Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

What were the keys for you to switch your mindset from just having one stream of income with your career to having passive multiple streams of income?

I can probably trace it back to when I was 17 years old and I first read the four-hour work week and came across the idea of passive income and immediately my mind was blown. It seemed to put a terminology on something that I'd sort of been feeling anyway that just the traditional career path of medicine, maybe it wasn't quite for me, but it was reading that book, the parable of the Fisherman, which he talks about as well, that made me realize, okay, what I really want to do

is I want to do medicine for fun, and then I want to make enough money to sustain myself through

multiple streams of income. The Parable of the Mexican fishermen is one of my favorite stories.

The story is that there's an American investment banker, and he goes this small coastal Mexican fishing village and he sees this Mexican guy on the boat and the guy's like fishing a few fish and he has some of the fish. He's like, oh, this tastes amazing. And the guy's like, yeah, you know, it's enough to support my family's immediate needs. And the American asks, well, why don't you go and fish more? Like, why are you only fishing like five fish a day? And he says, well, you know, I'm quite happy. I'm making good money. I get to spend time with my family. I get to have a nap in the afternoons. I get to go down to the pub in the evenings to play the guitar with my amigos. And then the American investment banker goes on some big rant about how he's a Harvard MBA and he can kind of transform this into a business empire and how he can then get the Mexican to move to New York and then open up his own warehouse, open up his own empire and eventually make millions 30 years down the line. And then the kind of long story short, the Mexican kind of, you know, asks the American, okay, what next, what next, what next? The clincher at the end of the story is that the American says, well, that's great, you know,

once you're 65, then you can retire and you'll have all that money. And then you'll be able to live in a village, you'd be able to, like, have a nap with your wife, you'd be able to play the guitar with your friends in the evenings. And that story really hit me hard because it really shows the importance of building a life

day to day that we enjoy and get value out of rather than the deferred life plan of working

really hard and grinding and hustling to get to the point where we have lots of money

and then we're retired and then kind of going back to that life that we could have had when we were younger.

What were the keys for you building passive income in the beginning when you started it?

And how many recurring streams of income do you have today?

Today, there's probably around somewhere between 8 and 10 kind of big categories.

And within those 8 to 10 big categories, there are sort of like dozens, if not hundreds of smaller categories. One of the keys at the beginning was actually learning to code. I still think learning to code is just a ridiculously valuable thing that anyone can do and anyone can learn. And it just immediately unlocks the ability to generate income from the internet, which you just don't really unlock when you don't

know how to code. Kind of in two ways. Number one, I think when you learn how to code, then anytime

you have an idea for something. So, for example, when I was in med school, I had an idea that,

hey, I want to help other people get into med school. The non-coder way of approaching that is,

okay, cool, let me run a course, let me create my materials and let me advertise it to my local neighborhood and see if one or two students will, you know, bite and take my course. Because I knew how to code, because I need how to make websites because I'd been doing freelance web design since the age of like 13. I knew that I could make a website for this. And I knew something about marketing. I knew something about ads. I knew something about content marketing. I need something about SEO. Those are all things that I learned through the learning to code web design trajectory, which meant that when I had this idea for a business, immediately it had a scale far greater than anyone else could have done who didn't know how to make websites and didn't know about this world of the internet. Later on, a few years down the line. Again, in medical school, sort of on the side while I was preparing for my med school exams, me and my brother, we both knew how to code. Neither of us did a degree in computer science or anything, but we kind of dabbled with it on the side. And so we created this software program, again, helping med students, because that was the niche that I was in. It was like an online question bank with subscription billing and an interactive kind of system with JavaScript and

like React. And if we didn't know how to code, that wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone something we could have created for ourselves. Even if you do hire someone. So since then, lots of people have reached out to me saying, hey, I don't know how to code, but I have this idea, how much would it cost to hire a developer to build this thing. And that's always a hard question. It's like, well, it could be 10,000, could be 50, could be 100,000. Usually that number scares people off. They're like, whoa, I was hoping it would be like $200 for some, you know, following the Tim Ferriss method. Having tried to outsource things in the past, it's genuinely really hard to outsource something, especially when you don't know about the thing that you're trying to outsource. You know, I know how to edit videos being a YouTuber. And therefore, when I outsource editing to go into an editor, I know what I'm doing. Equally, when you know a little bit, at least the basics of how to code, that doesn't mean you necessarily have to code everything from scratch yourself, but it means that you're more able to outsource that because you now have an understanding of the landscape. The other thing of it is when you learn to code, it unlocks an aspect of your brain and opens up your mind to ideas that you just wouldn't have had before. So for example, let's say when people talk about coming up with startup ideas, they say that you shouldn't just try and sit down and think of a startup idea. You want to find a problem in the world, preferably a problem that you're having yourself, and then think about how you might solve that problem. So let's think a few years ago, let's say you were to think, you know what, it's a real pain in the bum trying to get a taxi because, you know, taxis are expensive. They don't take card. It's an absolute nightmare. If you're not a coder,

you think, okay, this is a problem. I wish someone solved it. But if you're a coder, you think, huh, this is a problem. What would it take to solve this problem? Well, I guess all we really need is a middleman app that connects taxis with people who want taxis. And I suppose you could build that by essentially making a database, by having one table of taxi drivers, having one table of passengers,

be filled of figuring out some kind of integration with Google Maps API, figuring out some kind of payment system, maybe using Stripe. And all of a sudden, you've built a very prototype version of Uber or Lyft in your head because you know how to code. If you don't add a code, you just wouldn't, your mind wouldn't even go in that direction. But if you do, it does. And that is where a lot of the most interesting and most profitable

businesses over the last like two decades have come from, people who know a little bit about

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