How to Build Real Wealth by Thinking Like the Top 1%

Your brain is keeping you stuck, not because you're lazy or untalented, but because you're thinking like everyone else and everyone else is making bad financial decisions. I've spent hundreds of hours around billionaires and I grew up around people with nothing. The difference between them has nothing to do with luck or intelligence or even work ethic. It's how they think. And the 1% think in a way that completely flips the rules of money to their advantage. So here are the six mental principles the top 1% use to think differently about everything and how you can use them to build real sustainable wealth no matter where you're starting from. When faced with stress, setbacks, or drama, the 1% asks one question that changes everything. See, every time a deal falls apart or a key person quits, pause and ask yourself, will this even matter in five years? This might seem simple, but it is crazy how 99% of the time, the answer is no. And having that perspective is so important because it keeps you focused on what compounds, not what distracts. Recently on a Thursday, I had just wrapped up an entire day of one-on-ones, back-to-back meetings with my team members. And I get a late night text from one of my team members who says, I need to talk to you. So of course I pick up the phone, give her a call, and she lets me know that one of our favorite team members is resigning and he's no longer gonna be with us after two weeks. And after a day that wasn't the most awesome day, it could have been super easy to be upset, be frustrated, freak out, go into all of this chaos about what it's going to look like for us to have to retrain somebody, much less get over the fact that the person that we really enjoy working with is no longer gonna work with us. But instead of any of that happening, she and I just had a very calm conversation. And I used this framework then, thinking about in five years from now, will I even remember that this bad news took place? Because the reality of the situation is, in five years from now, I'm gonna be really excited about what I'm building, what she's building, and what he's building. And so having these moments of stress and drama and friction, they're never worth it. Because you're not even gonna remember that the situation happened. You're gonna remember how you handled it. And if you are a stressed out person, you will always respond with stress. If you are a calm, confident person who can work through problems, you are gonna always remember that your life was filled with fun, exciting moments and different twists and turns and excitement. You see most people confuse urgency with importance. Just because something feels urgent doesn't mean it's actually important and that you have to stress out about it. The 1% are able to separate the two by applying a long-term perspective. Now, this doesn't mean that you should ignore all of your problems. They're real problems. But you should triage them correctly. So next time something goes wrong, just pause before you react and ask yourself, will this matter in five years? If not, handle it with minimal energy. If it will, then give your full strategic attention to it and solve the problem. So instead of freaking out, we were able to make a game plan and get clear on who would need to replace him in order for the team to continue to thrive. And one thing that I have mastered after having interviewed thousands of people is an interview process. And if you're interested in the process that I've used to hire thousands of people, go to Instagram, check me out at Natalie Dawson and send me a direct message that says interview and I will send my process over to you right now. Now, the next principle is something that goes against what most people think about when getting rich. Don't focus on hard work. Focus on patterns. When I kept seeing top performers burning out after hitting their first million dollars in revenue, I realized that this was a pattern problem. Over the last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to study thousands of businesses and I get to see the difference between business owners who operate a million dollar business versus a $10 million business versus a $50 million business. And the majority of businesses never get over this million dollar mark. And it made me really look into what is actually happening at this million dollar mark inside any business. And what's happening is the business owner isn't able to see that they are the problem and that they are unable to train other people effectively. So I stopped having the same conversation over and over because I realized that me solving one business owner's problem individually over and over again was actually the same problem that they were running into. So I didn't take the approach of continuing to solve one-off problems. And instead I built a system, which is in my book called Teamwork, which is an end-to-end people framework that teaches founders exactly how to break through the $1 million ceiling. The way I like to look at this is if I have to solve the same problem two or three times, it's not a coincidence. This is a system issue. And the 1% are able to zoom out and see these cycles that keep repeating. Cycles could be people cycles, cashflow cycles, operational cycles. And they use that insight to make smarter and faster processes, smarter and faster systems. Because hard work just makes you busy. But pattern recognition, when you're able to tie a solution to it, allows you to become rich. So look at the last three problems that you've solved and ask yourself, are they actually the same problem wearing different masks? If you're solving the same type of issue repeatedly, stop doing that. Instead, build a system around the problem. Then you can document that system once you have the solution in place and it gets implemented forever. That is how you scale. Principle number three is something that completely changed how I make decisions. It's called one level up thinking. When my team brings me problems, I don't just jump in with answers anymore. I ask myself, if I were on the board, how would I handle this? What advice would I give? You see, this allows me to no longer react emotionally and forces me to think structurally. It also prevents me from jumping in and solving the problem. And this is one of the lessons that I actually learned from my husband. A handful of years ago, early on in our business, there was a massive fulfillment problem that we were about to run into. And it was going to require hundreds of hours of rework on projects that were already midstream that clients were expecting to be delivered. And this area of the business was my responsibility. But instead of him hopping in to help me solve these problems, he refused to get involved. He let me figure out how to solve this problem because it was my job to figure this out. It wasn't his job. And that was invaluable to me because it was actually difficult for him to not jump in. It wasn't something that was easy as if he was just giving me work and didn't want to do it. No, he wanted to solve the problem, but he didn't allow himself to get derailed from what his job was. So when you remove the emotion, you set your team up and the structure up for success. Because if you keep popping in and solving the problem, the team never gets better. The system never gets better. You just keep getting sucked in to doing the same thing over and over again. And this is how I went from being an operator to an architect. From doing the work to learning how to design the machine. The 1% constantly zoom out of their current level to think at the next one. And that is how you start acting like a CEO long before you get the title. So next time you face a decision, pause and ask yourself, how would someone a level above me handle the situation? What would they see that I'm not seeing? What would they prioritize that I might be ignoring? This will instantly upgrade your decision-making. Principle number four might be the hardest one to master, but it is also the most powerful. Emotionless decision-making equals freedom. When I fired my executive vice president, it wasn't emotional, it was math. And the numbers told the story before the drama ever did. You see, when somebody comes into your environment and you actually look at the numbers, you look at whatever it is that that role is supposed to drive, and you see that the numbers before them were growing, maybe like this, or maybe they were at least flat. But when they come into the environment, you can actually plot this person joined at this point and you watch what happens with the graph. And if the graph starts to go like this in a variety, if not all of the metrics that that person is responsible for, you do not need to use any emotion when firing the person because it's just math. And that math is tied to the results that they weren't able to create inside the organization. So it can get really emotional and you can use emotion and start pointing fingers and having all sorts of drama around it. It is simply, can a person in my life do the job that they're supposed to do? And the only way that you know if somebody is doing the job that they're supposed to do is if your stats in life get better. And anyone inside your environment where your life gets worse around them means that they are not fulfilling the role that they have in your life, so they have to go. I used to second guess tough calls and take things very personally, but now I treat my emotions like background noise. I can acknowledge them, but I make decisions based off of the data. And that discipline gives me peace and it gives me precision because the elite do not make decisions based off of their emotions. They make decisions based off of data-driven bets. They separate their feelings from true facts. Emotions slow down execution where clarity actually compounds with wealth. So next time you face a tough decision, write down the facts that separate from your feelings. What does the data actually say? What do your emotions say? And separate the two. Make the decision from the data column, not the emotion column. You don't fire somebody because you don't like them. You fire somebody because they can't do the job. And when you start to do this, you'll start making faster and better decisions and you'll sleep better at night. The next principle is about the one resource you can never get back. Protect your time like it is your capital. I used to feel like I didn't have enough time or energy to do everything that I need to do until I started saying no to quick calls and things that just added up that ended up costing me two hours of contact switching. So by cutting off these little things that I said yes to, I bought back time and energy for the strategy and the team development that is a requirement of my role. I learned this lesson very early on in college. You see, one of my close friends was always busy. She said yes to every person who wanted to get coffee with her, grab lunch, go out to dinner. She was very popular but incredibly stressed and she was never able to spend time on her grades. Whereas I rarely said yes to people. I like to do my own thing. I had a very small group of friends and I wanted to get my work done. So by the end of the semester, even though she looked like she was busy and she felt like she was busy, she didn't actually get the results that she wanted. The acquaintances that she was saying yes to weren't actually helping her get closer to her goals and she wasn't doing very well in school. Whereas I still did feel like I was busy, but I was busy focused on getting the grades that I wanted to get and spending time with just a handful of people who I loved being around. And this lesson really taught me that you can say yes to a million things and everybody's going to feel like they're busy. But if you're not saying yes to the right things and to the things that are getting you closer to where you wanna go, it's wasted time. And I've pulled this lesson forward to where today my calendar gets audited like it's a financial statement. If it doesn't create leverage or generate momentum, it's not getting scheduled. That one shift made me more effective than any other productivity hack ever could because average people trade time for money. The elite treat time as capital, as an asset that can compound or can be wasted. And they audit their calendar as if it's a profit and loss statement. They cut low yield activities, outsource anything that creates friction and reinvest hours into high return thinking and relationships. They don't manage time. They allocate their time like they're an investor. So this week, audit your calendar like it's a financial statement. For every meeting or every appointment that you have, ask, what is the return on this investment for this hour? Cancel, delegate, or shorten anything that doesn't create true value. And then reinvest that time into high return activities, strategy, relationship building, skill building. Your calendar today is actually your future. So allocate it like your goals depend on it. The last principle is one that most people ignore, but it might be the most important. You see, a curated environment equals curated thinking. I used to think that I could be successful despite my environment. It didn't matter that my house was a mess or that I had friends who were a little unaccountable or that I had a bunch of unfinished cycles because I wanted to go change the world. And what I realized is if I couldn't get control of my own environment, meaning the type of food that I eat, how I move my body every single day, the friends that I hang out with, the problems that I'm solving, if I can't handle me and my environment, how am I gonna be able to impact other people? Because why should they listen to me about me helping change their environment when I can't even get control and change my environment? So when I started to look at this, I really had to take an honest look at my environment. What were the state of my possessions? Were things banged up, messy, dirty? Or were they organized and neat? And was there order in place? When it came to my relationships, were those people doing well? Were they having wins in life? Were they successful? Or were they struggling and dealing with a whole bunch of problems and a whole bunch of issues that were then being placed on me? Was my income actually growing or was it staying stagnant? And what I found when I really looked at my income is I was so focused on solving other people's problems that I never took the time to solve problems that I cared about, that I could control, and I just wasted my time solving everybody else's problems. And so your environment and curating your environment has to be the first step in order to ever become elite at anything. If your environment doesn't challenge your operating system, you will end up defending mediocrity instead of truly evolving. And today I am ruthless about curating who I'm around because I know it will directly shape how I think. I just actually watched this with my husband recently. We are no longer spending time with a particular individual and my husband is five times happier than he used to be. He is happier in the mornings. He is happier at dinner. He is happier throughout the day and will send me random text messages. And I can trace it back to the fact that this one person who was in his ear is no longer in his ear. That is the power of the people who you spend time around. And the 1% know this. So they only spend time around people who stretch their standards, who challenge their thinking, and ultimately who sharpen their worldview. This is how they keep moving forward. So look at the five people that you spend the most amount of time with. Are they truly stretching your thinking or are they reinforcing your limitations? If your environment isn't challenging you, just change it. You can join communities, masterminds, or groups where you are the least successful person in the room. That discomfort is growth. Your thinking will never outpace your environment. So curate it like your future depends on it. If you act on these six principles, you will think differently from 99% of people. And that is how wealth is built. If you liked this video and want to learn how to communicate like the 1% so that people actually listen when you speak, watch that video next.