The 21 Rules of The Top 1%

I'm going to share with you 21 principles of success that I use to make my first million dollars by 28 years old now as my network has grown and I've rubbed shoulders with some of the richest people in the world while traveling and speaking at over 50 conferences in just the last four years I can assure you that these principles are what make the top 1% of people successful so if you want to achieve success in the shortest amount of time possible whether you're just starting your career or you're already making eight figures per year

then these principles are for you all right so jumping in success rule number one is that success leaves Clues now this is something I've built my career off of it sounds simple but it's actually one of the most misunderstood and maybe misused quotes ever so let's break this one down um I talk about this all the time and that is basically if you really want the cheat code the shortcut to success you find other people who have already achieved the success that you want and then you understand the clues they left behind you reverse engineer

how they got there now number one when you get advice making sure you're getting advice from somebody who's actually achieved it uh two like I said breaking that down now it seems pretty simple but here's why it's often misunderstood and maybe misused so for example in my Niche we're creating content I'm on YouTube maybe the the the biggest guy on the content game is this guy Alex Heros if you've heard of him and so a lot of people that are just starting creating content say well look at Alex Heros what he's doing I'm going to

do what he's doing or let's say in the podcast game sort of where I'm at as well you have Patrick Bet David you know he's so big I should do what Patrick Bet David does but see this is where it's wrong you want to reverse engineer the clues they've left behind and you need to do what they did not what they're doing so I need to go back if you're starting out fresh you need to go back and do what Alex heroi did starting down very nich down in content getting your reps in then expanding

your content going to different audiences then niching back down and so it's a predictable path and so you you wouldn't go to the gym look at some really strong guy lifting 400 lb and go I need to go do what he does lift 400 lb instead you'd have to start at 50 lb or 100 lb or whever that is but the fastest shortcut to success is to model to follow those successful steps and this kind of goes into rule number two which is something that you hear all the time and that is smooth Sea's never

made a skilled sailor well maybe you don't hear that all the time I use it all the time and really it's modeled after a quote from Nelson Mandela and he said that I never lose I either win or I learn and that is success is a horrible teacher we learn from our failures that's why smooth Seas success doesn't make a skilled seller we need the problems to get better at things but the thing is I never lose because even if I don't achieve what I want I'll learn and so what we want to do is

in any situation we we're not going to win 100% of the time we're going to have trials tribulations struggles and what we want to do is we want to pay attention to what those are we want to understand them we want to reverse engineer those what went wrong not to we point fingers and point blame but so we can learn from them my dad told me when I was a kid growing up that once is an accident but twice is stupid the sign of intelligence is how quickly we can change based off of new information

and we have to be able to do that all right now that that principle number two only really works if you understand principle number three which is doing everything with the end in mind you see intention is everything we always want to understand what exactly are we trying to do for example at one of my masterminds I was coaching I had somebody come up and we're doing like the hot seat in The Mastermind and he said you know I just feel like I'm working so much I don't feel like I'm spending enough time with my

wife and I said great how much time should you be spending with your wife and he didn't know the answer to that and so he didn't have any intention what does a great relationship with my wife look like how much time do we spend together what types of things would we be doing and so we want to think through intention of everything because if I'm just trying to win or learn as we talked about and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes not every mistake that I learn from is good you see only if they're

helping me finally get to the goal that I want but if I'm not clear on what the goal is that I want then no matter what I'm doing almost seems wrong and so we get all types of false starts we start something we realize we don't like it we quit we change our mind and we waste a lot of time without being clear and it kind of reminds me of this um movie clip from Alice in Wonderland let's just play that clip but I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go well

well that depends on where you want to get to oh it really doesn't matter as long as I then it really doesn't matter which way you go so you see she was given all types of options of what to do and she didn't know which one to choose or which way to go cuz she didn't know where she was going all right now this also then goes into success principle number four and that is lifestyle over retirement now I like to say that everything you learned is wrong and this is something that's definitely been taught

wrong when I was a kid it was like what do you want to be when you grow up a fireman a police officer a doctor right and today you hear from your financial adviser in mainstream media how much money do you need to retire so think about this how much money do you need to retire 1 million 5 million 10 million whatever that number is but again both of those are wrong lifestyle is greater than retirement so it's not what do I want to be doing policemen firemen and this is where people go wrong it's

like where do I what do I want to do in a year or 3 years or 5 years it's not what you want to be doing it's what is the lifestyle that I want to have what is the lifestyle where do I want to live how much time do I want to be outdoors do I like the warm weather the cold weather do I want to surf do I want to ride mountain bikes snowboard write all of these things what do I want my lifestyle to look like first then it starts helping all those other

things now back to Lifestyle versus retirement and how much money you need to retire I would ask another question which is why would you want to retire in the first place now ask yourself another question why do you think all billionaires still work it's because they like what they're doing they're not trying to retire if you're dreaming of doing nothing all day it means you really hate what you're doing so instead of thinking what you need to be doing or how much money you need so you don't have to do that thing anymore think about

the ideal lifestyle you want and build that all right that goes into rule number five which is creativity is a skill now this sounds kind of crazy most people think that people are born creative but it's not being born creative it's a skill and I believe that creativity is the single most important thing you need to be successful today you see it used to be being a technical and analytical worker you had to be a good coder a good engineer but the internet changed all of that now it's made those commodity workers and now with

the rise of AI and things like that especially with people thinking and it's it's true that AI might take a lot of jobs but what I believe is that AI cannot replace is human Ingenuity and human creativity and so you need to develop that as a skill it's the exponential multiplier about 15 years ago maybe a little longer I was going through Brian Tracy uh personal coaching programs and he talked about that uh what you need to do is every single morning get out a piece of paper like like an actual piece of paper and

a pen and write down five ideas now in the beginning it's very painful you don't know what you're writing down so you're writing down stupid stuff I want to go to the Moon one day I don't want to work anymore whatever it is but over time as you develop that creativity that muscle gets bigger bigger bigger bigger bigger and at the point now you know 15 years later later or whatever I can literally fill up and I do fill up pages every single day and people are like Mark how do you get all these ideas

you're so creative I wish I had ideas like you well it's because I've been working on it for a long time so start developing creativity as a muscle and develop it now that kind of goes into number six which is developing ourselves and becoming what I call superhuman or let me give you what I call the Superhuman protocol why wouldn't you want to just be the best version of yourself why why wouldn't you want to be the best you could be and so the human protoc superhuman protocol is e plus C plus d times F

let me break that down for you energy the first thing is I need energy without energy you're dead in the water you don't have enough energy to go to the gym you don't have enough energy to stay up late and work you don't have enough energy to read the book you fallen asleep you need energy without energy you can't do anything then I need to have Clarity it's not enough just to have energy and run around in circles I need to have clarity as to what I'm doing and then I need to have willpower to

get myself to do the things I need to do or not do the things I shouldn't be doing at the same time if I can get energy so I have the energy to do them the clarity of what I need to be doing and The Willpower to do the things I don't want to do I have those three times the multiplier which is focus all right focus is the multiplier so it's not about the about the hours I work it's the work in my hours focus is the multiplier that's the code master those three things

and you will become unbeatable with the Superhuman protocol all right jumping right into number seven this one is uh lie about your future now what does that mean lie about your future well tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us we can say we're going to do XYZ thing today tomorrow next year whatever that's not guaranteed anytime we're talking about the future it's a lie right and so we can choose to lie about it good or bad I am going to be amazing I'm going to make so much money I'm going to be in great

shape or I'm not good with money I don't have time I don't have good concentration and we could lie good or bad about ourselves you see it's important to understand that your words are prophetic what we say comes to reality right we're made in our Creator's image and he's a Creator our words say that so what you put after I am I am unorganized I am not good with money I am or it could be the opposite so whenever we talk about the future we're always lying so we might as well lie about good things

tell yourself be prophetic that you are good with money you are good with time management you will be able to improve your health you will be able to change your life your future family's life Etc and lie about your future in a positive way now this goes into number eight and this is uh one that's massive to understand and again is often misunderstood and this is understanding leverage now leverage you get it it sounds simple but let me explain this to you in a story so let's say I was hanging out with Jeff Bezos he's

the you know one of the richest guys in the world founder of Amazon and let's say that we went out we were celebrating last night uh we went out and went out on the town all night right and we stayed up late and partied too hard probably and didn't get enough sleep and in the morning you know cuz he's Jeff Bezos he laid around his mansion and laid by the pool and had his people bring him stuff all day and I had to go work all day I went and worked 10 hours doing digging holes

let's say at the end of the day he laid by his pool all day being catered to and I dug holes all day who worked harder now when I ask this question typically to a group they say that of course you did you worked digging holes for eight or 10 hours while he laid by the pool but that is only true if you measure the work by the inputs and not the outputs that's the difference of Leverage you see Leverage is getting more output for Less input so while I was certainly digging holes for8 or

10 hours my input equaled the output for him he laid by the pool all day but he had tens of thousands of people doing work for him he had millions and millions tens of millions of dollars of media going out and talking for him and so if you measure in output you can see that he worked way harder he got way more output done than I did and so you have to understand this core concept this is leverage and if you start to apply this to every area of your life you'll really start getting ahead

quickly how do I get more leverage now we get leverage with more employees right we can get um leverage with people we can get leverage with money how can I use my money to make more money we can use things like content how can I reach millions of people from One Piece of content I can write code and those are types of Leverage and start to think about every area of your life how you can do that let's go into rule number nine and this is don't drive with a flat tire now you wouldn't want

to have a high performance car a superar with a flat tire it wouldn't work very well but that's what a lot of you are doing with your own lives and back to the Superhuman protocol we should be treating our body better our life better than we would a superar and so what is this flat tire well I think about life being in Balance like a tire and really there's four main areas three sub areas under each one but let's call it four main areas so number one you have your business or your bank account right

you need to have some money and so I have that on a scale of 1 to 10 then my body that's my health my energy my focus things like that then I have my being that's my spirituality for me that's being connected with God that's for you whatever it is meditation or whatever and then finally is balance and so that's like my relationships um and things like that those are the four areas that need to be in Balance now they don't always have to be in Perfect Balance all the time sometimes your car tire gets

out of balance you take it to the shop and get it fixed but you want to understand where that's out and the more inbalance that is the more performance you're going to get out of it so if you're only f focusing on one aspect like I'm in the best shape ever I'm at the gym 5 hours a day but I have no money it's not going to be very good or I work all the time I have money but I have no relationships and I have no health and so you can understand that each one

is going to build up the other and if you neglect one unfortunately the other ones are going to get stunted as well now if you'd like I have a free download that you can get I give this to my coaching clients I'll give it to you for free I'll link to it down below put a QR code here on the screen and basically you just answer the questions and it'll create this wheel for you and you can quickly see which areas you need to work on it's a free gift to you if you want it

from my coaching clients all right now moving into rule number 10 and that is speed to action uh I like to say that money likes speed you see a lot of people they spend way too much planning and not enough time doing one of my favorite books I've read which is called Ready fire aim written by Michael Masterson in there there's a line that I always use and he said that obituary pages are lined with businesses that plan and to people are trying to plan and get more information do I have the right website do

I have the right business card do I have the right Corporation whatever they think that there's just one more thing they have to do or one more piece of information they need rather than just taking what they have and going and doing it so rather than focusing on the business do I have the right Corporation the letterhead the business card the website or whatever do you have sales right and so if I can move quicker I can outperform everybody else so for example while a lot of people are still planning what they want to do

maybe months maybe years into the future most people high performers maybe like myself could move in and get that done in days or weeks and so if you really want to have success you got to be going fast you have to be iterating we'll come back to that hey small business owner are you buried in all types of work keeping you from the real thing that makes you money well that's where just works comes in they're the all-in-one platform that supports small business growth you can get all their tools that help with benefits like payroll

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we're going to go to number 11 and so I want to give you a twofer these are going to be two different ones I'm going to combine them together and these are two laws from probably the smartest person in the world in history and that is Einstein now 11.1 we'll call it is the eighth wonder of the world Einstein said that the eighth wonder of the world um for those that know it earn it and those who don't pay it and what is he talking about he's talking about compound growth you see if you understand

compounding growth and how it works you can earn it you can compound your growth if you don't unfortunately you're going to pay for it so let me give you some examples of how you can apply this to your life for example on this video If I put out a very good video you're much more likely to watch another video when you see it pop up in your future if I put out a bad video you're less likely to watch it so that would compound now if you watch the next one in the next one my

channel grows I have more subscribers more views then more people are likely to come right and the opposite is also true it's not just linear growth it's exponential because it compounds um my health if I go to the gym one time doesn't do that much but if I go to the gym consistently over time it compounds I can lift heavier weights which then lifting heavier weights gets me more Improvement and then I get more heavier weights which gives me more Improvement uh your relationships your money all of those ways if I invest my money I

reinvest the profits you know I could put $10,000 on a house today and if I just continually reinvest those profits profits I could have millions of dollars of real estate in less than a decade That's the Law of compounding now I want to go into Einstein's Second Law which we'll call this 11.2 and this is the definition of Sanity now you might have heard Einstein's definition of insanity and that is that uh doing the same thing but expecting different results well the opposite of that would be doing the same thing and expecting the same results

now why would I want that well once I figure out what works for me I should do that over and over and over consistency once I found the perfect morning regimen that fires up my day and keeps me organized and uh productive then I should do that same morning routine all the time once I've found the right diet that works for me then I should do that diet over and over once I find the right format right and so we'll get to how we do that in a minute in another rule but once we find

something that works we want consistency why wouldn't I want to do the same thing and achieve the same results all right moving into rule number 12 I like to call this one Zer based thinking and it comes from a term called zerob based accounting and it basically is having a mindset that the answers change what do I mean by that so when you make a decision to take a job or move or enter in some relationship or whatever join some program you've hopefully used the best information you had available at that time to make the

best decision at that time but sometimes you get new information and so then you would ask yourself knowing what I now know I didn't know it then but knowing what I now know would I have made the same decision if the answer is no well then you need to change your direction as quickly as possible so a lot of people have what's uh called sunken cost fallacy they're like well I've already spent the time the effort the energy the money to do this I might as well see myself through now zerob based thinking would be

like look I yeah I did spend the money on it the money's gone whether I sit here and do this or not the money's gone so why would I put myself into any more torture when I used to go to the movies uh a long time ago I don't go anymore but once in a while we would sit down my wife and I we'd watch a movie and I'm like partway through and I'm like man this movie is terrible I'm out of here or watching one at home my wife like once to stick to the

end to see what happens but I'm like look I'm not going to spend any more time I don't care if we spent money to come here whatever I'm out of here here so zerob based thinking what do what do I now know that um would change my mind and if the answer is something different then do it all right number 13 this is a paradigm shift what's important to understand about a paradigm shift is that we can see the same thing but think about it differently we have to understand that situations are neutral but the

perspective that we have is everything so for example I could be stuck in traffic Los Angeles traffic Southern California it's terrible I could be angry I could be full of Ro road rage I could be you know whatever mad or I could be hanging out in my car listening to podcasts thinking that I'm in a university uh on a phone with a loved one having a great time and so the situation itself is neutral but how I view it how I choose to react to it and kind of going back to we either win or

learn understanding that I can learn lessons from this and all of a sudden it can take something maybe that you view as bad and turn it around to something good all right moving right into number 14 and that is that goals are just dreams at least without this now I told you I was listening to Brian Tracy programs I spent like 10 years in like personal development going through that I read a lot of books probably dozens of books on how to achieve goals this was something I wanted to do when I was young I

mean I I still do set goals but I wanted to know how do I set a big goal and then how can I you know guarantee my success or uh increase my odds of of achieving that goal but the thing is goals are only dreams without having systems in place and what you want to do is not focus on the goal but what are the daily actions the daily inputs that I have to achieve in order to get to that goal not the end result so for example if you wanted to grow a YouTube channel

from scratch you would say well my goal is to get the YouTube channel with you know some thousand subscribers or 10,000 subscribers but that's my goal what do I need to do to achieve that goal well I need to create videos I should probably create two videos a week great so then focus on the two videos per week knowing that if you do that over a long enough period of time you will have gained subscribers if I had a goal to put on you know 20 pounds of muscle mass I would have to one increase

my calorie intake I would have to two probably lift heavy weights you know four times five times a week now if I ate 20% more calories every single day and I trained heavy weights four or five times a week it would be impossible for me not to have gained the weight so think about the goal yes but without a system with daily inputs that you need and a way to track it you're never going to achieve it and it's only a dream I think about this quote from James clear the author of atomic habits he

said that you don't rise to the level of your goals cuz those are dreams you fall to the level of your systems that you have in place to do that all right let's move on to number 15 and this one is a one people love when I say it and it really comes down to the quality of your life if you want to have a better quality of life it's going to come down to the questions that you ask now what I found unfortunately is that most people ask horrible questions they ask very broad questions

which then you get back very broad answers so for example since I talk mostly about investing I get DMS and comments all the time Mark what should I invest into invest into for what like that's that's such a broad question how can I even answer that or they'll say hey Mark what's your opinion on this you know some some broad question it's like what do I even say like why don't you ask me something more specific so for example hey Mark you know I am this age these are my risk tolerances my goal is to

achieve this I'm really looking for cash flow I don't like these types of cash flow but I do like these what do you think might be something else I should consider okay so now I've gotten a much more precise question and I can give you much more precise answer back and this is one thing that I've found with AI yeah you know I'm using chat GPT and Claude and Gemini in my business extensively I've gotten really really good at using these prompts and it blows away blows people's minds when they see these prompts and most

people think that AI is is going to change everything but the answer is the truth is it's not you see if I ask open AI or chat GPT write me a book A book about what write me a book about dogs a book about dogs what write me a book about training dogs okay like what kind of dogs okay write me a book about training uh police dogs okay write me a book about training police dogs to do civilian life right and so the more precise question I can ask the more precise answer I'll get

back and the faster the quality of your life will go up all right moving into number 16 I think about three ways to wealth now this kind of goes back into the rule about leverage but when I want to build wealth I have to one provide value the only reason someone will ever give you money is you if you provide value for them solving a problem and I can do this three main ways number one I can provide my time I could provide a service now whether you make $10 an hour or 10,000 an hour

like you're a brain surgeon it doesn't really matter you're still trading your time at the end of the day you only have so much time so that's leverage number one number two then if I want to get more wealth I could scale that with selling products so whether that's like a retail store that sells physical products I sell them on e-commerce something like that that's good now when I'm sleeping those products could be sold someone else could be there when I'm not there they could be selling those products for me but I still have inventory

I still have to buy inventory ship it manage it produce it things like that so the third level I think about is selling your creativity now what's interesting about this is when you're trading time for money if you're making $1,000 an hour hour you still attach a dollar amount to an amount of time so my wife wants a new lou bag it's $5,000 I work I make $11,000 an hour do I want to spend 5 hours to get that bag for her but when you sell your information your creativity then you have no attachment how

much does that Lou bag cost me it cost me an idea how much did that idea cost me it cost me nothing now I had to get the idea through building creativity as a skill which we talked about in our earlier rule but I can create a course a digital course that could make me millions of dollars with just my ideas that I've collected with no products I've have to buy or ship or manage and no time and once you do that you realize that your wealth is infinitely scalable now let's go into number 17

which is Relentless optimization now this one's really important because all growth comes from optimization or really all growth comes from iteration you might have heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something right 10,000 hours of Mastery but that's not really true it's not 10,000 hours of Mastery it's 10,000 hours of optimization or iteration it's how quickly you can optimize so I don't want Bruce Lee said I don't fear the man who's done 10,000 kicks I fear the man who's done one kick 10,000 times and each time has optimized has improved and that's how we

grow now think about if it takes you 4 months let's say one quar to optimize a website a landing page an offer then that means you get four cycles of optimization in a year if I do it once a month I get 12 optimization cycles and who do you think will be better at the end someone who has 12 cycles of optimization or somebody who has four now what if I do it every week now I get 52 optimization Cycles in a year while you only get four now you start to get the secret here

let's move on to number 19 and this is die with debt now when I was a kid growing up my parents used to say all the time what do you think we have a money tree in the backyard you might have heard something similar well the answer is we sort of do have a money tree in the backyard you see we're in a debt-based monetary system that means all money is created through debt issuance so when I go to the bank to get a house a car a boat business loan that money is created into

existence that's my money tree so let's say for example I want to go buy a business it's a a dry cleaner a post office box or something like that um those will typically sell for three times multiple so I buy a million business throwing off $300,000 of cash flow per year profit I can go get a business loan for the million dollars the bank will give me a million bucks I have to give them $1 $150,000 for The Debt Service on that but minus the 300,000 I'm receiving in profit and I'm walking away with a

free and clear $150 $200,000 a year that money that million dollars literally came from my money tree from the bank now I know there's lots of people like Dave Ramsey that tell you that never use debt pay off your debt as fast as you can and that's one way way to go but if I have a money tree why wouldn't I use it in a debt-based monetary system if you want to scale your success and your wealth you need to learn how to manage debt now that's not to say that there isn't risk there certainly

is so you want to have good debt not bad debt good debt is productive debt good debt is using debt to get a cash flow and asset like the business bad debt would be using the debt to go on a vacation take my family out the dinner don't do that sticking with financial success principles we're on to number 20 and this is saving versus investing now what modern Financial advice tells you is to save for retirement put your money into your 401k your IRA save for 40 years and hopefully one day your portfolio be enough

that you can start to live off of that savings and hopefully it won't run out before you die but we don't want to be saving what we want to be doing is investing and so we want to think about instead of saving for 40 years and hopefully we have enough saved up to live off of why wouldn't I just start investing into cash flow today you see I could save for 40 years and maybe have enough to live off for another 20 or 30 or I could start investing in cash flow today and probably in

less than 10 years have enough cash flow coming in where I don't have to work anymore and it will never run out for the rest of my life not only that then I have assets to pass on to my kids and my grandkids that provide them cash flow as well so it's not about saving saving is for losers saving loses that's why right because of inflation your saving is losing value and even if you're putting in the S&P 500 it's not going up at the rate of debasement the saving is losing I don't want to

say you're a loser but the saving is losing invest that money specifically in cash flow instead and let's go to the last one rule number 21 and this is uh the big one actually I'm going to give you a bonus number 22 but let's 2 21 is chasing antelopes now I write this at the top of my uh board where I manage out my quarters and my weeks and my months and I'm trying to always ask myself this question am I chasing the antelope you see uh the story of a lion is the king of

the Jung and the lion could do whatever it wants it could eat whatever animal it wants it could easily snatch up a field mice and eat the field mice no problem but the problem is that the lion would literally have to be chasing field mice all day to get enough calories to sustain itself or the lion could sleep around for a day or two and wake up and go get one Antelope eat the antelope and then go back to sleep for a couple days and so the question I'm always asking myself am I chasing the

antelope or am I chasing field mice that's why I write it on my productivity board and so think about that what are the things that you're doing and are they field mice or are they antelopes and you should always be focusing on the one that's the highest value test the one that's going to move you the furthest ahead not chasing field mice chasing Antelope now I want to give you a bonus one and that is a bonus uh rule number 22 which is play to win this really summarizes all of these here and it's playing

are you playing the game to play the game or are you playing the game to win the game you see playing the game to win the game is to follow traditional advice which is go to school get a good grades get a good job save for 40 years in your mutual funds and your 401ks and maybe at some point in 40 years you might be able to retire and get a boat and sell around the world or get an RV and drive around the country maybe if you live that long and you may get to

that point and find out you don't even like it but what does winning look like to you and that goes back to trying to Define your ideal lifestyle you might winning for you might just be to live near the beach where you can fish every day and have some time to hang out with your wife or your spouse or in town with your friends and you might be able to achieve that for $2,000 a month right now by moving to Colombia or South America somewhere for example so what does winning look like for you and

then once you've been able to clearly Define that ask yourself what is the closest way that you can get the fastest way you can get to that goal now if you've liked these 20 own rules of success you might like this other video where I talked about how to go from $0 to 1 million in 12 months in 12 steps I broke them down month by month by month you can watch that video right here either way I want to make sure that you have true wealth which is time freedom and you join the new

Rich who are those of us who value time and location Freedom over just money so go watch that video and I'll see you on the next one