if I look at the last8 years of my career progression from starting my business in 2017 all the way through till now where I have a business that makes over a million dollar a year at stupidly High margins and is reasonably lifestyle cohesive so I can do what I want most of the time without having to work unbelievably hard if I look at that entire period of time of 8 years I think I got pretty lucky which is definitely not how you expected me to start this video but it's true I think I got pretty
lucky because if I look at those years and I look at the attributes that I think created that success those attributes whether I was born with them or they were nurtured through my childhood or upbringing or whatever it was if I look at those attributes I think the number one that I had that created that success is that I was unbelievably stubborn or I am unbelievably stubborn and persistent I think without those two attributes I would have been constantly distracted pursuing things that were less important than the primary goal and that's what I want to
talk about in today's video I want to talk about this idea that if you let yourself be distracted by the shiny object of the day in spite of where you want to go long term you may waste your entire life never allowing time to actually get you to where you want to [Music] go see I have so many young men in my DMs 18 19 20 year olds in my DMs trying to start the business of the day they're trying to become a closer of my team a Setter on my team they're trying to lease
my stripe account or be a uh a a growth operator or whatever this business model is that some other person has told them is the business of the day they're starting that thing because they're ambitious they're ambitious and they want to start a business they have this goal for the future but they think that the thing they want to achieve needs to be achieved now otherwise it's not worth pursuing at all see if you are an ambitious person you undoubtedly have an idea of where you want to go long term maybe it's you want to
be this Authority in a space or you want to be known for this thing or you want to be this character that can command a room or whatever it is you want to have a a billion dollar business $100 million exit whatever it is that you want to achieve you have a long-term Vision but what you want to achieve now is distracting you from being able to achieve that in the future see my unfair advantage of being stubborn and persistent actually worked against me when I first started I was fired from the only full-time job
I've ever had because I just refused to be told what to do I've burnt more client and sponsor relationships than you would reasonably expect because I just have this complete inability to be told what to do if what I'm told to do isn't aligned with where I want to go long term it's like as soon as someone tells me to do anything part of my brain goes I don't want to do this anymore and that led to a lot of negative outcomes early on that meant that I struggled through a lot of the early years
of my business because I refused to do the things that I needed to do in that moment because I didn't feel that they aligned with where I wanted to go eventually but because I had that persistence and that stubbornness that kept me on the path that kept me looking for the long-term Vision kept me focused on that thing it allowed time and work to compound in my favor till now where I have the business that I set out to achieve when I first started out I have the lifestyle that I set out to achieve when
I first started out and I've achieved a lot of the things that I wanted to achieve and I'm still working towards that idea of the future the reason why I wanted to make this video is cuz I had this conversation this morning with one of my clients uh he's a 24y old guy and he has a freelance business and he's trying to build his personal brand around his particular skill set to eventually start some kind of high ticket around that skill set and he was asking the question of how he can maximize his freelance business
in the short term to allow him to continue living this lifestyle he thinks he needs to live and also maximize his business growing his personal brand and building for that Future Vision And it immediately sparked this idea in my mind that you have to prioritize one at the expense of the other and I gave him the advice of you may have to sacrifice some of that lifestyle in the short term so youve can take some time away from your freelance business your clients the thing that you don't actually want to do longterm so you can
focus more of your time on your long-term Vision I gave the example and I want to share that example with you now I gave the example of me eventually I want to become a keynote speaker that is able to command $250,000 every single time I get on stage that is a long-term goal that I have I want to be a keynote speaker that can command a quarter of a million dollars every single time I get on stage that is an unbelievably audacious goal now if I had have told him that I want to get there
in the next 12 months that is a complete impossibility there is zero chance that I going to be able to achieve that goal in the next 12 months and so if I stop at nothing in order to get that $250,000 goal that speaking gig goal in the next 12 months then I will lose the ability to achieve it long term but if I give myself 10 years to achieve that goal if I tell myself and I give myself the grace and the freedom and the flexibility to go I have 10 years to accomplish this thing
that's important to me well then I have this amazing ability to compartmentalize that goal into chapters let's say I want to be that keynote speaker and I want to get there eventually one day and here I am right now who do I need to become for those people organizing those events to look at me and know that I am worth that price tag well if that was the case and I was trying to achieve that goal well 10 years I'd probably break it up into 3 years 3 years 3 years and 1 year what do
I need to do in those first 3 years to get me closer to the next step on the journey well I probably need to build a reputation for doing something I probably need to build a reputation of achieving a specific result I probably need to build a reputation of achieving a specific result for others and creating a result in my industry and then once I've done that for three years I can probably spend the next three years demonstrating that Authority building myself into an authority in this space because of the results I've achieved in the
previous three years and then in the final three years or the six to nine years I can then share that with the world maybe write a few books maybe get on a few podcasts maybe start a TV show maybe become an even bigger Authority in the space off the compounding of the previous three years and then in the final year all of that success will come together in a moment and I might be able to dictate or command a quarter of a million dollar price tag to get to get up on stage and talk about
what I've achieved in the previous nine see most people aren't willing to spend that long onone goal most people aren't willing to let themselves or give themselves the grace to achieve something long-term over 10- year period and so they get stuck chasing these little goals in the interim they go I want $100,000 now at the expense of where I want to go longterm because part of my long-term Vision involves me making money and so they chase things now that are stopping them from getting compounding on their side see part of achieving your goal is going
to be doing really ordinary work for an extraordinary amount of time and that's a really hard thing to quantify it's really hard for us to quantify in the moment that we're in now the results that we can create by doing really ordinary work or really consistent work consistently for an enormous period of time because our brains just aren't made to think that long term but if you can give yourself the grace to go okay I have 10 years to achieve this goal how could I chunk it up so all I have to do today is
make a little bit of progress in this chapter that I'm in and then we can go to the next chapter and the next chapter and the next chapter after that and eventually you can get to the point where you are commanding that price tag that you want to do for the job you want to do or you are the person that you need to be to achieve the things that you want to achieve I wanted to share this line with you that I read recently that absolutely blew my mind and should start to I guess
qualify some of the things that I'm saying I was reading uh in the book the psychology of money and it was the point talking about how Warren Buffett's average over the last 70 years has been 22% but most of what makes him so successful most of what makes that such an incredible story is that 22% obviously is amazing but not that amazing in the grand scheme of other investors but he's done it consistently for 70 years and they gave the example of another investor by the name of Jim Simmons and Jim Simmons since 1988 has
averaged 66% annually Warren Buffett has averaged 22% three times the results of Warren Buffett in terms of being an investor but then they said that if Jim Simmons had averaged his annual returns for the same amount of time as Warren Buffett had which is 70 years he would have and been prepared for this number 6 63 quintillion 900 quadrillion 781 trillion 780 billion 748 m160 th000 if you take Jim Simmons returns and give it to the amount of time that Warren Buffett has consistently maintained his returns he would have an extraordinary amount of money and
I think reading this line just further ingrained this idea that most people dramatically underestimate the value of time towards the goals that they're trying to achieve most people are so fixated on achieving a follower goal or an income goal or a growth goal or a business goal in such a short amount of time that they're actually stopping themselves of achieving it through a long period of time and if you just give yourself the grace to go all right I've got a really long period of time to achieve the things that I want to achieve you
might actually get there faster and one thing that I wanted to kind of cap this off on to give you the confidence to do this is that patient isn't this zero some game I think so much of the rhetoric online talks about how patience is kind of this delayed gratification you always need to put things off leave things for the future but one of the things that I've experienced in my own career over these last eight years is yes it's been this linear thing of I've achieved the biggest results that I've ever achieved the longest
period of time away from the beginning but it's not like I wasn't achieving anything throughout that period of time it's not like I wasn't living an incredible life through the entire period that I was patient and so patience isn't this Zero Sum game where you just have to put things off for the future and then be dead broke the entire time you're working towards the goal in reality if you have a big vision for where you want to go 15 20 30 years from now you may actually achieve incredible results this year and incredible results
next year and incredible results over the next 5 years that leave you living a pretty incredible life where you achieve a lot of the monetary goals that you wanted to achieve in 6 years instead of 20 years but then you spend the next 14 years after that achieving even greater results see it's not like patience is this game where you just have to put everything off and you live this horrible life in the interim you actually get to make incredible progress the game is just making sure where you're going today is leading you towards that
long-term Vision because I see so many young people get so caught up in what's going to make them rich now what's going to get them result now what's going to start the business they want now and that stops them from pushing for something longterm most of you if you just give yourself the grace to work towards something over an enormous period of time you'll achieve so much better results than you can possibly comprehend so what's the actual tangible advice for this video Beyond me just ranting about patience and all this have a really Clear Vision
of where you want to go see when I first started 8 years ago I knew what I wanted to build I knew I wanted to build a brand around me I knew I wanted to build a business that worked with my lifestyle and I knew I didn't want to have a job I didn't really know what that looked like but I had a bit of an idea of where I was going now sure I could have had a clearer idea I could have laid out a bit of a business plan but I think having that
North Star that broad vision for the future of where I wanted to end up gave me the ability to focus on that as my primary focus and yeah I had secondary focuses I had to pay my bills I couldn't live my life on dreams and ambition I had to live I had to eat I have to make money and so I had freelance businesses I had freelance clients but at every moment that was never my primary focus my primary focus was always make enough money to get by but continue working towards the long-term Vision I
never let myself get dragged into whatever thing was working in the moment I took advantage of opportunities as they came I took on some big projects that paid me more money than I knew what to do with even back then when things were tight but I never let myself get sucked into something that wasn't my own ambition I always had that North Star and so for you watching this video You're an ambitious person let's be real you wouldn't be listening to me for 20 minutes once a week if you weren't an ambitious person you're ambitious
you have goals you have this vision for where you want to go I would urge you to get clear about exactly what that is it doesn't need to be crystal clear it doesn't need to be perfectly mapped out but you have a bit of an idea of where you want to go maybe you want to be an Authority in a particular space maybe you want to be known for something maybe you want to write books maybe you want to build a business and sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars whatever it is you have
a pretty good idea of where you want to go my advice to you would be get clear about where that is exactly where you going and then work towards it every single day work towards it incrementally every single day through small consistent actions over an enormous period of time and then let time compound the results of your actions even if you have short-term needs even if you need to work freelance to make money or work a part-time job to get by or whatever it is that you need to do to continue working towards the goal
do those things but never let them become your primary focus never become distracted by crypto or whatever business model some Guru has told you was important in the day because none of them really matter long term none of the business models that everyone is talking about the next big thing none of the cryptocurrencies none of the coins of today are going to be the thing that gets you to where you want to go long term and so keep keep a strong focus on that North Star even if it comes at the expense of what you
could do today because over a long enough period of time time is going to compound your results into something extraordinary I hope this video helps and I'll see you in the next one
