“What is your secret?”

A meteoric rise and how to model

In 2013 I was broke.

Completely, totally, desperately broke.

That was not very long ago, about a decade at the time of this publication.

Here’s me sitting on the floor of our apartment in Memphis, TN, eating Taco Bell for date night.

Why am I on the floor?

Because we had just moved in and couldn’t afford a table. Someone gave us a table and alas, we graduated from eating on the floor like cave people.

I worked at a church and life was a challenge.

My rise was, how do you say it…?

Meteoric.

From 2013 to 2014 I transitioned to real estate. From 2014 to 2015 I started doing marketing in the real estate space. By 2018 I was an icon for new companies transitioning to the online space.

We built probably the biggest online consultancy in the world at that time for the SMB market.

• 100,000+ customers

• 4,000+ students

• 700 staff

• 700,000+ phone calls with clients, customers & small business owners

Anyways…

The point of this email isn’t how big I was or am — it is this: how did it happen?

A flawed question

People message me on social media every day - literally - “congratulating” me on my success and asking me how I did it.

Two things here:

• I don’t really feel all that successful… my vision and mission is set in the future and to date, I DON’T feel like I’ve really done anything crazy (because I’m grading myself against a future state that is inevitable but not yet come to pass)

• There are a thousand things — not just “one thing” — making that question extremely hard to answer and difficult to process

But if there was a way to boil it down into a proper “cheat code,” it’s simply a ridiculous level of action & decision making ability.

My first “mentor” was not a mentor. Turns out it was an MLM that I thought was a mentor. Fail.

I gave them five thousand dollars that I didn’t have and got nothing really in return.

So what did I do?

I hired another…

That one was marginally better but it actually wasn’t a mentor either — it was a software company and the salesman pitched it as if it was “handholding & guidance” when really it was just onboarding for the software.

Another three thousand dollars.

So naturally, I tried again.

Do you have any idea how crazy this is?

Especially NOW, after having helped 100,000+ humans navigate successfully online, people are not typically wired this way. If they do something and it doesn’t work, they cry to their mommy and go back to working at Best Buy.

THIS is why the people who rise to the top are often not the smartest, but rather the most resilient.

The third hire was the charm… he helped me get out of my own way, and put together a few simple frameworks to actually charge money for something I was really good at.

I took off like a rocket ship.

And guess what? I’ve never stopped hiring people to show me the way.

Most of my old mentors became clients. It feels like I surpassed everyone who taught me in the beginning — but there are still PLENTY of people who are wayyyyyy ahead of me.

I am drawn to them. I must study them.

I want to give them money in exchange for their secrets.

This obsession is the secret.

So if there is one ‘action step’ that I could recommend?

It would be this: make the decision quickly, and go all in NOW not later.

You will lose far more money through inaction than you will the wrong action.

-Taylor

P.S. This is a great video about habits — it was from a long time ago, but it’s pretty timeless.