10 Things to Do in your 20s to be a Millionaire by 30

Ahhh, the elusive millionaire status!

So many articles written about it, so many books.

As they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and similarly, getting to a Net Worth of $1 Million requires time too.

In this article, we are going to discuss 10 things that all twenty-something year olds should be doing in order to build the foundation for a bright financial future.

Being in my early thirties I believe I still have a good feeling of the younger generation and I am confident this advice will significantly help you.

Although this advice is geared towards a younger crowd, the principles remain the same even for you who are starting a bit late.

Fear not, regardless your current age, by taking action on the next 10 items, you are on your way to financial glory.

Before we begin, I have to warn you a bit about the contrarian nature of my advice.

You are going to read opinions that contradict the social norm. But think of it like this:

Are most people in their thirties millionaires?

Not even close.

That means that you will have to do quite a few things differently.

So, without further ado, here are ten things to do in your twenties to hit millionaire status by thirty!

1) Read like a maniac

Of course this will come as no surprise to anyone that knows me even just a little.

One of the best things you can do with your time is to read valuable books.

Go all around the spectrum and study all sorts of non-fiction literature:

• Finance
• Economics
• Business
• Human Nature
• Psychology
• Health
• Productivity
• (Auto)Biographies
• Science

As a baseline, you should be clearing one book per month. With this pace, you will have read around 100 books after 8 years.

Just by this feat, you will have already gotten yourself ahead of the pack (almost 95%+ of the world).

If you are even more aggressive, say 2 books per month, in just four years you will be so far ahead of your peers, it will not even be funny.

One great thing about knowledge is that it compounds. So at the beginning, what you learn might not be very helpful, but as you progress things are going to make sense. This is how you fuel your progress.

Personally, I had lost valuable time in the past, but I am trying to catch up now.

2) Focus on earning more

Young people are notoriously fickle and they tend to get distracted easily.

If you wish to be a millionaire by your 30s, you need to focus in one thing only:

Earn more!

Again, by focusing on something like that, you will be differentiating yourself from your average peers.

These people are going to be spending their precious time in stupid things like cheering for their favorite team, arguing about their favorite super-car and watching the latest reality show.

Do you know what is better than arguing about whether a Ferrari or a Lamborghini is more awesome? Actually owning one.

You in comparison are going to pick up valuable skills that you can use to provide value to the marketplace. As a result, you are going to be rewarded for that value. This is how the economy works.

Now, as you start earning your first money, you are going to notice some interesting things.

One of them is that you are soon going to hit a ceiling on your income if you are trading time for money.

Since your time is limited, if your income is dependent on your time, it will also be limited. What that means is that you need to decouple yourself from your earning capability.

That can only be accomplished by pouring your efforts into building a system that will generate value in your stead. Don’t be scared by the word “system”. It could be something as simple as a website.

In any case, it will be time to say hello to your new best friend: Entrepreneurship!

3) Save to invest

The next thing to do after you start earning some money is to save it. As no surprise, you will have again to differentiate yourself from the masses.

What other people typically do falls into one of the following two categories:

1. a) They save zero to little of their income (around 80% of the population).
2. b) They save just to save, leaving their savings idle (around 15% of the population).

The problem with the first folks is obvious. The problem with the second batch is that their savings are slowly evaporating, destroyed by the savage force of inflation.

Instead, what you are going to do is put those savings into good use by investing.

In its simplest form, investing means allocating resources into activities that have the potential of generating you more resources in the future.

Now, I am not talking about financial investments here. Those should be last on your list when you are starting out and you have a low net worth.

In your early days, your investments should revolve around education and various business ventures that you are trying out.

Let’s say that you have managed to save $100 this week.

You can either spend that money on a fancy gadget, or you can use it to purchase an online course on digital marketing and Facebook advertising.

Similarly, next week, you save $100 more.

You can either spend that money on a fancy dinner, or you can use it to advertise your new product or service on Facebook and reach thousands of people that are in your target audience.

These little choices are going to determine your long term success.

4) Invest in yourself

This was mentioned above, but it really deserves a dedicated point of its own.

Do you know how you will be able to get $1 Million? By becoming a person worth of $1 Million.

That means that you need to be improving yourself on a daily basis. Part of that improvement is gaining more knowledge.

In this time and age, a huge percentage of information and knowledge is available for free. However, there is still some knowledge that requires money in order to be obtained (and sometimes quite a lot).

This is totally fair, and it is something that differentiates the top players from the rest.

If you cannot afford to invest $100 in a course that is going to make you a better entrepreneur, what does that say about yourself?

One of the best ways to address this is to allocate a fixed part of your savings, say 10%, into non-free material that will take you to the next level.

Apart from the purely financial part, investing in yourself also means holding yourself to a high standard. Which brings us to our next point.

5) Take care of yourself

You need to understand that you are your vehicle to wealth. You are the one that is going to march forward creating value and building wealth.

For this reason, you need to take care of your physical self. That means consuming the right kind of foods, working out regularly, sleeping well and keeping stress levels low.

Unfortunately, modern society is structured in a way that makes those things incredibly difficult to achieve.

Since this is the case, you need to proactively make sure that the environment you live in is aligned with your health goals.

For example, your refrigerator should be filled with fresh vegetables and fruit, and not sweets and ice cream. When you open it, you won’t even have the option of eating something unhealthy (it just won’t be there).

With this approach, you are also going to preserve your willpower levels, something that you are going to need when you are working countless hours.

All in all, you should consider yourself as a well-oiled biological machine. You take care of it, and it will work hard to take you to riches.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”

– Jim Rohn

6) Build up your social skills

Another aspect of our lives that usually gets neglected is the one of building up our social (or soft) skills.

I know that staying behind your computer sounds very alluring to some of the more introvert kinds of people, but it is crucial to actually be able to interact smoothly with other individuals.

It is true that by leveraging technology it is now possible to become rich even if you are a hardcore introvert geek, but your chances will be better if you have a good baseline of social skills.

All business boils down to interactions between people, so you have to be able to elegantly handle them.

As the name suggests, social skills are in reality a skill, meaning that you can develop it and progressively become better at it.

Again, by following my initial point of reading 100+ books, you will have a solid foundation on how to interact with people.

At the same time, you will need to actually go out and interact with them in real life. This is the only way to become better at understanding human beings.

If you want to play in the big leagues some day, you are going to need social skills in order to crack the code of our next point.

7) Network with valuable people

It is a sad fact that the majority of the people that surround us are not destined for glory.

This seems to be benign for the individual that wishes to achieve success, but unfortunately is not.

As humans, we are social animals, and we are subconsciously affected by those around us.

That means that if everyone around you is a middle class employee, then it is almost certain that you are going to end up like a middle class employee.

In order to break this pattern and get to the millionaire status, you will need to associate yourself with people that are actually millionaires.

For this reason, you need to actively seek to meet and connect with successful individuals, who have been there and done that.

The benefits of networking with valuable people are multifold.

First of all, your subconscious will be convinced of what is achievable. It is totally different to read about success than to actually see it.

Second, these people are in position to provide helpful and actionable advice. Since you know they are the real deal, you can follow their guidelines and expedite your way to success.

Additionally, by being around successful people, you are going to expand your comfort zone and never settle or hit plateaus.

As a note here, please remember that networking with this kind of individuals is not easy. Their time is worth much, so you have to make it worthy for them too.

Always initiate a contact by giving some form of value first and make sure that you keep providing value during that relationship.

8) Delay gratification

It is a known scientific fact that people who have the ability to delay their gratification, can enjoy higher levels of success later in their lives (on average of course).

If you start implementing the things I have been discussing in this article, you will soon start to get some first drops of success. And this might pose some challenges.

When you start generating some income, what do you do?

Do you settle and get comfortable with some decent, yet not extraordinary results? Or do you keep pushing forward?

Think about like this:

Would you rather drive a BMW today, or a Ferrari in 5 years from now?

The more able you are to withhold your gratification, the more successful you are going to be in the long term.

Remember the example above with the $100 you had saved? Imagine being able to deploy the capital needed to buy a BMW into a venture of yours. The return is going to be staggering.

I understand that at some point you should enjoy the fruits of your labor. That is the reason that you are hustling so hard after all.

Yet most people err too far on the direction of enjoying gratification early, something that holds them back in the long term.

Patience is a virtue, and in the game of wealth, it is that much more important.

9) Take calculated risks

No risk, no reward.

This axiom holds true, especially in the realm of money. Yet most people, either take no risks at all, or take misguided risks.

Here is a typical example:

You think that the comfortable job you have in your local bank is providing you safety.

And BOOM, some day the bank directors announce layoffs replacing you with a robot that is much more efficient and orders of magnitude cheaper.

The world today is changing so rapidly, that you cannot afford not to take some risks.

Facebook CEO, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, has captured the essence of this with his quote:

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Now, let’s address the part of what kind of risks we should be taking.

The best example comes from MJ DeMarco, author of my favorite book, “The Millionaire Fastlane”.

As DeMarco states, the appropriate type of risks are those that provide unlimited upside, yet only have a limited downside. And by contrast, the “stupid” kind of risks are those that provide limited upside, yet come with some serious downside.

Let’s see an example.

Suppose you are young, energetic guy, with massive stamina. Since you do not have many obligations in life, your monthly expenses are minimal.

You are contemplating what to do with your future, and two options come in mind.

1. Take a job in corporation.
2. Start a business with another guy.

Now, society’s common advice would be of course to take the “safe” job. “Don’t start a business, that is dangerous!”

Let’s take a more rational approach.

What is the upside of taking a job? A decent, average salary.

Is this really a massive upside? Does this really excite anybody?

And what is the risk here? It is losing your most precious asset, time.

Time passes by, you remain stagnant in a mediocre position, and you are left behind. After a few years, you become obsolete, you lose your job and you are unable to catch up.

Let’s examine the case of starting a business.

What is the downside really? Spending a few months and a few hundred dollars into a venture that might not work. Big deal. The real life experience and knowledge that you would accumulate, are well worth it.

And what would an upside look like? Well, sky is the limit!

Your venture might take off and you might make $1M after a few years, perhaps several millions.

Isn’t that much more exciting?

Summing up this point, the only way to achieve success is to take (calculated) risks along the way.

10) Start a business (or two)

And this brings us to our final piece of advice. In order to make it big, start a company (or two).

Nobody got rich clipping coupons, and nobody got rich by working for a salary.

The most effective approach to accumulate wealth is to start a business of your own.

As I mentioned before, if your income is coupled to your time, you are going to get stuck in the small leagues.

You need to build a scalable system that will generate massive amounts of value and will serve thousands, or even millions of people.

But why do I mention “two”? The reason is that most probably, your first attempt will not be successful, or it might be mildly successful, yet not life changing.

Nobody was born knowing how to do it, so it might take a while until you crack the code.

This is a slow running process, and it might take a few years before you get to the millionaire mark.

Make sure to put in the effort, delay your gratification, and the result will be highly rewarding!

Conclusion

So, there you have it. My 10 things to do in your 20s, to become a millionaire by 30.

You can call it my “10/20/30” Rule of Success!

Here is a recap of them:

1) Read like a maniac

2) Focus on earning more

3) Save to invest

4) Invest in yourself

5) Take care of yourself

6) Build up your social skills

7) Network with valuable people

8) Delay gratification

9) Take calculated risks

10) Start a business (or two)

Now, before you leave, I want you to think of a 20+ years old friend of yours that might find this helpful, and send him/her the link. Both of us would appreciate it enormously. Take care!