Most people think getting rich requires genius-level intelligence, elite education, or connections. That’s comforting — because it gives us an excuse.
The truth is simpler and harder: making money is a game, and like any game, it has rules. Once you understand them, the path becomes clearer — not easy, but clear.
Here are 10 rules that separate those who build wealth from those who stay stuck. These aren’t textbook theories—they’re tested principles from real successful people learned through real businesses, real failures, and real success.
Rule 1: You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Get Rich
You probably believe you need to be smart, from some Ivy League school, or have some crazy background to get rich. That’s how most people view it until something shifts.
Picture this: You’re at a meetup, making no money, feeling like the odd man out. Then this guy gets on stage—kind of an idiot, honestly—and he’s like, “I haven’t been able to break past $400,000 a month.”
In that moment, your entire world shifts. You’re like, “I will never ever work a job again because I am smarter than that guy. There is no reason why I can’t make the same money as him.”
Making money is a game and you have to know how to play that game. You don’t need superior intelligence. Some of the richest people are in fact not that smart at all. You need to work hard, be patient, and have common sense.
Here’s the kicker: super smart people usually miss out on opportunities because they see too much of the risks. Not being intelligent is actually to your advantage because you’ll take opportunities that others won’t.
So the question is: are you willing to work hard, can you make sound decisions, can you wait? If you can do those three things, you can make money.
Rule 2: Saving Money Won’t Make You Rich, But It Will Give You Freedom to Take Risks
When you first start making money, you get excited, but it’s overshadowed by debt and no savings. The first thing to do is pay off all your debt. The second thing is put together what you call an “oh shit fund”—like if everything goes to shit, you know you have enough money to pay your bills, living expenses, and start from scratch if needed.
The moment you take money and put it into that fund, it unlocks a new layer of creativity. You say, “Okay, now everything that comes in I can use to build because I don’t need to worry about my bills. I can take care of the business now.”
With that money, you can put $4 million into starting another company and $3 million into starting a software company. You would not be able to do any of those investments if you felt like it was either the investment or paying for your apartment.
Saving money, you’re not going to save your way into becoming a fucking billionaire. What you look at is: will this money give you the security and peace of mind so you can focus all your attention on just making money?
It’s not about living below your means, it’s about creating the means to take risks. Savings won’t make you wealthy, but they will give you the security to step out and take opportunities that might.
Rule 3: You Make No Money for a Long Time, Then You Make All at Once
The way you get rich is you put in a shit ton of work without seeing the result of it. The first two years of building a business, you don’t just not make money—you lose money. Then one day you make a shit ton of money.
It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. which is essentially people overestimate their ability to do something. If you didn’t overestimate it, you wouldn’t start doing it in the first place. You quickly realize it’s hard and you suck at it, but if you stick with it, eventually you get better.
Then one day you’ve stacked enough skills that you see the benefit for all the work you’ve put in. Two years in, when you’re thinking nothing can get worse and you’re definitely going into bankruptcy, it all clicks. Zero to $7 million in six months. Zero to $27 million in two and a half years.
That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, because during that period when you felt terrible, that’s when you accumulated all the skills to make money that nobody can ever take from you. You can’t skip the hard shit. Learning never goes to waste. Skills only compound, but you have to stick it out long enough to watch them compound.
Howard Schultz didn’t make any money from Starbucks for 17 years. He at one point had to borrow money from the guy who made the boxes for the shoes to pay payroll. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that it’s actually hard if you want to build something sustainable.
The more money you want to make, the more periods of time you’re going to go through where you don’t see the fruits of your labor.
If you can get through that period of eating shit, you will make more money than everyone else.
Rule 4: Learn to Make Money While You’re Awake Before You Try Making It While You Sleep
When you first start a business, someone comes to you like, “I see you’re making money, that’s amazing, but you need to learn how to make money while you sleep.”
Make money while you sleep? Sounds fucking great, right? So someone tells you about real estate and how you can make passive income from it. You buy a rinky-dink house thinking you’re just going to get passive money that it generates each month from the renters.
That fucking house becomes the bane of your existence. Managing tenants, liabilities, property management companies dropping your account. Takes you almost a year to get rid of and costs you $20,000.
Just like building a business takes skills, so does picking the right opportunities to invest in. Investing itself is a skill. If you want to make money while you sleep, that is a skill of its own that you also have to learn.
You can’t have money work for you until you know how to work for money. If you want to learn how to make passive income, you first have to learn how to make active income.
Warren Buffett said this: before you can let money work for you, you have to put in the work yourself. Active learning and effort come first. Passive rewards come later.
Everybody that has made it to the level where they’re passively creating income in a really meaningful way—they have first fucking killed it at actively making income.
Rule 5: If Money Is the Only Goal, You’ll Never Have Enough
When you sell your first company and the big check hits your bank account, you feel nothing. Maybe relief, but not happiness. You don’t feel like a different person.
What you realize is that if money is the goal, you just never have enough. Money is only a tool that you can use to then get other things.
Once you realize that, the next thought is: what am I going to do with this money? What am I going to use it to build?
Money itself, it only is a means to an end. So the question is: what’s the end for you?
Time is a tool you use to make money, and what precedes making money is learning how to manage time. If you cannot use your time to create money, then you won’t have money.
Money is a great servant but is not a great master, because as long as it’s your master, you will never have enough of it. It is simply a tool you use to reach your end goal.
If you accumulate millions and it just sits in your bank account, what’s that money doing for your life? Does anything about your life change? Do you feel happier?
If you don’t use money to create something else, you might as well not have it. The only reason to make money is to do something with it. What are you going to build? How are you going to use it to make your life and other people’s lives better?
If money is your end goal and money is why you do things, you will make less than everybody else because money is a very empty reason as to why to do things.
Rule 6: If You Have No Money, You Should Have No Shame
Many people stay poor because they are too ashamed to do the work that it takes to become rich.
You go to college, get an internship, working as a hike guide, barely scraping by. A guest tells you, “I’m grateful we have people like you in this world willing to do this work. I could never do what you’re doing.”
In that moment, you think: dude, I’m willing to do this fucking work because one day I will be richer than you.
Don’t be afraid to put in the fucking work to do the odd jobs. If you’re not rich, there is nothing beneath you when it comes to making money and doing what you’ve got to do. If you were born poor, that’s not your fault. But now you’re an adult who has a responsibility to work yourself out of it.
People who are willing to feel embarrassed, to feel like they’re doing work beneath them, create so much more opportunity for themselves than those who aren’t.
There’s no shame in being broke and there’s no shame in doing grunt work, but there is shame in not trying to change your circumstances.
Rule 7: Counting Other People’s Money Won’t Make You More
Does counting someone else’s reps in the gym make you more muscular? No. So why would counting somebody else’s money make you more rich?
You’re doing a deal and someone says, “If we sell for the target, he’s going to make $500 million. That’s not fair.”
You’re like, “Why is that bad?” But you let the deal fall apart. You watch that company 10x in value over four years.
It was the wrong decision. If the deal works for you, why do you care how much the other person’s going to make? It’s a poor state of mind.
People who don’t have money are constantly focused on how much everyone else has. Wealthy people know that focusing on someone else’s pockets does not fill their own.
If you’re trying to make more money, stop looking at other people’s money. If people on social media piss you off because they make more money than you, unfollow them.
Yeah, you can look at someone else’s success but instead of complaining, you put your head down. You work harder. You learn faster. You stop making excuses.
Other people’s success isn’t the problem — it’s proof that it’s possible.
The best deals are when each person feels like they got the better end. Nobody that is truly wealthy obsesses over having the upper hand in every negotiation.
The grass is greener where you water it, not where you watch it.
Rule 8: Money Always Chases the Best
When you’re good, you chase money. When you’re excellent, money chases you.
Focus on being the best and forget the rest. Build up evidence that you’re the best. Get stories you can use to show people the results you produce.
Sign up for a fitness competition. If you want to be the best trainer, you have to show people. You don’t just lose weight—you compete in a fitness competition.
When you do your best, people notice. When people notice, money and success will find you. But it starts with being the best. It doesn’t start with trying to accumulate money—it starts with trying to be excellent because money is attracted to value and excellence in any field creates value that people are willing to pay a lot of money for.
First you have to become the best, then you have to make people aware that you’re the best. Once you do that, money will come to you.
Find a game that you can be number one at, and you only know you can be number one at something when you’re fucking obsessed with it. Ask yourself, “What could I be number one at?” and play that game, because if you do that, the money will follow.
Rule 9: You Don’t Need to Change Your Beliefs to Make Money—Just Your Behavior
You used to think you didn’t make enough money because you didn’t have positive beliefs about it. A lot of people buy into this—thinking poor beliefs prevent you from accumulating wealth when the reality is it’s actually your poor behavior.
You read books about manifesting money. You start giving away groceries to homeless people and donating money. Few days go by, week goes by. You’re giving away your groceries to hobos. You’re donating money, and you’re like, “Nothing’s changing.
Then someone tells you: “Money doesn’t discriminate who puts in the work to make it. You don’t have to believe certain beliefs to make more money. You just got to fucking work.”
You step back and realize: what if I didn’t try and change the way I think and I just changed what I’m doing every day?
The road to success, you get there by working hard. You don’t get there with intention. You get there by doing it. One of the key pieces in making more money is going from staying in your head to getting busy with your hands.
If you go out there and do the same things as a person who made a million dollars, you will make a million dollars, even if you don’t believe you’re worthy of it.
You can’t manifest your way to a million bucks. You have to go fucking work for it.
Tony Robbins said: “Stay in your head, you’re dead.” Get out of your mind and get into life and start taking action like somebody who could make money.
Rule 10: The Money You Make Is Directly Correlated to the Difficulty of the Problem You Solve
Elon Musk said: “If you want to make more money, provide more value by solving harder problems.”
Tesla’s mission: accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. SpaceX’s mission: make life multi-planetary. All of Elon’s companies solve very big problems, and by consequence, he makes a lot of money.
Here’s an example: Someone has a software company that does SMS chat. It’s okay, but there are 30 other tools that solve that problem.
He wants to do a deal with you because you’re one of the biggest customers of this platform. When he comes out there, he actually presents you with something completely out of nowhere. He says, “I’ve actually started a different company. I just wanted to bring it to you because I started this new protein bar.”
You’re like, “Oh, a protein bar, very interesting.” You’re thinking to yourself this is probably going to fail because there’s so many protein bars out there.
Little did you know, you take one bite of that protein bar and you’re like, “Holy shit. I never want to eat another protein bar again.” It didn’t taste like a protein bar and it didn’t have whey protein in it.
The problem it solved? All other protein bars gave you a stomach ache, tasted like shit, and had lots of calories. His was the lowest calories you’d ever seen, didn’t taste like protein, didn’t give you a stomach ache.
The tech company sold for a couple million. The protein bar company? Multi-nine-figure payday because he solved a harder problem.
You are directly paid in proportion to the difficulty of the problem that you solve.
A personal trainer maxing out at six figures teaches people how to eat right and exercise. He’s helping them solve the problem, but not fully solving it. But look at Ozempic. Same problem, but it removes the pain. Just take medicine, no hunger, lose weight. That’s why Ozempic’s creator makes exponentially more.
Value is created when you create a better solution or remove more pain from the solution.
Personal wealth goes up in accordance with the difficulty of problems you can solve. First, one-on-one teaching. Then selling customers to gyms. Then teaching gym owners how to get customers. Then teaching them how to build sellable gyms. Then teaching business owners how to build sellable businesses. Then teaching CEOs how to build eight or nine-figure enterprises.
Each time you solve a harder problem, you make exponentially more money. But you can’t skip steps. The skills you accumulate solving small problems let you eventually solve bigger ones.
Wealth comes from solving problems that others are either unwilling or unable to solve for themselves.
Final Thoughts
These ten rules aren’t just theory—they’re the foundation of how you can go from nothing to building multiple successful businesses. They’re not easy to follow, and they require patience, persistence, and a willingness to do uncomfortable shit.
But if you’re serious about building wealth, these principles will serve you better than any get-rich-quick scheme or bullshit shortcut.
The real question is: are you ready to put them into practice?
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