It has been a while since we've last talked, but I want to let you guys know something.
The podcast has been my focus for the past couple months, with the exception of the past
couple weeks.
And with that being said, I put in a lot of hours into it, and so I don't want to just
end it.
But I also realized that I'm focusing now, I'm now focusing on YouTube, and I'm focusing
on creating the best YouTube videos possible, and focusing on growing the YouTube channel.
And there's many reasons for that, the reasons why I switched from the podcast to the YouTube.
But one of the biggest reasons is because it's a lot easier to grow.
On the podcast, the only way to get discovered is to market yourself, is to go on to other
people's podcasts or do other marketing techniques.
But for YouTube, you can get discovered just by posting great content.
And so that's really what I'm focusing on forward.
And I'm going to be honest, over the past couple months, I've really been doubting whether
I'm choosing the right thing to focus on.
Because when I first started looking into business, I was really learning about how
you've got to create something that you're passionate about.
But you've also got to create something that is needed or people want.
And so the thing that I'm passionate about is self-improvement.
And what I've found is over the past couple months, I really started doubting whether
I'm actually doing the right thing or not.
Especially over the past couple weeks, I've been finding a lot more confirmation on whether
I'm doing the right thing or not.
One of the greatest confirmations that I've received is from a Hamza video that I watched.
And he said, it was about how to find your purpose in life.
And how to find not necessarily your purpose, but how to figure out what you want to do
with your life.
And so he basically said, ask yourself, what would your perfect day look like?
What would you spend most of your day doing?
So for example, Hamza, his thing, most of his day he would spend, like the first four
hours of his day, would be in the gym.
He would just train for a very long time.
That's his perfect day.
And then he also gave an example of maybe someone's perfect day is to play football all day.
And then so he basically said, figure out what your perfect day is.
And so for me, my perfect day consists of go to the gym in the morning and work on self-improvement
pretty much all day.
And very similar to what Hamza's is.
And basically what he said to do is figure out your perfect day.
And that's the most likely thing that you'll want to do with your life.
And so that's what you should figure out how to monetize.
So he said, playing football is going to be very difficult to monetize, but that's probably
what you should work on.
That's probably what you should strive towards.
And so that's one of the biggest things that confirmed me moving forward.
One of the biggest doubts and major moments that I had over the past couple of weeks was
one day I was watching YouTube and it was, I stumbled across a video of, it was something
along the lines of self-improvement is ruining your life or something like that.
Usually I don't click on those types of videos, but for some reason I felt urged to click
on it.
I watched it through and he talked about how a lot of people don't have hobbies to actually
make their life enjoyable.
A lot of in the self-improvement niche, a lot of like the self-improvement community on
YouTube especially, a lot of people treat self-improvement as their entire life.
And he explained it very well and I recommend watching that video if you're interested in
what I'm saying.
Basically, he was saying it's kind of like the metaphor or the analogy of a knight in
shining armor in the dungeon of the castle that's constantly sharpening his blade and
cleaning his armor and training and doing a lot of push-ups while there's a war going
on outside of the castle.
He's doing all this improvements, but he's not actually helping out on the war.
And so after watching that video, I realized I didn't have a hobby.
All I was doing all day is just self-improvement.
I literally just wake up right away, I drink the water with salt and supplements in it,
take a cold shower and then I work on the business or the YouTube channel.
And I guess the YouTube channel could be considered a hobby, but I don't see it as a hobby.
I see it as what I'm actually doing.
But so after watching that video, I realized that I didn't actually have a hobby and I
didn't know if I was actually like living a happy life.
And so I was kind of worried and then over the next couple of days, I really just started
thinking about it a lot.
And then I realized that I came to the conclusion after a couple of days that this is my hobby.
Self-improvement is my hobby.
And that's really, it was really good for me to come to that conclusion because I was
really struggling with that question of, am I even happy?
And then I realized that self-improvement is my hobby.
Like I enjoy improving myself constantly.
And so that brings me back to the YouTube channel.
That's my main focus now.
I'm starting to take YouTube a lot more seriously.
And I'm starting to actually create a lot higher quality content.
And the thing about that is I originally learned about it in a book called 10X is easier than
2X to focus on quality over quantity.
And I didn't really want to actually do that when it came to creating content because I
was selfish.
I was really selfish on YouTube or on podcasting, YouTube, TikTok, all that stuff.
I was selfish.
I was just pumping out the content, high quantity, but it all sucked.
And as a result, I wasn't getting the results that I wanted on the channels.
And the thing is, if I didn't even want to watch the YouTube videos or the TikToks or
the shorts or the podcasts that I was actually putting out, how can I expect other people
to watch it?
And so that's what I really questioned.
And that's why if you go back on this podcast to episode 100, episode 104, really over the
since like episode 80, I think from episode 80 to 104, I was really struggling with, am
I even doing the right thing?
Am I just wasting my time pumping out quantity when I should be focusing on quality?
And I'm very glad I made the leap to focus on quality because after I just stopped the
season one of the podcast and focused on making higher quality videos, I discovered that my
friend in my class has a YouTube channel and it's a very successful YouTube channel.
And so after realizing that, I was extremely excited because I just found my mentor.
He's my mentor now.
And so I told myself, I'm going to listen to every single thing he says and take action
on everything.
And that's what I did.
If you look at the first episode on this new season, which is called the first step to
self-improvement, and you look at the show art or the thumbnail on that episode, that
was like kind of my first thumbnail that I've made.
And if you look at the episode that I'm going to be posting on December what day?
It's going to be December 8th.
That is where I'm at.
That thumbnail, if you look on YouTube, that thumbnail is where I've gotten after around
20 days of listening to his advice.
And there was an entire week that I spent not even listening to his advice because I
was out of town.
I was on vacation.
I was at Dominican Republic and I'll get to that a little bit later.
But one of the early quotes that I heard was, if you want to fast track your way to success,
get a mentor.
Like having a mentor allows you to get to success the fastest.
And so I never really had a mentor other than reading books.
And so I was extremely happy when I got an actual mentor for YouTube.
And so that's what I've been doing.
I've been focusing on making better thumbnails over the past couple of weeks.
But I've gotten to a point where I'm fairly happy with my thumbnail skills.
But now I want to focus on my actual recording ability and my storytelling ability and just
all around my recording skills.
And so that's pretty much what I do.
Every single day I go home and create a thumbnail and I email it to myself because I go to school
and then show my friend.
So pretty much email it to my school account, my school email.
And then I pull it up every single day and show my friend and I get daily feedback from
him.
And that allows me to grow super fast.
So my thumbnails have gotten a lot better.
It was just in like 20 days.
And I was just telling my friend Franklin about how if I wasn't, if I wasn't, if I didn't
have a mentor to tell me exactly what I needed to do, it would have probably taken at least
three months to get to the point where I had my, where I'm with the thumbs.
So it's, it's got, it's helped me a lot getting, having a mentor.
And as a result, I've been focusing on creating the highest quality thumbnails and highest
quality videos on the YouTube.
And my mentor has helped me a lot with that.
But I want to get into back to the podcast.
I want to talk about how it's actually one of the things that I said I was going to do
a while ago is be a guest on a podcast.
And I did.
I became a guest on a podcast.
And I believe I talked about it on the last episode of like the last episode on this podcast
called changes.
And then it was like new plans for the future.
And I talked on a podcast called the personal growth project by Abigail Lang.
And she had me on and interviewed me.
And I think at the time I thought it was a great interview and when I was reviewing it,
I realized I stutter a lot.
And I might actually stutter a lot on this podcast as well.
And I don't realize it, which shows the value of reviewing your content and realizing where
you need to improve and where you got to get better at.
So that's another way to get higher quality is to review my YouTube videos.
And re listen to them and re listen to the podcast as well.
See where I need to get better at speaking.
So if you want to check out that episode, I definitely recommend it.
Maybe you're from that episode.
Maybe you came from that episode.
So if you if you did welcome, but if you didn't and you want to go check that episode out,
it's episode 85 on the personal growth project.
But I also want to I'm going to keep changing the topics because I've got a few things I
want to talk about today.
And when I went to funnel hacking life a couple months ago, which is a business conference
for entrepreneurs, Russell Brunson, the speaker, the action, the person that organized it,
but he spoke and he talked about Napoleon Hill, who if you've never heard of Napoleon
Hill, he's the author of think and grow rich, which is one of the most successful self help
books ever released.
And it was he was he wrote it in like the 1930s and during like the Great Depression.
And there was a whole story that Russell Brunson talked about at the event about the law of
success.
And it was basically how Napoleon Hill interviewed 2030 100, he talked to a lot of successful
people, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller, Henry Ford, extremely successful people.
And he figured out what is the secret to success?
Like what is the formula for success?
And so he actually wrote, he studied them for like 2030 years and wrote a book called
the law of success and 16 lessons.
And it's the entire formula for success.
And I definitely recommend that book.
I'm about halfway done reading it.
And the first lesson in that book is called the master.
And I was familiar with that term, the mastermind, it's like where you kind of get a group of
people to gather that are all thinking about the same thing and all have similar goals
and you gather and then you kind of share information.
And I realized that the mastermind was a very beneficial thing to do.
But I didn't realize how powerful it is.
And he basically talked about how you actually create a second mind when or a third mind when
you are gathered with another person and you're like in harmony with them and you're thinking
about similar things.
So that's the mastermind.
And as a result, I started going to the park with my friend Franklin again, because both
him and I are on this path to success, we're on the journey to success and we're both
on self-approval.
So we have similar goals.
And we actually stopped going to the park together because I thought that it was a good
idea to stop talking about things, to stop sharing your plans.
Which the reason behind that was because I thought that I wasn't actually making enough
progress.
And there was some truth in that because I was just too much talking and not enough
taking enough action.
But we started the mastermind again and I'm very glad we did because I learned a lot.
And before I get into what I learned about that, I want to talk about how I went to the
Dominican Republic.
And no, you know what, let's not talk about that because it doesn't really matter.
I just went to the Dominican Republic and it was a vacation for family vacation and
we were on the beach in the mix.
But whatever.
I got a nice refresh from that.
But I want to talk about what I learned from a mastermind with Franklin yesterday.
And I realized there is one thing that he told me.
He's watching a full discipline guide by Hamza on YouTube.
And one of the things he said to me, Franklin told me that one of the things he learned
on that full discipline guide is to be impeccable with the little things and to have a clutter
free desk, have a clear working environment.
And so I realized, oh, my desk that I work at is full of clutter and it's dirty.
And so that was the first actionable step that I took when I got home from that mastermind.
I actually cleared off my entire desk and now I only have the essentials, which is two
lamps and that's for my eyesight vision purposes as well as recording purposes.
It has better lighting.
And then I have my keyboard, my mouse, the mouse pad and the PC and my headset.
And that's pretty much all I have on my desk and the monitor also.
But oh, and my journal and pen and my water bottle.
Yeah, but pretty much I stripped out all of the non essentials and only have the bare
bones and it's a very minimalistic feel.
And then I started thinking about how when he told me that you have to clear, like have
a minimal environment and have clutter free.
I instantly thought back to when I got rid of my bed and I got rid of my dresser and
I basically cleared my entire room and made my entire room empty and had and replaced
my bed with a mat and I started sleeping on a mat and now my and then I like basically
have nothing in my room except for like my mat and a fan and like a journal.
And so I started thinking about how that affected me and my focus and my six, like my discipline
and all that, and it definitely positively affected massively.
And so I started thinking about how my closet is actually cluttered.
Like I ignored my closet when I was getting rid of all of when I was basically clearing
my room.
And so the second thing that I did after clearing my desk is I went upstairs and I cleaned
out my entire closet and I got rid of everything in that.
And in my closet, I probably had like a hundred books or maybe not a hundred books, but probably
like 50 books all stacked up and like four or five stacks.
And then I was thinking about, I heard Garrett J. White say one time, he said that he actually
cleared he had like thousands of books in his closet and he actually rented a dumpster
and cleared out all of his books except for like five.
He chose five books to keep and cleared out all of the rest.
And that was one of the best things that he did.
And I never took action on that until yesterday when I cleared out all of my books and I didn't
throw them away.
I just put them up in my attic.
And so now my closet is stripped of the bare bones as well.
I just have my dresser, a filing cabinet and my blankets on top of my dresser, my pillows
on top of my filing cabinet.
And then I have my four, I chose five books, which the five books I chose is called The
Law of Success in 16 Lessons, Reality Transurfing.
And then I chose Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson.
And then the fourth book I chose was called Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.
And I only chose that because I was planning on reading that next and I'd never read that
before.
So I wanted to keep it downstairs.
And then I also chose 10x is easier than 2x.
So those are the five books that I chose to keep up there.
And so that's pretty much all I have in my closet.
It definitely feels great.
I 100% recommend you to clear out your entire closet and your room and just declutter everything,
get rid of everything and go minimalistic and be minimal.
All right.
So I've got a few more things to talk about.
Another thing that I learned is about kind of discipline, but also making kind of training
yourself to love doing the hard things.
And I learned about this on an Andrew Huberman video.
He basically said, don't tell people your plans.
And this was one of the reasons why I didn't want to have a mastermind with Franklin anymore
a little while back, but I didn't watch the Andrew Huberman video until like a couple
days ago.
And Andrew Huberman explained it very well.
If you tell people your plans prior to doing like taking action on it and you're actually
not gonna, your like chances or odds of doing it, of actually going through with your plans
are much lower because of the like good feelings that it rise or because of the like good reaction,
positive reactions from the people that you tell.
And basically the actionable or the actual tips that he gave were to avoid a dopamine
peak before or after doing hard things.
So for example, let's say you are gonna choose your, okay, let's say you want to run a marathon
and you decide that you're gonna start training for a marathon.
And before you start training for the marathon, you tell your friends, I'm going to run a
marathon and then they like congratulate you and they say, oh, you can do it and they get
really excited for you.
That is that creates a dopamine spike.
And as a result, you're actually your chances of actually doing the training for the marathon
drastically drop.
So avoid dopamine spikes before doing hard things.
And then also afterwards, he said, avoid a hot fudge Sunday after the marathon.
Avoid immediately rewarding yourself after doing hard things.
And he actually brought up a study of children who liked to draw.
So people, so children who enjoyed drawing and actually did it on their own without being
told to, they just, it was their hobby.
That's what they enjoyed to do.
And so the scientists gathered or researchers gathered a group of children who enjoyed to
draw.
And once the children like finished their drawing, the researchers gave them a golden
star.
And so as a result, the kids actually got rewarded and they had a dopamine rush like
a dopamine spike because they liked the golden, like the golden star.
They enjoyed it because that would make them feel good.
And so then they drew, like they kept drawing more and more, they gave them golden stars
and then they actually stopped giving them golden stars.
And as a result, the children stopped drawing.
They actually stopped doing their hobby, the thing that they enjoyed to do because they
stopped getting rewarded for it.
So the two main things that I've been thinking about lately is to stop doing, like avoid
dopamine spikes before and after doing the hard work.
And then the actionable step that he said is to try and get dopamine spikes during the
hard work.
Try and cultivate a dopamine spike while you're doing the hard work.
And the way he did it was he told an affirmation, which I didn't memorize the affirmation entirely,
but it goes something along the lines of, I am doing this by choice because I love it.
Like I am choosing to do this because I love to do it.
And so it makes a lot of sense because especially like a year ago when I was biking to the gym
every single morning in the dark, in the cold, in the rain, it didn't matter rain or shine.
I was biking to the gym every single morning and I would always do it.
And then every once in a while, I would just be like super hype while I was biking, especially
if it was raining, I would just get super hype.
I'd be like, let's go.
This is so awesome.
Like it would be a lot more.
It would be more like let's freaking go this is so or like I'm freaking hype or I'm a
beast like you know, and I would just get super hype just biking, especially in the
rain.
And like I would cultivate dopamine spikes during the hard work.
And that was completely by accident.
Like I was purposely getting hype, but I didn't realize what I was doing of training myself
to enjoy doing the hard things.
So it kind of clarifies a lot.
And now I actually use it to my advantage.
Now every single time I'm like doing a set, like lifting or I'm like running or anytime
I'm doing something hard, I just get like I try to cultivate a dopamine spike.
And I found that it's actually helped a lot.
And he said, do it during the moments of like highest tension.
So one of the things that I do is especially when I'm like sitting down to do work, like
work on the YouTube or work on editing or thumbnails, like all that stuff.
Usually I'm able to, a lot of times I'm able to just get right into it, but a lot of times
I like am really tempted to just watch YouTube or do something that I shouldn't actually
be doing.
And so during those moments, those are the moments of highest tension.
That's when I should be saying to myself, I'm doing this by choice.
Because I love it.
So that's one of the best tips that I've learned over the past couple of weeks.
And I've been, I've actually been slacking over the past couple of months during the
school year because I thought that I wasn't going to be able to maintain my routine or
not necessarily routine, but I thought I wasn't going to be able to maintain cardio during
the school day or the school year.
And that was just dumb.
And now I have a new routine of doing cardio and, and go into the gym, but that's kind
of a sad tangent.
And I want to talk about the last thing I want to talk about today.
And it's the YouTube.
I am starting, like I said, I've started to take it a lot more seriously.
And one of the things I realized I got to do is I have to start coming up with great
ideas.
And so what I've been doing is like, there's two things in the youth in like two skills
and two skills for being a YouTuber that you can't necessarily outsource.
And it's creating or it's coming up with great ideas.
Yes, you can outsource coming up with ideas, but you can't really outsource coming up with
great ideas that are unique and original to you.
For example, one of the things that is unique to me, and yes, a lot of other people have
it, this like topic, what that I'm about to reveal is social anxiety and sweaty hands
and sweaty armpits in social situations.
That's a unique thing to me.
And that's, that's one part of the coin.
The other side is if the, if you can have great editing, a great thumbnail, but if the
idea is bad, then it, the video sucks.
So that's why I'm dedicating like 10 to 15 minutes every single day, just sitting in
silence with my pen and journal coming up with as many YouTube video ideas as possible.
So that's one of the skills that I like can't really be outsourced and the other skill that
can't be outsourced is actually recording and actually being in front of a camera.
And so that's also why I'm dedicating time every single day sitting in front of a camera
practicing my like being on YouTube.
And so like I said, I'm getting a lot more serious and going back to the idea generation,
you can have a very saturated idea and it's not going to get very many views.
For example, the first couple of videos that I was making were like the first three steps
of self improvement, discipline, like discipline, meditation and breaking up with your phone.
Those are very saturated topics.
Like a lot of people are making videos about that.
And so not, so it's my videos are not going to do very well.
What I realized is I need to come up with video ideas that I would be embarrassed, scared
or ashamed if other people that I knew, especially my parents and friends, if they found out
about that video that I made and watched it or even saw the title.
Like those are the types of videos I've got to be making in the future, which the social
anxiety topic is one of them.
And another topic is mediocre parents.
That is one of the, that's one of the topics that's very controversial and I'm very nervous
to release and I just recorded it a couple of days ago and then I re-recorded it today
because it was not as good as I wanted it to be.
So that's what I realized.
I had to be extremely prolific on YouTube and like be like true to myself and speak
about ideas that I would be scared to release.
So those are the types of ideas that I generate.
Things that I would be scared, embarrassed or like worried or like ashamed if actually
ashamed is not actually, yeah, in my use, in this use of ashamed, it's a good use, but
I'm not going to like post bad, like harmful, offensive content, like not that kind of ashamed.
Like those like the afraid, worried, nervous, embarrassed and ashamed, those are the emotions
that I need to be drawn up when I come up with ideas.
So that's what, that's another big thing that I have changed lately on the YouTube.
So this is the monthly update.
It's December 3rd when I'm recording this podcast and I'm going to be, I'm going to
be recording the monthly update every single month.
So you can expect a January update and I believe for the time being I'm going to be posting
the bonuses still, but I don't really like posting bonuses because it's kind of recycling
the content that I'm making.
But for the time being I'm going to be posting the bonuses just to kind of maintain some
level of high frequency in the upload schedule because monthly uploads I feel is not as good
as weekly.
But that's pretty much it for the episode.
So check out the just, I don't even know what I'm saying, but the next update will be January.
So have a good month.