S2 EP 10 | The Truth About Success: The 5 Things School Will Never Teach You

In this episode of Building Billions, I’m breaking down the five most powerful lessons that school never teaches you, but real life demands. From building influence and monetizing momentum to creating value and staying relevant, I share exactly how I went from having no formal education to building multiple $100M+ companies. Forget participation trophies — success is about execution, ownership, and results. Let’s dive in and talk about what it really takes to win in the real world.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
You ever wonder what school doesn't teach you? Real life
isn't a situation where everybody gets a participation award. Real
life is determined based on what you want. How you
get it is determined on what you're committed to. I
didn't go to school, but I have built multiple $100
million plus companies. How did I do it? Well, that's
what we're going to be talking about in this episode

(00:20):
of Building Billions. School only teaches you how to follow rules.
It doesn't teach you anything about how to win. My
company did over $500 million in revenue in just five
years from start up. And that's because of the skills
I've learned along the way, skills that they would never
teach you in school. So these are the five things

(00:41):
that you've never learned in school that could completely change
your life. So let's dive in. The first most important
thing you need to succeed is influence. Look, if you
want to operate in a successful environment, people won't just
put you in charge of anything. They won't just grant
you influence. You have to take ownership of something and

(01:01):
make results happen. And if you do that and you
take responsibility for it, you've earned it. Here's the thing
nobody's going to give it to you for free. They're
not just going to grant you influence, give you a
title and put you in charge. I mean, if they do,
they're probably going to fail anyways. Real ownership is when
you make things happen. That's how you actually get granted
responsibility because you've earned it. Remember, you can still build

(01:25):
influence within your job or career even if you don't
have the title. In fact, I would say those without
the title that do it actually earn it. Just become
clear about what your targets are and what your goals are,
and build your own confidence through consistent execution. By hitting targets,
making results happen. The next thing college won't teach you

(01:46):
is how to monetize momentum. Here's the thing you might
be guilty of. Most people spend too much time over
learning and under executing. They spend all their time trying
to get ready to actually take action, but they never
take enough action to get any kind of result. For me.
I would rather take action and learn as I go along.

(02:07):
There's an old saying perfection is the enemy of good enough.
Why is that? Because everyone wants to be perfect before
they do anything. But if you don't do anything, you
don't actually learn how to make something happen. This allows
people to make minor adjustments by taking action along the way,
and is one of the things that has made me

(02:28):
most successful in my career, because I've never been afraid
to take action and then make minor adjustments to hit
my targets. But I worked around a lot of people
that say they have to wait till they figure it out,
but they never do anything, so they never actually get
any results. For me, I never went to college to
learn how to do something. I actually got a sales

(02:49):
job and learned to perfect the job I had until
I became number one. That gave me the confidence to
go do it again and again and again and again.
And I just continued to succeed in life versus people
who go to school, come out of school, and then
actually don't accomplish anything significant because they're afraid to fail.

(03:09):
And this is simply not something I could have learned
in school. People ask me where I heard perfection is
the enemy of good enough. When I had a private
meeting with the founder of eBay, Meg Whitman, and I said,
how do you get your technologists to make things happen?
She said, perfection is the enemy of good enough. Most
technologists or analysts, they want everything to be perfect before

(03:30):
they do anything. But it's only through the process of
doing something that you actually become perfect at doing it.
The fact is, speed of implementation will move you to target.
In fact, the model of college is everything but speed
to implementation. It's learn but never do. That's crazy. The

(03:50):
biggest strategic advantage you can have in business is picking
a target, moving to target, adjusting the target, hitting target.
Everything outside of that is just wasted momentum and energy.
Now it's important to remember not to be a reckless doer.
People want to see that you can make good decisions,
take the right actions, and most importantly, get the targeted results.
This ultimately helps people build confidence in you because you're

(04:14):
taking quick action rather than sitting around theorizing or waiting
for something to happen. Next is number three, and this
is directly from my partner, Grant Cardone. Better known beats best.
Those that don't know you won't follow you, so make noise.
Get noticed by hitting targets. My friend Colin from Amalfi

(04:34):
Jets is a great example. A few years ago nobody
even knew who he was. So here's the thing. If
people know you, they like you and they talk about you,
you'll bust through obscurity. Now, how do you do that? Well,
first of all, if you're talking, you better follow it
up with results. People who look at top performers that
have great attitudes and get things done, they actually flow

(04:57):
to those people. But if they don't know you, they
cannot flow. You like everything in life. You need to
control the narrative. How do you do that? By being
numb and having results. If you're a top performer and
you're a good person, and you take the right action
with the right attitude and you get the right results,
people will flow to you. But you have to learn

(05:19):
how to promote yourself through your personal brand. Promote who
you are, promote what you do. Promote why you do it.
Promote your value proposition to other people and then promote
why people will want to be around you, know you,
like you, and work with you. How do you do that?
By being consistent over a long period of time, setting,
hitting and accomplishing targets, calling it Amalfi Jets. He started out.

(05:43):
He controlled the narrative. He was creative in how he
did it. He got known through social media, and now
he has a great business because he picked his targets
and he took the right actions to get known. And
by getting known through his personal brand, he was able
to attract people to his business. And that's how you
do it. And now what? Well, Colin's got millions of

(06:05):
followers and he scaled his business to over $100 million
in revenue. People confuse promotion with sales and marketing. What
is promotion? Promoting is who you are, what you do,
why you do it, your value prop, what you're capable
of doing. It's you putting out into the universe your
intentions followed up by your actions shown by your results.

(06:27):
And if you promote the right things and you do
the right things and you get the right results, people
will know you. They'll want to work with you, they'll
want to flow to you, and they'll want to build
with you. Because people who say what they're going to
do the way they do it legal, moral, ethically and compliantly,
they will get energy flowing to them. And if they're
smart about creating a business or career path, they'll be

(06:50):
able to monetize that in the things that they're actually doing.
If you're not promoting yourself, even if you're getting results.
I am a perfect example of that, by the way,
in my first two businesses I did not promote myself.
I only promoted my company. So when my company sold,
I literally lost my identity. It's important to know that
you should always be promoting your personal brand, what you

(07:13):
stand for, what you believe in, what you're going to accomplish,
what success looks like in the future, what other people
are going to benefit by being around you. That's all promotion.
And if you promote that with a personal brand and
you do it, you will be unbelievably valuable no matter
what you do in your career. The next is number four,

(07:34):
and it's that you need to create value rather than
chasing validation. Here's what school simply gets wrong. They teach
you to follow rules and take tests and maybe pass them.
I never passed them. But here's the thing they actually
have no idea how to teach you how to create
value for me. I got a job selling hearing aids
over the phone. What did that teach me to do? Well,
if you're going to call people, business owners and doctors

(07:57):
and try to sell them a product, you're gonna have
to learn to communicate in a way they can hear you.
And what that means is not only do they hear you,
but they take action based on your conversation, which converts
to sales. So if you learn how to do that
and you apply that, you can pretty much do it
through all aspects of your life. But if you don't

(08:17):
put yourself out there, you don't set targets. For me,
I had to set a bunch of targets. Who's number one?
How do they do it? How many calls a day?
How many conversations do they get? How many people buy?
How many of the things do they buy? Like, I
needed to understand who the best was at what they did,
set those as my targets, and perfect my own personal

(08:38):
craft and ability to communicate, which allowed me to become
one of the top salespeople and become successful and eventually
get noticed. I then could work on my communication skills
to get people to say yes, and when they said yes,
my confidence went up. And when my confidence went up
and I got more people to say yes and I
sold more things, I got notice. School doesn't teach you

(08:59):
anything about how to sell. In fact, the opposite. It
teaches you how to conform. It's a simple equation. You
get ahead by picking a target. Taking action towards the target.
Focusing on the outcomes of your activities until you actually
drive to the result. Unlike school. Remember to focus on
the outcomes. Not your effort, not your personal opinion, not

(09:22):
your accolades, but the actual results that you're attempting to accomplish.
Hit those targets and then you'll be successful. Number five,
you have to stop clinging to the past in order
to stay relevant. Look, clinging to your past is an
entire waste of energy and effort. Learning from your past

(09:42):
and spending your time. How to evolve your mindset, your actions,
the new things you're going to do to improve where
you failed, and constantly taking different actions towards a stated
objective or result is how you're going to build your future.
Forget about your past other than to learn from it
so you can build into your future. Don't limit your beliefs.

(10:07):
Don't reinforce your old habits. Don't do the things or
think about the things, or focus on the things that
don't work for you. So what does school not teach you?
To be curious. Always stay curious. The better questions you ask,
the bigger results you're going to get. Stay hungry. Blaze
your future trail and you do that by setting targets,

(10:29):
hitting targets, and working towards targets. Remember, real money does
not follow people with big degrees. Real money follows people
who make things happen. So be curious. Look at the opportunity.
Execute towards the opportunity. Promote yourself and what you're going
to do and show people you can do it. Stay
ahead of the curve. Go out and create as much

(10:50):
success as you want to. Success is not limited to
the educated. Success is limited to people who can execute
and make things happen. Create the world they want.