People Lazier Than You Are Making Millions

read online at anthonyvicino.com
​watch the video: (just released)
​read time 12 minutes

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We’ve all had that one d*ckhead boss…

The guy that only ever comes around to tell you what you’re doing wrong and to throw more work on your plate.

Ya know, god forbid he rolls up his sleeves and does some actual work, right?

Instead, he disappears back into his office and you’re left irritated by the fact that you work 5x harder than this lazy jerk, and yet HE’S making way more money.

This working dynamic used to strike me as wildly unfair and in truth, it put a massive chip on my shoulder.

I figured: “Why should I work harder than that jerk if he’s gonna get all the rewards?”

This mindset is the reason I got fired from 15 jobs before I even graduated college.

Now, I’m not gonna pretend that there aren’t legitimately bad bosses out there, ‘cause there are…

But the reality is (and this took me a really long time to figure out):

The reason there are lazy people making way more money than you is most often because they’ve unlocked a few cheatcodes that make the wealth-creation game WAY easier.

And today I'm gonna share with you those cheatcodes:

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1. Acquire Leverage

Listen, at the top of the game (which is where I assume you’re trying to get if you’re reading), EVERYBODY works hard.

There’s no getting around this.

But here’s the thing (and the part that really tripped me up when I was younger):

For example, imagine two burly lumberjacks each tasked with cutting down a tree.

You give one a freshly sharpened axe and the other gets a rusted, chipped, and dulled axe that barely cuts through butter.

It takes the first lumberjack 50 swings to cut down the tree, whereas it takes the second lumberjack 500.

So here's the question:

Who worked harder?

The second certainly expended more calories, but nobody's getting paid for how many calories they burn, right?

They both achieved the same output (cutting down a tree) and therefore will earn the same amount of money.

The difference in their performance lies in the fact that the first lumberjack simply had more leverage.

Leverage: how much you get out relative to how much you put in.

If you can get more out by putting less in, then you have more leverage than theo ther guy.

Truth is: The laziest people winning the money game are spending ALL their time thinking about how to apply more leverage to their work.

When it comes to making money in particular, there are four types of leverage you need to master (Labor, Capital, Technology, and Media).

​I unpack these 4 types of money making leverage in this video.​

Okay, okay, okay… now I can hear you through the screen…

“Great, Anthony… you’ve just told me to “work smarter, not harder”. Real original. Tell me something I don’t know.”

Very well…

Let’s build on top of this concept by revealing the single reason MOST people will never win the money game (even if they’re working hard AND smart by applying a ton of leverage).

It’s because they’re in the wrong vehicle.

So the second way to get ahead in life without actually working harder is simply this:

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2. Get in the Right Vehicle

Warren Buffet said it best:

So here’s how to think about this:

Leverage is whatever tool you have at your disposal to move the boat. That could be a paddle, a motor, or maybe just your hand.

But Opportunity is the boat itself.

The important thing here is that we must pair the right Leverage with the right Opportunity, otherwise we’re just gonna be riding the struggle-bus… or the struggle-boat (dad-joke).

After-all, it doesn’t do us any good to strap a gigantic motor onto a row-boat, right?

Alternatively, a paddle isn’t gonna help ya much if you’re on a battleship.

Pairing Leverage with the right Opportunity is essential… and this, in a nutshell, is why most W2 employees will never win the money game.

They’re busting ass on a vehicle that can only carry them so far and so fast.

But this doesn’t just apply to W2 employees…

I see entrepreneurs falling into the same trap by pursuing the WRONG opportunity vehicles.

For example, the guy running neighborhood grocery store is probably working just as many hours in the day as the guy building a $1B private equity firm.

The difference in their respective monetary results is due to which boat they’re in.

The most successful “lazy” entrepreneurs have simply gotten into the right boat and applied the right leverage.

Now, there’s a counterintuitive truth here I want to point out, and it stems from two things Steven Schwartzman (the founder of Blackstone) said:

He said:

“It’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically.”

But he also said this:

“Billion dollar opportunities attract billion dollar talent, and therefore, are often easier to build.”

The hardest business I’ve tried to build was a training center for national and olympic caliber rock climbers.

The difficulty is that we were barely scraping by and not able to attract top tier talent (mainly because in this sport, the pool to select from isn’t very deep to begin with). After-all, there just aren’t very many people out there capable of coaching top-tier talent in this niche sport.

So we had to settle for what was available, which were B-Players only capable of producing B-Results.

On the other hand, the easiest company I’ve built is our private equity firm where we’ve raised tens of millions of dollars of capital to acquire nearly $100M of real estate… here we could afford top tier talent… and as a result, the work feels “easier”.

So ask yourself, "Is the vehicle I’m in capable of getting me to where I want to go?"

If not, it’s time to make a change…

And to help facilitate that change, you have to master this third thing that lazy people do to win the money game. They:

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3. Think Different

Over the past five years I’ve coached hundreds of business owners who were at various points on their entrepreneurial journey.

And I noticed something pretty interesting:

The most successful entrepreneurs tend to think through problems in their business and life in a completely different way than their less successful counterparts.

See, the less successful entrepreneurs tend to rely on what’s known as Convergent Thinking, which makes sense, because this is the form of thinking we were taught in school.

With Convergent Thinking, we’re told there is a singular right answer. All we need to do to arrive at that single right answer is to execute the formula in the right order.

2 + 2 = 4

Our education system favors this form of thinking for two reasons:

First, it’s easier to grade a multiple choice test than it is to grade a 3-page essay discussing the nuance of different potential solutions, right?

Second, the modern workforce isn’t designed to reward original thinking.

If you’re working as a barista, Starbucks wants to know that you can follow the formula (aka the system) to consistently deliver a quality mocha.

So all they care about is your ability to follow instructions and Converge on the single right answer.

The problem here is that you are nothing more than a replaceable cog in the machine.

This is a great recipe for working yourself to exhaustion… but not a great recipe for getting ahead in life by doing less.

If you don’t want to spend your life endlessly grinding away in the machine, you have to learn to think differently…

After-all, as Einstein said:

So here’s the recurring trait I’ve noticed in the most successful entrepreneurs: they tend to be Divergent Thinkers.

That is, they recognize there is no one right answer… rather, there are just better and worse answers spread across a spectrum of probability given your unique context.

The question you have to ask is, which of these solutions maximizes the likelihood of success given my current context?

Now, I promise, the better you get at thinking in this way, the more success you’ll have (without necessarily having to work any harder).

And Bill Gates agrees with this. He said:

Now, developing as a Divergent Thinker takes time and practice, but the BEST way to improve is to simply surround yourself with people who already think this way.

Consistently exposing yourself to creative thinkers will rapidly expand the horizons of how YOU think.

So joining entrepreneur focused networking groups is a great place to start, but if you can afford it, I think the single best investment you can make here is in getting a coach/mentor.

Somebody who has already mastered this form of thinking and can help point out in real time the ways in which you’re limiting yourself.

Truly, you can’t be both successful AND lazy without first mastering this skill…

Now, speaking of skills, the fourth way lazy people get ahead is by:

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4. Level Up Your Skills

Because the reality is, skills are the ultimate form of leverage.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is one of my all-time favorite activities and I’m on a mission to get all my friends involved in this sport.

If you’re not familiar, this is a grappling style of martial art that involves two people rolling around on the ground trying to submit one another.

The problem with this sport for beginners is that it’s very physical, you have NO clue what you’re doing, and another person is actively trying to choke you out and get you to quit.

Now, most newbies have a very obvious strategy which is to compensate for their lack of skill with gusto. As a result, the average white belt spends roughly 90% of their time flailing spastically as though their life were on the line.

After an hour of this you practically have to mop the white belt off the floor they’re so exhausted. They’re disheveled and looking like they just fought a rabid Honey Badger, but they’re usually smiling, ‘cause there’s something really gratifying about trying so hard (which is why I love this sport).

Now, on the other end of the spectrum are the black belts who’ve been training for the better part of a decade (if not longer).

These guys and gals make jiu jitsu look effortless. It never seems as though they’re even trying, much less working very hard…

In fact, they often just look bored…lazy even.

Truth is: Effortless execution can easily be mistaken for Laziness.

And that’s the interesting thing about true masters of their craft: They never really look like they’re struggling, which gives the impression they aren’t actually trying.

Professionals make everything look easy because they are just SO DAMN skilled.

Skills are the ultimate form of leverage because once acquired, they serve you every single day of your life. They are the only investment that pays dividends regardless of market cycle, and they are the only investment that can’t be taxed or taken from you.

In my experience, the reason it looks as though lazy people are winning the money game isn’t because they’re actually lazy… it’s because they’re so good at what they do that it just doesn’t look like they’re even trying.

Now, to acquire high leverage skills you could just try and figure it out yourself… scour YouTube videos, read books, listen to podcasts and just put in the reps.

This works, but the problem with being self-taught is you don’t know what you don’t know, so it’s easy to have blindspots to what you’re doing well and what you’re doing poorly.

To accelerate your learning you could get a coach that has domain expertise, they can point out your areas for improvement, and they can put together a personalized plan for training that’ll save you a ton of time and wasted energy trialing and erroring your way to success.

The downside of a coach is that they can be quite expensive…

But there’s a third way of acquiring skills (and it’s one of my favorites), which is educational platforms like Skillshare.

Skillshare rocks because they've got classes on pretty much any topic you could ever want to learn, taught by experts, and laid out in a way designed to save you time while maximizing learning.

If you're a lazy-learner like me, I worked out a deal with Skillshare so that the first 500 people who sign up using this link will get a 1-month free trial.

This trial is completely FREE and you can cancel anytime, so you've really got nothing to lose. Go grab your free trial before they're all gone.

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5. Ask Better Questions

This right here is the quickest, easiest, and laziest way to improve your results in life…

And I admit, I was skeptical when my mentor first shared this concept with me a number of years ago.

In fact, I think I rolled my eyes.

But stick with me ‘cause I now know from first hand experience just how powerful the concept I’m about to share with you is because it has continually appeared in my life and business as one of the single most impactful lead indicators of success…

The best way I’ve heard it explained comes from the man with big hands, Tony Robbins, who said:

The importance of asking better questions is that it expands your thought process, gets you to look at problems differently, and helps you get to root causes.

A classic example is if you walk into a bathroom and see water pouring from a busted pipe in the ceiling.

The question MOST people ask in this moment is: “What should I DO?”

Now, there’s all sorts of ways you could answer this:

You could grab a mop and start cleaning, you could grab a bucket to collect the water, or you could call a plumber.

Lots of options, right? So what should you do?

Well, I experienced this problem first hand in one of my businesses a couple years back, and I’ll tell you what our Graphic Designer did when he stumbled onto the problem:

First, he put a bucket under the pipe.
Second, he called me so that I could call the plumber.
Third, he started mopping. Whenever the bucket filled up, he’d dump it in the sink and then put it back…

Now, all told, this sounds like a reasonable plan of attack, right?

But it misses the most important step which would’ve been revealed had he just asked a better question…

Instead of asking “What should I do?”…

The better question would’ve been: “What’s the actual problem here?”

In this example, the answer is pretty obvious… It’s not that there’s water getting on the floor. That’s the symptom or the result of the problem.

The actual underlying issue is that water is pouring out of a busted pipe.

So instead of trying to catch the water in a bucket, he could’ve just turned off the water to the building.

No water, no leak. Now we just wait for the plumber.

This question (what's the actual problem) gets to the heart of a powerful concept called The Theory of Constraints.

This theory simply states that a system will never grow beyond its biggest constraint or bottleneck. Another way you’ve maybe heard this concept described is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Using the Theory of Constraints to ask better questions and identify the TRUE underlying reasons slowing your progress in life is a powerful hack…

Because as they say:

“A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.”

If you want to learn more about the Theory of Constraints, there’s a fantastic (and underrated book) called The Goal by Eli Goldratt which I highly recommend all entrepreneurs read.

Alright, my beautiful people, that in a nutshell is how people lazier than you are making millions.

Until next week...

Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend
AV

P.S. If you ever want FREE coaching, click here and follow me on Instagram. I go live there once a week to answer any and all your questions.

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From YouTube this week:

​People Lazier Than You Are Making Millions​

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