If you want to start a business in 2026 that makes you real money, then you need to stop giving a When I crossed $100 million net worth by the age of 28, I had worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and I have seen this pattern. The people who struggle take everything personally. Now, the people who win, they treat decisions like experiments and then they move on really quickly once they find the one that works well.
So, if you want to build real wealth, here are five mindset shifts that you need to start a business that grows fast this year. Number one, the smarter you are, the better you are at hiding. This is like the most dangerous advantage you think you have and that is why it's number one.
Thinking you are smart and being smart is actually holding you back. Your intelligence isn't helping you succeed. It is the exact thing that's keeping you stuck.
I've lived this. Before I started my business, I was literally like the number one consumer of all things entrepreneur. Like the podcast, the books, free courses, [music] events, networking, like how do I meet the right people?
How do I learn the right stuff? And I constantly felt like I was never ready. Like there was just like I needed one more piece of information and once I found it then I would be ready to start.
And so it felt like I was like being really productive because I was like doing all this stuff and consuming this I'm walking and doing podcast and I'm like [music] doing stuff and between work and on my lunch break I'm like podcast and calling people networking and it felt like I was being really really smart doing my diligence. But this is what I know now. There is no piece of magical information.
Then there is never going to be a moment when you feel like you know everything that you need to know. In fact, I still don't feel that way. And because if you felt that way, what would it mean?
It would mean that you've already done the thing. You get the feeling after you do it, not before you do it. And that is the trap for smart people.
If you're not that sharp, you don't have that many options. You just go try stuff and you're like, "Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I don't think that much about it.
" But if you're smart, you can build an entire world of tasks that you must do to get ready and it looks like progress and it sounds like it to your friends and to your colleagues and your parents and everybody you talk about, but none of it ever helps you put something out there and find out if it's good enough. And for that reason, the smarter you are, the better you get at hiding. So, what's the alternative then?
To stop thinking and become like everyone else or get dumb? No, I'm not saying that at all. Okay?
I'm not saying don't think. I'm saying pay attention to what your thinking is actually for. Is it moving you closer to your goals, closer to the reality of launching a business, closer to starting a business?
Or is it just another fancy reason to go follow another rabbit hole and tell yourself that you're not ready? If I were starting today, I would be insanely suspicious of where every minute of my time went to planning. Okay?
Every time I caught myself planning, getting ready, building a plan, I would ask myself, is this bringing me closer to a customer, saying yes to buying my stuff? Is this moving the ball forward? What action would teach me more and get me ready faster than this planning session?
Most actions will. This brings me to number two. Understanding that the information that you need to grow your business doesn't actually exist yet.
If you keep preparing before taking action, that is what creates failure. Let me explain this. When Alex and I started gym watch, there was no master plan.
Like everyone always asked like, "You must have structured this and that and your funnel was built like this because of that. " No, we had no clue what we were doing. We weren't doing fancy research with consulting companies or running competitive analysis.
I didn't even have a deck that said what our strategy for our company was. It was me and Alex getting on the phone calling people. We thought, hey, you know, we've been gym owners.
What would have helped us? Maybe we should sell that to them. And then we called those gym owners and asked if they [music] wanted it.
We didn't have decks. We didn't have months of preparation. We just had let's call people, let's listen to them, and then let's do more of that.
Like literally, that was the thought behind it, guys. I'm talking we had it was sitting at a coffee table in a less than,000t apartment with not much money just winging it. We didn't know if it would work and we didn't know the right price.
We didn't know exactly the right product or the right customer. But I also knew that I was never going to find out by thinking about it and staying in my head. And so I picked up the phone, call people.
And this is what I wish that somebody had told me earlier. The information that you need to make the right decision doesn't exist yet. It is not in a book and it's not in my story or anybody else's.
It's not in the data that you're going to find chat GPT. You cannot find it because it hasn't been created yet. It only shows up when you do something.
When you put an offer out there and see what happens when you name a price on the phone and see if somebody says yes to it. When you ask somebody, would you pay for this? And they tell you yes, why or why not?
That is when you learn. It's not before. You don't learn before taking action.
You learn because you took action. And this is why, you know, research feels productive, but it keeps you stuck because you're looking for something that doesn't exist. Your situation is unique.
You can get as much probability as you want. You can feel as sure as you want. You're never going to know.
So, if I were starting [music] today, I would stop asking myself, "What do I need to know? " I would start asking myself, "What do I need to do to find out? " Now, once you start taking action, you're going to run into something that makes most people quit really early, which is they realize it's not perfect, but they can't let it go.
Which brings me to number three. You're going to waste time and work. And that's the game.
Okay, this is what nobody tells you about and it [music] sucks and you don't really know until it's too late. Every successful person I know knows this. Okay, let me give you a great example of this.
So, when Alex and I first started in our business, we actually didn't build a business for gym owners. We built an online weight loss business [music] first. I built this huge piece of curriculum.
I shot all the videos like barely knowing how to do it. I created a four full course. I got multiple certifications.
I source supplements, built [music] a website. We did two months of work, built the whole marketing page, the funnel, the sales page, the ads. Then we started selling.
And after literally two weeks, [music] we realized it wasn't going to work that the way we thought. And we were like, we need to pivot. The information is telling us this is not what people want.
We need to pivot. 2 months of building [music] everything to make a business work. And 2 weeks of selling customers and realizing that wasn't exactly what they wanted.
And then we just walked away and shut down, refunded people, give their money back. If I were [music] attached to what I thought was going to work, I wouldn't have pivoted. I've been like, "No, I've put so much work and I need to stick with this, didn't we?
I worked for two months on this. Oh my god, life is not fair. I put so much time into it.
" Because the universe cares how much time I put into it because the market cares how much time you put in your business. No, they don't give a The market only wants what it wants. It doesn't want necessarily what you built.
And it certainly doesn't care how much work you put into it. And if I had stuck with that, I probably would have failed and never built a $250 million business. Here's the thing nobody's going to tell you early on.
You're going to waste so much time to work, so much of it. You're going to build things that don't get used. You're going to spend weeks on stuff that people throw out and people hate.
You're going to put tons of effort into ideas that never pan out. That is not failure. That is feedback.
That's part of the game. That is how you learn. That's the cool part.
Like, that is how you become one of the best. You get okay with it. And the people and the entrepreneurs who move fast are not the ones who don't avoid that wasted work.
They're the ones who don't let the wasted work weigh them down by clinging on to it. And thinking life isn't fair and business isn't fair and it should have, would have, could have. Who gives a if there is a better option, you go with it and you say, "Fuck everything else.
Start from scratch. " First principles. You build something.
You test it. You learn if it's wrong. You move on without complaining.
You stop adding so much drama into it. And you don't need to justify the time you put towards it. It's called learning.
Okay? You're not going to school paying tuition. Your tuition is your time.
Okay? And I get it cuz like 2 months of work felt like a lot until you realize it's either 2 months or I could let that 2 months steal another 6 months or a year or 2 years of my life doing the wrong thing. [music] That costs way more.
So if I were starting today, I would expect to throw stuff away. I would plan for I would remind myself the goal is not to make every hour of work pay off. The goal is to work [music] as fast as possible, learn as fast as possible.
And sometimes that means that you got to be willing to walk away from that you built because there's something better and that's okay. [music] So you're moving fast, you're testing, and you're not clinging to some cost. But there is one more place where people waste months before they ever sell anything.
And that brings me to number four. You don't need to look like a real company. I run a $250 million business.
And I know, guess what? My website looks like crap still. I think I've been saying it for like a decade.
Here's why. In my first business, gym launch, we didn't even have a website when we started. We were selling people before one existed.
[music] We didn't have glass door, Google reviews, website, likeing nothing, right? We had no logo, no brand. It was literally just like calling people, closing deals, delivering results.
That's it. And I would say even to this day, it's not something I prioritized, which I probably will be soon, but I I haven't prioritized. Why?
Because it's not what I need to make my business work. I even think about like this. When we bought our first building, it had gross old ass orange carpet everywhere.
like so ugly, so old. And I remember saying, "We start here. We're not going to wait until it looks right.
" I was cuz at first what I I didn't want to bring customers in. I want to bring partners in. I didn't even want to bring my employees in cuz I was like, "This carpet's so disgusting.
" And then I said, "Layla, you got to listen to your own. Like eat your own dog food. Like you got to start before it looks right.
" And this is what happens to a lot of new founders. They want to look established, but you're not established. And so they spend like weeks and weeks and months on websites and they hire designers and logos.
They're obsessed over these brand colors and color palettes. They want everything to look like so beautiful and polished before they've even sold anything. You don't even know if it works.
And it's all just like another way to hide and not do the hard of selling customers. And I get it cuz it feels like work. It feels like I'm making progress.
Look, we got the website. But that dude, you can't fool me. It is not progress.
It's avoiding the thing that actually matters. Find out if people want what you're selling. The reason I'm so mad about this, like I've seen so many founders with these like beautiful brands and they have no money.
[music] And I have seen so many founders with ugly websites and you wouldn't even know they exist and making millions. The correlation is not what you think. You cannot be afraid of looking like you just started because you are just starting.
You did just start and that's okay. It's the truth. Own it and move on.
Even if you have a big brand, you have a big personal brand. Now you're starting a business. Be honest.
Own it. Move the on. Don't waste your time on this stuff.
So, if I were starting today, I would skip everything that's about trying to look big and trying to look legit. And I would be honest, and I would say, you know what? I'm going to prioritize having paying customers and a product that makes sense before [music] I fancy up and pay 20 grand for a logo.
I would say, I don't need the fanciest office until I have a fancy team and people that pay for my fancy. I would let the results do the talking rather than the opposite. So, now you're not obsessing over looking professional.
There's one belief that will sabotage if you do not deal with it ahead of time. Number five, the market doesn't care how hard you worked. This is what actually defines success.
Let me tell you this. I spent 18 months building what was going to be a done for you meals system to launch with my company, Prestige Labs. Meaning, we had supplements and we thought, you know, a lot of people when they're trying to lose weight and stuff are taking supplements.
They also are telling us like, well, the food's the problem. Like, I really need to understand how to eat [music] the food. And so we're like, man, if we want to make it like a no-brainer for people, we should launch meals where we basically could ship nationwide meals to everybody.
So I spent 18 months sourcing, developing, testing, learning everything about shipping meals across the country. It was a ton of work. And I was like, dude, I am ready to launch this thing for this to be a mega business.
[music] And it completely flopped. It's not like it made no money, but it by far did not justify the amount of operational complexity of shipping meals across the country. And I remember feeling like, this is so stupid.
Like, I spent 18 months of my life building this business that like I as I talk about it, you're probably like, I haven't even heard you tell the story before. Yeah, I blacked it out because it sucked. Cuz I'd like to forget about it cuz it was 18 months of my life.
But you know what I remember thinking at the time is that it wasn't fair that the market owed me something for all that work and effort. Like, I did the work. Shouldn't I get rewarded for it?
And I remember I had this mentor at the time and I was venting to her about it and I remember she just like I just never forget this moment. She just like laughed and she goes, "Oh, Ila, business isn't fair. Did you think it was?
" And I remember just thinking, "Oh, I guess I did. I did think [music] it was fair. " I used to think that if I put in really, really hard work, I would get rewarded no matter what.
And that was the belief that I realized I had that effort should equal outcome. Like, if I put in X, I'll get X back. Like, there's some kind of like fairness built into the universe.
And then I realized that there wasn't. Like, that's the game. Some things you work really hard on are going to fail miserably.
The thing is entrepreneurs who grow fast and get big. Except this. They stop thinking about the that they put a ton of work into that didn't work.
And they also stop needing the outcome to match their effort. Slow entrepreneurs get stuck in but I did everything right and like it should work and they just like mentally masturbate over this thing over and over again. And then what that does is they lose momentum because they're wanting the market to be fair.
They're wanting business to be fair and it won't be. So, if I were starting today, what would I do? I would drop the scorecard and I would remind myself the goal is not to get paid back for my effort.
The goal is to find what works. [music] And some things will take a year or 2 years or three and fail. And other things will take a month or a week and they'll win and they'll hit big.
And you [music] just have to keep moving until you find the one that hits. You see, the people who win are not braver and they're not smart. They have just stopped letting every little thing mean so much, overanalyzing every piece.
They actually let go. so that they can make a decision and then they see what happens and they adjust and they do it again. They see what happens, they adjust, they do it again and that is the whole game.
So stop, get out of your head, get into life, take action, stop holding on to things. And if you like this video, you can go ahead and watch the next one here and go ahead and subscribe if you [music] want more like this. By the way, if you want to see how I build a business in real time, you can subscribe to my newsletter.
It's called Leila's Letters. I know it's a tongue twister. It's [music] in the link in the description.
And these are like the raw unfiltered like I literally black out people's names memos that I send to my team every week at acquisition. com that I can also send to you. So go ahead.
You'll see in the description and you can subscribe.
