S1E8: “I didn’t realise I was poor” | Multi-millionaire by 27 on the different levels of wealth | entrepreneur Timo Armoo
What’s it like suddenly becoming rich? Entrepreneur Timothy, or Timo, Armoo grew up poor. But, having got a scholarship to a private school, he realised there was “helicopter-level wealth” so decided to win at the “game” of getting rich by building businesses. He sold his latest company Fanbytes last year when he was 27 which suddenly catapulted him up the wealth ladder. The next day, everything felt different…
Key things to think about from this episode
Making money and growing money are different skillsets.
Timo suggests trying to figure out the ‘game’ you’re trying to win, e.g. he realised he couldn’t win the intelligence game so decided to win the business game.
Most people who do something significant started off not having a clue what they were doing - they just look like they knew after the fact.
LeBron James played college football not basketball!!!
Timo didn’t feel worthy of the first ‘big’ money he made.
When you get lots of money, it can not feel real - just numbers on a screen.
It doesn’t matter how rich you are, there are always going to be richer people (unless you’re Elon, in which case, hello and please can we talk to you about money?)
Timo has his money in lower risk, medium risk and high risk pots.
Timo thinks money makes your happier by a couple of grades. It doesn’t make you happy if you were sad, it makes you happier. Let’s imagine 10 is ultimate bliss on the happiness scale, and you start as a 4. If you become rich, you might move up to a 6 because you have fewer problems, but you’re not going up to an 8 or 9.
It’s ok to have an internal scorecard for wealth building - basically how you judge yourself. But a comparative scorecard against others can be dangerous because you’ll never be rich enough.
He recommends The Gap and The Gain, a book by Dan Sullivan. His theory is people either live in the gap or the gain. The gap is where people are versus where they think they should be. The gain is where they are versus where they were. The latter is where you want to be. You can do this by reminding yourself where you came from.
Be careful with the stories you tell yourself about yourself, e.g. you’re bad with money. Often we just don’t have enough data/experiences to know if that’s true or not. Either way you can start with small steps to pretty quickly go from being bad with money (or thinking you’re bad with it) to being good with money versus most people.
You can reinvent your story.
