The biggest mistake in your 20's that will make you poor in your 30's

In this video, I'm going to break down one of the stories that impacted my life the most and hopefully how you can learn from it. So, I wasn't that great of a person when I graduated high school. I think I was really self-centered. It was always about me and what everyone could do for me. Everything I wanted was just like respect and status. And maybe that hasn't changed. I've just gotten better at it. I don't know. I want to share with you a conversation that changed my life. If you don't know who I am, my name is Al Mosy. I own acquisition. com. It's a portfolio of companies of $85 million a year. This particular story

was after my first semester of college. I went to an all guy school in high school and I went to Vanderbilt for my undergrad and I had acquired a pretty bad reputation in my opinion in high school by being kind of uh promiscuous for lack of a better term. I you know I was known as a womanizer and I just didn't generally have a very good reputation or at least one that I wasn't proud of. And so when I went to college I was like okay it's my chance to start fresh and it's a much bigger school so you know my transgressions won't be as known because there's way more people. And the first, you know, 3 months of my college career, I did everything that I was doing in high school on steroids. I did more of everything. I drank more. I went out more. I uh ended up having a one I think a one nine GPA going into. So I basically had these report cards from my uh teachers that were like halfway through the first semester that were sent home that were like, "Your son is failing basically every class. " And so my dad called me up and was like, "If you're going to do this, like, you can do this at here for free and not do this at college, right? " And so I went home and I was like, "How do I get these people to stop talking all the smack? " Like there was this thing back in the day called Juicy Campus, which is like a gossip form and ended up getting shut down because there was so much hate on it. But there was like this massive thread about me and how I was just like a total womanizer and all this stuff. I felt horrible. You know what I mean? You can imagine like the younger version of yourself that's really sensitive to like what everyone says about you. And so I just went to bed my dad and I was like, "How do I change what they're saying? How do I get them to say good things? " And it sounds to say this now, but what he said to me changed my life. And he looked at me in the eyes and he was like, "Why are you trying to change people's perception of you when you can just change who you are and let their perceptions catch up. The only way you're going to change your reputation is by being different. " He's like, "You need to stop being this person that does all these things and your reputation will catch up. And even if it doesn't, you'll always know. " I and honestly it barely scratched the surface because my ego was so high and I was like no I just have to think of a better way to like market myself. But I ended up knowing that he was very serious about the threat of pulling me out of school if I didn't get my grades up. And so what I ended up doing for the next half of the semester of my first semester of freshman year is I didn't go out at all. I didn't drink anymore. I really didn't like hang out with girls at all. And all I did was study. And I was able to pull my might have been one two. It was very low up to a 3. 2 two for the semester, which basically meant I got an A on everything from that point for the rest of the semester. And so when I went back home, he was like, well, now you know you can do it and so we should always expect that is what you're going to get from here on out. And it also kind of proved it to myself, too. I was like, I guess I can do this. And you know what happened is after I started switching that way, people still thought of me as a And I still had to deal with that. It took like 2 years to really

reverse the reputation that I had acquired in the first 3 months. I think during that period of time, I grew an appreciation for how easy it is, especially in first impressions, to set the wrong one and how hard it is to overcome a negative impression and my reputation overall. The realization I had was there's too many people that you're interacting with in the world to try and curate reputation. The only way to change your reputation is to change who you are. Reputation is fundamentally just what people say about you to your face and behind your back. I'm not saying that you need to care about what everyone else thinks. That's not really the point of this. It's much more if one person says you're an whatever. If every person you know says you're an like you might be an And so if you have one of those situations where you feel like the proof or the evidence is overwhelming and you might even believe it, then it's probably you. I think that for me getting out of the whole like I can control this and try and curate what people think about me and transitioning to be like at the end of the day I'm the only person who knows who I am and I don't like just saying like well how can I get to a point where I would like me even if everyone else hated me? How can I like me? When I started operating from that place, it really changed my life because then I started thinking like, what version of me do I want to be? And what does that guy do? Well, that guy studies really hard and that guy works out is a really good friend. He's always respectful, doesn't have an ego. And it took me a long time and I still work on this stuff. You know what I mean? I'm not saying I'm done by any stretch of the imagination. But I think that if you can simply shift the perspective of like I'm going to try and appear this way to like I want to be this way. If it just so happens to get

captured, great. And if it doesn't, great. And there's this quote by Anthony Tetus that I'm probably going to butcher, but he says, "If you need someone else to tell you something about yourself, you are out of integrity because you can always be your own witness. " I think that that's a great point to wrap the this little video lesson up with because that piece strikes to the core of everything, which is we are our own witnesses. And if we want to change our reputation, we need to change our reputation with ourselves first and then eventually it will reflect in the world. And this has just been very telling for me because like more and more people recognize me every day when I'm walking around and I'm like gez like I don't have any room for having a bad day. Like if I'm out to dinner and like I'm just like not concentrating and I'm short with the waiter and the waiter recognizes me, then you know he's like this guy's an or whatever. And so I guess in some ways it's like you can pretend like you're famous because you are to yourself. And so I will leave you with that. Mosy Nation. If you're new to the channel, welcome. Lots of love and I'll see you guys in the next video. Butch.