How I built my dream life step by step (just copy me)

When I was 23, I hit rock bottom. You see, I graduated college thinking I was going to be a millionaire entrepreneur in no time. But here I was, literally begging my friends not to kick me out of the house we shared because I couldn't even afford the $250 a month in rent. But in the next 10 years, I'd not only sell a company for $110 million, I'd also marry my dream wife, travel to over 30 countries, achieve all of my life goals, and ultimately retire. So today, I want to show you the exact steps I took to transform my own life, reveal the 10 key lessons I learned along the way, so you can literally just steal my process and transform your own life. Now, this is not a video about business. This is a story about life. And all good redemption stories start with a breakup. I was 23 at the time, living in Boston. I had actually moved there for a girl. We'll call her Katie, because that was her name. And long story short, we broke up. So I had to pack up all my crap, throw it in my car and drive eight hours back home to live with my friends who had dropped out of college to party. I mean, this is the literal application that I sent to the realtor for that home. And on the drive back, just all these questions are going through my mind. Like, what am I doing with my life? How did I end up here? Like, then I saw this guy, Tony Robbins. I didn't really know much about him, but I pirated one of his audio programs. And I said, I'm going to download this and just listen to it on the drive home. Because like, what do I have to lose? And somewhere along that drive, something shifted inside of me. I wasn't sure how, I wasn't sure when, but I knew at that moment, I made a commitment to turn my life around. And this is the first lesson in this video, which is any lasting change that comes in your life will come from a breaking point. You know, we often, when we hit these lows, it feels like everything around us is crumbling. It can feel like this is it. But those moments, those points where you feel like everything is ending. are the catalyst for change. In fact, I would say this is some of the best things that can happen to you because the biggest danger you face in life is not having bad things happen. It's being lukewarm. But of course, all that energy still has to face reality. And the reality was I was moving back into this crappy house and it was a party house. As you walked around, the floor would just make this noise as it sort of crunched from all the dry, sticky beer. It was just freaking gross. This was the cheapest place I could find to live. And the reason I'm telling you this is because you might be watching and you might be in a similarly crappy environment. Hopefully not like mine, but maybe you're with your parents or you're just in a bad situation. You need to get out of that. And the way I decided I was gonna get out of that was I was gonna literally brainwash myself to believe I was going to become successful. And to do that, I started going for morning visualization walks. Now, this sounds really woo wooey, but just stick with me, hear me out. I would wake up every morning and I'd have my shoes right next to my bed so that, you know, I had my clothes, my shoes, no excuses. Wake up, put them on, out the door immediately. I didn't check the news. I didn't look at my phone for emails or texts. I wanted to have the very first thing in my day start with programming my mind for success. I would walk. I would say, Tony calls them incantations, but they're really just sort of like things that you repeat with enough. intensity and strength to brainwash yourself. So as I would do this, you know, these four things, I would say, I love my life. I love my life. And I would just say this over and over in my head. I would say every day and every way I'm getting happier and happier. Every day and every way I'm getting stronger and stronger. Or one was God's wealth surrounds me. God's wealth surrounds me. I would just walk the streets like a absolute crazy person saying these things out loud to myself. And then these visualizations, you know, I would visualize so clearly I could almost taste it. I would visualize traveling the world with this amazing, intelligent, beautiful wife and I would just see the vacations we'd go on, the places we'd stay and I remember so vividly I'd always see this penthouse apartment in New York City. And then of course was the car. I'd close my eyes and see this white Porsche 911, my own supercar that I could drive every day and I would get so excited about these things that I'd be able to forget my exact circumstances. You know, I'd forget the sticky floors and I would just start to imagine this could be my life. And this brings me to lesson two, which is that all success starts in the mind. You need a compelling vision for your future that will pull you forward, that will make you take step after step towards your goals. And if you are not currently taking the actions that you wish you would take or getting the results that you wish you would get, it's probably because you don't have a strong enough why. And so with my strong why and my big vision, I started getting to work. I started my next business, which was called Local Dentist Ratings. The business model was super simple. We were basically going to be the Yelp for dentists. Go online, search your city, see all the reviews from top dentists, and then you can book an appointment. And dentists would pay a monthly fee to be listed. And early on, we started to see some success. We got featured in local magazines. We started to actually get traction from dentists. But then the business failed. But I still had my strong while, so I kept starting new businesses. And after a few more failed starts, I realized something else needed to change. So I started Googling, how do other people do it? And I wanted to see how do other young people actually become successful? I don't care about the 50, 60 year olds and how they built a career over 30 years. My vision and my dreams, they need to come like now. And the thing that I kept reading was Silicon Valley. These young people in Silicon Valley were making millions, it sounds even billions. in their early 20s even as teenagers and so i made a decision literally 1649.51 to my name i packed up everything hopped on a flight and flew out to san francisco and of course san francisco is an expensive city so i also quickly got a job because i needed to find a way to actually stay in this city and with my job and my newfound passion for san francisco i moved into my new home Now my new home was on one of the worst streets in San Francisco. It's called 6th Street. And 6th Street is known in San Francisco for being this sort of epicenter of crime, danger, drugs. And in that epicenter, I found my cheap apartment. It was less than 300 square feet and it didn't even have a proper kitchen. It had a mini fridge, a couple burners, and this tiny little sink. And the outside of this building was like a war zone. It was covered in graffiti. Windows were boarded up. You would always see either people doing drugs or passed out or, you know, sleeping in tents right outside the building. But what's funny is I have journals from that time and I look back at these journals and I'm almost like bewildered by what I seek. I would rank different aspects of my life. You know, how is my love life going? At the time, it was probably like a one out of ten. How's my physical health? How's my environment? How's my location? And I would rank the environment as a nine out of ten. And looking back, I'm like, this makes no sense. But it's because I was tapping into a special power. It was the energy and the environment that I was in. I didn't wake up every day and look at sort of the graffiti on the walls and the people sleeping outside in tents. I looked at the city I was in. This is the city of dreams. This is where young people come to be successful. And I would just focus on that energy. and that would give me not only motivation but belief in myself that like I was gonna do something special here. And so lesson three for you is find a way to find your tribe. We were not designed as humans to live in isolated societies and since COVID the world has become so isolated and it is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you. You need to find a way to surround yourself with like-minded people. Now as I started to settle into the city life actually started going pretty well. I was 24 at the time and I had gotten this role as the head of growth at VentureBeat, a hot new startup, really making waves in the tech industry. At the time, I was making $145,000 a year and this was allowing me a new level of comfort and freedom that I had never experienced before. I could go on dates and pick up the bill and pay for everything. I could go out with friends. I could even go on vacation. I was starting to actually be able to make enough money to live what I would say is a very good life. But in that moment, I started to also lose sight of why I came to San Francisco in the first place. And I asked myself, you know, did I come here to accomplish my dream life or was I really just trying to be happy? And ultimately, like, what is it that I'm actually searching for here? If not this, then what is actually going to bring me fulfillment? And I had to take an honest look at myself and say, you know, this is a good life. I can do everything I want. Just a little over a year ago, I was flat out broke. But the fact that it was a good life, the fact that it was nice, was actually what scared me the most. Because I didn't pick up my life and move to San Francisco for a good life. Good wasn't good enough. I wanted an extraordinary life. And as I reflected on this, my decision became pretty clear. I had to quit my job. So just nine months in, I walked into my boss's office and handed him my two-week notice. My big plan was to start a startup with a good friend of mine, Marty, that I had actually met in San Francisco. And I can tell you, leading up to that decision to quit, I was so nervous. I was really questioning myself. But the moment I handed my two-week notice, told my boss I was quitting, this overwhelming feeling of joy and relief washed over me. It brings me to lesson four. Being comfortable is a good thing in the short term, but it can be a very dangerous thing in the long term. You never want to lose sight of why you started something in the first place. But after I quit, we had to answer one big question. What business were we actually going to start? You see, both of us had tried and failed at different entrepreneurial ventures in the past. They say the average business takes seven years from start to sale. And the idea of choosing the wrong business and wasting seven years of my life horrified me. And so we started coming up with some basic criteria for what business we could start. And as we went through this investigation, we started to see a very clear pattern. You know, we were doing research, but we were also living in San Francisco. And one of the funny things about San Francisco is the offices can be incredible. You know, I'm talking like kombucha bars, all you can eat sushi, wagyu steak, nap pods. It's like a geek's paradise. And what we noticed is actually the nicest offices that we would see were these companies that no one had ever heard of. They were companies that built like database software or sales software for healthcare companies, like really boring, unsexy industries, but they were printing money. And so we said, you know what? There's something to this. And after doing lots of research on different industries that might work for us, we settled on the idea, let's build software for car dealerships. Car dealerships suck. Everyone knows buying a car sucks, but there's a wave of change that's happening where people might actually want to buy cars online. So why don't we be the company that enables that? Let's build the software that lets car dealerships sell cars online. And this brings me to lesson number five, which is success always leaves clues. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can look at what other people have done. That's actually the reason I'm making this video. I want to hand feed you the steps that I took so you can also copy them. And so with that, we started the business. Now going in, we knew already as entrepreneurs, the cards were stacked against us. Like just look at venture funding success rates as an example. The average investor in Silicon Valley will meet with a thousand companies and invest in one to two. But then... If you manage to do that and actually do this incredibly hard thing, the chances of actually selling your business for $100 million after you raise venture capital is less than 1%. So we knew like right from the gate, this is going to be an uphill battle the whole time. Our chances of success are very low. And so to change that, to try to find a way to hack the system and actually drastically increase our odds of success, we came up with a motto, a bit of a creed. See, the Creed was based on our experience being absolute video game nerds, if I'm being honest. You know, everyone's had that experience when you play the video game and along the way you get certain items and power-ups. Like in the Final Fantasy series, it was always like the elixir and the mega elixir, things that would completely heal your entire party. And you end up saving them the whole game because you're waiting for that one crazy hard boss fight when you get to use them. And then you beat the game. And you look in your inventory and you never use the elixirs, the mega elixirs. You've saved them too long. And so our motto became use all of your power-ups at every level because every stage of a business is like a boss fight. And so you want to use all the power-ups you can to try to just make to the next stage. And then if you get there, you can go get more power-ups and use them all again. And so we started looking at like what are the real life power-ups that we can try to take advantage of. And this is where being in Silicon Valley and being in the location of entrepreneurship paid off drastically. The first was mentors. It became very clear that if we could add world-class successful mentors to our business that could teach us how to not make mistakes and how to actually build this thing properly, our chances of success would go way up. And so we started actively going out and recruiting mentors and we gave them a portion of the business in exchange for mentoring us as young founders. And so the first mentor we added was actually this guy named Ralph, who became a very good friend of mine. The other big power up we discovered were accelerators. Accelerators are basically programs where you can apply. They're super competitive. But if you get in, you go through like a three month or six month kind of classroom style setting where you get paired with mentors, advisors, you meet with different people in your industry and they really coach you and guide you to being a successful entrepreneur. But also, at the end of the accelerators was a very important thing, demo day. And demo days are legendary events in Silicon Valley where you go on stage and you pitch 300 plus investors all at the same time. And if it goes well, you can get millions of dollars. And so as we wrapped up our second accelerator program, which was called Alchemist Accelerator, the demo day started to come closer. And this was going to be one of the most important and critical days. in the entire history of our startup because i had a big secret that only me and my co-founder marty knew the company was on the verge of bankruptcy you see at this point in the business our first product had already failed we thought we were onto something early on we'd signed 22 customers and things started going really well but then all 22 cancelled and i had to walk in one day lay off most of the team and go completely back to the drawing board figure out what are we going to do next and after like weeks and weeks of research we finally sort of felt we'd figured out what went wrong with sort of V1 of the product and how we could change it for V2. And early signs showed that we were onto something. Like we were signing big customers, we were getting big contracts, but as all this momentum was coming together, we were getting seriously low on cash. And I had tried to solve this problem for weeks. I'd been out pitching investors, meeting with them before demo day, trying to get some traction, but no one was biting, no checks. And so the week leading up to demo day, I'm a mess. I know that by the time demo day happens, we will be down to just three weeks left of cash. And it's all on me. I'm the only one on stage. I get four minutes to pitch over 300 investors. And the success of those four minutes will determine the future of our company, whether we succeed or go bankrupt this month. I literally practiced my speech hundreds of times to where I could repeat it on autopilot. And then the day comes, I'm sitting backstage and I watch each founder go up one after the next. And so I go up and in that moment, I just give it my everything, all the reps, all the practice come to fruition. I deliver my four minutes and then the next thing you know, I'm off stage. And before I know it, I'm meeting with investors. They watch the pitch, they're interested, they want to know more, and things start going our way. In fact, that day, one of the investors I had already pitched and had been trying to get to invest and was sort of on the fence, watched the demo day pitch, saw the buzz around us and said, you know what, I want to invest. So that night we get a term sheet for a million dollars and the business is saved. I sign it almost immediately. I mean, we're almost on the verge of bankruptcy and I cannot believe it. The next day I go into the office. I've never been happier. I pull the team in and I say, guys, listen, we were on the verge of bankruptcy. I've been hiding this secret, but we only had three weeks of cash left, but I just signed a deal for a million dollars of investment. We're good. It's going to give us so much runway. We can now deliver this product that we've been working so hard on. We can show the world that we're ready and all your paychecks are secured. Thanks so much for believing me. We got it done. And I say, you know what? Let's celebrate. Let's take the day off. close all the laptops and we go out and we just celebrate that day. It's an amazing day. We're all high-fiving. We know that the dream is around the corner. And then Monday morning comes and I get a call from the investor that's leading the $1 million deal. And they say, listen, Micaiah, we've been talking as a partnership and there are some concerns that we have about the business that weren't fully realized in our meeting. We're not going to do the deal. And I just remember sitting there. devastated. Like I just told the team that our paychecks are secure, that we can do this. Now this deal is pulling out. How am I even going to go into the office and face them? And I remember just sitting there crying and I get a phone call. The phone call is from Ravi Balani. He's the founder and CEO of Alchemist at Salivator. I'm so scared to answer it. I like, I know what he's going to say. He's going to be like, dude, you blew it. Like you had a million dollar deal. You were going to be successful and you screwed up. And now this investor is pulling out and your business is going to have to go bankrupt. And Alchemist Accelerator had invested in us and they've wasted their investment. So I answered the phone and Ravi's there and he just says, hey, Micaiah, I just wanted to call and see if you're doing okay. And I lost it again. I mean, I couldn't believe the compassion of this man who was there calling me after I just... not only lost a million dollar deal, but Ravi who invested $36,000 is going to lose his money too. He's just like, listen Micaiah, no matter what happens, I'm here for you. I support you. I believe in you. And I just want to make sure you're okay. That phone call meant the world to me. If Ravi hadn't called me, I don't think I would have been able to continue. In that moment, I said, you know what? I need to go into the office and I need to talk to my co-founder Marty because he doesn't know that this deal fell through. I go into the office. And the team's working and they're all on cloud nine. They're super excited. And so I grab Marty and we go to like a cafe sort of far away from the office so no one can hear me. And I say, listen, man, the million dollar deal that we signed with this investment firm, they called me this morning. They're not going to do it. Like I've talked to Ravi. I've tried to convince them. There's nothing we can do. Marty just looked at me and I was so in that moment struck by his calm because I was a mess. And Marty says, listen, man. I believe in you. Like no matter what happens, I think you're going to figure this out. So do what you need to do. Why don't you take the day off and like collect yourself and then let's go make it happen. Between Robbie's sort of call and belief in me and that conversation with Marty, I said, I'm going to go for it. We've only got a couple of weeks, but I'm going to just give this my all. And so I went to work and I remember just working nonstop. My girlfriend who had actually just started dating at that time. was so supportive because I would literally show up to dates and I would like have my laptop open, responding to emails, emailing investors, trying to set up meetings. And then when I wasn't sending emails, I was running meeting to meeting to meeting. It was just awful, but I had to make this work. Slowly, we started to see some investor interest pick up as we started having more and more meetings. And then one day I got a call from SV Angel. And SV Angel at the time had just been ranked the world's best seed investor for startups. And they said, listen, what are you doing this Tuesday? Could you come in for a meeting? We want to have a partner meeting and get everybody together and take a look at your business. So I said, yes, immediately. Like I'll be there no matter what. Like let's set a time. So we set the time. Tuesday rolls around and I'm nervous. Like cash is really, really low at this point. But I go in and I meet with the partners and go into the conference room, sit down, get my laptop ready, get ready to pitch. And what happens in these partner meetings is they always have like the assistant or whatever. And she's like, do you want a drink? Do you want a coffee? Do you want a water? And I'm like, I'm already wired because I've been chugging coffee, trying to get my energy up. So I say, just have a water. She brings the water in and sit down. Partners come in and it's time to pitch. So I pick the water up and take a little sip and I'm just kind of holding it. And I look over and my hand is shaking so bad. that I am so nervous. And I'm like, man, if the partners realize how nervous I am, it's game over. And so I literally, like true story, no exaggeration, take my hand with the cup and I put it under the table. And I use my other hand to kind of flip through my slide deck. And on the surface, you know, I probably seem maybe a little nervous, but I'm flipping through the side deck. Underneath that table, it's carpet, thank God. I literally like shake the entire cup empty on their floor. soaking their floor with water as I'm pitching them and they have no idea because upstairs I'm just clicking away. I remember leaving that meeting and thinking there's no way I didn't come across so nervous, so scared, so desperate for money because I am. There's no way they're going to invest. Then Thursday I get a call and it's SV Angel and they're like, hey Micaiah, wanted to circle back on our meeting from Tuesday. And I know the way this call goes. It's like, we really enjoyed meeting with you. We love your vision, but you're a little too early. But then they surprise me and they say, listen, we are really interested in what you're doing. And I don't know how the round is coming together, but would you be able to make room for us to invest for $200,000? And I'm like, play it cool, play it cool. Because I have no money in the bank and I have no investors interested. But I take a deep breath and I say, you know, $200,000, I think we could probably make that work. We would need the money wired pretty quickly. But if you can send over the documents, we can get it squared away pretty quick and say, yeah, sounds great. We're super excited to partner. And so they send over the documents. And I think like a day later, they wire $200,000 in. And this is like, you can see how I'm beaming just talking about this. That is the moment that would change everything because I knew once SV Angel invested, it was game over. The best seed investor just picked us. And sure enough, everybody else starts coming in. 8VC. Battery Ventures, all these different large firms hear about SV Angel. And the next thing I know, they're all writing million dollar checks. We'd end up raising $5.4 million. And so the lesson here, I'm going to steal something from Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. You never know what's on the other side, but for sure, hell awaits you if you stand still. Now, fresh off our success, I'm feeling like Silicon Valley's new hot kid. And with that success, with that glory and headlines, the greatest temptation of our startup would come. See, I'm sitting in the office one day and I get an email from a guy named Dan Gill. He says he saw our startup at Demo Day and was quite impressed. And he's recently taken a role at Carvana as the chief product officer. And I knew immediately who Carvana was because Carvana was making headlines like crazy. They had just raised hundreds of millions of dollars and their billionaire founder was building out the world's largest online dealership and Dan says listen we're gonna be in San Francisco next week our CEO Ernie is gonna join us how would you like to meet we'd love to like hear more about you and like learn what you guys are up to and things like that sounds super casual but in the back of my mind I'm like there might be something interesting here we set up the meeting And we don't meet in our office because if they come into our office, they're going to see we're just a team of four people. We're a really small company. So we like pick this neutral outdoor location where we can meet them and, you know, just make it feel real cool and casual. So they show up. Dan Gill, the chief product officer, Ernie, the CEO, and then it's me and Marty. So these are like the C-suite of probably the biggest player in our space. And it starts off like a normal meeting. You know, we're chit chatting back and forth. You know, how'd you get into this? You know, what's your background? How's it going? Where do you see this industry going? And about like 15 minutes into the meeting, Ernie, I'll never forget. He just says, listen, guys, I want to just like get right to the chase here. We are here to buy your company. We've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We have serious cash in the bank and we're really serious about this. And in that moment, I knew what it meant. You know, just three years before I was that broke kid. And now if I just said yes to this, I'd be an instant millionaire. And frankly, just a couple weeks before, our business had been about to go bankrupt. So this was a pretty serious and pretty amazing offer. And to top it all off, I really vividly remember how much money I had in the bank because we started the business with $45,000 in savings. But because our business was struggling, I paid myself very little. And so I had less than $10,000 in personal savings. And right here, right now, if I just say yes, I'll be a millionaire. The weird thing that surprised me is in that moment, when it was offered, I knew I had to say no. And so after they left, I went back and met with Marty and it was like immediately clear, we're gonna say no to this. And it wasn't because we knew we were gonna succeed. It wasn't because we knew we were gonna make it. It was because we did not want to sell ourselves short. It was because we refused to live our lives wondering what if. And so lesson eight for you is never make a decision that will leave you wondering what if. What if you ask that girl out? What if you took that leap of faith and started the business? What if you made that call? In these moments, I actually have a very simple framework that I use, which is what would make a better story for me when I'm 80 years old telling my grandkids? Do I want to tell them that I took the offer, made a million bucks, and that's how my business ended? Or do I want to say, no, I actually went for my wildest dreams and made them come true. And when you think about it that way, for me, the decision was obvious. And I'm so glad we said no, because things started going pretty well for us. You know, we started expanding the team, hiring different people. A year later, we'd raise another $11 million, and we started to really get all the joys and success and accolades that we dreamed of. We got to move into this swanky office downtown that made headlines. Marty and I both made Forbes 30 Under 30. I even got to marry that amazing girl that had been supporting me the whole time. And of course, Ralph... our first advisor was there. He was actually my best man. And Marty, my co-founder, and Eric, our first hire, were also there. And we partied away and celebrated. Seemed like everything was going perfect. And then COVID hit. And at first, COVID actually seemed like it might be a good thing for us. I mean, after all, dealerships were shutting down their physical locations. They couldn't actually sell cars in store due to the social distancing rules. And so... Online car sales seemed to be a pretty popular thing. But what I didn't realize was what was happening behind the scenes. You see, like most startups in Silicon Valley, we were on this typical venture cycle, which meant every 12 to 18 months, we'd be going out to raise our next round of funding. And our next round was going to be our Series B. And on the surface, we looked ready for a Series B. Our revenue was growing really fast. We were getting great customers. We were making headlines. I was on Fox News and CNN. But then when I started actually pitching investors, something really weird happened. See, I pitched over 50 of the best firms in Silicon Valley. And I had a really good success rate on going from what they call the regular meeting to what's known as the partner meeting. The partner meeting is where all the partners gather together to hear your pitch. Typically speaking, if you go into a partner meeting, they want to do the deal. So you have like easily a 50% chance. of them actually investing in your company. But I had eight partner meetings for our business and all said no. No one wanted to invest in us. It wasn't that they didn't like our business. They liked our business, they liked me, but the auto industry itself was too uncertain. See, US car sales were doing okay, but European car sales had tanked. They were down over 90%. And the general wisdom of the crowd was that if the European market has tanked, they're sort of ahead of the COVID wave. And so once COVID really hits America, US auto sales will also tank. In fact, the only thing that got us in the partner meetings in the first place was sort of the second phase of our business that I had been pitching. We were going to transition from being a software business to a fintech business that actually was transacting auto loans. But that business hadn't launched yet. So until that business launched, they were like, don't come back. And so one day I had to throw in the towel. I remember looking at my list of all the investors that I could possibly meet with. And I was like, I've met with all of them and they've all said no. No one's going to invest in us. And I kind of panicked. I kind of freaked out and said, man, I just need to get out of here. I cannot sit here, go to work every single day, talk to my team, act like everything is fine when nobody in Silicon Valley will invest in us. And we only have about six months of cash left before we're really going to be in trouble. So I called my executive team and I said, listen, I'm going to just take a break. I'm a little burnt out. I need to step away. I'm going to step away for one week. During this week, don't email me. Don't call me. Don't text me. I'm not going to respond. If you absolutely need to get in touch with me, my executive assistant has my wife's cell phone number. You can talk to my EA. She will call my wife and then my wife will put me on the phone and we can talk. And packed up my stuff and me and my wife went on a road trip. We started driving north and we went to these amazing sort of nature reserves and I remember hiking this mountain and we hiked a volcano and then we went up to Bend, Oregon and just like hung out and disconnected from it all. I even actually ended up meeting up with one of my board members who was just a really nice guy and really like sort of knew what I was going through and just, you know, we didn't talk about business but he really just sort of lifted me up and we got to spend some time in nature. And I remember during this time, I brought my journal everywhere we went. And I was convinced that like, if I just journaled enough, the answer would come. I would find a way to fix this. But the days of the trip started dwindling down. And day after day, as I journaled, no answers came. I was just drawing a blank on what to do next. And so the trip actually ended. And I remember just packing our stuff, driving back to San Francisco. And I have no plan. I have no way to fix the problems in the business. I have no way to get the cash. And I just remember I'm driving and my wife is passed out in the seat next to me. I'm listening to EDM music on the radio. It's pouring rain, lightning. It's just like a nasty day. Driving down the highway and I'm not thinking about the business. I'm just trying to enjoy this beautiful drive that we're on before I have to go back and face reality. And then in that moment, it hits me like a flood of divine wisdom. I get all the solutions just like flooding my brain. And I immediately pull off into the next exit that I can, park the car, whip out my notebook, and I just start writing. And I write for like 30 minutes. Here's what we can do to the business. Here's how we're going to change it. Here's what we need to change to our pricing. Here's how we're going to get to this thing. Here's how we're going to get to the next stage. And I just wrote this full master plan. And I went from this depressed state where I didn't know what was next to feeling like I was invincible. And so immediately I go back to the office, call up my investors and say, listen, I've got this new business plan. It's going to change everything in our business. I need to raise money quickly. And so almost like that, I go from begging people to invest and not getting anything to this new fired up CEO. And I raise $4 million in two weeks. And this brings me to lesson number nine, which is success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. Nothing had changed fundamentally about the business. The CEO took a week off. It's not a big, like we didn't sign new customers or anything like that. I had changed internally and people could sense this new enthusiasm for the business, this new vision that I had, and they wanted to be a part of it. And ironically, this is something that Tony Robbins had said on that first drive back from Boston, but I had forgotten it. It had been stored away until a moment like this. And so we got our $4 million, but it did come with a very stern warning. This is your last lifeline. If you can't figure it out with this $4 million, there's no more money. And so we needed to prove out this second phase of our business. So I went to the office and I immediately called an emergency exec meeting. I said, listen, I have the plan for us moving forward. I'm calling it the Manhattan Project, like the project to build the nuclear bomb in America. This is going to be our nuclear weapon that we bring to this business. We are going to transform everything. And it was not a popular decision in the company, but they could see my passion. They could see how fired up I was about it. And so they did it. We went all in on this new business idea. And within a couple of weeks. we actually started to see some success. We started to see lenders start to get interested in what we were building. And so we started signing partners, we started signing new lenders, we started signing more dealerships than ever. And all of a sudden, those Series B investors that had initially said, you know what, we don't want to invest, we want to see the second phase, started reaching back and saying, we're hearing good things, let's catch up. And right around when the Series B interest was starting to pick up and we were really feeling good about the business, I got a phone call that would change my life. It was from a company called Upstart. They were a lending company that had just IPO'd and they had heard about what we were doing and they wanted to build out an automotive division for their business. And they had looked at the space and they felt that we could be the perfect fit. And after meeting with them a few times, it became very clear that this was a win for both sides. I still remember the day that they gave me the term sheet. to buy our business for $110 million. I remember showing it to my wife, and this time I wasn't the one on the couch crying. She actually snatched my laptop, read the term sheet, and just cried. And she wasn't crying because of the money. She was crying because she had been with me at those low points when I had everything going wrong, when everything felt like failure. And she knew what this meant for me, that all those dreams that I had would come true, that I'd get the white Porsche 911, that I'd get the penthouse in New York City, and that we'd get to travel, and all that's come true. Which brings me to my final lesson for you, lesson 10. It's actually one of the lessons, again, that Tony Robbins taught me driving back from Boston 10 years before, but I had stored it away, almost forgotten it until this moment. See, in the lesson, he gives the analogy of playing golf. And Tony's playing golf and he's driving the ball. He hits the ball and it goes, you know, 50 meters off to the right and then 50 meters off to the left. And he can't figure out. how to hit it straight and he's thinking, you know, I'm way off the mark here. But he talks to his golf coach and his golf coach says, listen, it feels like you're, you know, way off, but you're actually just a millimeter off. If you just shift the club one millimeter, you'll drive it straight down the middle. And so the lesson is sometimes it feels like you're completely off path, but you're only a millimeter or two away from success. Now there is one big thing that I left out of this video. It's actually a yearly ritual that I would do and I started doing when I was 23 and I still do to this day. It's too much to explain this video but I did make an entire video breaking down how to completely reinvent yourself. I'll put the link over here so click that. Hope it helps.

Watch this next: https://youtu.be/y5ks4FhoGfQ

If you're new here my name's Michia (Muh-ky-uh). I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor. Since selling my last startup for 9 figures, I'm investing my own money into the next wave of founders at my VC firm, L7V. 

I'm sharing everything I learn here so subscribe and stick around.