In the video, the speaker reflects on his difficult past in his 20s, characterized by financial struggles, poor relationships, and repeated bad decisions, and offers practical advice he would give to his younger self to aid in overcoming these challenges. He shares a personal journey from financial despair to success, highlighting key strategies to win the "money game" and regain control of one's life. The experience of living minimally in a van and saving money helped him build a financial foundation, ultimately leading to business success and personal growth.

The speaker emphasizes several critical lessons learned from his experiences. He advocates living below one's means to save money, encourages young people to focus on personal development rather than seeking romantic relationships, recommends avoiding expensive luxuries like owning a car if unnecessary, and stresses the importance of maintaining focus by eliminating unnecessary subscriptions and entertainment distractions. Each strategy is designed to encourage young individuals to optimize their resources and concentrate on personal growth and financial stability.

Main takeaways from the video:

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

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. monstrosity [mɒnˈstrɒsɪti] - (noun) - An extremely large and usually ugly or frightening object or building. - Synonyms: (behemoth, giant, colossus)

It was a 13 passenger monstrosity built in 1987, and I could drive that thing, but it sounded like it was going into labor.

2. facade [fəˈsɑːd] - (noun) - An outward appearance maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality. - Synonyms: (veneer, disguise, pretense)

And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me.

3. disguise [dɪsˈɡaɪz] - (noun) - A means of altering one's appearance or concealing one's identity. - Synonyms: (camouflage, masking, cloaking)

Now, I didn't realize it at the time, but this was actually a blessing in disguise that I never would have discovered on my own.

4. obliterated [əˈblɪtəˌreɪtɪd] - (verb) - Destroyed utterly; wiped out. - Synonyms: (annihilated, eradicated, demolished)

I've obliterated my credit score and I have $80,000 of debt to my name.

5. twiddling [ˈtwɪdəlɪŋ] - (verb) - Fiddling or playing with something in a restless or nervous manner. - Synonyms: (fidgeting, fussing, playing)

See, I easily spent an hour every day sitting in Bay Area traffic just twiddling my thumbs.

6. escalator [ˈɛskəˌleɪtə] - (noun) - A moving staircase consisting of an endlessly looped belt driven by a motor. - Synonyms: (moving staircase, auto-stairs)

In fact, if you follow the brutal advice that I've laid out in this video, those stairs will practically transform into an escalator.

7. facade [fəˈsɑːd] - (noun) - The front of a building, especially an imposing or decorative one. - Synonyms: (front, exterior, outside)

And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me.

8. facade [fəˈsɑːd] - (noun) - An outward appearance maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality. - Synonyms: (veneer, disguise, pretense)

And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me.

9. facade [fəˈsɑːd] - (noun) - An outward appearance maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality. - Synonyms: (veneer, disguise, pretense)

And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me.

10. facade [fəˈsɑːd] - (noun) - An outward appearance maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality. - Synonyms: (veneer, disguise, pretense)

And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me.

Feeling Behind in Your 20s or in life? Watch this.

I've been cheered by thousands and booed by thousands. But nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those 10 minutes before you fall asleep. These words from the legendary tennis player Andre Agassi pretty much summarized my 20s. I was chronically broke, I had poor relationships, and I just, I couldn't help but make one bad decision after another that just kept pushing me further and further behind in life.

Now since then, I've managed to write 12 best selling books, I've built a couple eight figure companies and acquired nearly $100 million of real estate. And if I could go back in time, this is the brutally honest, tactical advice I'd give to my younger, poorer self to help him turn those boos into cheers to win the money game and to take back control of his life. Number one, get a roommate. Or maybe three. So after graduating college, I was in such a hurry to be an adult that I jumped straight into an apartment I thought I deserved. It made me feel good. And I loved coming home to a nice apartment every night. Made me feel important, made me feel valuable, made me feel successful.

The problem, however, is that I couldn't really afford to live there. But I lied to myself and I said I could, despite the fact that every single week my bank account would hover right around $0. As soon as my paycheck hit, it would immediately go out to cover some past due bill. I played this game for years, barely keeping it all together, until one day it all just came crashing down. The next thing I know, I'm kicked out of my apartment with nowhere to go because I've obliterated my credit score and I have $80,000 of debt to my name. My only option at that point was to live in a van that my dad helped me buy from a local church for $1,000.

Now, as it turns out, this is one of the best things that ever happened to me because I accidentally discovered the power of living below your means. Because living in the van was so much cheaper than my expensive rent, I had a bunch of money left over each month to pay bills and start putting away a little into savings. And let me just tell you, as a person who was so accustomed to the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, the ability to put money into savings and to create a little bit of a safety net is still to this day, one of the best feelings of my life.

The truth is, living above your means is a trap. It's a prison of your own making, filled with things that own you more than you own them. Things you can't just walk away from. And it's often all in the pursuit of trying to look successful, Trying to impress people who aren't even paying attention to you in the first place. Now, after living in that van for four months, I ended up moving into a two bedroom apartment with a couple other people in a really rough area of Oakland where at least once a week, somebody would break into our backyard to steal our bicycles.

It was super sketchy, but awesome because it enabled me to keep putting money into savings that years later would prove pretty damn useful. Because I ended up living off that money while building one of my first businesses. So if I could go back in time and I could talk to my younger self, I would tell them, listen, you're young. Forget the penthouse, get your ass in the basement, live in the dirt. Right now, you are building the foundation for the rest of your life.

Rent a cheap apartment, cram as many hungry and ambitious young people in there as you can get away with, live for dirt cheap, and save every single penny you can so that when it comes time, you can go on the offense, you can take advantage of opportunities. All right, so here's the second piece of brutal advice I'd give to my younger, poor self. Forget dating. Now I get it. You're young, you're full of hormones, and you're desperate to find love or at least find someone willing to spend the night with you. But here's the problem. In this life, you will only attract that which you are. And right now, you're not all that much.

I'm sorry. That's okay. Just remember, you're in building mode. In the meantime, stop worrying about finding your soulmate and instead focus on becoming the type of person your soulmate would be attracted to. Because here's the secret to attracting an amazing partner. First, you must become the type of person who a great partner would want to be with. Now here's the interesting part. Throughout my 20s, I was not the type of person a great partner would want to be in a long term relationship with. But I was very good at pretending in the short term.

Because in the beginning of a relationship, everybody's all googly eyed and optimistic, right? So it's pretty easy to get into relationships, but it's hard to maintain them for more than a few months or maybe a few years once the other partner starts to see you on a consistent basis and they come to realize that you don't really have your shit together all that much. This usually ends in a brutal breakup when the other person realizes you aren't all you're cracked up to be.

And this is exactly what happened to me at 28 years old, when after a year long engagement, my fiance finally said, enough is enough. I simply wasn't the type of partner she'd signed up to be with. And that only became more and more evident as time went on. And see, during that period, I was so busy maintaining a facade that I didn't have time to work on the underlying foundation of me, which was quickly eroding underfoot.

All told, I wasted a lot of time, energy and money dating throughout my 20s, because at the end of the day, even if I'd found the absolutely perfect partner, it never would have worked out long term because I simply didn't have my shit together. This is the time of your life to go get your shit together. Put it all up into a pile, keep it nice and bundled, right? Learn how to be with yourself. At this point in your journey, the time, energy and money that you're spending on dating would inevitably be better spent leveling up your experiences, your skills and your resources.

I promise, if you can prioritize working on you during this phase of your life, it will pay massive dividends down the road when you finally find the one. And that brings us to the third piece of brutal advice I give to my younger, poorer self. Ditch the car, get a bicycle. Okay, so let me tell you a bit about that van I used to live in. It was a 13 passenger monstrosity built in 1987, and I could drive that thing, but it sounded like it was going into labor. Every time I press on the gas pedal. I was terrified that it was going to break down on the side of the freeway or some random side road.

And. And because this van was doubling as my home, that meant wherever it broke down, that was going to become my new home. So I parked that bad boy in the back of a climbing gym in downtown Oakland, and I only moved it when absolutely necessary. Now, luckily, this gym, you know, was smack dab in the middle of the city, which meant I could get practically anywhere I wanted with a short walk, a bicycle ride, or public transportation. Now, I didn't realize it at the time, but this was actually a blessing in disguise that I never would have discovered on my own had my life just not gone down the toilet.

See, only a couple months earlier, my ex and I, we had bought a brand new Subaru Outback that I used to get literally everywhere. I loved that car because it made me feel cool and fancy and successful. Never mind the fact that I absolutely could not afford it. But I justified the expense by telling myself I need it to get to work. Therefore, it's an investment because it helps me make money, right? Well, the truth is, that car was just burning a hole in my bank account. And in a really weird twist of fate, it actually made my life less convenient.

See, I easily spent an hour every day sitting in Bay Area traffic just twiddling my thumbs. And it wasn't until I found myself carless that I discovered I could actually get anywhere in the city far faster with a combination of the bus and a bike. They say necessity is the mother of all invention. And truth is, I had never entertained the idea of going carless before that moment. Because I'm an American and owning a car is like our birthright or something. Okay, maybe not so much.

But I was very attached to the idea of owning a car at that time. But when that option was just ripped away from me, I discovered something else. Cars are wickedly expensive. When you tally up the car payment, the insurance, the gas, the maintenance, I was spending a lot of money I didn't have on something I didn't even need. So if I could go back in time and I could offer one piece of advice to my younger self, it's this. Move to the heart of a major city where everything you could ever want is within five miles. Ditch the car, get a bike. A car is a luxury you simply can't afford and you don't actually need.

So cut it out. And you're going to get ahead way faster. All right, so here's the fourth piece of brutal advice I give to my younger, poor self. Cancel all subscriptions that aren't helping you make money. Listen, the true savings here, it's not actually monetary, though that is not insignificant. No, the true value in canceling subscriptions like Netflix, Disney, Hulu, is that it guards your most valuable asset, your focus. If you ain't got much going for you at the moment, then stop making things harder than they need to be. Ruthlessly eliminate distractions. Stop turning to entertainment as an escape from your current reality. You cannot change your circumstances by running away from them.

Be the buffalo, not the cow. Okay, so what's that even mean? See, when a cow sees a storm on the horizon, they run in the opposite direction, trying to get away from the storm. But the storm eventually catches them. And because they're running in the same direction that the storm is moving, they actually spend longer in the rain. The buffalo, however, he sees the storm coming, he turns to face the reality of their situation. And then he runs towards the storm because they know the quickest way out is through.

So be the buffalo, my friend. Cancel all subscriptions that aren't helping you make money. Actually, I don't know about you, but I'm tired of paying for subscriptions at all. Even the ones that do make me money. Especially software subscriptions. Now, depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember, but there was a time back in the day that if you wanted a piece of software, then you'd just buy it once and it's yours forever. Unfortunately, these days every everything is a SaaS product or a software as a service, which means you have to pay a subscription fee every single month to keep using that program.

That is unless you use Appsumo, which is the sponsor of today's video. Appsumo has been around since 2010 and it is the best place on the Internet to find incredible lifetime deals on software. You pay once and it's yours forever. And because they offer a 60 day money back guarantee, you can try out any product you want for two whole months before deciding if you want to keep it for good. You seriously have nothing to lose and you can find some pretty incredible cutting edge tools for marketing, finance, web development, sales, and everything you could ever need to get your business off the ground.

Seriously, these guys have helped launch over 3,000 products, including some big names you might have heard of like Dropbox and Zapier. So save yourself a ton of money. Go check out AppSumo to find your next favorite business tool. I'm going to drop a link down in the description, but I really recommend you check out Appsumo because I personally found some ridiculous deals on there over the years for tools that I still use to this day.

So if you've got a business that you're trying to take to that next level, stop playing the game on hard mode. Go check out AppSumo. Now here's the fifth piece of brutal advice I'd give to my younger poor self. Stop drinking alcohol. About two years ago, I stopped drinking alcohol and the benefits were pretty immediate and pretty incredible. I was already in pretty good physical shape, but cutting alcohol helped me drop another five pounds that I didn't even realize I was carrying. Not to mention the quality of my sleep went through the roof.

Now you've got to understand, up to that point I was only having one or two drinks a week, so it wasn't like I was going crazy. But still, the results of cutting even that little bit of Alcohol was profound. Now there's a mountain of research pointing to the fact that there really is no healthy or helpful amount of alcohol to be consumed. It's simply poison that's holding you back from becoming the greatest version of yourself. And I've come to the opinion that regardless of where you are in life, alcohol is an expense you really can't afford.

And again, just like with subscriptions, I'm not really talking about the monetary expense. But let's not fool ourselves. This is, on its own, a pretty damn good reason to give up alcohol if you're young and broke. No, the true price of alcohol is the toll it takes on your body and your mind. Now, I get it. It doesn't seem like all that big of a deal when you're young and you can recover quickly. But as a good general rule for life, avoid things that make you a lesser version of yourself. And I'm sorry, there is literally no upside to alcohol beyond how it makes you feel for a few hours.

It is an anchor around your neck, simply making the game of life harder than it needs to be. Remember, you're trying to crawl your way out of the basement, and it's a long ways up to the penthouse. Those stairs get a whole lot easier when you drop the dead weight. In fact, if you follow the brutal advice that I've laid out in this video, those stairs will practically transform into an escalator. And you're going to find yourself at the top far faster than you ever imagined possible.

So what you're waiting for, you ain't getting any younger. So go turn those booze into cheers.

Inspiration, Motivation, Finance, Personal Development, Life Lessons, Self-Improvement, Anthony Vicino