steal my stuff and be annoying and I didn't have older brothers beating me up. I didn't have chaos. Both my parents worked and I was home alone a lot. At an early age, I didn’t learn how to operate effectively in an environment of chaos.

Now I have four kids. I know what a chaotic home is. I didn't develop those skills. For me, as soon as things get chaotic, I regress to my most brutish animal self and I forget all the good thoughts that I've worked so hard to develop. I go to my default programming. I can't remember anything that sounds smart. Life as an entrepreneur is inherently chaotic and high stress. There’s a lot of frenetic energy and high velocity in this communication, transaction, and all this stuff, I got to have the simplest things that I can default to even when I'm dumb and I'm neurologically flooded.

I came up with the 3 Ps where even my Neanderthal self can be like, “Do the 3 Ps, Jeff.” I'm not creative, but I can at least remember to do the 3 Ps, Physical, Personal, and Professional excellence. I spend so much of my time being chaotic and trying to juggle all this stuff that I have to have this super simple thing for physical, personal, and professional excellence. As an entrepreneur, Krissy, do you have those moments when you're like, “What am I supposed to be doing right now?”

Yes. I’m like, “What is it that I'm trying to avoid right now by sitting and looking like there’s something to do?”

You have to look at business through the lens of value.

This is useful in that regard too because at the end of the day, if I'm sitting there in a moment like, “What can I do right now?” I can go, “What can I do that will contribute to my physical, personal, or professional excellence?” Therefore, somebody else says, “We'll come to this. Let's go have lunch.” I look at the relationship and look at the person and I'm like, “Am I going to get more physically, personally, and professionally excellent by having lunch with this person? I'm going to pass.”

If he gets this super simple litmus test for life and ideally, I look at it as, “In the 16 to 18 hours a day that I'm awake, how much of that time can I spend becoming more physically, personally, or professionally excellent? Admittedly, to the exclusion of everything else. I'm totally comfortable alienating people or outright pissing them off by rejecting whatever it is that they're talking about or doing for my life because it doesn't make me more physically, personally, or professionally.” That's it. It's my super simple formula to be better at life, especially when you're stressed out.

As an entrepreneur, that happens quite often where you are stressed. There is a lot going on and you have many ideas running through your head. You want to do them all and you want to tackle them all. Being able to reground yourself with that, “That's fine.” We can steal your 3 Ps and we can adapt them to be our own. You're not going to get mad at us, right?

They're for sharing. They're like a candle. You can light as many other candles with that candle and it's never going to burn out the original candle. That's the great thing about it. The other thing that is important about it is I have this picture on my wall that's got three circles and they’re physical, personal, and professional. I always put physical at the center and a lot of people flip that. They say, “If I had the money, then I'd work out. I’d shop at Whole Foods and buy better quality produce. I’d hire a therapist and fix my marriage. I’d do all this stuff.”

You got to realize, all you're ever going to be compensated for in this world is how your energy emits outward to the world. All you're ever going to have in a relationship is based on how your energy emits outward and connects to another person. Where does energy come from? Energy is about the body. If your energy here is messed up, you don't deserve money and you probably aren't going to have good relationships because what are you putting out of sufficient quality, where you even get to have an expectation of what the world gives you back.

Fix it here first. Physical is the center circle, then personal. You can't take great care of three people in your family. What a ridiculous notion to say, “That's okay. Family is family. I'm going to focus on my 3,000 customers.” No. You have three customers at home that need and deserve more from you than your business customers and you're neglecting them? No, you don't deserve the money. Physical, personal, and then professional.

That is genius. We do have a lot of female mom readers who get that mom guilt, but they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first on the airplane. You can't help someone else if you have no energy. You're putting out bad energy and you're exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed. You're snapping at everybody else, your three people at home you should be taken care of.

You don't have nearly as much time if you're living that way because the reality is oxidation, free radicals, stress, and genetic mutation are real. You will probably get cancer and die twenty years sooner than you would have otherwise if you don't start dealing with that now. Time is the number one asset when you're building a business, the law of compounding. The more time you’ve got, the more value you can build. People are like, “I don't have time to work out.” You do not have time not to work out because you've already cost yourself twenty years. Now you need to start working out to gain that back.

I had my telomeres tested. Have you heard it?

I'm super interested in that science. Tell me about it.

I needed to start working out more and eating better. I live a fairly healthy life. I was 46 or something. Telomeres is the coating on the outside of your DNA, like the end of a shoelace. As your telomeres retract, that's showing the aging process. They used to think that as you aged, it retracted off your DNA. You’re aging and there was no way to reverse it like your age. Now they know you can reverse it and there are lots of different factors that you can do like chiropractic care, eating anti-inflammatory diets, taking care of yourself, and exercising. There are many things that contribute to good health.

My husband first got tested and we used to make fun of him that he was 53 or something like that. I would talk about, “You, old man.” He was taking his peptides that were supposed to reverse it and he keeps getting tested every six months, and it has gone back. His telomeres are saying, “He is the age that he is,” which is good for me because hopefully, that means it's going to be around a lot longer. I was always living the healthier life I thought and I ended up being 46. I need to do some work on that. You've re-inspired me by chatting with you. Physical is always the thing that I let go of first because I enjoy the personal and the professional so much more. They give me a lot of fulfillment.

I want to live my best happy life. I like to focus on those things that I enjoy. The physical tends to fall off, but you have re-inspired me that I have to put the oxygen mask on first so that I can be there for other people. That's what I'm going to take away from this whole thing, but I know everyone reading is going to take their own piece. Even if it's one little thing from what you said. Everyone's going to take away something different, which is what is cool about sharing your message with everyone.

I feel like there's one open loop that I'd like to close real quick because I dropped the ball on your question when you're asking about the speed. I like to under-promise and over-deliver. I'd rather people come into my world thinking, “This guy's harsh. It's all going to suck,” and then be pleasantly surprised when there are some good news and some silver linings. The good news is, and this is why I'm such a believer in the internet, you can dramatically accelerate the process of getting results by dramatically accelerating the process of getting leverage.

When I talk about the fastest way to become a millionaire, what I'm saying is most people go through life spending their whole life and they may not have this language for it, but they're trying to get a little bit of leverage. They're trying to get enough surplus that they can convert that surplus into an asset. It's essentially like a clone. If I could clone myself, I get twice as much work. You can clone yourself, not by cloning yourself, but by creating surplus money where the money can go to work, like a twin or something.

Most people never get there. I’ll talk about what I call the three phases of legacy. The fastest way to become wealthy and leave a generational legacy in your life is to understand these three phases. You must create what probably will feel like dramatic surplus to ever get ahead. Most people are just waiting for that incremental 2%, 3%, 4% raise at the end of the year. This is why everybody needs to start a business. That isn’t going to do crap. Inflation is 3.25% a year. You didn't buy any more milk and eggs without a raise. You just paid for what they're going to cost next year.

You got to get a dramatic surplus. You’ve got to take whatever extra time you can squeeze out in your life. I get that people have jobs, bills to pay, and responsibilities. Find some window of time that you can commit to creating pure surplus income. Not raising your standard of living, but creating a surplus that you can then move into the next phase, which is called growth, which is about stabilizing that income and putting it into either businesses or investments that create predictable cashflow. When you have predictable cashflow, then you can borrow against it. You can sell it as an asset, bank on it, and count on it. You can make different decisions on the basis of it, and then and only then, can you move into wealth creation.

I had a guy message me and he’s like, “I lost my job from COVID and I'm about to get evicted. I was able to squeeze out $3,000. What stock should I buy?” I'm like, “No, you're trying to operate in the third phase of legacy wealth creation. You need to get into the first phase of creating a baseline of stability, bringing your expenses as low as possible, and then doing whatever you have to do to create surplus within the bounds of the law and morality, of course.” The fastest way is to change your perspective on your relationship to money to that perspective and be honest with yourself about what phase you're in, and then be firm with yourself about, therefore, what needs to happen.

Be ruthless with yourself about excluding everything in your life that isn't that because you have lots of time when you're older and you have millions of dollars in the bank to play golf, have tea with your friends, and play canasta. Whatever the things that people think they need to have now as part of a balanced life. If you don't create that surplus, which most people don't and most people don't even have a full concept of how much surplus it takes to be a legitimate surplus, the rest is just a hamster wheel of decay.

Tell me the three.

You have to have your surplus phase. It’s also called your cashflow phase. It’s about increasing your cashflow so much more than your cost of living. Shatter all preconceived notions of how much more you have to have to have enough more. Only then, you take that surplus and try to stabilize it by making it what I call bankable, predictable, and sellable cashflow. You have to think like a bank. Would I loan money against this cashflow? Would I buy this cashflow as an asset? Can I make long-term 30-year decisions on the basis of this cashflow? Would I issue a mortgage that was secured by this cashflow?

Until you've converted your one-time surplus into something predictable, bankable, and sellable, test yourself and say, “It's predictable, bankable, and sellable, but I'm going to go try to get a bank to underwrite this cashflow and see if they'll give me a loan.” Only then, will you know that it's as secure as it needs to be and you fully entered the growth phase. Now, you have a consistent surplus that you can bank against to go build wealth. Cashflow or surplus, growth, and wealth.

All you're ever going to be compensated for in this world is how your energy emits outward to the world.

Message us and tell us what phase you're in. I want to know. Usually, I play a little game with my people in the end. I want you to tell them the freebie that you have for them and where they can find you.

We put a landing page together just for this episode. If you go to MillionaireSecrets.com/KrissyC, there are three things you can do on that page. One is you can get my giveaway, which is a free eBook called The Millionaire Shortcut. Two is you can subscribe to my YouTube channel which has 400 videos, thousands of hours of training, or something crazy all for free. You can subscribe to my Millionaire Secrets podcast, and then you should start with the episode where I interviewed Krissy.

Let’s do rapid-fire. I’m going to ask you something and you have to give me the answer that shoots off the hip here. There’s some would you rather mixed in there. Books or podcasts?

Books.

What's your favorite book?

No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits by Dan Kennedy.

Would you rather have Rambo or The Terminator on your side?

Terminator because he always leverages technology.

Music or silence while you work?

Binaural Beats music.

We're going to have to go look that up. I don't even know what that is. Favorite way to relax away from work? Do you ever relax?

I play the piano for 45 to 60 minutes every morning. It's heaven for me.

Favorite place you've visited around the world?

This is going to sound such a cliché, but there is no place on Earth that I'd rather be than my home.

You're there all the time. The fact that that is your place, that's amazing for you.

Let me say that speaks to it. Create a life that you never want to travel to escape. Travel is nice. You shouldn't want to travel to escape from your life. Create a life where the best place is where you live.

I'm going to have to move someplace with a few more palm trees. My husband always jokes to me, “Do you want some palm trees?” I'm like, “We're in Atlanta, Georgia. There are people that look tacky.” I'm just going to have a second home. It's going to be fine. Would you rather be able to hit the rewind button on your life or the pause button?

Honestly, probably rewind because of more time.

Would you rather have the good news first or the bad news first?

Always bad.

The bad news is this episode is over. The good news is that we get to put your message out there to the world and help some badass people go crush their business. Jeff, thank you for being here with us. Until next time, remember, done is better than perfect and channel your inner badass to take imperfect action every single day. Thanks, Jeff.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Jeff Lerner
• GROworkspace 
• The 10X Rule
• MillionaireSecrets.com/KrissyC
• The Millionaire Shortcut
• YouTube - Jeff Lerner - Millionaire Secrets
• Millionaire Secrets - Apple Podcasts
• No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits
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About Jeff Lerner