Becoming self-made means finding people who live the life you are after, copying what they do at your own level, and then building milestones, patience, skills and teams until your own results carry you forward. Nobody is completely self-made. Almost every successful person had help along the way, but there is a noticeable difference between people who start from scratch and those who had some doors opened for them. The team behind the video says they learned this the hard way by going through the whole process themselves.
These are the fifteen steps they lay out, in order, and a bonus on status games.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 steps at a glance
- Find successful people living the life you want (0:27)
- Study these self-made successful people (1:11)
- Break down what their life is and what they do (1:43)
- Emulate successful people to the best of your ability (2:23)
- Build a milestone system for yourself (3:41)
- Embrace the boring (6:09)
- You become a builder (7:09)
- Push yourself (8:08)
- Delay gratification (9:15)
- You specialize in 2 or 3 things (10:10)
- You re-invest strategically (12:30)
- You hire people to do the things you find boring or hard (13:27)
- You constantly dream bigger and move on to the next level (14:09)
- You do not give up, you adapt or adjust (14:52)
- You carry the torch (15:37)
- Bonus: do not play status games
1. Find successful people living the life you want
When you are starting out, you do not know how much you do not know, so the easiest way to begin is to identify a shining light in the distance. This is your North Star: the life you are aiming for, or at least a guide until you work it out for yourself.
To achieve a goal you first have to define it precisely. The easiest route, in their experience, is to find people already living the lifestyle you desire. That gives you a starting position and a direction.
2. Study these self-made successful people
These people got where they are by following a set of steps and by doing some things differently from others. Your job is to identify as many of those things as you can. If you want to be rich, you first have to study the rich.
Because you look up to them, the process will feel enjoyable to you, while others may see it as work.
3. Break down what their life is and what they do
Call them rules, principles or values: these are the building blocks on which these people built their lives, and they are a key differentiator between them and everyone else.
Look at how they act and behave, what they do, how they think, how they look at life, how they set goals and what their habits are. Take anything that translates back to you. Successful people have a recipe for their success, and the step is to learn it.
4. Emulate successful people to the best of your ability
Do the things these people do yourself, at your own level. If they read books, you read books. If they wake up early, so do you. If they work 80 hours a week toward the next goal or practice their craft for set hours daily, you match it.
The aim is to get your mind and body used to the motions. You will not face their problems, but the ones in front of you: get the website up, build the content calendar, write a page a day, take 30 photos a day, edit for at least an hour a day.
This is where people give up. Everyone knows exercise and good food help you lose fat, and the hard part is putting it into practice. Success is a mental challenge, because your mind gives up before your body does.
5. Build a milestone system for yourself
No matter how fast or far you run, you never reach the horizon, because it is a direction, not a destination. That is why milestones matter: they let you track how far and how fast you are moving.
People set poorly sized goals. They say they want to be a billionaire and stop there, but a billion dollars is a goal for someone already worth between 250 and 500 million. If you want to be a billionaire but struggle to pay rent, your first goal is to become a thousand-er. Make 50,000 more than last year. Getting from 0 to 50,000 teaches you what you are missing to go from 50,000 to 250,000.
Goals are medium-term objectives just out of your current reach. Your long-term objective should never be a number. Make it a version of reality you are fulfilled with, because there is always a bigger number than the one you set.
Do not play a game of how big your number is.
6. Embrace the boring
Whatever you want to do, it will take time. There is no secret method to get things done quickly and effectively. Your creativity, drive and intellect are multipliers of the boring things you have to do every single day.
Changing your life takes time because it requires you to keep changing small things and stick with them for long stretches. Money, wealth, success, health and even happiness are time-consuming efforts, and effort means doing things outside your comfortable self. Your only job is not to listen to the voice at the back of your mind that says you have done a great job and can take the day off.
The boring stuff will take you where you need to go.
7. You become a builder
Self-made people are always builders: they build their life, businesses and things that have value. To be great you need two things, knowing how to build and knowing how to sell, and the first is more valuable over the long term.
Think about the people you identified at the start and how much they have built. Then ask what it would take to build the lifestyle you want. You do not start with the whole house. You build the foundation, the structure, the roof and the walls. Everyone loves a beautiful, comfortable home, but your eye goes to the furniture, not to the hard work that went into digging the foundation, and life is the same.
8. Push yourself
In the team’s experience, self-made people have a second gear they can switch on when needed. There will be days when you do not want to continue because it is tiring, time-consuming or your heart is not in it. That is when you push the button and put in the work even though you do not feel like it.
Progress happens on the days you wanted to skip. You can do more than you think. The video claims statistically that people quit at 30% of their ability, whether it is pain, hardship, hard work or creativity. You enter the second stage when being successful matters more to you than another episode or another round of a game.
9. Delay gratification
You do not need a treat every time you do a trick. Life is a strategy game, and sometimes in chess you sacrifice a few pawns to make progress. What small things are you willing to give up for the big win?
Every self-made person has used delayed gratification, which the video calls trading with the future. Not eating cookies now means a lot of cake to share later. Progress is not linear. It is slow at first and then snowballs past a certain point, which is why rich people keep getting richer. Delay gratification until you have your own snowball.
10. You specialize in 2 or 3 things
People hear specialization and think of one thing. That used to work in small communities, where the best shoemaker got all the customers and the best baker sold the most bread. Then the internet arrived and you stopped competing only with the people around you.
Being really good at one thing makes you a valuable, hard-to-replace employee, but being really good at two or three lets those skills be stacked on top of one another. Self-made does not mean you do everything yourself. It means your skill-set is enough to carry you into the future you want.
The recommended trifecta:
- One skill that lets you build something of value
- One skill that lets you communicate with and relate to others
- One skill that lets you expand yourself creatively
Being good at one thing is no longer enough.
11. You re-invest strategically
Many people make mistakes at this stage, so the video uses a metaphor. Say you live somewhere extremely cold and need wood for warmth. The smart man cuts two trees: one to keep the current fire going and one saved to the side. The side one is just as important as the main one, and the mistake is ignoring either.
Stop putting wood on the main fire and you die of hypothermia. Without reserves or a safety net, when hard times hit (and it is when, not if) you have no fighting chance. Self-made people focus on the main thing they are building, but part of the outcome must be set aside as a safety net.
12. You hire people to do the things you find boring or hard
By now you have specialized and are good at some things, which are the big moves that push you ahead. But the road is not even, and there are time-consuming tasks you dread.
When you do what you are good at, time is irrelevant and you almost have fun. What looks like hard work to others is basically play for you, and that is where you thrive. Find people who enjoy or are at least good at the tasks you should not be doing. Successful self-made people always build strong teams around them.
13. You constantly dream bigger and move on to the next level
Here is a secret from the future: the hunger never goes away, you just want better food. The moment you hit a milestone, new doors open ahead and fill you with excitement. You start thinking about what else you can do, and how one move could lead to another.
You fall in love with the process, very much like an addict. You are no longer competing for survival but to see how far you can take it, like Michael Jordan constantly trying to top himself. Chained people do not know what lies above the clouds, but you have glimpsed it and will not stop halfway.
14. You do not give up, you adapt or adjust
One of the biggest traits of self-made people is a determination never to quit. It is extremely rare to get it right on the first try, and most highly successful companies started out as something else. Facebook was a private social network for Harvard students and Amazon was just a bookstore.
You will probably not build a trillion-dollar business, but the idea is the same. You face life with everything it throws at you. Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn, and you get back up and prove them wrong, not for them but for yourself.
This is your path, so do not let anyone else write your story.
15. You carry the torch
Everything in life is cyclical. Step one was about finding the people who inspire you, and every self-made person who drew inspiration from others has a responsibility to carry that torch for the next generation. Become the inspiration you needed when you were starting out.
The step closes with a question for the viewer: what is your purpose, and what do you really want from this life?
Bonus: do not play status games
You are not here to impress anyone. The goal is not to look rich but to be rich, and not for others to think you are happy but for you to be happy. Do not worry about what others think of where you are going, since they are not heading the same way and you will not meet them at your destination.
If you want people to know you are doing well, they will notice without you lifting a finger. The moment you start playing status games your fire is slowly going out: you are too busy telling the world how warm you are while few logs remain on the fire. The video calls status the most destructive thing people have tried to force since the beginning of time.
Start with the North Star
The fifteen steps run in a loop: find the people you admire, learn what they do, practice it at your level, and eventually become one of the people others look up to.
The video’s invitation is simple: write down what you really want from life, then take the first step toward it today.
FAQ
What does it mean to be self-made?
The video says nobody is completely self-made, but self-made people start from scratch and build their skills, habits and results without doors pre-opened. It means your skill-set is enough to carry you into the future you want.
How do you set better goals?
Set medium-term goals just out of reach, such as earning 50,000 more than last year, and make your long-term objective a version of reality that fulfills you rather than a number.
Why should you specialize in two or three things?
Because the internet puts you in competition with everyone. Being good at one thing makes you hard to replace, but several skills build on each other, such as building, communicating and creativity.
What does delayed gratification have to do with success?
Progress is slow at the start and then snowballs. Giving up small rewards now lets you build your own snowball, which is why every self-made person has used it.
Why should you hire people to do boring tasks?
Once you are good at what you do, time on it feels like play. Handing off the tasks you dread to people who are good at them frees you to work on the big moves.
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