How Much Should You Invest Into Yourself? (11 Minutes)

1:02Now, someone that wants to be a millionaire, if I told you, "Listen, you want to be a millionaire?" 99.999% of people will say "Yes." Okay, if you want to be a millionaire, I can teach you a profession of how to be a millionaire. So, okay, when do I start? I tell you, okay, listen, not only can I teach you, but you have to understand it's a tough schedule. No problem. You have to wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning. No problem. You finish training every day at 10 o'clock at night. No problem. You do this every single day for six days a week. We don't work on Shabbat. No problem. You have to do this, and you're going to pretty much barely survive for a few years. No problem. And eventually, you're going to start. You're not going to make a million dollars on day one. It's going to take you a few years to build up. No problem. Why is there no problem? Because you want the goal. You want the prize at the end. How do I know this is true? I had hundreds of people come to my office every single day with the same exact dream. They all wanted to be millionaires.

2:10And every one of them would go through a process. Many people would not make it. I trained over 130 different people to be salesmen. Some of them made it and became very successful. Some of them completely wasted my time and money. But the reality is that everyone wanted to dream. Why? Because they see that I had a fancy watch also, but mine didn't make music like this. And they saw that someone is sitting in an office, you know, big office, a lot of employees, in his 20s, practically printing money. Who doesn't want that? Okay, whatever you did, I want to do the same thing. Like you go to the dentist, who tells you, oh, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You say, fine, sure. If I could have teeth like the woman in the picture, I'd rinse and repeat all day. He doesn't tell you that she's been doing it since she was born, practically. And most likely, the teeth are fake. He doesn't tell you that. He says rinse and repeat. Okay, which toothbrush? Oh, it's the one that's $150. Fine, no problem. Which toothpaste? The one that's $60. No problem, because you want the results. The same thing with these employees. All these employees came, and they wanted the results. And they were willing to sacrifice.

3:32And some made it, and some didn't. But either way, they're willing to sacrifice. Hashem is telling you, just like you're willing to sacrifice a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years in some cases, to reach a level of success in your career that's only going to last, what, thirty years, forty years, fifty years. How long is your career going to last? How long are you going to live here? 70, 80, 120, let's say. Moshe Rabbeinu, 120. You're like Moshe Rabbeinu. Okay, 120 years also. Let's say you live 120 years. That's it. Then what? Then you have the real world. The real world is eternal. It's forever. A million years is just the beginning. It's just the beginning. Meaning that 120 years is not even a phase. It's not even equivalent to the time that it took me to pick up this cup and drink. Nothing. What's 120 years? Hashem says, so for these 120 years, you invested 20 years to learn to make a few dollars that in reality, what did you really enjoy out of it?

4:54But for eternity, for what's going to last forever, you couldn't invest half an hour. You couldn't go to a shiur for a couple of hours. You couldn't invest 15 minutes a day. No excuse, my friend. Oh, you didn't know? Okay. You also didn't know how to be a millionaire before you tried being a millionaire. But that didn't stop you. You didn't know how to be a millionaire before you came to work for me, right? But that didn't stop you from coming. In fact, it encouraged you to come. Why? Because you saw this is the place to learn how to be a millionaire. So you can't use a sad excuse like, "Oh, I didn't know." Okay, you didn't know. That's why you go to a place where you learn. "Oh, I didn't have time." But you didn't say that with the job that you were trying to work really hard at. He didn't say to the guy, "Listen, I need to make the million dollars faster than a couple of years. Your training system takes too long. I need to make the million dollars by next week. You have something better?" He didn't say that. Why? Because he said, "Listen, whatever it takes, you're realistic. Whatever it takes, I'm going to do, and eventually, I'll get there." He didn't say, "I don't have time." He didn't say, "I have to go watch basketball every..."

6:10He didn't say I have a busy schedule. When you wanted to succeed in your material world, you invested everything and anything, in some cases for something that's just temporary. So why couldn't you invest some time for something that's permanent? And this is one of the things that most people today do not understand even the ones that know exactly everything that I just said by heart. Because there's knowing it and there's living it. Most people today do not understand, even those who know exactly everything I just said by heart. Because there's knowing it, and there's living it. Living it means that your priorities are different than all of mankind. Knowing it, okay, so you read the shiur, you watched this as a clip, you read it in a book somewhere, okay, you committed it to memory, that's it, you know it. Big deal. I know what the sine, cosine, and tangent of certain numbers are. Does that mean anything to you? No. It also doesn't mean anything to me. It's completely worthless knowledge. I can tell you the financial history of certain companies. I can tell you where to find red flags.

7:26In corporate financials, I can tell you who's a good CEO, who's a bad CEO, what's a good business, what's a bad business, who's going to make it, who's going to succeed, which is all based, obviously, on my opinion, but also experience. Is all of that worth anything? No, it's worth absolutely zero. Why? Because I'm not in the business anymore. If I was in business, still putting money to work, that knowledge could be put to use. But if I'm not in the business world anymore, the knowledge is worth zero. Same thing with someone's Torah knowledge. When you see a guy who sometimes comes to you with black and white, acts like he knows everything, but behaves like an animal, that means that everything they learned in Yeshiva, everything they learned in the books, it's all worth zero. You see a guy that comes to a shiur, and every time you start a sentence, he completes your sentence. you also know that everything that he learns means absolutely nothing to him. It's just something committed to memory. Why? Because if he knew middot, if he had even a half an ounce of a character trait that's of good quality, he would know it's not polite to do that. So, knowing it, any monkey could know it. You could even teach a monkey to speak if you really wanted to.

8:54You could teach the parrot to speak. There's a parrot, by the way. There's a story about a parrot that made two people do teshuva already. I'm not joking. Do you know the story about the parrot? It's not Rav Mizrahi's parrot. He doesn't have a parrot. Rav Mizrahi told the story, a couple of rabbis told the story. It's a famous story. It's a parrot that used to say "Shabbat Shalom." And... And I heard it originally from Rav Ephraim, the story, and I also heard it from Rav Mizrachi. So there's a parrot that belonged to a rabbi, and it used to say Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shalom, all the time, Shabbat Shalom. So one day in Israel, some guy stole the parrot. He didn't know this parrot says Shabbat Shalom; he just stole the parrot, it's a nice big parrot, he stole it. After a couple of weeks, he comes back, he knocks on the rabbi's door, and says, "I'm sorry, I took your parrot." The guy is now wearing a kippah. The rabbi responds, "Oh, okay, it's okay, it's okay." The man asks, "You're not upset at me?" The rabbi reassures him, "No, no, absolutely not, I'm not upset at you, it's okay. I just want to let you know, Kevod HaRav, that I started keeping Shabbat because of this parrot."

10:15You know, he goes, "Why, what happened to you?" He says, "I don't know. I was not keeping any mitzvot, obviously. A thief a few weeks ago. And on Shabbat, I'm smoking a cigarette, and the next thing you know, this parrot keeps screaming, 'Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shalom,' every two minutes. I'm like, I started thinking to myself, the parrot knows it's Shabbat, and I don't know it's Shabbat. So I'm keeping Shabbat." The rabbi says, "Yeah, good, you're the second guy it's done that to." The second guy started keeping Shabbat because of this parrot. So the parrot has a zechut. You've just experienced another Torah class.