The video discusses the idea of how some individuals can advance in their careers and financial lives without seemingly much effort. In the introduction, the speaker shares a personal anecdote about having a difficult boss and explains the common frustration of working harder than others but not reaping the same rewards. This leads to the exploration of the concept that people who appear to be lazier often achieve more because they adopt strategies that allow them to use leverage effectively in their professional lives.

Through illustrative examples and references, such as the parable of two lumberjacks, the video conveys that hard work does not always appear as one might expect. It introduces leverage as a key factor—focusing on how much one can accomplish with minimal input. The video categorizes leverage into four areas: labor, capital, technology, and media, and suggests combining the right leverage with the right opportunities to achieve success. The speaker emphasizes the importance of not only working smarter but also ensuring one is in the right "vehicle" - the right industry or position for substantial growth.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. convergent [kənˈvɜːrdʒənt] - (adjective) - A type of thinking that focuses on coming to a single, correct solution. - Synonyms: (uniform; unified; centralized)

The less successful entrepreneurs, they tend to rely on what's known as convergent thinking.

2. divergent [daɪˈvɜːrdʒənt] - (adjective) - A type of thinking that explores multiple possible solutions to a problem. - Synonyms: (different; deviating; variant)

They tend to be divergent thinkers.

3. leverage [ˈlevərɪdʒ] - (noun) - The advantage gained by using something to achieve a desired result. - Synonyms: (advantage; upper hand; influence)

leverage is how much you get out relative to how much you put in.

4. constraint [kənˈstreɪnt] - (noun) - A limitation or restriction affecting progress. - Synonyms: (restriction; limitation; impediment)

This question, what's the actual problem here? Stems from a powerful concept called the theory of constraints.

5. bottleneck [ˈbɒtlˌnɛk] - (noun) - A point of congestion or blockage that slows down a process. - Synonyms: (obstruction; blockage; slowdown)

A system will never grow beyond its biggest constraint or bottleneck.

6. convey [kənˈveɪ] - (verb) - To express or communicate a message. - Synonyms: (transmit; communicate; express)

Through illustrative examples and references, such as the parable of two lumberjacks, the video conveys that hard work does not always appear as one might expect.

7. impression [ɪmˈprɛʃən] - (noun) - An idea or opinion about what something is like. - Synonyms: (perception; notion; understanding)

Truth is, effortless execution can easily be mistaken for laziness. And that's the interesting thing about true masters of their craft. They never really look like they're struggling, which gives the impression they aren't trying.

8. illustrate [ˈɪləstreɪt] - (verb) - To explain or make something clear by using examples, charts, etc. - Synonyms: (depict; exemplify; clarify)

Okay, so this is obviously an extreme example, but I use it to illustrate a point.

9. execute [ˈeksɪkjuːt] - (verb) - To carry out or accomplish a task. - Synonyms: (implement; perform; carry out)

With convergent thinking, we're told there is a single right answer. And all we need to do to arrive at that right answer is to execute the formula in the right order.

10. monetary [ˈmɒnɪˌteri] - (adjective) - Relating to money or currency. - Synonyms: (financial; fiscal; economic)

The difference in the respective monetary results is due to which boat they're in.

People LAZIER Than You Are Making Millions

We've all had that one bad boss. The guy that only ever comes around to tell you what you're doing wrong and to throw more work on your plate. And you're left irritated by the fact that you work five times harder than this lazy person, and yet he's making way more money. Now, this working dynamic used to strike me as wildly unfair. I figured, why should I work harder than that person if he's going to get all the rewards? This mindset is the reason I got fired from 15 jobs before I even graduated college.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that there aren't legitimately bad bosses out there, because there are. But the reality is, the reason there are lazy people making way more money than you is most often because they've unlocked a few cheat codes that make the wealth creation game way easier. And in this video, I'm going to share with you the lazy person's strategy guide to getting more out of life by doing less but better acquire leverage.

Listen, at the top of the game, which is where I assume you're trying to go if you're watching a video like this, then everybody works hard. There's no getting around this. But here's the thing and the part that really tripped me up when I was younger. Hard work doesn't always look like hard work.

For example, imagine two burly lumberjacks, each tasked with cutting down a tree. The first guy, he grabs his axe and immediately gets to work. He's whacking and wailing at this bad boy. He's going for a hot minute, but after a while, seems like the tree is made out of diamonds or something because he's barely making a dent anymore.

After about 30 minutes, he looks over and he notices the other guy. He hasn't even started yet. He's just sitting on the ground, casually running a stone across the blade like he doesn't have a care in the world. He thinks, what a lazy bum. He wipes the sweat from his brow and gets back to work.

After another 30 minutes, the first lumberjack, now breathing hard and feeling the burn in his muscles, steals another glance over at his buddy, who still hasn't moved an inch. He's just sitting there, dicking around with his axe. The first lumberjack grumbles a bit. He's like, what the hell? But he's a hard worker, so he gets back to work because unlike his buddy, he knows that tree ain't gonna cut itself down well.

After another 15 minutes of grueling labor, the first lumberjack notices his buddy has finally gotten off his ass and started to work. It's about time, he thinks, because I'm nearly done over here. And sure enough, 15 minutes later, he swings the ax one last time. The tree comes down.

Exhausted, he turns to his buddy. He's prepared to point out and brag that he's already finished. But lo and behold, the second lumberjack's tree is also on the ground. How is this possible?

Well, as Abraham Lincoln said, if I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe. Okay, so this is obviously an extreme example, but I use it to illustrate a point. Ask yourself, which of these two lumberjacks worked harder? The first certainly expended more calories, but nobody's getting paid for how many calories they burn, right?

They both achieved the same output, aka cutting down the tree, given the same time constraints. 90 minutes. And therefore they're going to earn the same amount of money.

The difference in their performance lies in the fact that the second lumberjack utilized one of the most powerful concepts in the world. leverage. Now, leverage is how much you get out relative to how much you put in. If you can get more out by putting less in, then you have more leverage than the other guy.

The truth is, the laziest people winning the money game are spending all their time thinking about how to apply more leverage to the work. So when it comes to making money in particular, there are four types of leverage you got to master. You got labor, capital, technology, and media.

I unpack these four types of leverage and how you can use them on your own wealth building journey in the video that's going to pop up here on the screen any moment now. Okay, okay, okay. So I can hear you through the screen. Great. Anthony, you've just told me to work smarter, not harder. Real original. Tell me something I don't know very well.

Let's build on top of this concept by revealing the single reason most people will never win the money game. Even if they're working hard and smart by applying a ton of leverage, it's because they're in the wrong vehicle.

So the second way to get ahead in life without actually working harder is simply to get in the right vehicle. Warren Buffett said it best. He said it doesn't matter how hard you row if you're in the wrong boat.

So here's how to think about this. leverage is whatever tool you have at your disposal to move the boat. That could be a paddle, it could be a motor, or maybe just your hand. Right? But the opportunity is the boat itself.

The most important thing here is that we must pair the right leverage with the right opportunity. Otherwise, we're just going to be riding the struggle bus or the struggle boat. After all, it's not going to do us any good to strap a gigantic motor onto the back of a rowboat, right? Alternatively, a paddle isn't going to help you very much if you're on a battleship.

Pairing leverage with the right opportunity is essential. And this, in a nutshell, is why most W2 employees will never win the money game. They're busting ass on a vehicle that can only carry them so far and so fast.

But this doesn't just apply to W2 employees. I see entrepreneurs falling into the same trap by pursuing the wrong opportunity vehicles. For example, the guy running the neighborhood grocery store, he's probably working just as many hours in the day as the guy who's building a $1 billion private equity firm.

The difference in their respective monetary results is due to which boat they're in. The most successful lazy entrepreneurs, they've simply gotten into the right boat and applied the right leverage.

Now, there's a counterintuitive truth here I want to point out, and it stems from two things that Stephen Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone, said. He said it's as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically.

But he also said this: billion-dollar opportunities attract billion-dollar talent and therefore they're easier to build. The hardest business I've tried to build was a training center for national and Olympic-caliber rock climbers. The difficulty is that we were barely scraping by and not able to attract top-tier talent.

Mainly because in this sport the pool of top-tier talent is very, very small. After all, there's just so many people that are capable of coaching top-tier talent in that niche sport. So we had to settle for what was available, which were B players only capable of producing B results.

Now, on the other hand, the easiest company I've built is our private equity firm where we've raised tens of millions of dollars of capital to acquire nearly $100 million of real estate. Here we could afford top-tier talent and as a result, the work feels easier.

So ask yourself, is the vehicle I'm in capable of getting me to where I want to go? If not, it's time to make a change. And to help facilitate that change, you have to master the third thing that lazy people do to win the money game. They think different.

Over the past five years, I've coached hundreds of business owners who are at various points in their entrepreneurial journey. And I noticed something pretty interesting. The most successful entrepreneurs tend to think through problems in their business and in life in a completely different way than their less successful counterparts.

See, the less successful entrepreneurs tend to rely on what's known as convergent thinking. Which makes sense because this is the form of thinking we were taught in school. With convergent thinking, we're told there is a single right answer. And all we need to do to arrive at that right answer is to execute the formula in the right order. Two plus two equals four, right?

So our education system favors this form of thinking for two reasons. First, it's easier to grade a multiple-choice test than it is to grade a three-page essay discussing the nuance of different potential solutions. Right? Second, the modern workforce isn't designed to reward original thinking.

If you're working as a barista at Starbucks, they want to know that you can follow the formula, AKA the system to consistently deliver a quality mocha. So all they care about is your ability to follow instructions and converge on the single right answer.

The problem here is that you are nothing more than a replaceable cog in the machine. This is a great recipe for working yourself to exhaustion, but not a great recipe for getting ahead in life by doing less. If you don't want to spend your life grinding away in the machine, you have to learn to think differently.

After all, as Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created those problems.

So here's the recurring trait I've noticed in the most successful entrepreneurs. They tend to be divergent thinkers. That is, they recognize there is no one right answer. Rather, there are just better and worse answers spread across the spectrum of probability given your unique context.

So the question you have to ask yourself is which of these solutions maximizes the likelihood of success? Given my current context. Now, I promise the better you get at thinking in this way, the more success you're going to have without necessarily having to work any harder.

And Bill Gates agrees with this. He said, I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

Now, developing as a divergent thinker takes time and practice, but the best way to improve is to simply surround yourself with people who already think this way. Consistently exposing yourself to creative thinkers is going to rapidly expand the horizons of how you think.

So joining entrepreneur-focused networking groups is a great place to start. But if you can't afford that, I think the single best investment you can make here is in getting a coach or a mentor, somebody who's already mastered this form of thinking, and they can help point out in real time the ways in which you're limiting yourself.

Truly, you can't be both successful and lazy without first mastering the skill. Now, speaking of skills, the fourth way that lazy people get ahead is by leveling up your skills because the reality is skills are the ultimate form of leverage.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is one of my all-time favorite activities, and I'm on a mission to get everybody in the world involved in the sport. Now, if you're not familiar, this is a grappling style of martial art that involves two people rolling around on the ground trying to submit each other.

Now, the problem with the sport for beginners is that it's very physical and you have no clue what you're doing and there's another person actively trying to choke you out and get you to quit. Now, most newbies, they have a very obvious strategy, which is to compensate for their lack of skills with gusto.

As a result, the average white belt spends roughly 90% of their time flailing spastically as though their life were on the line. After an hour of this, you practically have to mop them off the floor because they're so exhausted. They're disheveled, and they look like they just fought a honey badger. But they're usually smiling because there's something really gratifying about trying so hard, which is why I love this sport.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there's the black belts who've been training for the better part of a decade, if not longer. These guys and gals, they make jiu-jitsu look effortless. It never seems as though they're even trying, much less working hard. In fact, they often just look bored. Lazy even.

Truth is, effortless execution can easily be mistaken for laziness. And that's the interesting thing about true masters of their craft. They never really look like they're struggling, which gives the impression they aren't trying.

Professionals just make everything look so easy because they are so damn skilled. Now, I believe skills are the ultimate form of leverage because once acquired, they serve you every single day of your life.

They are the only investment that pays dividends regardless of market cycle, and they are the only investment that can't be taxed or taken from you. In my experience, the reason it looks as though lazy people are winning the money game isn't because they're actually lazy. It's because they're so good at what they do that it just doesn't look like they're trying.

Now to acquire high leverage skills, you could just try and figure it out on yourself. You could scour YouTube videos like this, you could read books, you could listen to podcasts and just put in the reps. This works, but the problem with being self-taught is you don't know what you don't know.

So it's easy to develop blind spots to what you're doing well and what you're doing poorly. To accelerate your learning, you could get a coach that has domain expertise and they could point out all the areas for improvement, and they could put together a personalized training plan that saves you a ton of time and wasted energy trying to trial and error your way to success.

But the downside of a coach is that they are usually quite expensive. But there is a third way of acquiring skills, and it's one of my favorites.

Alright, let's unpack. The fifth lazy way to get ahead in life, ask better questions. This right here is probably the quickest, easiest, and laziest way to improve the results in your life. And I admit I was skeptical when my mentor first shared this concept with me a number of years ago. In fact, I think I rolled my eyes.

But stick with me, because I know from firsthand experience just how powerful the concept I'm about to share with you is, because it has continually appeared in my own life and business as one of the single most impactful lead indicators of success.

The best way I've heard it explained comes from the man with big hands, Tony Robbins, who said, quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.

The importance of asking better questions is that it expands your thought process. It gets you to look at problems differently, and it helps you get to root causes. A classic example of this is if you walk into a bathroom and you see water pouring from a busted pipe in the ceiling.

The question most people ask in the moment is, what should I do now? There's all sorts of ways you could answer this. You could grab a mop and start cleaning. You could grab a bucket to collect the water, or you could call a plumber. Lots of options, right?

So what should you do? Well, I experienced this problem firsthand in one of my businesses a couple of years ago. And I'll tell you what my graphic designer did when he stumbled onto the problem.

First, he put a bucket under the pipe to collect the water. Second, he called me so I could call the plumber. Third, he started mopping. Whenever the bucket filled up, he just dumped it in the sink, and then he'd put it back to start collecting more.

All told, this sounds like a reasonable plan of attack, right? But it misses the most important step which would have been revealed had he just asked a better question.

Instead of asking, what should I do? The better question would have been, what's the actual problem here? In this example, the answer is obvious. It's not that there's water on the floor. That's the symptom or the result of the problem. The actual problem is that the water is pouring out of a busted pipe.

So instead of trying to catch the water in a bucket, he could have just turned off the water to the building. No water, no leak. Now we just have to wait for the plumber.

This question, what's the actual problem here? Stems from a powerful concept called the theory of constraints. This theory simply states that a system will never grow beyond its biggest constraint or bottleneck. Another way you might have heard this expressed before is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Using the theory of constraints to ask better questions and identify the true underlying reasons slowing your progress in life. It's a powerful hack because as they say, a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved. Now if you want to learn more about the theory of constraints, there's a fantastic and highly underrated book called the Goal by Eliyahu Goldrat which I highly recommend all entrepreneurs read.

Alright, so that in a nutshell is why people lazier than you are making millions. But there's another surprising group of people out there managing to make a ton of money. If you want to learn how people dumber than you are making millions then check out the next video which is going to be popping up here on the screen at any moment and I'll see you over there.

Entrepreneurship, Business, Motivation, Leverage, Leadership, Finance, Anthony Vicino