Master the Skills That Unlock Financial Freedom

The only thing that's standing between you and financial freedom is just that you don't yet have the skills that you need for it. And the people that learn the skills are the ones that end up financially free. And the ones that don't are the ones that don't. Because it really is just a series of skills. Let's say your route to financial freedom is by starting your own business. What are the skills you need? Well, there is one set of skills that I like to label attract. So, the skills of attracting customers. There is another set of skills that I like to call convert, which is how to uh convert customers from being strangers to actually giving you money for your

stuff. And then there is a third set of skills called delights which is that once you've got a customer for your service or product or whatever thing you're doing, how do you give them a good experience? So that then they give you the four Rs. The four Rs are basically reviews, referrals, renewals and most importantly results. You actually want them to get results with whatever your product or service is, right? We attract, convert, delight. In the middle we have the skills around operating. So this is sort of like operate in the context of a business. This would be things like doing the taxes and stuff, right? You know, the basic stuff, registering a business, etc., etc. And then once you get to about $100,000 a year in revenue and

beyond, uh, you then have another set of skills that we like to think of as scale. These five categories, they're just it's just a set of skills, man. In the same way that you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to drive, but you learned how to drive. And in the same way you didn't come out of the womb knowing how to tie your own shoelaces, but you learned how to tie your own shoelaces. No one comes out of the womb knowing the skills of sales or marketing or customer service or delivery or finances or operations. But people that learn the skills are the ones that end up financially free and the ones that don't are the ones that don't. I was having a conversation with one of our

lifestyle business academy students the other day. Um this is our online business school where we help professionals build their own online businesses. Links down below if you if you're interested. Anyway, let's call the guy John. He was like, "Oh man, I found a customer who's really struggling with marketing her business." and she seemed really interested in me helping her marketing her business. But I was like, I don't have any marketing skills, so I can't help you market your business. And in that context, I sort of face pond a little bit. I was like, John, John, my friend, we need to have a chat about this. There is this thing that we like to teach our students uh that we call the uh Teddy Roosevelt method, which is

when you are starting out a business and someone asks if you can help with something, you say yes, and then immediately after saying yes, you figure out how to actually help them with the thing. You get busy learning the skill of doing the thing. This is from a quote from Teddy Roosevelt to that effect. Theodore Roosevelt, whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell him certainly I can, then get busy and find out how to do it. Really, really, really good as a method for building your own business and learning skills. And so John was held back. He said no to this client who wanted to give him money and wanted his help. And John actually had experience in the field that she

needed the marketing help with. Uh he just didn't have specific marketing skills. He was like, "But how can I say yes if I don't have marketing skills?" And I said to him, I was like, "John, how do you think anyone learns marketing skills?" And John said, "I don't know. I guess like some people do degrees in it." And I was like, "Ah, see, this is the problem." John, his conception of the world was that in order to learn a skill, you need to take a degree or you need to study it at university or something. That's just not true. Um, like if we really think about like marketing skills as an example, you know, what's the hardest part about running a business? The hardest part is actually getting the customers. Um so if

we let's focus on the attract uh side of this you know okay how do we actually get customers like what are the different methods for attracting customers let me just list a few number one is you can do content so for example you can do what I'm doing and create a YouTube video that's a set of skills number two you can run ads so you can run ads on like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Google or Tik Tok or Snapchat or what have you can do outreach which could be warm outreach or you could just reach out to people that you know and be like hey do you know anyone who needs a thing you know that's often uh the method that most of our Lifetime Business Academy students use

to get their first customer, at least in 95% of cases. You can do cold outreach where you're trying to send emails or to strangers or trying to cold call them and stuff. Again, that's a skill. You can tell another skill if you want. You can join uh communities, go to networking events, you know, this sort of stuff. Now, speaking of skills, content creation is one of the big high- income ones that like so many people are making a bunch of money off of. And if you are or are interested in becoming a content creator, then you're definitely going to want to check out Epidemic Sound, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. I have been using Epidemic Sound since pretty much day one of this

YouTube channel back in 2017. And so for the last 9 years, Epidemic Sound has been our source for royalty-free music that makes our videos like elevates them a little bit. Whether it's a vlog or whether it's a sit down video or a study with me from back in the day, everything in the Epidemic Sound library is restriction free. So, there are no copyright claims. There are no muted videos. And you can publish your stuff on YouTube or Instagram or Tik Tok, any platform you want without any issues. All of their tracks are also made by real professional musicians. This is not some AI music that they just like use a computer to generate. And the artist gets paid whenever the music gets used.

And so you'd be directly supporting the artist as well. And one of the coolest new features they've added is the assistant feature. Now, back in the day, I used to spend hours and hours browsing the Epidemic Sound library to find the perfect music for the vlogs or for the videos. But now, their assistant feature is really cool because you can just describe the scene in plain English, and their assistant will automatically then look through the library and give you curated suggestions, which is super nice. So, if you would like to bring your videos and your stories to life with nice music, then check out the link in the video description. And if you use the code Ali50 at checkout, then you will get 50%

off your Epidemic Sound subscription for the first 2 months. And that offer is valid until August the 30th, 2026. So, thank you so much to Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video. And let's get back to it. Let's take something like ads for example, and let's say, you know, Instagram ads are your thing that you're going to try and do. Instagram ads are the sort of thing that John's client was like struggling with. But John didn't yet have marketing skills and didn't like double click into marketing skills to know that like Instagram ads is like an option for example. But let's take the skill of Instagram ads. How does anyone learn how to do Instagram ads? Do they go to university and take a course taught by

some old some professor about how to do Instagram ads? Probably not. Almost everyone who has learned how to run Instagram ads for any business in the world learned it by giving it a go, watching a couple of YouTube videos, googling it these days, asking Chad PT to help them out. And that's about it. That's how you learn the skill of running Instagram ads. The concept of I can just learn how to run ads is scary. Like, oh my god, there must be so much to it. It must be really, really hard. People do degrees in this stuff. Like, you try it out. You're like, oh, actually, Facebook makes it really easy.

There's the thing called meta ads manager. You just go on it. You upload creative. If I go on Canva, they've got like 5 zillion templates for Instagram ads. Oh, wow. [__] Could I just like take one of those templates, just replace the contents of the image with like my own business, and now I have an ad. And then, wo, there's all these like settings. Ooh, this is confusing. Let me ask chat if you or let me like watch a YouTube video about it. Oh, interesting. I've learned that in the last few months there's this new Andromeda update to the Facebook algorithm that actually means I don't need to twiddle around with all these dials. I can just let the algorithm do the work. Okay, budget. You know how

much should I set my budget as? Talk to Chad, talk to Google, watch a couple of YouTube videos. People telling you can start with like $10 a day. Okay, cool. Could I start with a $10 a day budget and just see what happens? Well, okay, nice. And within about a weekend or less, I would know because I learned the skill of running Instagram ads over the course of about a weekend. and bunch of friends I know who make millions from their businesses running Instagram ads taught themselves the skill in about a weekend and then of course they refine the skill over time. You realize this [__] is not that hot and I think that is the fundamental mindset shift that I am trying to that I would love everyone to

have and in particular is the one that um I spend a lot of time on with our lifestyle business academy students which is that everything is a skill and everything can be learned. something that feels like a blackbox to you right now, like marketing or sales or operations or finance or customer success or AI. All of it is just a skill and it can be learned just like driving. Before you've learned how to drive, driving seems really [__] hard, doesn't it? It's like, oh my god, you're literally in like a metal thing. You could like kill someone. Oh my goodness. And then you learn how to drive. You didn't sit around for absolutely ages thinking, "No, my goodness, in order to learn how to drive, I need to do a degree in it."

Yeah, probably you got a driving instructor, which is why I think it's useful to have a mentor and a coach when teaching you stuff. Driving is a life and death skill. So it's useful to have a driving instructor to do it on the road. And it's the same with almost any skill you can think of. If you want to learn marketing skills, marketing skills is a broad topic, but like Instagram ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Tik Tok ads, all of these are different types of ads you could run. There's content, so you could learn how to do content on Instagram reels, uh Instagram posts, carousels, YouTube videos. I literally have video videos on how to make YouTube videos. You can film it with your phone.

Cold outreach. There are people on YouTube who have made videos about how to do cold outrage, how to send emails to strangers and get them to respond, how to use tools like Apollo and these other things to like enrich leads and send emails to them. It's all easy stuff. And it's easy stuff because there's literally people who are world class at doing the thing, who are teaching it for free on the internet. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I went to Cambridge University Medical School, one of the best medical schools in the world. And to be honest, for me and most of my friends, 99% of what we learned was actually through

YouTube videos. It was not actually through the lecturers that we had at the university. I mean some of it was but for the most part university lecturers are selected on the basis of their research output not on the basis of how good they are at teaching at least in the fancy universities in the UK and even if the lecturer is really good you attend the lecture once maybe you watch the recording of the lecture but then there's like other things you have questions in and turns out there's people on YouTube that have done deep dives into all of this stuff with amazing diagrams amazing animation in medical school you learn how to do a cardiovascular examination for example

like you know how to listen to someone's heart and like what order of operations to do it in and yeah you do it in a lecture or in a seminar for the first time. But then how does every single medical student in the world actually drill the skill? They watch a YouTube video about it. You know, there's a YouTube channel called Geeky Medics where some guy has put together these videos where you can just watch it repeatedly and they can download a PDF with like the mark scheme. It was those PDFs that we printed out that me and all my friends at Cambridge to learn the skill and it was those videos that we had on the background. It wasn't the fact that we taught we got taught it at

a lecture like 2 years ago. Even doctors are learning the skills of medicine not from medical school but from YouTube videos. I have some friends who are surgeons now. They're literally learning how to do operations. Now, of course, a surgeon learns the operation by like observing the senior surgeon doing the operation and like assisting it and stuff. But how do they know the steps of the operation? They watch a YouTube video about it thankfully. And this is a great service to the world. There are all sorts of surgeons all around the world who have literally recorded their operations and are talking through the steps. And you can in a way learn at least the theoretical component of the

skill of literally taking out someone's appendix by watching a YouTube video about it. uh and then of course you're actually putting into practice when you're in a surgical residency or when you're when you're on the job for that kind of practical skill. So if a surgeon can learn how to do an appendicctomy from watching some YouTube videos and then putting into practice, why can you not learn how to run an Instagram ad by just watching some YouTube videos and then putting into practice? Once you start seeing life this way, that every single thing is a skill and every single thing can be learned. It means that the thing of I don't have the skill for X gets replaced with I don't have the

skill for X yet. The word yet is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because you know that everything is a skill. Everything can be learned. And if someone else has figured out how to do it, you can as well. I was doing a Q&A on Instagram the other day and someone asked, uh, how do I build a business when I don't have any AI skills? If you replace that, how do I build a business when I don't have AI skills yet? Then it becomes like, well, learn the AI skills that you need. What are the skills you need for a business? Well, you need to know how to attract, convert, delight customers. You know, you need to learn how to operate your business and you need to learn how to scale things once

you're at, you know, a reasonable revenue milestone where you can actually hire people. You know, AI is a thing that facilitates all of these different options. And so these days, you can literally just ask Chad PT being like, "Hey, Chad Beauty, I'm attempting to learn the skill of Instagram ads. Can you help me figure out what the best AI workflows are to make Instagram ads?" And guarantee you'll get an amazing response from Claude and Chad and Gemini that will teach you the skill of doing that. We started running Instagram ads in our business like probably a few weeks ago uh with one of my team members. And I realized I did not yet have the skill of actually running Instagram ads in a reasonable way.

And so what did I do? I asked Claude to teach me the skill. I watched like two YouTube videos about I got up to speed and then I started tinkering around with Meta Ads Manager and we managed to run some Instagram ads uh profitably. So, we're actually making money off of running Instagram ads. If someone needs something or if your business needs something, is your immediate mind, oh, I can just figure it out. Or is your mind, oh my god, I don't have the skill and it's going to be so hard and take so long to learn the skill and I don't have time to learn the skill. It's like, bro, when you're on the toilet, you can literally just talk to Chachi PT and ask it to teach you the skill. If you

literally don't have the time for that, you can put on voice mode and next time you're on a walk or doing the laundry or something, you can literally just ask it to pretty much teach you anything and explain it to you. And then of course that's the theoretical component like you learn what to do in order to do the thing. And then once you start applying it in practice that's when you actually gain the knowledge and the skill seeps into your brain, your body, your subconscious, all of that kind of stuff. But it really is just a matter of it's a skill. Everything is a skill and everything can be learned. And then it's just a question of just how long it takes, right? I really like this line from Alexi which I think about a lot which

is that you can train anyone to do anything. You're probably not a neurosurgeon, but you could train to become a neurosurgeon and you could learn how to remove brain tumors from someone's brain. You have the ability to do that. The question is just how long it takes. I've got two friends who are neurosurgeons. The way they learn the steps of the operation is by watching YouTube videos, unsurprisingly, but then the way they put it into practice is because they spent 15 years training to get to a point where they're even allowed to put the skills into practice. Uh for good reason. So, you know, for you to become a neurosurgeon would take about 15 years. I was speaking to another one of our lifestyle business

academy students. I called her Jane. Jane had landed her first client for her business and was helping this co this like local coffee shop with their operations and automating aspect of their operations and she was learning how to use Calendarly and how to use Zapier and how to connect it up to a Google sheet and I was asking her you know how hard did you think it was going to be and how hard was it actually and she was like yeah you know before I got started I just in my mind I thought that operations is really difficult and then I started doing it I was like oh okay I mean the software just makes it super easy and I can just watch YouTube tutorials and I can just ask chat and so

she figured out how to literally automate this coffee shops like uh operations never having done it before and just figuring out how to do it to understand how it all fit together and then was literally saving them hours and hours every week where they could actually spend making coffee rather than doing the admin. That's so cool. Everything is a skill issue if you're not yet rich. If you're not yet financially free, it's just a skill issue, man. Like you just don't have the skills. You don't have the skills of attract, convert, delight, and operate. And are those skills very difficult to learn? No, not really cuz it's tutorials for literally all of them. Have you ever done a sales call before? You know, this

is something our students in our LBAS have had me do having are having to do now. sales calls where you get on a Zoom call with someone and you try and pitch them your thing. Before you do it for the first time, it seems like the scariest thing in the world. Then you do it a couple of times and you're like, "Okay." And then you watch a couple of videos about sales training. You attend a couple of our workshops. You ask your coach, whatever the thing might be. And honestly, there's loads of free YouTube tutorials about this stuff and oh, previously I thought sales was like this scary thing and actually was like really, really hard, but actually there's a framework that you follow. It

seems really hard and seems like a real black box before you're in there. And then once you're in there, you're like, "Oh, there actually is a method to the madness." It is the same with everything. But the reason I wanted to make this video is because I want to make this video as a video that I send to, you know, all of our lifestyle business academy students when they have this kind of mindset um or anyone really who wants to be financially free but has this idea that like skills are hard to learn. Skills are not hard to learn. Like with the amount of free information you've got on the internet these days with AI, like pretty much any skill you want is literally at your

fingertips. And certain skills mean that like you become rich. Like if you have the skill of knowing how to attract customers, if you have the skill of knowing how to sell to them, you are way more likely to become rich and get way richer than someone who does not have those skills or the version of you that didn't have those skills. And Shakur, you can learn those skills. You can watch free YouTube videos, you can ask IDP, you can take courses, you can sign up to a lifestyle business academy if you really want, but like everything around you is built by people who are no smarter than you are. If you're at this point in the video, the only thing that's standing between you and

financial freedom is just that you don't yet have the skills that you need for it. And learning skills is easy. If you want to become financially free, it's just downstream of learning a few skills. It's really not that hard. So, with that said, if you enjoyed this video, uh there is a video over here which is more honest advice for someone who wants financial freedom. Otherwise, have a lovely day and I'll see you next time.