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0:00 Once the richest people in the world get these, they never let go of them. I'm David. I run Filterbuy, an air filter manufacturer doing $23 million a month. Before Filterbuy, I spent years on Wall Street where I watched people make and lose millions overnight. These are the boring investments I never see the top 1% let go of. And at the end, I'll tell you the single best investment I've ever made and how you can copy it starting today. Let's start with the three hard investments. Actual assets that you can buy today that keep paying you for decades. Some investments don't just grow, they pay you cash every single quarter for decades without you lifting a finger. The richest people I know own the most boring stocks [music]
0:45 imaginable. Here's why they'll never let them go. My buddy Chris bought Johnson & Johnson stock when he was 32. He kept it simple. His thesis was two sentences. People will always need Band-Aids and baby shampoo. This company has been around for 130 years. He started buying shares the same day every month. Whether the stock was up 5% [music] or down 10%, he bought, set it and forget it. Boring. Over the years, there were plenty of reasons to panic and sell. Lawsuits, pharmaceutical drama, market crashes. He never touched it and he stuck with his strategy. Today, he's got $340,000 in Johnson & Johnson. [music] He started with $8,000. And every 3 months, they mail him a check for $2,400.
1:33 He doesn't even think about it anymore. Companies like Johnson & Johnson are called dividend aristocrats. That means they've raised their dividend payment every single year for at least 25 consecutive years. A dividend is just a profit-sharing [music] check. Every quarter, the company sends you a portion of its earnings because you own shares. These aren't exciting companies and most likely they're not going to 10x overnight. But, here's what you're actually buying. Millions of households on autopilot purchasing the same products every month for decades. Tylenol Band-Aids Listerine Aveeno. [music] You can own a piece of that system today for $50. If you're overwhelmed, there's an autopilot version. There are funds that hold all the dividend aristocrats
2:20 together. Ticker NOBL is just one example. You can buy it, reinvest dividends automatically, and let time do the work. Actual wealthy people don't obsess over finding the next big thing. They find durable systems and hold them. I forgot about an investment account for 12 years. When I finally opened the statement, $50,000 had appeared. This dumb investing strategy has beaten Ivy League geniuses for 50 years straight. Early in my career, I got a piece of mail I almost threw away. It was a statement from an investment account I had completely forgotten. I opened it at my first job on Wall Street, threw $8,000 into basic index funds tracking the S&P 500, and then just moved on. Life happened. I changed jobs, got busy,
3:07 I completely forgot it existed. True story. 12 years later, I opened that envelope and $50,000 fell into my lap with zero work. My honest reaction wasn't, "Wow, compounding works." It was regret because I knew exactly what I had done instead of staying with that strategy. I chased hedge funds. I thought it made me look smart. Hedge funds were our client base when I worked at Goldman. These were sophisticated people with impressive track records on paper. I put $30,000 into a fund that imploded in 2008. Gone. Poof. Meanwhile, the boring account that I ignored was still there, still growing, still beating the smart money. Here's why the S&P 500 is so hard to beat. The index does one thing. It owns America's 500 best companies and
3:55 replaces the losers automatically. When a company gets weak, it falls out. When a company grows, it gets added. You don't have to lift a finger. The index self-cleans. Over the past 50 years, historically, your money has doubled every 7 years in the S&P 500. $10,000 today becomes $20,000 in 7 years, $40,000 in 14, $80,000 in 21. The S&P 500 consistently beats most hedge funds. Not because hedge fund managers are dumb, but because they override the system with emotion. They see a red day and panic-sell. They see a hot stock and they chase it. The index, on the other hand, just sits there. [music] So, if you want to start today, all you got to do is open a brokerage account like
4:40 Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard. It honestly doesn't matter. You can even use Robinhood, although it's not my favorite. Search for a fund that tracks the S&P 500. VOO, I believe is the lowest cost, or SPY are two common ones. Set up automatic contributions every month. Then, close the app, come back in 40 years. Done. Thank me later. If you don't understand bonds, you don't understand money. People sleep on bonds. Here's the honest case for owning them. Now, I want to be honest with you up front. I don't own bonds. My business generates cash flow every month that isn't tied to the stock market. If the stock market crashed tomorrow, I wouldn't lose much sleep. That's exactly what bonds can do for you. Here's the simplest way I can put it. Most people don't need bonds. They need cash flow.
5:26 Predictable income that doesn't depend on whether the market is up or down. If you don't have that, no business, no rental income, nothing, bonds are your substitute. When the stock market crashes, people tend to run into US Treasuries because they're viewed as the safest place to park money. And that becomes your cushion. Right now, the US 10-year Treasury is paying around 4 to 5% per year. That's real money for doing basically nothing, just lending money to the US government. Even if you don't own bonds, you should watch bonds because they're one of the best indicators of a recession. Normally, you earn more for lending money for longer. And that makes sense. The 10-year bond should pay more than the one-year bond. When that flips, meaning when short-term bonds pay more
6:12 than long-term ones, historically, that's been one of the most reliable warning signs >> [music] >> of a recession. Not a guarantee, but a signal worth knowing. You don't need to trade around it. Just knowing it exists makes you more financially aware than 90% of people. Maybe 99, who knows. If you're purely focused on growth and you have time, bonds may not be your priority. But, if you're trying to protect wealth or if you want income that doesn't move with the stock market, a simple Treasury bond fund like BND or VTI gives you that in just one click. The goal isn't to own every asset. The goal is to own the right ones for where you are in life. Okay, so those are the hard investments. Money in, set it, forget
6:58 it. But, the investments that have actually gotten me ahead, they weren't financial. They were things I learned, the skills I built. Those still pay me every single day. I call these soft investments. They compound just like money, but they're totally free to learn. Every entrepreneur talks about sales and marketing. The skill that actually changed my business is something that nobody puts on their highlight reel. The most boring skill I ever learned is worth millions of dollars a year. We rebuilt our pricing at Filterbuy using basic statistics instead of gut decisions. Before, pricing decisions were made by feel. Someone would look at a competitor's price, look at our cost, and make a call. [music] And honestly, that worked at small scale, but scale changes
7:44 everything. Small improvements become enormous. We made a pricing change that added millions to the business without selling a single extra vulture. At a $250 million business, a 1 or 2% improvement in pricing is [music] worth 2 and 1/2 to 5 million dollars a year. The most unsexy skill I've ever learned is basic statistics and statistical thinking. Most people think that learning means taking a course, getting a certificate, putting it on LinkedIn. And that is not what I mean. I mean, find the skill that will compound inside whatever you're already doing. Learn it deeply enough that it changes how you think. Statistical thinking changed how I look at pricing, at marketing spend, at hiring decisions, at production
8:30 planning. It became a lens. So, if you're starting from scratch, here are two things that I would learn for free right now. First, basic statistics. Khan Academy has a full free course. It will take you a few weeks to complete and it will pay you forever, I promise. Second, how to actually use AI inside your life or your business. Not, how do I use ChatGPT? I mean, how do you connect AI to budgets, to spend, to your emails and messages? We plugged AI directly into our Google Ads account. Not to replace people, but to review thousands of keywords every single day and recommend changes. Before, a human might touch parts of that account every few days. After, the whole account gets reviewed
9:15 daily. The fastest way to level up in your career is the one thing most people are too afraid to do. Every time I figure something out well enough to teach it, my job is to hand it off. Build a system around it, find someone who can run that system, and then go find the next problem. Story of my life. Most people don't do this because they think holding onto responsibilities is what makes them valuable. It feels risky to let go, but that kind of thinking is what's keeping you stuck. The most valuable people I've ever seen inside a business aren't the ones who can't be replaced. They're the ones who keep replacing themselves. This is less about a single dramatic moment and more about a mindset you can run on repeat. Figure something out, build a system, hand it
10:00 off, move up. That's the playbook. Every loop makes the business stronger. Every loop makes you more free. Pick one thing you do every week that someone else could learn to do. Write down exactly how you do it, every single step. Teach it to someone else, then use the time that frees up to work on something bigger, to add more value. Do that 10 times and I will promise you that your career looks completely different. Okay, so now we've talked about index funds, dividend stocks, bonds, statistics, and systems. But, if I had to name the single investment with the highest ROI in my life, hard or soft, none of those are it. I know this sounds like a Tai Lopez meme, but hear me out, because the data actually backs it up. Wealthy
10:47 people I know made one investment that everything else is built on. Tai Lopez got a lot of heat for standing in front of Lamborghini and pointing to a book and saying, "Knowledge." People made it a meme, but honestly, he's not wrong. The single best investment I've ever made, the one I never had to buy twice, is knowledge. The question people always ask is, "What should I learn?" And my honest answer to that is you got to follow your curiosity, not just your passion, your curiosity. Follow your passion isn't enough, because passion fades. Curiosity doesn't. If you're great with computers and it genuinely interests you, then go deep on AI and learn how to apply it inside real businesses. If you're better with your hands, but you're watching videos like these, go learn a trade. Go deep on the business side of it. The best way to
11:34 learn is to start. If you fail, but you choose to keep going, you'll know more than 99% of people easily. If you want to understand investments, watch my full video on my biggest [music] competitor, the bond market.
