After many months of hard work, we've launched the Pathways To Wealth show!
This show is going to be in both video and audio form. You can watch the video episodes on the ChrisDunnTV YouTube channel. We've also released the audio version of the show on Itunes, Stitcher, and Soundcloud.
In the first episode, I'm discussing exactly what you're going to get out of this show, and what to expect in the future.
These episodes are going to be packed with interviews and lessons from some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, investors, traders, innovators, and authors.
So, let's go ahead and get this thing kicked off…
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
- How I stumbled into becoming an entrepreneur at age 16 after getting suspended in high school
- Why I quit corporate America despite having a six-figure income at age 19
- The 16 hour-a-day hustle that helped me build my first seven-figure business
- My goal of this show – helping you discover new & time-tested pathways to creating more income, wealth, and time-freedom
- The two types of episodes in this show:
- Interviews with some of the world's most successful investors, entrepreneurs, and innovators.
- Lessons from tests I've run, and what's working and not working
- Who this show is going to be valuable for
Subscribe To The Pathways To Wealth Show:
Itunes | Stitcher | Soundcloud | YouTube | Email
Transcription:
Chris Dunn: Welcome to the very first episode of Pathways to Wealth. I'm your host, Chris Dunn and I am so excited to kick this show off because my team and I have been working on this for well over a year.
And in the first episode here, I'm going to introduce myself and also explain exactly what you're going to get by watching or listening to this show.
If we haven’t already met, I'm probably best known for the fact that I created a 7-figure business in my mid-20s while traveling to well over a hundred countries around the world with my wife.
As cool or as glamorous as that might sound, the reality is that it took a tremendous amount of effort, blood, sweat, tears, heartache, failures, let-downs to get to that point.
And my goal with this new show is to bring you the realities of new and time-tested pathways to building what I call true wealth and we’ll talk about what that is in a second. But first, I want to talk a little bit about how we got to where we are today.
I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. In fact, I was born into a military family. At the age of 5, we moved to South Korea and then in middle school we moved to Iceland. That’s probably where I got my travel bug from and started really early.
In high school, we moved to Florida, and this is where things began to unravel…
See, I was never really a great student. I failed pretty much every math class since the 4th of the 5th grade but when I got into high school, I started to get into trouble. I was failing nearly every class and I ended up getting in-school suspension, I believe, in the 10th grade.
Instead of sending you home and suspending you and just kicking you out of school, they have this thing where they basically put you in a classroom from the beginning of class to the end of the school day and you couldn’t speak to anybody. They basically gave you two options. You could sit there and do homework or you can read books.
Seeing that I was the rebellious type, I didn’t do homework in high school, so I just started thumbing through some books and found a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad and a couple of other business books. So I started reading that, I got really inspired.
I learned that you didn’t have to go through the traditional process of going to college, spending a lot of money, time, and effort on a formal education to get a job at a corporation that was going to take care of you for 30 or 40 years or more, and then finally, when you're 65, be able to relax and enjoy retirement.
That plan scared the hell out of me. And so when I was reading these business books and alternative education books, I got really inspired. In fact, I read so much that week that I just asked my teacher can I stay in the suspension class because all this other stuff is distracting and I don’t care about any of it.
Shortly after that, I started my first business. It was a detailing business where we detailed fleets of cars after school and on the weekends. After some hustling, I started pulling in about $3000 in cash a week. I hired a lot of my friends in high school, we started doing car shows and traveling, and doing some really cool stuff. I got the ball rolling on my entrepreneurial journey really early in life.
By some miracle, I ended up graduating high school and I still have this guilt and this belief that I had to go to college because that “guaranteed success” and I didn’t know what the future held. I ended up selling the detailing business and enrolled at a local community college because quite frankly, my grades were so bad no university or state college would take me.
I went to community college and quickly found out that that just wasn’t the path for me. I couldn’t learn at the slowest person’s pace and I felt like the time and the money and the energy was really just a waste. I ended up quitting and I was sitting there one day and ended up having some connections through my business that I own and ended up hustling my way into the mortgage business for a nationwide homebuilder.
This was really interesting because this was right before the housing boom of the early 2000s, so the timing was pretty good. I ended up earning a 6-figure income when I was 18, 19, and 20 years old.
But what I found out was that was not the path for me either because even though I was making a lot of money and I built my first house when I was 20 years old and had the nice truck and the nice car, we’d go out to nice dinners every night, I felt like that was the definition of success but in reality, I was miserable because I didn’t own my time.
I sat in rush hour traffic 90 minutes to and from work each way and I was working for a big heartless corporation and I basically was selling debt to people. I was in the front lines of the subprime mortgage crisis.
I learned that money wasn’t the end goal. I had made money before and just working at some corporation and slaving away in an office in a cubicle wasn’t really what I was destined to do.
I ended up quitting that as well and I had a little bit of a nest egg, but I really wanted to get into investing. I had done some real estate deals after I graduated. I had been involved in the stock market ever since 11th grade in high school and I knew that there was another alternative. I knew there was a better way.
For the next 18 months or so, I told my girlfriend at that time, who is now my wife, I said, “Babe look, we can't go out for dinner. I have to hustle. I have to save money and I have to work hard.”
From about 7 in the morning every single day to about 2 or 3 in the morning, I was in front of my computer or on the phone learning, hustling, and just doing everything I could to find a pathway to wealth that worked for me. It wasn’t easy. I actually burned through nearly all of my cash, I went about $90,000 in debt, and this was around the time that the housing crisis started to hit, so I lost a lot of equity in my properties and things were looking just very, very grim.
But after several months of just really busting my ass and hustling as hard as I could, things started to come together. I started to make money and started to have a few different income sources and then within the course of about a year, built my first 7-figure business.
Fast forward to today, I'm an active investor and entrepreneur, I do real estate, we trade the financial markets. My wife is actually a full-time stock trader. I'm an angel investor. I work with early stage tech start-ups in Austin, Texas and I'm really just addicted to building business, building wealth, and doing epic adventures around the world.
My motivation to start this show actually happened a few years ago when I realized that there are so many people that are stuck in jobs that they hate. They are either not making enough money or they're not fulfilled in what they're doing and the fact that the middle class in America and in other western countries is evaporating.
What I mean by that is you have more and more people every day that are in the downward cycle slipping closer and closer into poverty but the good news is, is that we also have more people than any time in history becoming millionaires. You have this evaporating effect where some people are slipping closer to poverty and moving into poverty every day, but then you also have people that are moving towards wealth every day.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that is just becoming faster. That process is happening at a faster and faster rate. My goal with this show is to help people find new and time-tested pathways to building true wealth.
What is true wealth? To me, true wealth doesn’t mean having a Ferrari or a mansion, that might be part of your plan but the most important thing when it comes to true wealth is having ownership over the most important asset that we all have that is finite, means it always depleting, and you can never buy or get any more of that back.
What is that? It’s time.
It doesn’t matter if you're making a million dollars a year, if you're in a job that you hate and you're miserable like I was when I was working in the mortgage business, then you don’t own your time. You are not truly wealthy because what does it matter if you're working 80 hours a week in a job that you hate that you can't enjoy your money, but on the other side of that, income.
If you don’t have sustainable increasing income, you're constantly slipping lower and lower into poverty and also building wealth –passive income, income producing assets, there are just so many ways to create income to get you out of your situation now and then to build your capital to set you up for the long run and do it in a way that you own your time.
There’s a ton of great books and resources out there like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; The Four-Hour Workweek and things like that. But the problem is that books usually only teach theory and so my goal with this show is to bring you actionable steps for how to achieve your goals and things that are working today.
We’re going to do that in two ways…
The first way, is I'm going to be interviewing some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators where they're going to show you what’s working for them today, and then number two, is I'm going to giving you specific lessons on things that I've tested and things that I'm doing that are working for me and maybe some things that used to work but don’t work anymore and some ideas that I'm currently testing.
We’ll talk about everything from how to build a business and how to be an entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter if you just want to build a lifestyle business or if you want to create a start-up that you're going to hopefully sell for 100 million dollars or if you just want to be a freelancer.
I think that in the very near future, pretty much everybody is going to be an entrepreneur on some level. Even if you're a nurse or a construction worker, everybody is going to need to incorporate these lessons and abilities that entrepreneurs have. We'll also talk about real estate investing, trading the financial markets, international investing, sales and communication which I think is a big thing that is lacking in our school system today, online marketing, and much, much more. I am a total geek for researching, testing, and putting into action theories and ways of building wealth.
Look, this is not about getting rich without trying. I'm the no bullshit guy and I'm not going to give you fluff. We’re going to go into actionable strategies and things that you can put to work today.
Let’s talk about who this show is for. It’s really for people that are entrepreneurial minded that wants to build wealth, maybe you're interested in traveling and having more time freedom, and I think there're a few different categories if you will. The first is maybe someone who is young, maybe in high school or college, entrepreneurial minded, isn’t sure if college, the traditional route or self-education is best for you.
The second group would be somebody or maybe a young couple in their 20s or 30s that is maybe in a career that they're not happy with, maybe they're in some debt, maybe you went to college and you're now paying off student loans but you're willing to hustle and do whatever it takes to build wealth.
And the final person would be maybe someone in their 40s or 50s, maybe you're semi-retired or self-employed and you have a little bit of a nest egg, maybe you have some debt and you're really just not happy with what you're doing with your daily life and maybe you want to create more time freedom to spend with your family or do some traveling or something like that. So it’s really for anybody who just wants to create more income, build more wealth, and own more of your time.
We’re going to be releasing at least one show a week both on the Chris Dunn TV YouTube channel and on the podcast so you can listen to it if you're driving to work or working out and I hope you're really excited for this journey. This is going to be a really fun and valuable show, so don’t forget to subscribe to the Chris Dunn TV YouTube channel, subscribe on the iTunes podcast and also visit ChrisDunn.com for the show notes, video downloads, and abundance of resources that we’re going to be posting there.
Thank you guys so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode!