The One Skill You Need to Make Your First $1 Million transcript

I started with $50 and an old computer that my girlfriend bought me, and that turned into one of the biggest agencies in the country, $10.2 billion in client sales, and landed me as a shark on Shark Tank. And every single bit of it came down to one skill. And this one skill will pay for every single other skill that you can ever learn. But most people spend their entire life avoiding it because they feel like it is beneath them.

However, thanks to AI, this one skill is more valuable than ever. Call it sales if you want, but sales is just one branch of it. Because above sales is persuasion. And persuasion is the absolute master skill. Think of it this way. Any piece of communication, whether it's written, it's a video, it's a one-to-one sales pitch, it's effectively when you are communicating with somebody else asking them to do something that it is that you want them to do.

Every text, every email, every video you shoot, every DM, everything comes under the branch of persuasion. And you don't get to opt out of it because everybody has to go around the world partaking in it. If you are communicating with other people, and if you are trying to sell an agenda or get an outcome, then you are effectively trying to persuade. And then it really just comes down to are you any good at it or not?

And if sales feels sleazy to you, it's probably because you have like a negative connotation [music] with it is that you are trying to manipulate somebody to do something that isn't in their best [music] interest. Where persuasion is simply getting somebody to get clear, have clarity, and actually decide and make a decision on an outcome that's going to be to their own betterment. And if you have the skill of persuasion, all it allows you to do is to pass that conviction to that prospect that this is the best step that they could possibly take for their own self-interest, not for yours.

Because amateurs pitch their product. They are in such a rush to just list off all the features and benefits of what it is that they've got to sell. We're a pro, they ask questions, they think about what are the pains, fears, hopes, and dreams of this market. What is it they want more than anything? And then how do I position my product or service to simply get them what it is that they already want. It is to channel the desire that is already present in the marketplace.

And the way that you do that is to think about your prospect. What is their dream destination? Where is it that they're trying to go? What is it they want in their life more than anything else? And how does my product help them get there? So instead of putting up your product and service on a pedestal and thinking that that's going to sell itself, you need to focus all of your time, energy, and advertising efforts on your prospect and where it is that they want to go.

And all the messaging that you put out should be focused on that end outcome, not what it is that you are selling. And contrary to popular belief, sales people aren't born, they are made. They are forged in the fire. For me, I got my first sales gig when I was 16 years old. actually calling businesses up and I was offering to buy back their empty ink cartridges and then we would go on to basically sell them back. And this was the first sales job I ever had and I absolutely sucked.

I was literally the runt of the litter. The founder actually pulled me aside and was like, "At the two-week mark, if you don't turn something around, Subri, I'm going to have to let go of you in a couple of days." And then I took that desperation and I thought about everything that I'm doing and I went back to the drawing board and I changed my entire output. was when things started to turn for me. And then I used those skills and I went traveling all over the world selling everything that you can imagine one-to-one and one-to-many.

And then I started up my first business, which was actually selling gray market boxer shorts and I was putting in DL flyers into people's lockers at university and at gyms and then people would call me up and they would say, "What is this offer about?" And so it wasn't that I was born with the gift of the gab. No, I just got in so many reps and got so much feedback into the system that it was unreasonable for me not to become an absolute savage cuz I got so many reps in over so many years.

So, regardless of what people are telling you, if you're an introvert, if you're quiet, if you don't have the gift of the gab, ignore all of that because sales and persuasion is a skill and any skill can be [music] learned. And this skill is more powerful than ever right now in the age of AI because every day there is a new story popping up of some engineer who vibe coding a multi-billion-dollar SaaS product in a day or two.

If it's not about the product, if anyone can build a product, then what does it come down to? Your ability to persuade, to go out there, persuade people to watch your content, to hijack attention, and then convert that attention into actual customers. Because marketing and distribution is just persuasion at scale. And while the tools and the platforms are changing month to month, this is all bred on the foundations of psychology and human beings, which hasn't changed in over 10,000 years.

So, here's how to actually get good at persuasion and sales. The first thing that I would recommend is if you are in your 20s, that you should get a high-frequency sales [music] job. And the reason that I recommend this is because in order to get good at anything, you first have to get a lot of volume in. And when you're selling something that's cheap, it requires a lot of volume in order for you to actually make any money.

Then, what it is that you need to do to persist further in the call and actually get somebody to whip out their credit card and buy whatever it is that you are selling. And I can tell you right now, there is nothing that I have done in the rest of my life that has shaped who I am more as a person than getting on the phone and making 300 cold calls per day. Think of it this way, you are getting paid to learn the most important foundational skill that you can ever learn.

However, you might be watching this and being like, "Sabri, I don't want to get in sales. I don't want to do a high-frequency sales job. I'm just not cut out for this." If you don't want to do it, I also want to offer you another path. What I recommend that you do is something called the Yap Challenge, which is every single day for 365 days, you basically go to whatever AI that you want to use and you say, "Hey, give me a random topic that I need to talk about." Then the challenge is you have 10 minutes to research that, to take some notes on a Google Doc, and then you must put your notes away, and you must look at the phone on your camera, and you must yap to it uninterrupted.

And you must effectively educate that viewer around that topic and have a hot take [music] on it. You do this every single day. A pro tip is if you get shy, you can set up a brand new TikTok or Instagram account, and then start to post those yaps daily onto those accounts so you can start to get feedback and see what works and what doesn't. Most people, the moment you stick a camera in front of them and you say start talking, they crumble.

However, doing the Yap Challenge alone isn't enough because that's going to get you the skill of being able to talk and communicate in a coherent and effective way, but you need to build the muscle of getting rejection, of feeling very uncomfortable. And that only comes when you are either negotiating or you're asking strangers for money. What I learned very early on with sales is the reason that I was always the top salesperson at every company that I ever worked is that I was just willing to persist more so than any of the other sales people within those organizations.

So much so that they used to use my sales call recordings to train people and be like, "Look, Sabri has asked this person 17 times for the close." And it's just having that ability to flex that muscle and get a callus where you don't cringe anymore when you ask people uncomfortable things. Because yapping trains the mouth, but asking trains the nerve. And you must train that over time, and if you do either of these paths, you will not recognize yourself in 90 days.

And if you do this for 365 days, no one else will recognize you, either. And if you're leaning in and you're thinking, "Hey, I want to actually give this a try. Where do I start?" then I made this video that walks you through absolutely everything that you need to know about sales from A to Z. Go watch that now. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.