We last talked one month ago and right now I'm recording this on January 30th of 2024.
So the last time we talked I had 48 subscribers and I was really just focusing on making the best
video possible. But my main medium that I was doing that through was by editing the best
video possible, making my editing super good. And I remember I was telling you guys I am going
to be focusing on making my deep work better, like cultivating my deep work ability. And that's
what I did. I spent pretty much the whole month making the best videos possible through editing.
And I was also focusing on coming up with the best ideas possible as well because a bad idea
will equal a bad video, but a good idea will equal a good video if and like the execution is less
important if it's a good idea. And then I went on this whole journey over the past like week or two
where I realized that I didn't even know who my dream customer was. I always said like seven
months ago I read a book called dot com secrets. That was the first like business book that I read
that actually taught like a lot of tactics and strategies relating to business. And I read that
book and the first step literally the like the second chapter after the introduction the first
step of the entire book is to come up with your dream customer. And I did do that I thought I said
my younger self which is true but it's way too broad because my younger self could be
fourth grade could be eighth grade it could be junior year it like all of those are completely
different people like radically different people. So my younger self is not good enough like that
is not good enough so I realized that I was sitting on the couch I was reading my storytelling book
that I'm reading right now it's called the power of personal storytelling and
in the beginning of the book he just said like well you gotta you gotta realize like when you're
creating your stories you gotta think like who is the audience who is this for. And that's where
it really made me question like do I even know who my audience is even though I'd seen many different
prompts saying like who's your audience and I would always say my younger self and I never
really thought anything else. But now I'm realizing I'm sitting there on my couch and I'm like oh I
don't even know who this is for because I need to come up with like stories that are exactly for
this person. So I was like okay well I gotta figure this out and I remembered that I was thinking like
when did I learn about the dream customer. Well I remembered dot com secrets and I put
dot com secrets up an attic with all of my other books because I'm only focusing on a few books
right now. And so I literally just went straight away went up to the attic and grabbed dot com secrets
and then I locked myself in my room with nothing but my book a journal and a pen
and I just sat there answering all of the questions that he lists relating to the dream customer. I
said like who was he what does he look like what are his goals ambitions aspirations all of these
things I answered I it it took three hours I was sitting there for three hours on the floor on my
tatami mat just coming up with my dream customer. And then after that I had like four or five pages
full of notes about my dream customer in a journal and it was not consolidated enough so I spent
another like half hour transferring it over to a single sheet of paper. And then after that I went
to the basement and turned on my computer and went on to chat gbt and filled out all of the stats
about this person and I told it to create an image for him and I got like a bunch of like
crappy images that I didn't really like that I didn't like I turned out I described it wrong
because I it's it that's a whole like it doesn't really matter. And so after like a couple back
and forth between me and the AI I found the best I like got the best image that suits the person
not the best but an image suitable for my dream customer. And so what I did was I printed that
sheet of paper and then I took my sheet of paper with all the stats and then my sheet of paper with
my with with the the the printed out image. So I took both these sheets and some tape and literally
taped it up to my wall and if you have been following my videos or even my podcast you know that
that I am extremely minimalistic with my room I get rid of everything if I don't use it every day
or if it's not extremely essential or important. And so me taping a random piece of paper up on
the wall is extremely uncharacteristic of me yet that's how important this is that's how important
it was to take this first step and literally tape up a piece of paper of an image and a bunch of notes
written down of my dream customer. So that was the game changer number one. This literally happened
like maybe one or two weeks ago like right when I was starting reading this book the power of personal
storytelling. And then after that I quickly realized that my dream customer does not want all of these
highly edited videos. He does not want that. And I was like, well what does he want? He just wants
and I went on this whole journey. I was like okay first I realized that he wanted the unedited
stuff. He wanted like the raw unfiltered content like Hamza has been posting. He's got a second
channel Hamza unfiltered and then like all kinds of people are doing this. And then I went to the
park with my friend with two friends. They're both working on YouTube channels Franklin and Gorn.
And before on this podcast I wasn't really comfortable sharing names but I just recently
caught up on like the past two months of my friend Franklin's podcast and it only took like two hours
or not even probably like an hour because I was skipping all the parts that I didn't want to listen
to. And I realized that he was sharing my name also and I didn't feel like bad. I didn't feel like
angry that he was sharing my name which gave me a real good confidence booster and pretty much
gave me the green light to share his name because I feel like it's a lot more authentic if you
share their names. And then so I'm sharing and then the reason why I shared Gorn's name is because
I wasn't going to share his name but he started commenting on my YouTube videos.
Like literally the videos where I say I am like here's my mentor or like videos where I posted a
video thanking my mentor and I put it into a playlist on like feedback. Like mentor feedback
or Gorn feedback I don't know. And so he commented on it so basically revealed him so that gave me
the green light to share his name. And if they tell me that I don't they don't want their names
then I'll not share it in the future but for now I'm comfortable sharing their names. So pretty
much I go to the park with Gorn and Franklin and we haven't mastermind for an entire month at this
point. Actually I haven't seen Gorn since literally like December 15th and I just saw him and this
like we went to the park like two days ago. So I hadn't seen Gorn for literally over two months
and Franklin I saw one month ago. This was a very good mastermind. We got so much information but I
was kind of like fried and I didn't really take that much notes because I kind of had the thought
process where I wasn't really getting much out of it during it but then I reflected a lot afterwards
and came up to a bunch of conclusions and made a lot of connections. First there was one time where
Gorn, my mentor, he was talking about how there's like hundreds of like Hamza clones and like a lot
of people who are doing basically the same thing Hamza did and does and so he said that you got
to figure out like what is going to differentiate you from the pack. Like what's going to make you
different? Like because at that time I was not different and I still kind of am very similar
to other people but so I was like at the time I wasn't really thinking I was like okay I gotta
figure this out and then afterwards I realized storytelling. I was sitting in my room during
my daily pondering session literally me sitting in my room with the lights off on the floor on my bed
and just thinking for 30 to 40 minutes and I'm thinking well what what will make me stand out
what differentiates me and I realized that is storytelling because lots of different memories
caused this and one very potent one was Hamza stood out because of his storytelling. He actually
said that he and his editor were in a brainstorming session together trying to figure out what made
him stand out and Hamza thought it was like his leadership and all this other stuff but his editor
Sam was very adamant that it was his storytelling. He just told very good stories very compelling
stories and he told them well and then so I'm like okay storytelling and I'm like still thinking like
it's all about storytelling. More and more as the days go by I realized that it really is all
about storytelling. The only thing that matters like the only thing connecting us is storytelling.
I came to the epiphany during that meditation that pondering session that
YouTubers are just good storytellers. They're just good storytellers like yeah they have all these
like Mr. Beast has all of these editing all of this like production post-production pre-production
like he buys islands he has a lot of money all this stuff but he's just telling a story.
At the very core of things he is just telling a story so the only difference like at the very core
if you strip it to the extreme bare bones obviously there's a lot more differences between me and
Mr. Beast but at the core of things the only difference between me and Mr. Beast is he is
just a better storyteller he tells better stories and over the like that just makes so much sense
to me so I realized that like YouTube success is just a matter of figuring out how to tell good
stories figuring out what works what doesn't work how to tell it better all of these things so that's
what I've been doing. Right away I looked up best books on storytelling there's a top five
and I listened to all of his descriptions and I chose the two best ones that fit my current
situation the first one was the power of personal storytelling and the second one was Unleash the
power of storytelling which I was going to read Unleash the power of storytelling first
but I chose not to because the power of personal storytelling just came first in the mail from
Amazon so I started reading that and it absolutely changed my life for many different reasons and
the first reason is I realized that I had a very like bad relationship with self-improvement because
first of all a couple weeks ago I thought that all there was all like all my life was is once I
started self-improvement I thought that my life started when I started self-improvement and then
I realized that in this book he gave a bunch of activities actionable steps and one of them was
thinking back to your childhood so I was just thinking very broad like what was my childhood
like and I could not come up with very many memories it took a long time to start having
the memories come in like literally hours of pondering but now I'm able to like think of a
lot of things about my childhood and I realized that my childhood was not terrible I learned so
many I relearned so many lessons from my childhood now and I'm able to share them as stories and I
have I learned that video games were not actually the worst thing to happen to me it was actually
probably one of the better things to happen to me and I also learned that I've been on self-improvement
all my life I always thought that I was one and a half years old because that's when I started
reading so that's when I actually thought that my self-improvement journey began but no it was
it's not been one and a half years it's been 18 years my entire life I've been on self-improvement
because I can think back to many different memories of me improving myself the first instance was
when I like wanted to get good at soccer and I would play soccer all the time with my friends
in elementary school and then another instance is when I like I am an introvert so I'm an introvert
this is context I'm an introvert and I'm a shy person I've been like this all my life and
it's getting better like I I'm not sure if I don't know enough about introvertedness to know if it's
good or bad but I'm getting better at being less shy and also being like having less social anxiety
so it's getting better but all my life I've been like an introvert and shy which I'm actually not
sure now that I've been pondering my memories a lot I'm not sure if I've always been an introvert
and shy because I was like the most popular kid in elementary school so I don't know but I've been
I'm in like I have social anxiety and maybe I'm not even an introvert I don't know maybe it was just
video games that caused it yeah that's that's some inner work that I got to figure out but
middle school I'm walking around like this kid with social anxiety walking around selling chips
trading chips for hot lunch walking up to a bunch of strangers like that was scary that was hard but
I did it every single day because I wanted to I wanted to eat the hot lunch and I like I'd have
to pay for it or I would have to trade for it that's basically what I had to do but that was
another instance another instance was when I started working out and literally like I've been working
out all my life but when I started working out for myself in like eighth grade and then like being
intentional about going out just to work out and not just to play soccer and then I like and then
soft or like freshman year sophomore year junior year senior year all these times like I had been
on self improvement that's like that's another big epiphany I came to I've been on self-proven
all my life and I get that's a huge confidence boost as well for me because think about it if you
just assume and think to yourself like I've only been alive living how I want purposefully for one
year that's going to destroy your confidence but if you're like oh yeah I've been improving myself
my entire life and everything leading up to this point has been helping me for this good or bad
then that's a huge confidence boost so I'm like realized that I have been on self-proven my whole
life and storytelling is the next focus like I've been saying storytelling is my biggest focus
and so I've been researching how to tell better stories I've been reading books I've been well
actually I've only read one book so far but I've been reading I've been watching videos and I even
have been after I got home from that session with Franklin and Goren I realized that I got to figure
out who my competitors are so I was sitting in my room pondering again and I was like you got to
figure out your competitors you got to figure out what they're doing and then you got to find your
pocket that's literally what I wrote down I came up to that epiphany while I was sitting in my room
in darkness and I wrote it down in darkness so then I was like okay in the morning that's what
I'm gonna do that's my task for the next day find all my competitors figure out what they're doing
and then find my pocket so that's what I did I woke up the next day and I found all my competitors
not all of them but I found a lot of them and I created a google doc and I put a table down
and on one column it was their their channel name and a link to their channel another column was
their most popular video and then another column was notes about it and I found like eight or nine
youtubers some had like one had 50k one had 150k and then the rest had like below 5 000 subscribers
I'm talking about and so I basically go through and find all these people and I find I watch all
their most popular videos because I'm not interested in their duds I'm interested in their best videos
and I found out that all of their videos were just good stories all their best videos were just
good stories they began the video with good story and then I wrote a lot of notes and then
eventually while I was researching this I found another guy another self-improvement youtuber
hoff he has like 3.8 000 subscribers and I watched his most popular video and it was insane literally
is changing my life I'm not even kidding because his channel is the perfect case study for me
he had he was getting hundreds of views before he posted his most popular video just like I am
hundreds of views and then he posted his most popular popular video and it got 167
thousand views so he 100x'd his view count 100x if I do that too if I 100x'd my view count
from my most popular popular video I get 1.5 million views in one video so I was like how did
this guy do it because it was no accident that the algorithm just promoted it to 167 thousand views
no accident the algorithm does not make mistakes so I'm literally studying this video I completely
disregard all of my other competitors and I'm only focused on hoff so I on this same google document
I extend hoff's notes by literally like in two whole pages all of the other competitors I wrote
like one sentence like oh they started their video with a good compelling story oh there's that
and then hoff's notes literally extremely detailed I've pretty much memorized his intro he said
he said for the past two weeks I have been in a rut now what a rut is is basically when
you don't really get things done and I actually didn't say that quite right because he had a
slight pause behind rut and that happened at three seconds and then he had a long pause with a thud
on on the table after he said done like getting things done and then he thought like he basically
said getting things done and he thud the table and so and that happened at like 18 or 19 seconds
like I've literally been studying this video I discovered it I think yesterday or two days ago
and I've already seen it it's like a seven minute video and I've already watched probably like
like two hours worth of it maybe and I have so many notes and because this guy did not do it all
like it did not happen on accident he has the perfect formula for at least to get 167,000 views
without any editing and another reason why this case study is so perfect is because he had the
worst camera quality and it was in portrait mode so it's literally like there's black spots on both
sides like you know how when you take a picture on your phone in portrait mode there's like black
strips along both sides of just nothingness because the picture is just taken in the middle
that's exactly what his camera was doing his thumbnail was in portrait mode also which like
his thumbnail was terrible his video quality was terrible so that means that literally the only thing
that made his video pop off was his storytelling because he just told a story that's all that
there was to it in that video and so I'm getting like hundreds of views and I'm I'm thinking like oh
this guy literally popped off with nothing but a good story like the first 80% of the video was a
story and then the last 20% of the video was the moral of the story and he did not say like that you
should do it he just said listen up because this may help you because it helped me like that's
literally all he said so I'm studying this guy and I've already practiced videos like
like many I've already practiced videos and I'm already starting to change my videos to
this formula because it he proved that it works and I was looking at his other videos like after
he made 160,000 views on that video he posted another video and it only got 2.8 thousand views
which tells me that it was a bad video and the only reason why it got 2.8 thousand views was because
of the lingering effect from going viral all of these 2000 people went to they wanted to see his
next video because his previous one was a banger so they wanted to see his next one so that was
his opportunity to go viral again but he missed it because he didn't follow this formula which I do
not know what the formula is but I am extrapolating the formula literally as the days go by and I've
only been watching it for like two days and I'm not just studying I'm also implementing I am taking
action on this formula and that is basically like why I'm studying Hough he is literally one of the
best case studies for me right now another thing I want to talk about is over the past month I've
been training myself to love the work like love the process and not the rewards which I am extremely
glad and grateful I did because now I just do it for the work and I don't really I'm not really
dependent on the rewards which I'm talking about rewards meaning the analytics like getting a high
view count and then if I don't get a high view count then I don't get a reward so then there is no
meaning or purpose for doing this which is dangerous if you fall into that trap so that's why
I train myself for an entire month not to do that I made it a point not to look at analytics until
six days after each video was posted and I did that and now I've trained myself to like the work
so now I realized that okay I've trained myself through this mindset now it's time to actually
like figure out what works and what doesn't and in order to do that I actually have to see the
analytics at a pretty quick rate so I can apply it to the next video because before I was only
seeing the analytics one week late by the time I already finished the next video so then I have to
apply it to the next video so it'd be like I'd be on two weeks behind schedule two weeks delayed
so that means that I was only able to learn from two weeks ago which is not good so now which but
I it's worth it was worth it because I trained myself for that mindset so but now I am I'm all
good and now I'm able to look at the analytics and not get completely bummed yes I feel a little
sad if a video doesn't do that well but now I'm able to go into it with a sober mind and
figure out like why it was wrong for example a most recent video that I posted called like
Hamza's flawed self-improvement concept I thought that was my best video ever yet it's gotten like
15 views ever since I checked the analytics this morning and that posted yesterday so it's been
like a day it's a day old and it's gotten 15 views and I have a theory well actually I know exactly
why it's not doing that well it's probably because my intro was bad it didn't follow Hof's method
Hof just went straight into it and told the story my video took three minutes for me to get into the
flow stay took three entire minutes to get into the flow stay so that is another reason so that
means that I got two things to work on work on Hof's framework and then also train myself to get
into the flow state right away and moving forward I have 92 subscribers didn't really make much
progress over the past month on my channel I've I yes I did double my subscriber count but
that's not that much I just added like yes I doubled but I only gained like 40 subscribers
which is a lot but in the grand scheme of things it's not that much so if I only gained 40 subscribers
again this next month I'm definitely doing something wrong so that is basically like where I'm at right
now and moving forward I'm going all in on storytelling like the differentiator between
me and the pack is my stories and the storytelling my ability to my story ideas and my ability to
tell stories that is the differentiator that's what I believe right now I will see you guys
next time next month actually