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There are layers to what's called leverage in the world. The first lever was labor—it was just work. If you wanted to get more done, you had more workers, more employees, and back in the day, slaves. The second lever, which created more wealth than labor, was capital. That was when the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and the titans of U.S. industry were created, around the time banking laws changed to allow access to other people's money—capital. The most recent lever is code. This is how Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk created an army of labor and capital in the form of robots and online code. Today, the most democratized, easily accessible lever for all of us is — the audience.

Curiosity beats intellect almost any day of the week. How many intelligent people have you met who couldn't thread a needle through a hole? So many people think intelligence is the key to success, but if you actually look at data, you'll find that the smartest people—those at the far end of the curve—have some of the lowest levels of success (wealth, relationships, happiness). If I could give one skill to anyone, it would be curiosity. If you're curious, you learn something, iterate on it, innovate, and eventually win.

If you want to be a good investor, what are you doing? You're asking questions to see if people are lying to you in order to decide if you should give them money or not. That's what investing is: Do I believe what I'm being told? And if I believe it, should I allocate resources to it?

Do you think you're the hero, or are the people you're serving the heroes?

How much more powerful are my ripples if I can influence others to live incredible lives, to get bigger, to create greater things, and I can just be like Yoda, whispering in the ear of the heroes—which is all of you?

As I was watching all of that, I thought, "God, what is the difference between me and them?" My last name is Sanchez. I'm a young woman. They worked in factories called maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border—essentially warehouse factories for companies like Lowe's or Home Depot. They were shipped in from southern Mexico to work in these shantytowns. It was a better life for those women compared to the south—more pay, more opportunity—except for the pervasive violence. Hundreds of women are murdered every year in Juárez, and I imagine the real number is much higher. What I realized in that moment—and one of the big reasons I'm into content today—is that I don’t think we should get rich quietly. I believe the difference between getting rich quietly and getting rich together is that we make more money and have more impact. The difference between me and those women was simply that I was born an American citizen with the ability to earn. What if we could teach more people that? That’s why I’m loud on the internet and why I’m mission-driven.

I am so tired of seeing content creators more concerned about their own image and what people think of them than about speaking the truth.

I work a lot from gut instinct as opposed to technicality. When I say, "speak to a specific person," I think the easiest way to start when you're growing a channel is to focus on a specific niche. If you go out and try to be like Emma Chamberlain (I don't know if she's relevant anymore) where she’s just lying in bed talking about coffee or whatever happens in her day with no particular niche, it’s really hard to grow. If you want to grow faster, you actually do the counterintuitive thing: you narrow it down. In my world, I started with people who wanted to buy laundromats. Think about how small that niche was—laundromat buyers! I don't even know if there were people on the internet doing that, but I found it interesting. That was my specific niche. Then I thought, okay, maybe car washes, maybe boring businesses in general, maybe people who care about business, or people who care about community in business, or those who care about making an impact on the world through community and business. See how it branches out?

I think each platform has a personality, and you need to understand who you're serving on each platform. Maybe you’ve already talked about this, but TikTok is like your 17-year-old kind of shitty nephew, right? That’s TikTok. He’s got ADD, he's a little angry sometimes, but sometimes he wants to be inspired. He’d like you to dance—yeah, TikTok. If I were going to serve TikTok (and I don’t pay a lot of attention to that platform for personal reasons, I’d think, "Would my 17-year-old kind of shitty cousin like what I’m about to create?" Am I speaking specifically to him? Many of you are probably parents and friends of young people, and the way you communicate with a 17-year-old is very different from how you’d communicate with a 45-year-old. That’s TikTok.

Then we’ve got Instagram, which I think of like a young 30-year-old mom with a couple of kids who likes pumpkin spice lattes, matching outfits, suede boots. You see who has the most engagement on the platform—mom bloggers crush it. There’s one I love named Dani Austin, and she’s created multiple brands. She does these goofy dances, and everyone loves the kid content—that’s Instagram.

There’s an old saying we used to say in finance: People want to take vitamins, but people actually take painkillers.

When I think about what I serve our users, I’m obsessive. My team will tell you I’m maniacal about it. Every moment someone spends with our content is me taking a small piece of their life—a tiny little moment, because we only get so many of them. If they’re going to give me that moment, I’d better give them something worthwhile. I’d better give them something that could create more moments in their life. I never want to give them junk food.

I’m like force-functioning people to care about business. Most people don’t care. My mom watches my videos and says, “That’s cute. I liked that part.” I ask, “What part?” She says, “All of it.” So, you have to realize the games you play have repercussions. The repercussion of me thinking that business and entrepreneurship are really important and that everyone should have ownership in something, and that it will change their life, is that I probably will never get as many views as a Kardashian wannabe applying 13 levels of lipstick. You just have to decide what you want to do. If you want to go viral easily—none of it is easy—but if you want to go viral, makeup and beauty channels have eight times the level of engagement of most other channels. They also sell more products than almost any other channels. So, when you think the Kardashians aren’t smart, you’re wrong. They’re incredibly intelligent. They know which channels are going to hit and create brands around them. I just don’t think the world needs another one of those. I think there are plenty. I’m happy to buy from them—it’s not my jam—but I have actually started to realize that I don’t really care much about clothes or makeup. You might say, "But Cody, your face is painted like a clown today. What do you mean you don’t care? You have so much lipstick on!" The reason is I’ve realized it’s something I’ve done because I understand it now, not because it’s my natural state. I’ve realized that to reach women, they need to see something they want in the life we have. They’re not as inspired by a big bank account. This is a gross generalization—some of us are—but they’re not as inspired by a bank account or a huge business. They’re like, "Are you happy? Do you still feel feminine? Are you and your husband happy? Can I be more financially free?" So, I’ve started to realize that this personal brand really does matter. If it were up to me, all I’d want to hear from someone are the tactics. I don’t really care about anything else. But again, the content isn’t for me—it’s for someone else.

In the beginning, I shot one day a week. I had all the scripts prepared, went through all of them, and that worked. Then, as we got bigger, I realized, why would I try to come up with content when I can document instead of create? The cool part is, if your content is authentic to you, you're probably already doing the thing you're creating content about. There is some packaging and changing you need to make, but the best creators are like, "I'm building an aquarium, and also there's a camera."

In my opinion, personal brands are easier to grow. Humans like and follow humans. We don't naturally like and follow logos. It's easier to grow a personal brand, harder to grow a business brand, but the business should outlast you as a person. Unless you've created that, you've only created a very public job for yourself, not a real business.

Most people’s prices reflect what they think their value is, so take a deep look at what you think you're worth.

Have you ever come home excited to tell your spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend something, and you explain it to them, and they just shit on the idea? Has that ever happened, or is it just me?

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