meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
My First Million

I chose to be broke for a year

My First Million

Hubspot

Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.72.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Want the 4 money rules that changed my life? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/fws Episode 783: Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) gets interviewed by his former intern about quitting a $120K/yr job in his 20s to become strategically broke and the other counter-intuitive decisions that made him successful.  Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:56) Quitting a $120k job to be broke and live with 3 friends (Don’t linger on bad decisions) (10:26) Fear is what holds people back more so than anything else (13:17) How to get what you (actually) want. (16:37) Most people are not serious (28:21) Who is the most important voice in your life? (34:05) Why I decided to sell my company to Twitch & Amazon. (40:18) The biggest waste of time is doing something that needn’t been done at all (Elon) (41:52)  “You can’t run an A/B test on life” (Act Accordingly) (52:37) There are no bonus points for making things harder for yourself (location) (58:23) The best people are 'down' (Buffett) — Links: • The Biography Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@thebiographypod  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The biggest risk you have is spending your life trying to do a really good job at the wrong thing. Yeah. Idiocrity is the real risk. Yeah. For any person with high potential, because it'll sap you, sap your will, sap your time, sap your resources, slap your energy, sap your belief in yourself. This is Sean Pruy. He sold his company to Amazon and Twitch for millions, and he now runs one of the most successful business podcasts in the world with millions of listeners. I know this because I spent 10 years doing things only for like, ooh, if this worked, it'd be amazing. The work has to be the win. Yeah. The win can't be some future hypothetical payoff. Because you enjoy it, you do it all the time. Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it. Because you get really good at it, you do get the results.

0:39.3

Right.

0:39.8

That's the flywheel. In this episode, we talk about what it takes to be successful, how to work smarter, not harder, and how to live a good life. I think hard work is overrated. It's probably maybe the fourth or fifth most important variable. You know, I think the very first one is

0:53.5

I feel like I can rule the world

0:56.0

I know I could be what I want to For fifth, most important variable, you know, I think the very first one is... I feel like I can rule the world.

0:56.1

I know I could be what I want to.

0:58.8

All right, today's a special episode because I'm the guest of today's episode.

1:05.9

Normally, we have guests on and we ask them all about their life, their philosophies,

1:09.5

how they work, how they did it, how they made it. But this time, I'm the guest because my former intern, Walter, uh, created his own podcast. He used to work for me when he was, I don't know, 18, 19, 19, 20 years old. He was in college. And he's gone on to create a cool podcast. And he asked me to come on. And so I went on. I'm one of the first episodes of his thing. And I watched it and I was like, this is actually a really good interview.

1:29.6

And the reason why is because it's a lot of information about before we ever made any money. So, you know, how I was thinking when I was in my early 20s, the ups, the downs, the indecisions, the uncertainty. Do I go this way or this way? and how I thought about it. I think it's going to help a lot of people, specifically people who are,

1:46.8

you know,

2:01.3

you haven't quite made it yet. Maybe you're young. Maybe you just haven't, it hasn't all clicked for you yet. I think there's some very useful philosophies in here. So I hope you enjoy this is an episode where I got interviewed by my former intern, Walter. You had a great life, seemingly. So why did you end up moving?

2:03.0

And what was that year of being strategically broke right?

2:05.5

Yeah, strategically broke.

2:06.9

That's what I called it.

2:07.9

Yeah.

2:08.5

I think most of me would just call it unemployed.

2:10.9

But why not?

2:12.9

I put a luxury brand on it.

2:15.4

So basically what happened is I graduate from college and I get a great job.

2:18.8

I got a job paying me $120,000 a year to go work in a boring industry that I knew nothing about,

2:24.9

didn't really care about, kind of stumbled into a job that I thought was too good of money to pass up.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hubspot, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hubspot and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.