I have been asked to explain how I made my first million dollars, so I’m going to break this down very quickly into two distinct categories: I want to cover how there is making your first million dollars in terms of the amount of asset wealth that you have and being able to make a million dollars a year in terms of income wealth.

These are not the same thing at all. The reality is that by the time a huge percentage of Americans hit their retirement age, 60 or 65, given the fact that housing values have probably risen a lot, a lot of people have a million dollars in assets for those decades. So, if you’re talking about how to make a million dollars in terms of your assets, the general answer there is to buy houses and hold them or buy stocks and hold them.

Asset-Based Millionaire: The Power of Patience

The big mistake that people make when it comes to investing in real estate or investing in stocks is quick turnaround. If you keep on trading and trading, you are very likely to make costly errors and not learn of the potential of your stocks or of your properties.

The other day I was discussing something as simple as sharing with my kids who are 10 and 7 respectively. Yes, that is the thing we do in my house. They had earned some money from a business they built, making stickers that people put on their scooters to identify their scooters when they go to synagogue. From this, they made a couple hundred bucks. They asked me what to do with it, and I told them to buy stock. They then demanded an explanation.

Further

They got together, and they bought one share of Apple stock. I told them just to hold it for a long time, and they will be fine. I went on E-Trade and realized that I had bought a little bit of stock back in my college days that I’d forgotten about. It was a couple of shares of Walmart and a couple of shares of a gold ETF. I did great—great because I bought them and left them there. I forgot about them, and then came back years later and they were up like 700%. That’s the reality of investing and earning Million Dollars.

If you buy a building or a share – as representatives of different types of investments can call stock – in general, you keep it in the long term. On average, you will be in a good position to create a strong base with lots of assets, or if you choose to let it grow with compound interest, depending on which kind of interest rates you attain, then we will be extremely rich as well.

Moving Toward the Million Dollar Income

Okay, so that’s assets. But the real question that people are asking when they say, “How did you make your first million dollars?” is not how you got a million dollars in assets. It’s how do you get to a million dollars a year in income? So, I’m going to give you my trajectory on how this happened.

When I was 17 years old, I started working for myself. I wrote columns weekly, and I made virtually no money—maybe a couple thousand dollars a year off of that. But that did open the door to writing books and writing books meant that I could make $5,000 or $220,000 for a book like Brainwash or Porn Generation—my first couple of books.

So, I went to law school, took out loans to go to law school, and when I got out of law school, the base salary for an associate was about $40,000. If I’d stayed on that trajectory, I would have made a million dollars a year eventually by becoming a partner at a law firm. After 5 or 10 years, you’d end up making a million dollars a year because you’re charging very high hourly fees.

But that wasn’t something that I wanted to do, and what I realized very quickly is that the sweet spot in terms of money-making for me was going to be finding the combination of things I liked to do, things that I am good at, and things people are willing to pay me for. Most people get two out of the three, but that will not take you to a million dollars a year in income. So you have to have all three of those elements.

The Decision to Leave Law and Start Over

I just got engaged to my wife. We had put a down payment on a condo in Los Angeles, and I was miserable at this law firm. So I went to my then-fiancé, now wife, and said, “I am miserable at this law firm,” and she could see I was miserable. I was losing weight; I was so upset about being at this law firm. She said, “Why don’t you quit?” I said, “Well, we have bills to pay.” She said, “You should quit anyway, because I have faith that you’ll be able to make enough money to pay our bills, and worst comes to worst, we sell the condo, we lose a little bit of money, and we’ll live.”

So, I quit my job making $180,000, and I proceeded to take a job making $60,000 a year at Talk Radio Network. But the deal that I made with the owner of the company was that I would spend half of my time learning the production side of the radio business because what I wanted to do was get a radio show. I believe that until you find the business, having multiple streams of revenue is a very good idea. It’s a sort of diversification of your revenue sources.

Diversifying and Building Multiple Revenue Streams

I started working at Talk Radio Network, and I’m working a couple of jobs at once. I have my primary job, I’m also writing my column weekly, and I’m writing books and speaking. So I’m cobbling together maybe $100,000 a year, $110,000 a year from all these various sources of revenue. About a couple of years in, one of the hosts at Talk Radio Network had a book contract. He didn’t know how to write a book. I’d written several of my own by this point. So, the host came to me and said, “Would you help me write this book?” So I started in the ghostwriting business.

Now I have multiple sources of revenue. I have today’s ghostwriting. I have my everyday blue-collar job, I have my worldwide request column, and I have my speaking engagements. In my blog of the 27th of December 2011, I stated that I wasn’t happy at Talk Radio Network anymore when looking at options. I decide that I’m making enough of an aside income that I can afford to leave my primary income at Talk Radio Network and try to find something else.

The Birth of The Daily Wire

I ended up talking with my friend Andrew Breitbart. Andrew says, “Listen, I need somebody to come help me out over at Breitbart.com. We’re about to flip what was a bunch of separate websites into Breitbart.com. ” So he gives me the title of editor-at-large. Then in 2013, I got a call from Phil Boyce. The programming director of Salem Communications, which owned a station in LA called KARA. He said, “We have a host on the air in LA who needs somebody else on the air with her. She needs a sidekick.”

Then also in 2013, I was hired by David Horowitz at the David Horowitz Freedom Center to run a website called Truth Revolt, which is essentially the reverse of Media Matters. So now, I’m working a wide variety of jobs. I’m doing two radio shows, I’m the editor-in-chief of Truth Revolt, and the editor-at-large of Breitbart. I’m ghostwriting, I’m writing my books, and I’m speaking. This was my day in 2013–2014. At this time, I’d say that my income had risen between all of these various jobs to over $400,000 a year.

Reaching the Million Dollar Income

In 2015, a series of events led to Jeremy being let go at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and me quitting in solidarity. Jeremy and I both bought houses at that point. So we went in search of angel investment for an idea we would later call Daily Wire. I believe the first year I made a million dollars in terms of yearly income was probably 2016. More on this in a moment.

The Moral of the Story

Here’s the moral of this story: nobody starts off making a million dollars. My income? I was cobbling together a wide variety of incomes until I could find the thing that was going to succeed and pour all my efforts into that thing. All the radio work that I had done ended up becoming The Ben Shapiro Show. My writing efforts, which had been centralized on other people, just ended up being my books. All of a sudden, all the income was coming from one place because it all got centralized in one place.

But the thing that everybody forgets about stories like this is the times. I joke about this with my wife. When I would have a new book out, and if I sold five books out of the trunk of my car at $25 a pop. I was a happy camper. That meant we were going to have groceries that were pretty good that week.

Final Thoughts: The Importance of Planning and Hard Work

There are two sets of advice when it comes to income strategies. One is the set of advice before you’ve started, you’re 17 years old. How do you get to a million a year? The answer there is both professional and personal. You need to make a bunch of good decisions about your personal life to get to a million-dollar-a-year income. That would mean, for example, getting married, finding a person to settle down with, thinking about when you want to have kids, and being very deliberate in your planning. If you are going to have kids, make sure that you live near a support structure.

Conclusion

Then there’s the other question: okay, I’ve made a bunch of mistakes, or I haven’t followed that path—how do I get to a million dollars a year now? The answer is: you’ve got to work with the time you’ve got. The rules of the market don’t change just because you have extra weight on your back. It just means you have to find ways to shift the weight around so you can achieve that goal. That’s going to require some giving up.

It is going to require that you perform some acts that you prefer not to and that those acts that you did prefer would not be able to be performed. You may have to look for some time, you may have to take up several employments; you may have to put in immense hours of work, and you may have to work pro bono. Discover that thing and, you will end up earning one million dollars a year doing that thing that you like, which you are good at, and which people want.

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