Why You’re Not Financially Free (Yet)
AAli Abdaal
Small Business/StartupsAdvertising/MarketingAdult EducationComputing/Software
Transcript
00:00:00the only thing that's standing between you and financial freedom is just that you don't yet have
00:00:03the skills that you need for it. And the people that learn the skills are the ones that end up
00:00:05financially free. And the ones that don't are the ones that don't. Because it really is just a series
00:00:09of skills. Let's say your route to financial freedom is by starting your own business.
00:00:13What are the skills you need? Well, there is one set of skills that I like to label attract. So the
00:00:17skills of attracting customers. There is another set of skills that I like to call convert, which is
00:00:24how to convert customers from being strangers to actually giving you money for your stuff. And then
00:00:29there is a third set of skills called delights, which is that once you've got a customer for your
00:00:33service or product, whatever thing you're doing, how do you give them a good experience so that then
00:00:38they give you the four R's. The four R's are basically reviews, referrals, renewals, and most
00:00:46importantly, results. You actually want them to get results with whatever your product or service is,
00:00:49right? We attract, convert, delights. In the middle, we have the skills around operating. So this is sort
00:00:55of like operate. In the context of a business, this would be things like doing the taxes and
00:00:58stuff, right? You know, the basic stuff, registering a business, et cetera, et cetera. And then once you
00:01:02get to about a hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue and beyond, you then have another set of
00:01:07skills that we like to think of as scale. These five categories, they're just, it's just a set of
00:01:13skills, man. In the same way that you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to drive, but you learned
00:01:17how to drive. And in the same way you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to tie your own
00:01:21shoelaces, but you learned how to tie your own shoelaces. No one comes out of the womb knowing the skills of
00:01:25sales or marketing or customer service or delivery or finances or operations, but people that learn
00:01:30the skills are the ones that end up financially free. And the ones that don't are the ones that
00:01:33don't. I was having a conversation with one of our Lifestyle Business Academy students the other
00:01:36day. This is our online business school where we help professionals build their own online
00:01:40businesses. Links down below if you're interested. Anyway, let's call the guy John. He was like,
00:01:43oh man, I found, I found a customer who's really, really struggling with marketing her business.
00:01:48And she seemed really interested in me helping her marketing her business. But I was like,
00:01:53I don't have any marketing skills, so I can't help you market your business. And in that context,
00:01:58I sort of face pondered a little bit. I was like, John, John, my friend, we need to have a chat about
00:02:03this. There is this thing that we like to teach our students that we call the Teddy Roosevelt method,
00:02:08which is when you are starting out a business and someone asks if you can help with something,
00:02:13you say yes. And then immediately after saying yes, you figure out how to actually help them with
00:02:17the thing. You get busy learning the skill of doing the thing. This is from a quote from Teddy
00:02:22Roosevelt to that effect. Theodore Roosevelt, whenever you are asked if you can do a job,
00:02:26tell him, certainly I can, then get busy and find out how to do it. Really, really, really good as a
00:02:31method for building your own business and learning skills. And so John was held back. He said no to
00:02:35this client who wanted to give him money and wanted his help. And John actually had experience in the
00:02:40field that she needed the marketing help with. He just didn't have specific marketing skills. He was
00:02:44like, but how can I say yes if I don't, if I don't have marketing skills? And I said to him, I was like,
00:02:47John, how do you think anyone learns marketing skills? And John said, I don't know, I guess like
00:02:52some people do degrees in it. And I was like, ah, see, this is the problem, John. His conception of the
00:02:57world was that in order to learn a skill, you need to take a degree or you need to study it at
00:03:02university or something. That's just not true. Like if we really think about like marketing skills as an
00:03:07example, you know, what's the, what's the hardest part about running a business? The hardest part is
00:03:11actually getting the customers. So if we let's focus on the attract side of this, you know, okay,
00:03:16how do we actually get customers? Like what are the different methods for attracting customers?
00:03:20Let me just list a few. Number one is you can do content. So for example, you can do what I'm doing
00:03:24and create a YouTube video. That's a set of skills. Number two, you can run ads. So you can run ads on
00:03:30like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Google or TikTok or Snapchat or what have you. You can do
00:03:35outreach, which could be warm outreach. You could just reach out to people that you know and be like,
00:03:39hey, do you know anyone who needs a thing? You know, that's often the method that most of our
00:03:42Lifetop Business Academy students use to get their first customer, at least in 95% of cases. You can do
00:03:46cold outreach where you're trying to send emails or to strangers or trying to cold call them and stuff.
00:03:50And that's a skill. You can totally know the skill if you want. You can join communities, go to
00:03:54networking events, you know, this sort of stuff. Now, speaking of skills, content creation is one of the big
00:03:58high-income ones that, like so many people, are making a bunch of money off of. And if you are
00:04:01or are interested in becoming a content creator, then you're definitely going to want to check out
00:04:05Epidemic Sound, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. I have been using Epidemic Sound since
00:04:08pretty much day one of this YouTube channel back in 2017. And so for the last nine years, Epidemic Sound
00:04:13has been our source for royalty-free music that makes our videos, like elevates them a little bit,
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00:04:21Everything in the Epidemic Sound library is restriction-free, so there are no copyright claims,
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00:04:33musicians. This is not some AI music that they just, like, use a computer to generate. And the artist
00:04:37gets paid whenever the music gets used, and so you'd be directly supporting the artist as well. And one
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00:05:03use the code ULLI50 at checkout, then you will get 50% off your Epidemic Sound subscription for the
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00:05:12Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it.
00:05:14Let's take something like ads, for example. And let's say, you know, Instagram ads are your
00:05:20thing that you're going to try and do. Instagram ads are the sort of thing that John's client was
00:05:24like struggling with. But John didn't yet have marketing skills and didn't like double click
00:05:27into marketing skills to know that like Instagram ads is like an option, for example. But let's take
00:05:31the skill of Instagram ads. How does anyone learn how to do Instagram ads? Do they go to university
00:05:35and take a course taught by some old professor about how to do Instagram ads? Probably not. Almost
00:05:40to everyone who has learned how to run Instagram ads for any business in the world, learned it by giving
00:05:45it a go, watching a couple of YouTube videos, Googling it, these days asking ChatGPT to help
00:05:49them out. And that's about it. That's how you learn the skill of running Instagram ads. The concept of
00:05:54I can just learn how to run ads is scary. Like, oh my God, there must be so much to it. It must be
00:05:59really, really hard. People do degrees in this stuff. Well, you try it out. You're like, oh,
00:06:02actually Facebook makes it really easy. There's the thing called meta ads manager. You just go on it.
00:06:06You upload creative. If I go on Canva, they've got like five zillion templates for Instagram ads.
00:06:09Oh, wow. Shit. Could I just like take one of those templates and replace the contents of the image
00:06:14with like my own business? And now I have an ad. And then, whoa, there's all these like settings.
00:06:19Oh, this is confusing. Let me ask ChatGPT or let me like watch a YouTube video about it. Oh,
00:06:22interesting. I've learned that in the last few months, there's this new Andromeda update to
00:06:25the Facebook algorithm that actually means I don't need to twiddle around with all these dials. I can
00:06:28just let the algorithm do the work. Okay. Budget. You know, how much should I set my budget as?
00:06:31Talk to ChatGPT, talk to Google, watch a couple of YouTube videos. People telling you,
00:06:34you can start with like $10 a day. Okay, cool. Could I start with a $10 a day budget and just
00:06:37see what happens? Okay, nice. And within about a weekend or less, I would know because I learned
00:06:43the skill of running Instagram ads over the course of about a weekend and a bunch of friends I know
00:06:46who make millions from their businesses running Instagram ads, taught themselves the skill in
00:06:50about a weekend. And then of course, they refined the skill over time. You realize this shit is not
00:06:53that hot. And I think that is the fundamental mindset shift that I am trying to, that I would
00:07:00love everyone to have. And in particular is the one that I spend a lot of time on with our Lifestyle
00:07:04Business Academy students, which is that everything is a skill and everything can be learned. Something
00:07:08that feels like a black box to you right now, like marketing or sales or operations or finance or
00:07:14customer success or AI, all of it is just a skill. And it can be learned just like driving before you've
00:07:19learned how to drive. Driving seems really fucking hard, doesn't it? Oh my God, you're literally in
00:07:23like a metal thing. You could like kill someone. Oh my goodness. And then you learn, you learn how to drive.
00:07:27You didn't sit around for absolutely ages thinking, no, my goodness, in order to learn how to drive,
00:07:31I need to do a degree in it. Yeah, probably you've got a driving instructor, which is why I think it's
00:07:35useful to have a mentor and a coach when teaching you stuff. Driving is a life and death skill. So
00:07:38it's useful to have a driving instructor to do it on the road. And it's the same with almost any skill
00:07:41you can think of. If you want to learn marketing skills, marketing skills is a broad topic, but like
00:07:45Instagram ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, TikTok ads, all of these are different types of ads you could run.
00:07:49There's content. So you could learn how to do content on Instagram reels, Instagram posts,
00:07:53carousels, YouTube videos. I literally have video videos on how to make YouTube videos.
00:07:57You can film it with your phone. Cold outreach. There are people on YouTube who have made videos
00:08:00about how to do cold outreach, how to send emails to strangers and get them to respond. How to use
00:08:04tools like Apollo and these other things to like enrich leads and send emails to them. It's all
00:08:08easy stuff. And it's easy stuff because there's literally people who are world-class at doing the
00:08:12thing, who are teaching it for free on the internet. I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
00:08:15I went to Cambridge University Medical School, one of the best medical schools in the world.
00:08:18And to be honest, for me and most of my friends, 99% of what we learned was actually through YouTube videos.
00:08:24It was not actually through the lecturers that we had at university. I mean, some of it was,
00:08:28but for the most part, university lecturers are selected on the basis of their research output,
00:08:32not on the basis of how good they are at teaching, at least in the fancy universities in the UK.
00:08:37And even if the lecturer is really good, you attend the lecture once, maybe you watch the recording of
00:08:41the lecture, but then there's like other things you have questions in and turns out there's people on
00:08:44YouTube that have done deep dives into all of this stuff with amazing diagrams, amazing animation.
00:08:48In medical school, you learn how to do a cardiovascular examination, for example, like how to listen to
00:08:52someone's heart and what order of operations to do it in. And yeah, you do it in a lecture or in a
00:08:56seminar for the first time. But then how does every single medical student in the world actually drill
00:09:01the skill? They watch a YouTube video about it. There's a YouTube channel called Geeky Medics where
00:09:05some guys put together these videos where you can just watch it repeatedly and they can download a PDF
00:09:09with the mark scheme. It was those PDFs that we printed out, me and all my friends at Cambridge,
00:09:13to learn the skill. And it was those videos that we had on the background. It wasn't the fact that we
00:09:17taught, we got taught it at a lecture like two years ago. Even doctors are learning the skills of
00:09:22medicine, not from medical school, but from YouTube videos. I have some friends who are surgeons now.
00:09:26They're literally learning how to do operations. Now, of course, a surgeon learns the operation by like
00:09:31observing the senior surgeon doing the operation and like assisting it and stuff. But how do they know the
00:09:36steps of the operation? They watch a YouTube video about it. Thankfully, and this is a great service to the
00:09:41world. There are all sorts of surgeons all around the world who have literally recorded their operations
00:09:45and are talking through the steps. And you can, in a way, learn at least the theoretical component
00:09:50of the skill of literally taking out someone's appendix by watching a YouTube video about it.
00:09:53And then, of course, you're actually putting into practice when you're in a surgical residency or when
00:09:57you're on the job for that kind of practical skill. So if a surgeon can learn how to do an appendectomy
00:10:02from watching some YouTube videos and then putting into practice, why can you not learn how to run an
00:10:05Instagram ad by just watching some YouTube videos and then putting into practice? Once you start seeing life this
00:10:11thing, every single thing can be learned. It means that the thing of I don't have the skill for X gets
00:10:15replaced with I don't have the skill for X yet. The word yet is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
00:10:19because you know that everything is a skill. Everything can be learned. And if someone else
00:10:22has figured out how to do it, you can as well. I was doing a Q&A on Instagram the other day and
00:10:26someone asked, how do I build a business when I don't have any AI skills? If you replace that,
00:10:29how do I build a business when I don't have AI skills yet? Then it becomes like, well, learn the AI skills
00:10:34that you need. What are the skills you need for a business? Well, you need to know how to attract,
00:10:37convert to customers. You need to learn how to operate your business and you need to learn how to
00:10:40scale things once you're at a reasonable revenue milestone where you can actually hire people.
00:10:43You know, AI is a thing that facilitates all of these different options. And so these days,
00:10:47you can literally just ask ChatGPT being like, hey, ChatGPT, I'm attempting to learn the skill of
00:10:50Instagram ads. Can you help me figure out what the best AI workflows are to make Instagram ads? And
00:10:54guarantee you'll get an amazing response from Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini that will teach you the
00:10:58skill of doing that. We started running Instagram ads in our business like probably a few weeks ago
00:11:02with one of my team members. And I realized I did not yet have the skill of actually running
00:11:06Instagram ads in a reasonable way. And so what did I do? I asked Claude to teach me the skill.
00:11:10I watched like two YouTube videos about it. I got up to speed and then I started tinkering around
00:11:14with Meta Ads Manager and we managed to run some Instagram ads profitably. So we're actually making
00:11:18money off of running Instagram ads. If someone needs something or if your business needs something,
00:11:22is your immediate mind, oh, I can just figure it out. Or is your mind, oh my goodness, I don't have the
00:11:25skill and it's going to be so hard and it takes so long to learn the skill. I don't have time to learn
00:11:29the skill. It's like, bro, when you're on the toilet, you can literally just talk to ChatGPT and ask it to teach you the skill.
00:11:32If you literally don't have the time for that, you can put on voice mode and next time you're on
00:11:35a walk or doing the laundry or something. You can literally just ask it to pretty much teach you
00:11:38anything and explain it to you. And then of course, that's the theoretical component. Like you learn
00:11:41what to do in order to do the thing. And then once you start applying it in practice, that's when you
00:11:45actually gain the knowledge and the skill seeps into your brain, your body, your subconscious,
00:11:52all of that kind of stuff. But it really is just a matter of it's a skill. Everything's a skill and
00:11:55everything can be learned. And then it's just a question of just how long it takes, right?
00:11:58I really like this line from Alex Formozzi, which I think about a lot, which is that you can train
00:12:03anyone to do anything. You're probably not a neurosurgeon, but you could train to become a
00:12:07neurosurgeon and you could learn how to remove brain tumors from someone's brain. You have the
00:12:11ability to do that. The question is just how long it takes. I've got two friends who are neurosurgeons.
00:12:15The way they learn the steps of the operation is by watching YouTube videos, unsurprisingly,
00:12:18but then the way they put it into practice is because they spent 15 years training to get to a point
00:12:22where they're even allowed to put the skills into practice for good reason. So, you know,
00:12:26for you to become a neurosurgeon will take about 15 years. I was speaking to another one of our
00:12:29Lifestyle Business Academy students. That's called her Jane. Jane had landed her first client for her
00:12:32business and was helping this local coffee shop with their operations and automating aspects of their
00:12:37operations. And she was learning how to use Calendly and how to use Zapier and how to connect it up to
00:12:42a Google Sheets. And I was asking her, you know, how hard did you think it was going to be? And how
00:12:46hard was it actually? And she was like, yeah, you know, before I got started, I just, in my mind,
00:12:49I thought that operations is really difficult. And then I started doing it. I was like, oh, okay. I mean,
00:12:54the software just makes it super easy. And I can just watch YouTube tutorials. And I can just ask
00:12:57ChatDubt. And so she figured out how to literally automate this coffee shops, like operations, never
00:13:02having done it before, and just figuring out how to do it to understand how it all fit together. And then
00:13:06was literally saving them hours and hours and hours every week where they could actually spend making
00:13:09coffee rather than doing the admin. That's so cool. Everything is a skill issue. If you're not yet rich,
00:13:12if you're not yet financially free, it's just a skill issue, man. Like you just don't have the skills.
00:13:15You don't have the skills of attract, convert, delight and operate. And are those skills very difficult to learn?
00:13:19No, not really, because there's tutorials for literally all of them. Have you ever done a sales call before? You know,
00:13:22this is something our students in our LBA, a lot of others are having to do now. Sales calls where
00:13:26you get on a Zoom call with someone and you try and pitch them your thing. Before you do it for the
00:13:31first time, it seems like the scariest thing in the world. Then you do it a couple of times and you're
00:13:34like, okay. And then you watch a couple of videos about sales training. You attend a couple of our
00:13:36workshops. You ask your coach, whatever the thing might be. And honestly, there's loads of free YouTube
00:13:40tutorials about this stuff. And you're like, oh, previously I thought sales was like the scary thing.
00:13:43And actually it was like really, really hard. But actually there's a framework that you follow. It seems really
00:13:46hard and it seems like a real black box before you're in there. And then once you're in there, you're like, oh,
00:13:50there actually is a method to the madness. It is the same with everything. But the reason I wanted
00:13:53to make this video is because I want to make this video as a video that I send to all of our Lifestyle
00:13:57Business Academy students when they have this kind of mindset, or anyone really, who wants to be
00:14:02financially free, but has this idea that skills are hard to learn. Skills are not hard to learn.
00:14:07Like with the amount of free information you've got on the internet these days, with AI, like
00:14:10pretty much any skill you want is literally at your fingertips. And certain skills mean that like
00:14:17you become rich. Like if you have the skill of knowing how to attract customers, if you have the
00:14:21skill of knowing how to sell to them, you are way more likely to become rich and get way richer than
00:14:25someone who does not have those skills or the version of you that didn't have those skills.
00:14:28And shock horror, you can learn those skills. You can watch free YouTube videos. You can ask
00:14:31ADPT. You can take courses. You can sign up to our Lifestyle Business Academy if you really want.
00:14:33But like everything around you is built by people who are no smarter than you are. If you're at this
00:14:36point in the video, the only thing that's standing between you and financial freedom is just that you
00:14:40don't yet have the skills that you need for it. And learning skills is easy. If you want to become
00:14:43financially free, it's just downstream of learning a few skills. It's really not that hard. So with that
00:14:47said, if you enjoyed this video, there is a video over here, which is more honest advice for someone
00:14:50who wants financial freedom. Otherwise, have a lovely day and I'll see you next time. Bye.