Entrepreneur Shares 23 Lessons He Learned While Going From Earning $0 To $2M In Just 8 Years
Danny Baldus-Strauss is an entrepreneur and growth investor who helps people attain financial freedom. Baldus-Strauss recently shared the 23 lessons he learned while going from earning next to nothing to pulling in close to $2M per year. In the Twitter thread, Baldus-Strauss offers advice like “play long term games,” “focus on the $10K+ questions, not the $5 ones”, “learn to avoid lifestyle inflation,” and nuggets of advice helpful to people of any age.
Baldus-Strauss combines personal experience and lessons with quotes from famous entrepreneurs to tell the overall story of his rise to success.
Here’s a quick rundown of Baldus-Strauss’s advice and lessons learned along the way.
- Play long-term games with long-term people.
- Focus on the $10K+ questions, not the $5 ones.
- Invest early and often. Time in the market > timing the market.
- Learn to avoid lifestyle inflation.
- You can get rich at your job, but you only get wealthy at home.
- Live in the present while still building and planning for the future.
- You’ll never get wealthy renting out your time.
- Cut expenses in areas you don’t care about so that you can spend extravagantly in areas you do.
- Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
- Money’s greatest intrinsic value is its ability to give you control over your time.
- Generating income is more important than cutting expenses, but it’s a balance.
- Mind, body, and business are connected.
- Be an optimist.
- Invest in your greatest asset- You!
- Money is made in the waiting.
- Volatility is not the same as risk.
- Focus on the future—not in the next year or even three years, but in the next decade or even two decades.
- “Only when the tide goes out to do you discover who’s been swimming naked” – Warren Buffett.
- The way to create life-changing returns is to hold onto your winners.
- Tune out the noise.
- Realize that stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down.
- You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
- People who are right a lot of the time are people who often change their minds.
All of the advice is solid but if I had to cherry-pick the most important to focus on, just based on my own life experiences, I would say the most crucial points to remember are:
- Learning to avoid lifestyle – Don’t buy the stuff you need to impress people you don’t like anyway.
- Cutting expenses – cutting costs is important but don’t cheap out on life and experiences.
- Be an optimist – Things could ALWAYS be worse.
- Tune out the noise – The only voice that matters is yours.