Potential is a priceless treasure, like gold. All of us have gold hidden within, but we have to dig to get it out.

—Joyce Meyer, A Leader in the Making

ONE OF THE GREAT JOYS of writing a book is hearing from you, the readers. I wrote my first book, Disrupt You!, as a way of helping others to transform their lives. I wanted to break down the business world in a way that made success accessible to all. Disrupt You! flipped the message of most books: in order to change the world, you first must learn to change yourself. The book connected with readers around the globe (and is currently published in 10 languages).

I was humbled and touched by the response. I received emails from thousands of readers. Readers from dozens of countries shared stories with me of how they applied the lessons in Disrupt You! to their lives and businesses. I heard from a dentist in Pakistan who went from not being able to support his wife and children to having one of the most successful practices in Islamabad. I heard from intrapreneurs who gained the courage to change old companies from within and from single moms building side hustles that gave them the freedom to quit their day jobs. One young reader, still in his early twenties, even drove hundreds of miles to see me speak and thank me. He wanted to tell me that in just two years of applying what he learned in Disrupt You!, he was able to buy his parents and grandparents their own homes. As gratifying as these responses were, the one note that haunted me was from another young man who loved the book, but didn't believe he could make it happen.

At twenty‐something years old, he had already given up on his goals. He hated his dead‐end job and was drowning in credit card debt. He couldn't envision a future beyond living paycheck to paycheck. He felt trapped and defeated. He didn't think success was possible. I read and reread his email, trying to muster the proper response. By failing to prove to him that success was possible for everyone, I had failed him.

What would it take, I wondered, to convince a millennial – or anyone – that they could achieve financial success? He had written me, I surmised, as a cry for help. His pain gnawed at me and kept me up until dawn. Could I take individuals with very little work experience and no family background in business and mentor them into becoming a self‐made millionaire? How long would that take? Could it be achieved in a year? Would they learn the skills to be future proof for life?

This is the story of how I decided to challenge myself and see if I could create a Future Proofing millionaire. For a year, I mentored one individual on how to turn his perseverance into his first million dollars. I took detailed notes of each weekly session and I mapped out the process. My goal wasn't to just mentor one person but to come up with a program by which anyone could Future Proof their life. You now hold in your hand the knowledge and the results of our experiment.

Rules for the Future Proofing You Experiment

Before I went searching for a mentee, I needed to set up the guidelines for my Future Proofing You experiment. First, I wanted to make sure that the process was repeatable and accessible to all. I was going to mentor someone to do it on their own. I was the coach, but they had to go on the field and run their own plays. To be a fair test, the insights had to be theirs alone. They had to decide what type of business to launch, how to find their niche, and how to acquire customers. The effort too had to be theirs alone. If they didn't internalize the process, they wouldn't be Future Proof.

Since many first‐time entrepreneurs blame a lack of money or access to investment capital as the reason for their failure, I needed to find someone who was broke. My mentor would not get a penny from me (though, in full disclosure, I did buy him pizza at our lunch meetings). I also wanted to show would‐be entrepreneurs that success could be achieved without raising any capital. He would have to use his skills to create a business that wasn't capital intensive and learn to reinvest his own profits to fuel his first year's growth.

Second, I wanted someone who had no external advantages. I wanted someone with little or no corporate experience. Someone who had only worked entry‐level jobs so that every reader could relate. My mentee had to come from working‐class roots. No entrepreneurs in the family to use as role models or to lean on for a loan. I also wanted someone with a limited social network. I wanted to find the proverbial fish out of water. Someone new to Los Angeles with no safety net.

Lastly, I was not going to open any doors nor share any of the business connections in my vast global network. I wouldn't ask friends to throw business his way or help him find employees. For this experiment to be truly fair, my mentee would have to build his own universe of contacts and associates. By setting these conditions, I knew that the mentee would feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with achieving something on your own. I needed him to internalize that feeling and use it to catapult him over each new obstacle in his path.

Finding a Mentee

As I noted earlier, the one attribute I was looking for in a subject was perseverance. One cannot teach perseverance. I needed to find someone who was resilient and had overcome many obstacles in their life. Someone who came from a tough background, and though not financially successful yet, worked hard to better their circumstances. I didn't want to invest all of this time (and my reputation) on a quitter. So even if I wasn't sure if the goal of earning a million dollars could be achieved in only a year, I had to find someone who believed it could be accomplished.

Though my methods for quickly generating wealth can be applied by young and old alike, I really wanted to find a millennial. There is a prevailing cultural stereotype that millennials are spoiled and afraid of hard work. Many of my peers have written off millennials as a pampered generation who were given trophies for just showing up and expect accolades for everything they say or do. Having raised two hard‐working millennial sons, I didn't believe the entitled narrative. I wanted to find someone who would obliterate those preconceptions. If this book was going to help the largest generation our planet had ever seen succeed, then I wanted one of their own to lead the charge.

In my mind, the rules for engagement were set. I was prepared to bet my entire professional reputation on one person. All that I needed to do now was find my mentee.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.

Lao Tsu

One Saturday morning, when I was sitting in the audience at a growth‐hacking event in Los Angeles, I watched as the young speaker paced nervously across the stage. Moving like a caged panther that had ingested a case of Red Bull, the nervous young man quickly strode back and forth across the proscenium as he spoke at an ever‐dizzying speed. Much like pivoting your head at a Wimbledon tennis match, he was exhausting to watch and difficult to follow. His constant movement distracted the audience from the substantive information in his hundred‐plus slide PowerPoint. He had so much he wanted to say and couldn't get all of the thoughts out of his head fast enough. To make concentrating even more challenging, the lanky young man was wearing a gold lamé jumpsuit with matching gold high‐top sneakers adorned with the Roman god Mercury's wings. Under the spotlight, his glittery ensemble shimmered like a disco ball bouncing from wall to wall. And yet, underneath his gilded veneer, there was something genuine about him. He was bursting with energy, passion, and ideas. He had taught himself how to do online marketing on the cheap, but didn't know how to build that into a business. I had found my Future Proofing You millionaire to be.

Vin Clancy grew up in a poor, working‐class family in London. He and his older sister lived in council housing (or as we call it in the States: government projects) in the gritty Shepherd's Bush neighborhood. A few years before his birth, Shepherd's Bush became internationally infamous when three Metropolitan police officers were gunned down in a routine traffic stop. Vin's father was a caretaker and his mom worked when work was available. Throughout his childhood in council housing, Vin was surrounded by poverty, violence, and substance abuse. At 12 years old, he used to stop by the Blue Hawaii restaurant on Richmond Road on his way home from school because they gave out free glasses of pineapple juice. One day, one of the waiters who was supposed to hand out the juice didn't show up, and young Vin was offered a job. Earning four pounds for a few hours work, Vin kept the job all through high school. In his early twenties, Vin worked a series of odd jobs, including at the popular British grocery chain Tesco. Directionless, Vin even tried a sales job, but soon grew bored and quit. Until recently, he had been living in the UK on welfare, collecting about $100 a week. Statistically, a young man with his background was more likely to end up dead or in prison than a self‐made millionaire.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars.

Sean Parker in The Social Network

In spite of all these obstacles, or because of them, Vin had something powerful going for him: perseverance. Unfortunately, Vin was a go‐getter with no idea which direction to go. All that changed one night in the Odeon Kingston cinema when he became mesmerized by David Fincher's movie The Social Network. Based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, the film glorified Mark Zuckerberg's journey from obscure hacker to the world's youngest self‐made billionaire. The Academy Award–nominated movie was an epiphany for Vin. He saw in Jesse Eisenberg's performance a character with whom he could relate. He saw his future and a place to channel his energy. He too was going to become a rich and famous hacker. But first, he would need to get a computer and learn how to use it. The local library had computers Vin could use for free, so Vin started there.

Though not a programmer, he taught himself how to use a computer and put all his focus into learning how social media works and, as he would call it, how to “hack the system.” Vin networked with others online, learned which tools could help grow a person's social media following and how to interact with followers. Like so many of his generation, Vin's dream was to be famous online and move to Hollywood. He wanted to be a social media influencer, like Kylie Kardashian or British Minecraft reviewer Daniel Middleton, who are paid millions each year just for posting branded social media content. He was determined to become a self‐made social media marketing expert and had created a personal following of over 100,000 twenty‐somethings without spending a penny. Vin scrimped and saved, sold everything he had in the world, and with stars in his eyes, bought a one‐way ticket to Los Angeles. He came to America ready to build his personal Vin Clancy brand. When fame and fortune quickly proved elusive, he tried to pivot his skills to being paid to generate followers for others. Turns out, even in Hollywood, finding paying clients was hard. As a way to find new prospects, Vin started speaking for free at events like the one I was attending.

Flat broke, owning no car or furnishings, he crashed at the ant‐infested apartment of two welfare recipients. Still, Vin refused to give up. What sealed the deal for me that Vin was the one was a story he told me of a hack that worked back in England for a new pub.

With over 7,000 pubs in London, generating buzz around a new one opening is quite the task. As the UK's capital, most forms of advertising in the City are prohibitively expensive. With London's rents being notoriously high, a new night spot has to quickly build a clientele or it will go out of business. In my opinion, the solution he came up with was pure genius. He maximized both his profit and the pub's success without spending a cent.

There was no need to buy any social media ads, shoot any glitzy photos, or target Google users. Instead of thinking about the problem from the pub's point of view, he innately focused on the potential customer's journey. How and why do people go to pubs? Who do they go with, and where do they meet those people? From this out‐of‐the‐box thinking, the solution revealed itself. Instead of going on social media sites where people hung out with friends, the campaign created fake profiles on Tinder. Using appropriated photos of hot guys and girls, these “singles” would get a lot of swipes. Once connected, they were let in on the ruse.

“I'm not real, but if you want to find real people like me, check out the action at our new pub.” The campaign spoke to the moment and was authentic to how people live their lives. Everyone was in on the joke and shared it with their friends. Soon, the press was writing about the hack and the place was packed. Vin innately understood how to think like a disruptor, or, in his parlance, a hacker.

If I was going to put my entire reputation on the line with the Future Proofing You experiment, I needed to make sure that Vin had a growth mindset from day one and believed that he could become a self‐made millionaire in a year. So, I used a technique discovered by University of California Riverside professor of psychology Richard Rosenthal. What Rosenthal studied was the effects of self‐fulfilling prophecies on student performance. At the beginning of the school year, all the students at an elementary school were given an IQ test, and based on the results, their teachers were told by Rosenthal that certain students were “intellectual bloomers.” These students would likely substantially excel in the coming school year. The professor lied. The truth was that the bloomers were chosen completely at random and had no greater intelligence than the rest of their classmates. Rosenthal wanted to see what the effect of teachers believing certain students were special would have on the children's intellectual growth and performance. At the end of the year, first‐ and second‐grade “bloomers” showed a statistically significant mean gain in IQ scores. Just by saying a student was smarter made her smarter. Now known as the Pygmalion Effect, this creates a virtuous cycle of change and a self‐fulfilling prophecy.

In selecting Vin Clancy for my Future Proofing You experiment, I counted on the Pygmalion Effect to improve our odds of achieving success. From the outset, I let Vin know that I had interviewed many candidates and, of all the potential mentees, he had impressed me the most as having the skills, drive, and intellect to be a millionaire. Vin internalized my praise and immediately got excited about how he was going to focus all his energy on making a million dollars. After our initial interview, Vin stayed behind at the restaurant where we met and wrote the following essay to himself (which he only shared with me six months later, when he was achieving inconceivable success):

There's a scene in Requiem for a Dream where she goes for a meeting with her psychologist with an extreme power imbalance. She needs money from him, and what he needs from her? Well, you can work it out.

I'm reminded of this scene as right now I'm sitting across the table with a multi‐multi‐millionaire (may even be a billionaire idk) and I desperately need what he has.

He wants to take someone and make them into a star and a millionaire within one year.

Mentorship, getting them clients, getting thousands of book sales so it's a number one hit when he writes the book, the lot. He is the elixir saving everything that's broken in the crummy business I've slaved over brick by boring brick.

So, we're sitting eating pizza on the beach and I mask my excitement with cynicism like I tend to do (so little is truly exciting, and the thought of being let down and it not happening? Too much.) He was on the founding team of three companies who own the internet to this day. Vice Chairman of a household name which makes a good 10 figures every year. It goes without saying that he knows anyone who's anyone in California, but his involvement in the companies that have changed the world for the last 25 years, and looking for a youngster to mentor before he retires brings a life‐changing moment.

He is interviewing people for this role and I am just one of many. He tells me about his experience talking to one of my rivals (fuck that guy, I'm thinking of my head). I have to believe every word he says.

When I was brought home from the hospital to the housing project my parents lived at, a gangster got shot in the kneecaps outside our flat. The turf war had escalated and murders were becoming every week thing. By the grace of god, we moved to a better housing project and we're okay from then on. I had come a long way and MAYBE THIS IS IT WHAT I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

I don't really have any control here. I tell my story but am mainly listening as the conversation happens. We're all looking to be led, for a personal savior, because life is hard at whatever stage you have it (even those who have cashed out still go crazy). “We all long to blow up and leave the past behind us” as Eminem once said.

I wanted to say “If you don't mentor me can you find me someone who will?” but I can't accept second place, I have to keep that to myself. Maybe if he says no I can tell him he's making a big mistake (and then say it).

This is only month one in Los Angeles and the number of opportunities should be heartening, but I get so focused that this HAS TO BE THE THING, rather than the abundance of opportunities in this town. I wrote this up and walked out of the restaurant with the only feeling being “fuck that! I'm gonna make it without anyone.”

It's the only consolation I can give myself to make myself feel better. My desperation since being on welfare has never left me. Maybe at some point I'll get what I want and it will cease, but for better and worse, remembering the poverty I came from strengthens my resolve that I never wanna go back to where I came from. I came out swinging to a city that was at best indifferent to my existence, and I'll find a way yet to land a knockout blow.

The message that a successful businessman would have only chosen Vin if he knew he could do it gave credence to Vin's self‐confidence. Now that Vin believed that he could, he would. Or as Napoleon Hill was fond of saying, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

Before turning Vin loose on the world, we discussed the importance of setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Setting goals and planning out your day is the easiest way to stay focused. This journaling would have the added benefit of reinforcing his growth mindset. Too many people get trapped in the bottomless pit of answering emails, voicemails, and texts as soon as they come in to work each morning. We agreed that Vin would email me his weekly goals and we would measure the results in our Friday mentoring sessions. To maximize revenue, one needs to also focus on those tasks that can only be performed at specific times of the day. You can't make a sales phone call at 11 p.m. His mantra was going to have to be: daytime is for selling, nights are for writing proposals.

In complete transparency, I must admit something to the readers of this book that I never shared with Vin: he was the only candidate I interviewed. Without a control group to compare results, I thought the more effort I put into cherry‐picking the perfect candidate, the less valid and less broadly applicable the results of this Future Proofing You experiment would be. Vin was the first person I interviewed, and he ticked all the boxes.

Having selected Vin, the burden was now on me to deliver. My challenge would be to not only mentor Vin in business but to keep him motivated and focused for 365 days. Vin would often tell me that this is the hardest he'd ever worked, and that as a young man it was equally hard to forgo having any semblance of a social life. “I'll go on holiday when this is over,” he would frequently lament. Though often exhausted and operating on too little sleep, Vin stayed positive for our entire year working together and persevered.