It is March 1st, 2024, and it's been an entire month since I last talked.
And with that, there has been a lot of changes.
So first I want to talk about, I have 109 subscribers.
I only gained like 11 subscribers since we last talked.
There's a couple reasons for that.
My theory was that as long as I just radically improve my storytelling, then I will, like
that's all that will matter.
However, my ideas started to go down.
I started to come up with worse ideas.
And the execution was just bad.
There was no editing.
So there was basically nothing to compensate for the bad background or anything.
And that's, I think mostly the ideas were the thing that really made it worse.
And so I was getting like, maybe less than 50 views per episode.
And that leads me to the next thing.
I want to talk about the mindset going on as an entrepreneur.
Nobody wants, like, or not nobody, but a lot of people don't want to be an entrepreneur.
However they do want the result of an entrepreneur, which is like a, if you do it right, you get
to schedule your own time.
You don't have to work as much.
You basically get all of the fruits of the labor, which is like all the money.
However, nobody really wants to do the actual process of becoming an entrepreneur.
And what I've noticed and what I was prepared for is that it's a long, it's a long grind.
Boy, excuse me.
Shoot.
I can't be doing that now that I'm actually posting these videos.
It's a long grind to actually be able to become an entrepreneur or at least to become a successful
one.
But I started really focusing on this.
I started the podcast in July of 2023.
So it's been like eight months.
July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March.
Yeah, it's been like eight months since I have started my podcast and I have had zero results.
In fact, I have not made a single dollar.
So now a lot of people are going to want to actually push through eight months, much
less years of having little results.
However, the mindset that I'm going on with is, yes, I'm not seeing any results now, but
that's what everyone else experienced.
Every single person who was a successful entrepreneur or who is a successful entrepreneur, every single
person who I've looked up to during my journey, they went through a period of nothing.
They went through a period of seeing zero results, but they just kept pushing.
There's a guy.
I never really watched him.
I've seen him before on YouTube, but he is very famous.
His name is Aiden Ross and he's got like five million subscribers on YouTube.
So he has success.
He actually saw success and I saw one of his videos pop up on my feed the other day.
And it was basically a video of when he was 18, when he was getting zero results, like
no one was watching his stuff, just like how I am 18 and nobody's watching my stuff.
He called it the grind mode.
He said, when he was 18, before he saw any success, he said, you just have to go through
grind mode.
Every single up and coming artist or musician, they went through a period of seeing zero
results of grind mode.
They went through grind mode.
And if you just push through, nobody else wants to do it, but if you push through, then you'll
actually make it.
And just seeing that just reminded me, like that was already kind of my mindset, except
I really like how he worded it.
He basically said grind mode.
And that's kind of what I'm, that's what I'm doing, but then it also kind of made me
second guess, because he said that he would regularly do 12 streams.
Like he would be working for 12 hours a day.
Me when I saw that a couple of weeks ago, I was working one hour.
I was just practicing one hour a day.
Yeah, I was doing like some other things, but reality in reality, I was only doing one
hour of work every day.
So I was like, man, I am not doing enough.
So then I tripled my workload and I increased to three hours.
And what I mean by work is just practicing because there's really one thing that's going
to get me forward.
And it's just how good I am.
Yes, how good of videos I make will get me forward 100%.
But the most important thing is how good I am.
However, that's kind of the mindset I was going on with for the past couple of weeks,
but I realized that the highest leveraged thing that I can do, the highest leveraged
task that I can do is actually idea generation.
Last month, I said that I'm going all in on storytelling.
I said, storytelling is the only thing like if I can get so good at storytelling, I'll
be able to be so like, I'll actually see success.
And that's what I did.
I spent all month just practicing my storytelling.
In fact, I started a story vault.
So it's basically where I have this journal where I just write down the name of a story
and I have collected like 70 stories so far, at least 70 stories, probably even more than
that.
And after I've collected them all, I've spent the past two weeks, wrapping them out, literally
sharing the same exact story at least a dozen times.
I'm not even kidding you with you.
It's like if somebody saw my life on a time lapse over the past couple of weeks, they
would think that I am insane because I literally just come down to the basement at like six
in the morning and look at my story vault and look at the story I left off at and share
it.
I've practiced telling that story even though I've already shared that story like 10 times
in the past three days.
But that's exactly what you got to do.
Repetitions.
A huge lesson I learned from playing video games was if you just figure out what the
one thing or the if you just figure out like what the skill that you need to be good is
and then figure out how to get as many repetitions of that as possible, then you'll get super
good.
In video games, I used to set up this like practice course where I would just get repetitions.
Literally just do the same action time and time and time and time again for minutes.
Literally just clicking the same button five times every second for minutes long.
And that got me really good at the game.
And that's kind of the principle that I'm applying to my own skills in real life.
If I just practice my story telling, practice my communication skills, the way I speak my
body language, if I practice all of these things, if I get the repetitions, then I will
actually get so much better.
And I did that.
I spent three hours every single day for the past couple of weeks.
It's only been maybe two weeks.
I'm on here.
I'll tell you exactly what practice number I'm at.
I am on bulk number 37.
I just finished recording bulk 37 this morning, which each bulk is a one hour and a half practice
session.
And I do two bulk practice sessions each day.
And I've posted pretty much all of them on my YouTube channel.
And that leads me to the next thing.
I am no longer posting on this podcast.
However, there are some normal practice ones, like normal practice episodes that I had scheduled.
In the beginning of this month, I did a lot of normal practice.
Like the episodes that you've been listening to over the past couple of weeks are just like
practice number 22, 23, 24.
All of these I actually recorded like an entire month ago.
So you actually might be surprised depending on how much I actually grew or how much better
I am at speaking.
You might be surprised on how much better this episode is than the last one.
And even the one that I'm going to post tomorrow because I have a few practice episodes scheduled
in advance.
In fact, I have all the way up until practice 81 scheduled.
And I recorded that one on February 7th.
And that's when I started a series of talking about the 100 most influential people.
Yeah, don't worry about that.
I didn't do that because I read the book and I realized that a lot of these people were
scientists and I didn't really care for them.
So just ignore those two episodes.
But that is kind of what I'm doing now.
I'm not going to be doing the practices on the podcast anymore because it's a waste of
time.
I literally have to sit here for 15 minutes every day waiting for all of them to schedule
and upload.
It's just too much time.
I can either spend the time uploading a video, uploading like five videos every day, or I
can spend that same time practicing.
And I'd rather practice because the thing that's going to move me forward is practice.
So that said, this podcast is going to cut down to once a month.
I'm going to maintain these monthly updates so that next time you'll see me after March
10th, which is the last practice episode post date.
After that day, you'll see me on January, February, March, April.
April 4th is when the next monthly update will come.
So that's it.
The podcast, it's just for me to document the journey.
I'm not really trying to grow it because if I wanted to grow it, I know exactly what I
had to do.
I have to actually market it.
I have to actually go on to other people's podcasts.
I have to actually get other people onto my podcast.
And I don't want to do that.
I want to do the YouTube channel.
The YouTube is my real focus.
That's what's actually going to get me places.
So I've been doing three hour practices because I thought the storytelling was the best.
And I'm going to maintain the three hour practices.
However, now I understand that storytelling is not actually the best because I've had
plenty of videos that I posted that got like 10 views.
Absolute garbage because it was a trash idea, garbage idea.
So that's why, like I said earlier, the highest leverage activity that I can do is idea generation.
Now let me explain.
So in YouTube, there is a...
Okay, so your idea determines your total addressable market, the TAM, the total amount of people
that potentially could see your video.
So your idea basically determines that.
So let's say you're making a video on...
Let's say you're making a video on water skiing.
That's a outdoor sport.
So that video idea would only address water skiers.
However, let's say you made a video on outdoor sports.
That would address way more people.
Now I'm not saying one is better than the other because there's many different reasons
why you should not do the outdoor sports one.
However, how this applies to me is I was coming up with garbage ideas, ideas that no one really
cares about.
And so the highest leverage thing I can do is idea generation.
If I can come up with an idea that has the largest TAM, then that will give me the most
views.
And that's where execution comes in play because I heard somebody say that your idea determines
the TAM and the execution determines the percentage of people you actually reach.
So let's say your idea has a potential view count of one million people, one million views.
So you came up with that idea.
Now it's time for the execution, which is recording, creating a thumbnail, creating
a title, editing, and all the stuff in between, that is the execution.
So now that you have this one million TAM, your execution decides or determines what
percentage of that.
So if you have a really, if you have perfect execution, which is impossible, you will get
one million views on that video with perfect execution, not even the best people on the
planet are able to achieve perfect execution because it's impossible.
There's always something you can do better.
So it's more realistic to have like a lower execution.
So that's why like businesses, TAM is a known concept in business.
That's why businesses never expect to actually reach the entire TAM.
However, if your execution, my execution is pretty bad because I don't really, I'm a
brand new YouTuber.
I've only been posting on YouTube since November.
It's only been like four months, so I haven't had as many repetitions as other YouTubers
have.
So my execution is going to be low, which means that I have to improve it.
And in order to improve my execution, excuse me, in order to actually improve my execution,
I have to actually get better every day, which I have been doing.
However, it's a long process.
That's why YouTubers go years without any results because they have to take years to
get all the repetitions.
So that's why what I'm trying to say is that, let's say I only get 1% better every day.
That means my execution will get 1% better.
So let's say right now it's at 10%, and then in a week it'll be at 11%, and another week
it'll be 12%.
That means that what I'm doing right now, spending three hours a day practicing my skills
on being a YouTuber, that is only going to improve my view count by maybe a thousand
or a couple thousand views per week.
However, the reason why I say that idea generation is the highest leverage activity I could do
is because if I find an idea that has not one million potential views, but a billion
potential views, well then that will actually increase my views tremendously because my
execution is going to stay the same.
Let's say I have a 10% execution rate.
So that means that I get 10% of the potential audience of that view or of that idea.
So if I have a one million person view video, then my execution will only be 10% of that.
I'm not good at math, so what is that?
Like 10,000, 100,000?
Yeah, 100,000 views.
So if I have a one million view idea, then I'll get 100,000 views with my execution.
Number five, a billion view idea and I have a 10% execution, well then I'll have a 100
million view idea or a 100 million view video.
So that's why idea generation is the highest leverage activity because there is little
skill, yes there is skill involved in idea generation, however it's just a volume game.
So if I just come up with 200 ideas, I'll find like one really good one.
And that is exactly what Mr. Beast does.
He spends hours coming up with ideas, maybe even days coming up with ideas and he comes
up with the highest ham ideas possible.
That's why his views or that's why his video is yet over 100 mil on every single video
because he just has the best ideas.
Yes, his execution is better than everyone else's, but it's also his ideas are the best.
So that's why I know I've been repeating this over and over again, but idea generation is
the highest leverage thing I can do just because I can come up with a great idea right now.
But right now I can't really improve my execution skills tremendously.
It takes a long time, like any skill.
That brings me to the next thing.
My videos were crap because I wasn't editing.
They were just garbage and I was not proud of putting them on my channel.
So that's why starting today, actually the video that I'm posting today, that one was
actually edited and it's not even like that fancy of edits.
It's just like simple camera changes like zooming in, zooming out and putting in some
pictures and videos potentially.
But I just want to have some edits so it's not like that garbage.
And last month I talked about how I needed to find what differentiates me from everyone
else.
Like where's my pocket?
What kind of, where, there's a huge market, self improvement market, but it's pretty much
already taken up.
Everyone is kind of struggling for some more views.
All my competitors, they're all struggling to steal the eyeballs of the giants already
in the space.
So that makes me think, okay, well, I need to figure out what differentiates me from
everyone else.
Like what's my new opportunity?
There's a concept in a book that I read called Expert Secrets.
It's basically where a lot of people have a tendency to provide an improvement offer,
which is basically like a better this, a better that.
And those are garbage.
Like those are basically how you're trying to compete with the already established giants
in the field.
Steve Jobs, he is an amazing improvement offer, or not an improvement offer, he is an amazing,
amazing new opportunity creator.
When back when people were listening to music on CDs or hard drives, all the CDs, I don't
know how many songs a CD can hold, but for example, sake, let's say a CD can hold 10
songs.
A improvement offer back in the day for a CD would have been like a better CD that could
hold 100 songs.
Steve Jobs, he did not do that.
He created a brand new opportunity.
He knew that people didn't want a better CD or a better hard drive.
He knew people wanted something different.
So he introduced the, what is it called?
Man, why did I just completely blank on what it's called?
He introduced, oh, the iPod.
He introduced the iPod, which is a completely new market.
And that is like a extreme innovation.
However, self-improvement is not an innovation thing.
So that means that I have to figure out how to present my improvement offer as a new opportunity.
Russell Brunson, he is the guy who wrote that book, Expert Secrets, that I'm talking about
right now.
He is a co-founder of a company called ClickFunnels, which is basically a website builder, like
a drag and drop website builder.
Now when he was creating that, like when he first introduced that, like that business,
product, there were already a bunch of website builders out there.
So his product in of itself was an improvement offer.
However, he positioned it as a new opportunity by creating this new thing called Funnels.
He basically popularized that, oh, our website builder can help you build a funnel, and it's
not just a website builder, it's a funnel builder.
And then he also said, he also weaved in his own frameworks for success into that.
So that's how he created a brand new opportunity with an improvement offer.
And I reread that book recently, and I learned what my new opportunity is.
Self-improvement in of itself is an improvement offer.
What I am offering my YouTube channel is an improvement offer.
So fundamentally, excuse me, fundamentally, oh my gosh, I gave you some water.
Man, my throat just got really dry.
Fundamentally, my YouTube channel is doomed for success.
Why?
Because it's an improvement offer.
I'm trying to do a better thing than all of the established giants are doing.
And why come to me when you could just go to the person who already has the established
audience, which is why I had to get a new opportunity.
I realized that the thing that makes me unique in the market is that I escaped high school.
I graduated high school early.
There's not very many people online talking about that.
So that's why I basically made that my new opportunity.
Self-improvement but to escape high school.
So that's kind of my new opportunity.
And I gotta admit that I'm not really doing that great of a job like creating videos for
it because it's tough.
I created one video of how to escape high school, but it got two views.
So I'm not really sure how to actually execute on this, but I'm figuring it out as I go.
Now that's another thing.
I have a dream customer.
I have an established viewer that I'm making my videos for.
However, as I am going about my days, I'm hearing stories about other people who are
listening to my stuff.
And so that's kind of tainting my idea of my viewer.
So I find myself speaking to the person who I'm not actually making the videos for.
And that is affecting the quality of the videos as well as the messaging.
So I find that there's a concept in Expert Secrets called, actually I don't know if it's
an Expert Secrets.
I think it's in Traffic Secrets, which is one of the other books in that trilogy of books
that Russell Brunson wrote.
There are three types of customers.
There is a cold audience who don't really know what you're doing.
Actually, no, no, no, this is the wrong concept.
There's three types of people, three types of customers in the market.
There is a satisfied, so, oh wait, no, no, let me start with, there's a diehard, a diehard
customer.
You are never going to convince them to switch to your product because they are already really
happy.
In fact, they are a diehard about their own product and they're never going to switch.
Those are the people that you should not target because you're never going to win them over.
Then there's the satisfied and they're kind of happy with their product.
They're also not like completely mad with it or completely excited about it.
The only reason why they would switch to your offer is if you have a significant feature
advantage or price reduction.
And then there's the person who I am targeting, which is the frustrated.
This person is frustrated with their own product and they are, usually they hand you money
the second they see that you are offering them a new product.
So you don't really have to do much marketing or much work to get these people because they're
already frustrated about their own product.
So they're easily able to move over to you.
That's why I find myself kind of talking to the diehard a lot of the times.
I'm talking to the person who is not really into self improvement is not really, is not
really all into this stuff.
Even though I should be talking about the frustrated, the person who is frustrated that they have
to go to high school.
So that's one issue that I'm worried folks don't, or that I'm like dealing with right
now.
And I want to talk about kind of what I'm working on right now.
I've mentioned earlier that I've not made a single dollar.
I've not made a single cent on like on my entrepreneurial endeavors.
I made more money as a fourth grader, as an entrepreneur fourth grader than I have now
when I'm actually taking it seriously.
In fourth grade, I when I first started playing the saxophone, I memorized some Christmas tunes
and I got my friend to come to the corner of the block at an intersection.
And we basically just put a tip jar out and we put Santa hats.
We were wearing Santa hats.
It was during the Christmas season.
And we started cranking out some Christmas tunes and got some tips.
Like we made a lot of money that day.
Someone gave us a $20 bill.
That was in fourth grade.
So I've made more money in one day as a fourth grade entrepreneur than I have in eight months
as a full time high school.
Actually not even high school anymore, but full time 18 year old entrepreneur.
So that got to me over the past couple weeks.
Like really got to me how I have not made a single dollar.
And that's why I realized that I have not even had an offer out.
The only focus that I've had was growing my channel, growing my YouTube skills.
And I knew that was going to be a long game.
It's going to take a long time to get good enough to actually be able to make some money
on YouTube.
But then I realized that I wasn't even putting out an offer.
So that's why over the past couple of weeks, especially like three weeks ago, I posted
a video called the gym was holding me back.
And that video is basically just an entire sales letter to try and get people to buy
a product.
And I signed up for an affiliate market position.
Like I signed up for a Amazon affiliate partner and that would allow me to earn commissions
on the sales.
However, it did not go as well as I thought.
I got 2000 views on that video, 60 clicks on my link.
So 60 people actually clicked on the link and zero sales.
So it's going to take a little bit more effort or more time to actually earn money on that
front.
That brings me to the next thing.
What if I just make ads?
There's a thing called direct response marketing.
And Russell Brunson, the guy mentioned earlier about the book that I was reading of him,
he is the king of direct response marketing.
He is probably the best direct response marketing in the world right now.
And he talked about how you basically create ads and target viewers target customers, whether
they like it or not, you buy ads, you buy their eyeballs, and then they click on your
link and they buy your product.
And then you basically make a second sale.
You basically keep them as customers through the brand.
So the actual marketing, I don't remember the word he used, but the direct response marketing
is to get the first click, to actually get a customer in the first place and then the
brand, like your YouTube channel and the company brand, the personal brand, whatever, that
is that role to actually heap that customer in your area and to actually make more sales
with them.
But that understood, I have just been focusing on the brand.
I've just been focusing on my YouTube channel.
And he said that it's actually really difficult, it's way more difficult to make sales just
by using brand than it is to make sales through direct response marketing, which is why I
picked a product, I picked an affiliate link.
Yes, I'm not really sure if this is like true direct response marketing because I don't
have my own product.
However, I picked my own product that I use in my own life that I could sell from Amazon,
which is a gymnastics rings.
And I also tried Tatami mat.
That was the first ad I made a couple of weeks ago of trying to sell it to time.
But I didn't even get a single view on that ad, even though I bought a bunch of stuff.
Doesn't matter.
They didn't charge me anything.
So I used that money on a different ad, which I rerecord, I record a brand new ad.
It's less than two minutes long.
And it's a YouTube ad.
So it's like one of those skippable ads in front of a YouTube video where you have to
click skip after five seconds if you want to skip it.
And I recorded that trying to sell gymnastics strings.
And honestly, I think that was one of my best videos I've ever made because the music was
just so perfect.
The editing was so amazing.
And I just really am really proud of that advertisement.
And I put it online.
I bought advertising for it.
I actually paid real money to get some eyeballs.
And it cost, I have a $1.50 budget.
So $1 every day I spent.
And I've spent $1.50 so far.
It's been live for like three days.
I don't know why they haven't actually sent it to more people yet, but I've spent $1.50
and I got 200 views.
However, the actual view count that they told me was 50 views and zero people clicked.
But with a 1% conversion rate on the actual video, then that means 1% of the people will
click.
So then that means I have to have 100 views for people to actually click.
And then of that 1%, there's also a 1% conversion rate inside of that to actually get them to
buy it.
That's with really conservative numbers.
If my salesmanship is my, if my sales skills are garbage, like 1% is garbage, I think.
Which also makes me think that I'm probably not even going to make money off of this because
with that, with those numbers, I have to spend like $10 to make like $2.
I don't know.
But honestly, I'm just really excited to see where it goes because I'm just curious
how well it does.
And that's basically what I'm working on right now.
Just making like the best videos possible, coming up with the best ideas, while also
actually trying to sell things and making ads and just experimenting with ads.
See how that goes out.
That brings me to the last thing.
Ever since I started talking online, I've been really kind of holding myself back, holding
back, kind of censoring myself.
But lately, I've been getting really brave.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or it's a bad thing.
I don't know, but I've been getting really brave with my voice.
And I've also just been kind of getting a little frustrated too.
So that's why some of the videos that I'm going to be posting in the future, starting
with the one I'm posting today on March 1st, so that one is actually live by the time you're
listening to this, the videos that I'm going to be posting in the future are going to be
talking about what I actually think, attacking our culture and our society, while also trying
to maintain a good will with the individual.
I'm not trying to attack an individual.
I'm trying to attack our culture, our society, how it's normal to be unhealthy in our society.
It's normal to spend hours just consuming garbage media.
Why?
Because I was in that position.
I grew up in our society and I grew up learning or watching TikTok, looking on social media
for hours.
And it destroyed everything about my existence.
I was so miserable.
My mental health was garbage.
I literally just felt worthless.
I felt like a piece of garbage.
And that's exactly what our society calls normal.
And that's exactly what our society is preaching for us to do, maybe not through the actions,
or maybe not through the words.
Through the words, society is saying that this stuff is bad.
It's no secret that junk food is bad for you.
It's no secret that it's bad to scroll on TikTok for hours every day.
This is no secret.
Society says that it's bad for you, yet through the actions, society is telling you to do
these things because everyone does this.
And it's really bad for our health.
It's destroying our future.
And that's what I've been really thinking about for the past couple of years.
And I've just started to pick up the courage, eight months into this.
I've started to find the courage in myself to actually start talking about this because
it's a sensitive topic and I could get in some trouble.
Not gonna lie, I could get in some trouble.
I could pull myself into a bad situation by talking about this stuff, but it's what I
really care about.
It's what I'm passionate about and it's what I want for the future.