I have 327 subscribers, so I gained 67 subscribers, but I set a goal for 500 subs by August 1st,
and it is August 1st, and I did not achieve it.
Whatever, doesn't matter.
Like I said, I don't really care about the subscribers.
I really just care about getting better videos.
Now, let's talk about what I talked about last month.
Last month I talked about why I was doing 1% dad and why I stopped.
I want to elaborate a little bit further.
And first, let's talk about one video in particular on my YouTube channel.
It's called, Mediocrity is not your role model.
I made that a long time ago.
Last year, and that was like the first video that I really took seriously on my YouTube
channel.
And I made that because that's what I wanted to talk about.
That was what I wanted to say.
Because pretty much my entire career on my YouTube and podcast, I always censored myself
because I felt like I had to protect some people.
And I'm being very vague on purpose because I learned a lesson, and it's not something
I'm sharing on the podcast.
But that video I made, and I actually had it up for a long time.
And then I unlisted it a couple months after posting it.
And then I started censoring myself again.
That's completely numbing my voice and numbing my message down just because of some people
in particular.
And then I did 1% dad because that's what I thought would send this message to these
people and they could listen.
But no.
I realized there's a book that I read recently.
It's called Primal Branding.
And there's one part of it.
And it's basically seven pieces that you need to build a great brand.
And one piece is a creation story.
And I kind of had my creation story here and there for a long time.
But I really decided to nail it this time and just say what I wanted to say.
And I'll actually pull it up right now.
What my creation story is because I spent a pretty long time, maybe a couple hours thinking
about this.
And it's only like three sentences.
So here it is.
Over many years, I tediously raised myself out of the debilitating modern lifestyle.
Yet, the delusion remained all around me.
I became enraged at the sight of this self-inflicted suffering.
So I decided to channel that rage into this YouTube channel.
So that's my creation story.
Basically I didn't like the lifestyle that I was living.
And so I carried myself out of it.
But I noticed that the lifestyle was still all around me.
And again, this creation story is extremely vague because of that lesson that I learned
when I posted a video called, or actually it was a lesson I learned while I was making
that video of mediocrity is not your own model.
And so that is super, that's my creation story.
Basically I get really angry at seeing.
I don't get angry at seeing.
I get angry at the fact that I'm living with the lifestyle.
It's like a constant.
I'm trying to find, I don't know what the, I don't know the word, is it adjective or
adverb?
I don't know.
I'm trying to find the correct word to use.
It's like the word that I used in the mediocrities and I remote role model is like it's offensive.
But it's more of like I used to live this type of lifestyle and I realized that it sucked.
And so I can't imagine it not sucking for other people yet.
I'm still surrounded by that lifestyle.
And it just gets to me.
It just makes me so angry.
I, in March of 2022 was, I think that was the first time where I ever actually wrote
it down in my journal of me just being completely pissed off.
March 2022, it was freezing.
I remember I was grinding.
I was literally grinding.
I was going to the gym every morning, even on the weekends.
And it was a Saturday or a Sunday.
I don't know.
And I biked and this morning it was like the cold rain.
And so it was just warm enough to where it wasn't snow, but it was cold enough to where
the rain was just miserable.
And I biked home from the gym and I got home around eight in the morning because I got
up at like four in the morning and got home and I just saw that constant reminder of that
old lifestyle that I used to live.
And it made me pissed off.
And every single time I always get angry at that lifestyle.
Every time I see that lifestyle, I get so angry.
But today when I was coming up with like the structure, the outline that I was going to
talk about for this podcast episode, I realized that I actually don't get angry anymore.
I've basically trained my mind to become so indifferent to these.
Okay.
I be key.
I trained my mind to become so indifferent to this thing that I'm talking about.
And that was because of the lesson that I learned.
There was a very definitive moment when right before I posted or right around the time when
I was making the episode on mediocrities and I remote role model, there was a very definite
moment where I learned a massive lesson.
And it caused me to become iron.
I like my mind became a prison.
I became so indifferent, so immune to reacting to these things.
And that's what I had to do to survive.
That may sound a little crazy.
Some people like, oh, you're just 18 year old kid living in your mom's basement.
No, that's what I had to do to survive.
And because I know that if I kept being angry, then I would literally die from my just anger
plus the fact that it's not healthy to be angry at people so that my solution was to
be indifferent.
And I don't think that's a good solution, but that was the only solution that I knew
and it's still the only solution that I know.
And it's caused, it's actually helped a lot, but I don't think it's very healthy.
And this is an ongoing story.
I have a lot more to share about this story, but I'm not going to share it until a very
definite thing happens.
And that's something that I will, you'll just have to wait and see as you follow along
my journey.
But that's basically that whole thing.
I realized today that I just don't care that much about seeing this, this lifestyle.
Like I've become so broken inside that I just don't care anymore.
And honestly, it's just saddening to me that that's the way that I developed.
But that's just what I had to do to survive in my environment.
So or at least that's what I had to do in order to achieve the life that I want to achieve
because it's impossible otherwise.
So that's that partial, that's part of that story.
And you'll hear the rest of the story as the months go by and the years go by.
But how this relates to what I'm doing right now is I realized that I've been censoring
myself for a long time.
And my actual creation story is the fact that this stuff makes me pissed off.
This stuff makes me consumed with rage.
And so that's what I'm really happy with how I came up with that creation story.
How I crafted this brief, like three sentences.
And it's literally just, I think that it's really good.
The only thing that's not good about it is, or the only thing that I know is not good
about it is the fact that it's like an a ninth grade reading level, which in stories you
do not want higher than a fifth grade reading level.
Like honestly, you should have like a third grade reading level.
But there were some big words that I really wanted to use in this creation story, like
tediously debilitating and yeah, those were the two big words, tediously and debilitating.
Those were the two big words that I wanted to use.
And those two words, especially in the same sentence, raise the reading level tremendously.
But that's a big side note.
So that's what I wanted to update on my YouTube channel, the fact that this stuff makes me
angry and I want to just let it out there.
So now let's talk about something really special that happened this past month.
And I'll just play the clip.
So you're about to listen to a clip that I recorded.
I'm going to pause the recording right now and look it up so I can tell you.
I recorded it on July 8th and you're about to listen to the clip.
If you don't want to listen to the clip, it's a minute and 38 seconds long.
So skip a minute and 38 seconds long, but it's pretty vital to the story that I'm sharing
in this episode.
Here's the clip.
I just made my first dollar online.
I just pulled it home.
My goodness.
I just made.
Okay, this is, I did not, I was just sitting here.
I was recording some B-roll footage and I got distracted like an idiot.
And I started reading comments and here, there's this guy.
I was reading comment.
He responded on one of my videos, my newest video that did really well.
And then I saw that he responded.
He said, hi James.
He responded on this video.
All of this stuff is in, I think this is reversed for you.
I don't know.
But this is my private, unlisted, like this is my unlisted training video, which means
that he bought my course.
Oh my goodness.
This guy just bought my course.
And then you know what I did right after that?
I pulled up my software system.
Wait, I'm, I can't even type right now.
System, I pulled it up.
Oh my gosh.
One sale.
I made one dollar.
That is awesome.
Let's go.
Man.
So that was me making my first dollar online.
And that was just a part of the video.
It's like a, I think it's like a five minute long video.
I'm going to link it in the description to a unlisted YouTube video that you can check
out.
It's the actual video that I recorded on the, like probably 10 seconds after I discovered
that I made my first dollar online.
It took me basically an entire year of grinding to make one dollar.
And that was an amazing moment.
And the funny thing is that right now, it's, I went back to normal.
There's this thing that I heard Hormozzi talk about.
And it's basically that he always, he's getting closer and closer to the reason why he actually
does what he does.
And it's the work.
When he was younger, he used to do the work for the results, like the money.
But now he's like, okay, I just do the work for the work.
I just like the work.
That's what I do.
And that stuck with me a lot.
I've been trying to train myself to focus on the work, the process and not the results.
And this kind of proves it because when I got, when I got my first dollar, obviously I was
excited because that was something that was like a big milestone on my journey.
But it tapered off.
It faded away.
There's this girl that invited me to speak on a podcast episode a long time ago.
And her name is Avigale Ling.
I forgot what her podcast is called.
But she basically explained how we were on a Zoom call before the episode.
And she was talking about how she went viral one time on TikTok.
And it felt amazing at the moment.
But then it kind of just faded away.
And it's like, oh, whatever.
And that's exactly what I felt about the one dollar.
Looking back on it, I'm really happy that I made a dollar.
But pretty much I went back to like normal mode, probably a day after.
Honestly, maybe even 10 minutes after that video, the dopamine kind of wore off.
And I just started to go back to normal mode.
But that was, that's why it's always better to focus on the process and the work.
Because when I make a good video, when I come up with a good video idea, I'm like, oh, this
is good.
But then immediately after I finished the video, I'm like, oh, that kind of sucked.
And I post it.
And I work on the next video because it's a much more reliable dopamine.
This is kind of the way I interpret it.
It's way more reliable.
It's more sustainable.
Because if you just focus on the results, then you're just working super hard for just
a one time hit.
Just one thing.
But if you focus on the process and learn to love the process, then you basically get
to do the thing.
Yeah, I don't like, there's a lot of times where I'm just like, okay, this sucks.
I sit down in the basement with a blank Google doc or I have like a half filled out Google
document and I just have to grind out.
I just have to go through a painful crucible to get a video done.
And oftentimes it sucks.
But you get way more pleasure from making a video than you do from getting, okay, no,
no, no.
Here, let's say it takes 20 videos to get your first sale online.
The amount of pleasure you would get from those 20 videos if you focused on the process
is a thousand million bajillion times more and more powerful than the amount of pleasure
you get from just making your first sale.
So that's why I always focused on the process.
And yes, the results are great.
It's awesome.
I know it's good, but just know that it's kind of, it's going to fade away.
Just like when I got my first hate comment, that was something, it sounds weird, but that
was actually something I was looking forward to.
And when it happened, I don't think I recorded it, but I was sitting in this in, in my chair
and I pulled up my comments and I saw that I got a hate comment and I was hyped.
I was ecstatic.
And then it kind of just fade away and that's like the results fade away, but the process
never leaves you.
The process never fails.
And in that video, I mentioned how one guy, a dude bought my first thing.
A dude bought my course.
And that same guy has become my number one subscriber, my number one fan.
And he has become like a friend to me.
And I don't want to reveal his name.
I want to keep him anonymous because I don't know how he feels about me saying, just sharing
that, but this guy, I love this guy.
I basically ask him so many questions and he gives me the longest responses.
It's actually amazing.
I, the first time I heard him, he, he emailed me and he said, like, I love your stuff.
Like I want to help you.
I want to make sure that you blow up.
And so I basically sent him a bunch of questions, probably 10 questions.
And he created a Google document and spent a couple of days typing probably a six or
seven page long entire, like the entire page was filled with words, six or seven pages.
And I learned so much.
Honestly, I was kind of on the edge of recording videos outside.
I was like, Oh yeah, cool atmosphere.
But now it's like, Oh, I got to record all my videos outside unless the context calls
for an inside one.
For example, if I'm like scrolling on TikTok, if it's a clip of me scrolling on TikTok,
I'm going to do it inside.
And I learned, I just learned so much about the psychology of my dream customer just talking
to this guy.
And he gives me such great feedback.
It's awesome.
So that is basically my superpower, my hidden superpower behind a lot of the improvements
that happened on my channel over the past month, because I set a goal for 500 subscribers
for this month and I said that I didn't really care.
And the reason why was because my content got so much better.
My mentor, my YouTube mentor said that my content is like a thousand times better now
than it was a couple of months ago.
And he also said that one video in particular, it was like, it was a video on me waking up
early for a thousand days.
He said that video was a massive leap in quality compared to the one just before that.
And the reason was because I read a book called How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck and I'm
actually in the middle of rereading it right now, again, because it's so great.
But this guy, the guy that I'm talking about, my number one subscriber, he actually helped
me so much with Build That.
Actually helped me so much in basically being aware of what I'm doing well and what I'm
doing bad.
And here's what I am focused on now.
I realized, I learned that basically all of my competitors, every single, the majority,
I don't want to say everyone, but there's not really any Mr. Beast style self improvement
YouTube videos.
And when I say that, I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about how he does like challenges
and how he's, I'm talking about how his quality, the effort he puts into it, the standard he
holds himself to and how every single video is just a piece of art.
There's not too many content creators in my niche that do that.
The majority of them, or at least the ones that I'm aware of, are all just business.
That's how this, my number one subscriber talked about it.
He said, they're all just business.
They're all just trying to make money.
And basically the content style is a teenager, teenage guy sitting in his mom's basement
or sitting in his room looking at a camera and talking with no cuts, no edits, like low
effort just for business.
And that's basically what I was doing for a very long time.
And it's not a bad thing, but I realized where I could stand out.
I put a lot of effort into my videos.
And I've been really trying to train myself to hold myself to a higher standard.
And that's where I stand out.
My number one subscriber keeps on reminding me that like my videos are different.
And here's where it gets dangerous because I don't like, I don't like broad praise.
I don't like praise unless it's specific.
People share very specific praise.
I like that.
But if they're like, oh, your videos are great.
I don't like that because all that does is boost my ego.
It doesn't tell me why they're great.
And so it basically creates like a blind delusion.
It makes me delusional.
But my number one subscriber keeps on reminding me why my videos are great and gives me a
lot of like actionable steps.
And that is super valuable for me, especially in the early days that I'm in right now.
I'm only a year into this.
And here's what I want to talk about.
I am not, okay.
Actually that's basically it.
That's like the whole spiel for this month.
I made my first dollar and I'm feeling, feeling good, but I got more work to do.
Got more stuff to do.
And there's a type of video that I made.
It's a completely different type of video.
It's called dumb ways to live.
I'm not going to post it for a couple of weeks.
But that video, my number one subscriber said that he liked it so much that I should just
delete all my other videos and just focus on this type of video.
I don't think I'm going to do that, but there is some, there's some room for experiment on
my video styles.
So it's really exciting because my content is evolving a lot.
And the, I just finished making a YouTube video this morning.
It's, it's like how to finally fix your life.
I'm pretty sure it will post the day that this podcast episode goes live.
So that video, when I finished making it, I just didn't like it.
I think that it's got some good pieces, good moments in it, but I just didn't like it.
Yet it was so much better than even like my video five times ago or six times ago, six
weeks ago.
So my content is evolving a lot and I'm getting a lot better and I'm really excited for the
future.
So there's not going to be another goal for next month because I just want to focus on
getting way better content or just improve my skills.
Peace.