Working a 9-5 job was soul-crushing for me.
Long hours. Boring meetings. Bosses who thought they were going to be the next Donald Duck president and gave speeches full of political mumbo jumbo.
Even in school I disliked the conventional path. I got called into the career councilor’s office in my final year of high school. She looked at my file and proudly said “I think you should become a plumber.”
My potential was cleaning up other people’s poop. Great.
I always had bigger ideas though. I knew from an early age I would be a millionaire somehow, some way. It became a necessity because I grew up in two homes that were taken away by the bank.
I never wanted my own kids to deal with this stress.
The path to millions was never clear, but I knew it would happen one day through the internet. It’s why I spent my youth online.
Because I have average IQ it took me longer than normal to figure it out. I tried many experiments and got nowhere. Then I had a decent break with an 8-figure eCommerce business in my 20s, but that ended in dark mental health issues.
Then I saw the rise of social media. I said early on that one day a president would win the election because of the attention economy.
It finally happened in the U.S. in 2024.
Before I share the how-to, I want you to be aware that money isn’t everything. If you’re not open-minded, treat people like garbage, get a big ego and obsess over owning luxury junk, being a millionaire can destroy you.
Let’s get into it.
The corporate career path hides these little-known truths
Working in a big bank brainwashed me.
My view of the world became tainted. I saw society as two classes: 1) The have-nots and 2) The haves. And the bank taught me that to be in the second category I had to wait my turn in line for decades and be chosen by a recruiter or boss.
This reality never sat well with me.
I’m impatient. I hate asking for permission. And I don’t respect seat warmers who think years in the game or credentials count for anything. I can 100% sit in a college classroom for 4 years and do homework to get a degree, masters or PhD if I want to.
But I choose not to… and won’t pay $100K for it either.
My time is better spent elsewhere.
Before I made millions online, every wealthy person I came across in Australia made their money from real estate. They’d get into huge debt, buy a family home, become a landlord, and rent their property to a family. Then they’d take the equity after a few years to bankroll the next investment property.
If they were super weird, they’d also start buying commercial real estate. I had no interest in real estate. It’s despicable that family homes have become big business that screw normal people out of ever owning a place to live.
The other cliche advice I got was to invest in the S&P 500 with every spare dollar I had. “The U.S. empire will never die, Timbo. 8% growth every year, mate.”
In 2008, the recession hit and I nearly lost everything. So I lost hope in betting on one single country. The final path I saw was the startup path. It goes like this…
Come up with an idea based on tech. Raise a bunch of money from venture capitalists. Build out a huge team of employees and buy ads to promote the business. Exit the business later on, or do an IPO. Get rich. Become Zuckerberg.
Thankfully, working in a bank gave me the raw data on this dream. No matter how smart or gifted you are, the chances of winning the startup lottery are worse than buying a real lottery ticket.
So I gave up on the unicorn startup dream.
During the 2020 bat virus the creator economy (hate the name) was born. Everything changed forever. Social media finally had a place in society. Monetizing your mind and skills with nothing but an internet connection went from being a meme to reality.
There are 3 important ideas you need to know about this movement online that’s creating more millionaires than any other opportunity.
1. Money is this odd type of game
Okay, you’re going to hate me for saying this.
What I’ve learned over the last 11 years of online business is the how-to of being a millionaire doesn’t matter much. Why?
Money is created in the mind.
That’s woo-woo as hell, and yes I watched the law of attraction movie last night (joking). But this is the missing piece of the puzzle no one talks about. It’s impossible to become a millionaire if you have the wrong mindset, such as these thoughts:
Seeing investments as expenses
Getting frustrated instead of learning
Being a victim instead of getting even
Thinking every good idea is impossible for you
Seeing wealthy people as scammers (a.k.a eat the rich) instead of mentors
Thinking the government is going to save you from your problems
Investing your time and mental energy into the news and politics
How you see the world is directly related to how much money you have.
To be a millionaire you must be an opportunist. You must help make the world slightly better than it is. You must see humanity getting better and more productive, not darker and on the edge of an apocalypse.
It may surprise you to know that my family labeled me as a pessimist for many years. And I was. I lived in a dark place in my mind. I hated myself. I spent many hours in therapy. Ultimately, I’d lost hope in myself and humanity.
Going to a wild Tony Robbins event changed my reality. In 4 days, I learned I was conditioned to see the world as evil. I didn’t trust anyone and I was skeptical of every opportunity.
I loved being skeptical because it made me feel smart and that was amazing for my fragile ego. I binged on skepticism and conspiracy theories while I chugged down pure blonde beers (Timbo was a blonde bimbo).
Anyone who taught people how to make money, I labelled as a guru. I instantly dismissed them and called them a scammer.
The truth is I wasn’t ready to be a millionaire.
I needed to heal my mind. I needed to cleanse my mind of all the toxic poison TV had fed it. What this means for you is money is more of a mental game than you may realize.
Here are some practical things you can do to upgrade your mind:
Read more biographical books of influential people
Spend time with millionaires
Turn off news/politics
Join a mastermind
Program the social media algorithms only to serve you content that you approve, which is good for your mental health (never go to any social media homepage).
One of the biggest mental unlocks I had came while working in banking. I was forced to do volunteer days at a charity of my choice. If I didn’t do it, I didn’t get my bonus.
So I signed up to volunteer at a homeless shelter. I went in with an immature mind and came out a different person.
The mental health issues I had at the time seemed microscopic when I spent the day with people who had nothing and slept on the street. Or who were facing drug and alcohol abuse issues. Or women who’d been r*ped. My problems felt ridiculous after that experience.
Volunteer at a homeless shelter to get some perspective on how good you have it
2. Working hard is the biggest lie of the 21st century
I had a weird experience recently.
A customer said something like “I paid you $800 for help and you’ve only spent 10 minutes with me this month.”
Initially I felt guilty. Then the millionaire mindset I learned years ago kicked in.
“How much time I spent is irrelevant. What matters is whether you got the result. And would you rather get the result in 10 minutes or 16 hours?”
The factory worker model of the world, that humans still worship like a cult, says we gotta “work hard.” Ya’ll know what I mean. Just spend 15 minutes on LinkedIn and you’ll see 100s of grinders posting quotes all saying some version of “Work hard, bro.”
To become a millionaire you must disconnect your time from your income.
When I worked in a call centre the first way I learned to do this was by becoming an investor. I’d make a peanut salary then invest anything leftover into the stock market. Every quarter I’d get dividends and/or the upward growth of the stock price.
Money in, money out.
I clicked one button in my stock trading app and money poured out of it for years without me having to do any more work. I still do this today.
“Hours spent” doesn’t equal value.
What makes you a millionaire is your ability to solve problems people face.
The more problems you solve for people the more money you make.
The harder the problems you solve the wealthier you become.
I started out helping people get a writing habit. Now I help people create 6 and 7-figure online businesses. The transition between the two has drastically increased my income which is to be expected.
Helping someone create a successful business is one of the hardest and most highly desirable goals on earth. It’s reasonable someone would be paid millions to do so.
Go from a by-the-hour worshipper to a problem solver. Start with easy problems, and then solve hard problems.
3. Build distribution then build whatever the f*ck you want
This idea is so dumb I’m scared to put my name to it.
In the early 2010s, it became obvious to me that a great idea didn’t mean much. I had many great ideas back then and was broke as a joke.
I learned the hard way as a musician that talent was enough. I’d make a Grammy-award-winning song and make three sales. During this time talent shows like X-Factor, American Idol, and later, The Voice, dominated TV.
Because I wanted to be a famous musician I watched these shows.
After the winner of each season I’d track their journeys. They’d win some fake $250,000 prize (paid out over decades lol) and get a record contract. Within a year, the record label would drop them, and they’d likely give up music or play at pubs for a couple of free beers. This pattern repeated.
When I thought about it, it made sense. These musicians had talent but they needed an audience. So they’d go on a TV show like The Voice and sing for free. They’d borrow the audience. People would like them.
As soon as the TV show ended, so did their access to the audience. So they’d go right back to the start again unless a record label decided to rent them a new audience. This revelation changed the game for me. I could finally see my fatal flaw.
I’d spent my career focusing on talent instead of distribution.
So, above all, I chose to build distribution. I didn’t think about business, money, or education. I just focused on posting daily on social media. I eventually racked up 1B+ views online on my content.
The paths to monetization at this point became endless.
If you don’t have attention on what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what you sell.
But this idea gets taken too far…
What I’ve learned recently is you don’t need 1M followers on a single platform to become a millionaire. You can do it with an audience as small as 5000-10,000 followers.
This makes me so happy.
I know millionaires online who have distribution and sell stuff as dumb as men’s hair gel or tubs of ice cream. When people buy into your worldview they’ll buy almost anything you have to sell.
Unsexy businesses usually make the most money.
Action: stop obsessing over a business idea or talent. Nobody gives a sh*t, including your grandma. Build distribution in the form of followers that convert to an email list.
The path to make $1M online
This sounds like clickbait. It’s not.
And even if you have this goal and fail, as the cliche quote says, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”
To make $1M online you’ll first have to think of yourself as a business, not an employee. This means you think and act like an owner.
You say, “Yes, I’ll write on X to get attention, but I’ll never forget that I can get banned or the platform can go bankrupt. So I’ll always focus on my email list.”
It means you don’t focus on income streams like writing royalties, book advances, ad-share revenue, Youtube ads, newsletter sponsorships, etc. Why? Because these are gifts that can turn off at any moment or plummet in revenue.
A business built on quicksand is still a bad foundation, even if Mark Zuckerberg meets you each morning to shake your hand and personally kiss you on the butt.
Heres’s the oversimplified path to $1M:
Mastering the art of one social media platform.
Posting every day on that one platform.
Only promoting your email list on social (nothing else).
Creating one core paid offer.
Validating that paid offer with real clients.
Iterating on that paid offer to add more pricing tiers.
Building an offer stack with multiple offers (some passive, some requiring your time).
Aggressively iterating on your offers every 30 days.
Obsessing over the deliverability of an offer to make it 1% better each day.
Scaling your distribution by adding more social media platforms.
Using a ghostwriter to write on social media platforms you dislike to further scale distribution.
All of this is simple to understand but takes obsession to execute.
Being a millionaire makes many parts of life a lot easier. To access these huge advantages, it’s reasonable to expect that making $1M is harder than warming an office chair in a cubicle for a few decades.
The part I like most about being an online millionaire is it’s one hell of an adventure. Every day you meet new people. You get comments from your heroes. You get invited to do cool stuff. Your opinions matter. You get to teach people what you know.
I dare you to choose this unconventional path and, in doing so, stick your middle finger up at society that wants to mold and shape you into a robot.
