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The Calum Johnson ShowHow To Make Your First Million Dollars (This Year) | Arlan Hamilton
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Arlan Hamilton on Going From Airport Floor to Millionaire
- Arlan Hamilton recounts sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco airport in 2015 and says a vision bigger than herself, helping underestimated founders, kept her going.
- She credits her confidence to a belief that everyone is equal and to embracing being the 'weird' kid, a trait she says now earns her a return.
- She describes a research-and-development phase for picking one offer from options like courses, memberships, affiliate marketing, consulting, agencies, SaaS or e-commerce, and focusing on it for a year.
- She and Calum Johnson discuss marketing versus sales, documenting rather than creating content, and the volume of effort needed, illustrated by her 100 customized emails that led to a job with CeeLo Green.
- Hamilton closes by saying a first million is a mixed bag that can 'rent' happiness and ease family worries, and that entrepreneurs will then ask what their second million looks like.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasThink bigger than yourself
Hamilton says wanting to be a millionaire wasn't enough; her goal of positively affecting many people, sparked by a statistic on venture funding, got her through weeks on the airport floor. She says feeling stuck may mean you're thinking too small.
Naivety and a macro vision both matter
She says she held a day-to-day focus alongside a five-to-ten-year picture, with no idea of what lay in between. She and Calum agree that knowing everything it would take might keep people from ever starting.
Build skills while you wait
Hamilton says she committed to learning something every day from 2013 to 2015 because it was the one thing she could control, so she was ready when her first check arrived in September 2015.
Pick one offer and focus for a year
She says to choose one of the eight options, or a teach/show/do-it-for-them approach, and stick with it, because this is where about 90% of people drop off. Calum adds that spreading across options is often a hedge rooted in low confidence.
The offer should be obsession-worthy, ethical and valuable
Hamilton says it should be something you're obsessed with, that helps others, makes money, and isn't only sold to broke people. A very cheap offer, she argues, isn't sustainable.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesIf you find yourself really stuck, it might be because you're thinking too small.
— Arlan Hamilton
All the things that made me weird and outcast in the past, I now have an ROI on.
— Arlan Hamilton
Build skills. Stack your skills so that you're ready, like you said, when the phone rings.
— Arlan Hamilton
It's not Netflix. You don't put your feet up and watch it and then go to sleep. You do something about it
— Arlan Hamilton
Money not being able to buy happiness is absolutely true. But what you learned is it can rent happiness, and it can get you closer to happiness because it takes certain obstructions out of your way so that you can clearly see what happiness looks like.
— Arlan Hamilton
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SPEAKERS
Arlan Hamilton
guestFounder of Backstage Capital and venture investor focused on underrepresented founders.
Calum Johnson
hostPodcast and YouTube host of The Calum Johnson Show.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
