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7 Surprising Habits to Be a Millionaire by 30

2023-04-08 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Cliff Weitzman · recording, 11:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career (also: Relationships and personal life) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Evidence-based framing, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His own numbers

Ali breaks down seven relationship habits from his podcast interview with Speechify CEO Cliff Weitzman: cold emails, consuming people's content, asking people to hang out, bonding over ambition or vulnerability, thank-you notes, giving without expecting a return, and working in your zone of genius.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Relationships as the skill of millionaires; meeting Cliff Weitzman

  • ★★★ Ali says building relationships is a key skill of millionaires; he used to feel weird about "it's not what you know, it's who you know" because of nepotism and privilege, until interviewing Cliff Weitzman changed his view. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali says Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, a massive text-to-speech platform. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ When Ali first met Cliff Weitzman he felt envy towards someone his age who was far more financially successful; interviewing him in depth, he realised how much hard work had gone into that success. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman: Once Cliff Weitzman had read all the books he could on a topic, he made a Google Sheet of the hundred people who knew most about it, messaged every one of them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or email, and followed up. — 00:00:58 · Google Sheets, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
  • ★★★ Ali's first habit from Cliff Weitzman: send as many cold emails as you can to people you admire and want to get to know. — 00:00:58

00:01:10 — Habit 1: send lots of cold emails

  • ★★ Ali has never met anyone as comfortable sending cold emails as Cliff Weitzman, who credits much of the value in his life and business to them; most people, Ali included, do not send enough. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali says two or three of the few cold emails he has sent directly led to outcomes worth over a million dollars, through the chain of events that followed. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali gets a ton of cold emails and finds it sad that most people are very bad at writing them, though a cold email can bring mentorship, learning from top people, a job, an internship or even the love of your life. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali's second habit: to build a sort of relationship with someone you admire who has content online, such as a book or podcast interviews, consume all of it; almost anyone with good ideas now shares them online. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — Habit 2: consume all the content of people you admire

  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman: On a flight from California to New York, Cliff Weitzman listened at 2x to 3x speed to the eight-hour book Barack Obama wrote before becoming president and finished it by landing. — 00:02:44
  • ★★ Ali, who has admired the indie developer Pieter Levels for years, found every podcast Levels has been interviewed on through Spotify and listened to all of them at about two and a half times speed. — 00:02:44 · Spotify
  • ★★ Ali messaged Pieter Levels on Twitter and they have since had a back and forth; Ali says that at some point he will visit Levels in person and they will record a podcast episode. (hedged) — 00:03:14 · Twitter
  • ★★ Ali's third habit, from Cliff Weitzman: get comfortable with asking people to hang out. — 00:03:14
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman says he quickly realised that the best thing about college is the people there, much more important than the classes. — 00:03:14

00:03:20 — Habit 3: get comfortable asking people to hang out

  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman: At college Cliff Weitzman had two dinners a night, moving between tables to talk to everyone, for the first two months of every semester, and so got to know 60% of his freshman class. — 00:03:43
  • ★★ Ali says some people find approaching others easier, but no one is physically unable to; people he knows with social anxiety built the skill of talking to strangers and making friends through systematic desensitisation and effort. — 00:03:43
  • ★★ Ali admits he does not talk to strangers enough: next to someone on a plane he stays in his head, although serendipitous conversations have brought him friends, business associates and ideas, and he would like to do more of it. — 00:03:43

00:04:44 — Sponsor read: Morning Brew

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth habit: bond over ambition or vulnerability, since little real bonding happens over small talk and deeper relationships come from shared vulnerability, ambition or experiences. — 00:05:30

00:05:41 — Habit 4: bond over ambition or vulnerability

  • ★★ Ali keeps in mind the structure of a good story: we get invested in a character by knowing what they want and why they can't get it, as with Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. — 00:06:00
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman: To get to the meat of a person, Cliff Weitzman asks questions such as their biggest struggle right now, their top three goals in life and what gives them energy in their work. — 00:06:29
  • ★★ Ali would not open a conversation by asking someone's deepest desire, but he keeps in mind wanting to know a person's goals and challenges, what they want and why they can't get it, which sparks much conversation. — 00:06:51

00:07:17 — Habit 5: write thank-you notes

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth habit: write thank-you notes, to people you know personally or not; a thank-you note costs very little but generally means a lot to the person who receives it. — 00:07:20
  • ★★ Ali cites a University of Chicago business school study in which people writing thank-you letters, in every experiment, overestimated how awkward it would be and underestimated its impact on the recipients. — 00:07:20
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman sent Audible founder Don Katz an eight-paragraph thank-you email; Katz replied about 40 minutes later with a longer email, saying such messages make his months, and they built a relationship. — 00:07:49 · Audible
  • ★★★ A Cliff Weitzman habit Ali wants to adopt: instead of procrastinating on social media, scroll your phone contacts or recent messages and send a nice thank-you message to whoever catches your eye. — 00:08:18
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman sends a message even to someone he has not thought about in six months, and says this is how he keeps his connection with people he is close with. — 00:08:48
  • ★ Ali is sceptical that Cliff Weitzman always sends thank-you messages instead of scrolling social media, since he knows Cliff scrolls a lot too, but calls it a nice standard to aspire to. — 00:08:48
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth habit, which the book The Go-Giver, one of his favourites, talks about a lot: put good energy into the world without an expectation of return. — 00:08:48
  • ★ A few months earlier Ali listened to The Go-Giver audiobook on a road trip with cousins who do not normally listen to self-help, and they loved it. — 00:08:48

00:09:07 — Habit 6: put good energy into the world without expecting a return

  • ★★ As Ali sums up The Go-Giver, value you put into the world without expecting a return comes back many times over; one example is making free YouTube videos without expecting views, likes or revenue. — 00:09:17
  • ★★ Early in your career, Ali says, you can work for free for someone you admire: if you do a good job, chances are they will want to pay you and refer you to friends who need that work. (hedged) — 00:09:46
  • ★★★ Ali's seventh habit: work in your zone of genius, creating opportunities for yourself in areas where you personally can really shine, where work feels like play. — 00:09:46

00:10:08 — Habit 7: work in your zone of genius

  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman says to work inside your zone of genius and never step outside it; his is real-time, live, high-pressure situations, and when he can go full force into it he clears his calendar. — 00:10:15
  • ★★ For Ali, filming videos, writing, coming up with ideas and teaching feel like play most of the time, while going through numbers, spreadsheets and operations feels like a lot of work. — 00:10:15
  • ★★★ Ali advises figuring out your own zone of genius: the area in which you can personally thrive and flourish. — 00:10:44
  • ★★★ Ali says it is far easier to be better than 99% of people if your work feels like play, because, as Naval Ravikant says, you cannot compete with someone who is having fun. — 00:11:19 · Naval Ravikant
  • ★★ Ali says working in your zone of genius is not the same as following your passion, which his other video calls really terrible advice for succeeding at work. — 00:11:19

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Cliff Weitzman · cold email · zone of genius

Also: People: Barack Obama · Don Katz · Naval Ravikant · Pieter Levels

Works: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone · The Go-Giver

Organizations: University of Chicago

Products: Audible · Google Sheets · Speechify · Spotify

Also centred on Cliff Weitzman: I Asked 15 Experts For Life Advice. Here's What I Learned.

Also centred on cold email: The Power of Cold Emails #shorts · What Does My Mum Think of Me? 4M Subscriber Q&A

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