Improvement Pill here recently I've been having strong urges to share some of the stories from my past I've always liked telling stories they're interesting they're memorable and they are the single most effective way to pass down lessons to the next generation so today I'm gonna tell you a special story the story behind why and how I started this channel when I was 19 years old I decided to drop out of college I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time but I knew one thing and that was if I stayed
in college I would waste two more years of my life and still be stuck without a clue as to what I wanted to do and by pure chance I ended up somehow landing a job as an old school salesman working door-to-door yes they still do that selling Internet and TV packages in the Bronx of New York City and thus began what I consider to be the only real schooling I ever went through in my entire life because it was on the streets of the Bronx that I learned about true work ethic I learned how to
push myself to keep on going working 12 hours a day all alone in a hundred plus degree weather being baked alive with a full Sudan it taught me how to deal with rejection man I've yet to face something as demotivating as spending 12 hours a day knocking on doors getting yelled at and having doors slammed in my face only to go home having nothing to show for all the hard work I had just put in there were plenty of days at least once a week where I would make no sales which basically meant I had
just spent 12 hours working without earning a dime this taught me how to never give up in the face of failure it exposed me to different people in different cultures I've met tens of thousands of people while on the job and I've been inside thousands of different homes in the hands-down most diverse city on this entire planet and this showed me just how different some people are but also just how many similarities there are between all sorts of people of different ethnicities ages and levels of income the job taught me how to be charismatic how
to calm down screaming old ladies who are threatening to call the police on me and how to talk with such finesse that they'll be cooking dinner while filling out the paperwork to buy my internet package an hour later but most importantly of all it taught me the joys of being a teacher see after working my butt off for a couple of months I became one of the top performing salesmen in the office my boss saw some potential in me and I was promoted my new job was to continue to go out and make sales but
to also train other new salespeople at the same time and at first I was pretty bad at it see teaching someone how to be a door-to-door sales person isn't only about teaching them how to be good at sales you also have to teach them about all the other stuff I mentioned before you had to teach them how to be mentally tough how to be optimistic in the face of failure and how to speak with finesse in a way it's sort of like what I do now it was sort of like teaching self-improvement and boy was
it tough see in the beginning every single person that I took under my wing quit in less than a week I was very discouraged I thought maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a teacher but my boss said that this was perfectly normal that there was a learning curve to teaching just like how there's a learning curve for doing sales and he continued to give me more and more people to Train this went on for a couple more months and I got better and better at teaching people all of these skills and mindsets and
that's when I met a very special girl someone who I'll never forget for the purposes of this video I'm just gonna call her Stella Stella was a single mother she had her son at the age of 17 with a stereotypical scumbag father who ended up running away and leaving her with all the responsibilities her previous job was working as a cashier making minimum wage and she decided to try her hand at sales because well she needed to make more money to support her kid she wanted her kids to have a good future and she told
me all of this on the very first day I met her so I knew exactly what I was working with I knew I couldn't let her down so I took her under my wing and I brought her onto the field every single day for weeks and weeks and I worked with her intensely making sure to pass on all the little tricks and skills and mindsets that brought me success in the past she was the first person that I truly taught with all my heart because I knew if I let her down I would also be
letting her son down and eventually the results started to show she started making a lot of sales on her own in fact there were plenty of weeks where she performed better than me that was so happy because she was the first person I ever coached successfully fast forward many many more months and I was managing a sales team of 12 people and we were ranked number one for the entire Northeast region of the US for an entire winter bringing in over 1 million dollars worth of revenue for our client and because of this achievement I
was given the opportunity to open up my own office on Wall Street and at this point in time I thought I had made it I thought I would be happy but in reality what I had worked my butt off for over a year trying to achieve was a big fat lie see after opening up the office I found myself working even more hours every single day totaling up to something like a hundred hours a week and I wasn't even making much more than before because I had to pay for the rent and all the other
utilities for the new office and worst of all the one thing that I truly loved about the job which was teaching was something that I no longer did my new responsibility was to deal with more of the backend issues and compliance with the clients I was basically stuck in the office all day doing paperwork and this soon caught up to me because just a couple months after opening the office I woke up in bed one day looked at my phone put it on silent and went back to sleep I was burnt out I told the
rest of my team that I had reached my limit and I shut down the office the next day this was the biggest failure of my life because I had spent so much time working towards this goal thinking that it would bring me happiness only to realize that it just didn't but I did learn one thing and it was that money wasn't gonna bring me happiness freedom was far more important and that's something that has stuck with me to this day anyways about a year later my sales team had a reunion we threw a party at
a karaoke joint and Stella came by to say hi and as the night was ending she dragged me outside and told me about what she was doing with her life now after I had shut down the office she ended up getting a job at a furniture store doing sales and she said because of everything I had taught her she was now the number one performer in the entire store making about $80,000 a year a huge jump from the 20,000 she was making before as a cashier and she looked me in the eyes and told me
that because of my efforts she was now able to send her son to a good school she could afford to pay for a bunch of extracurricular activities and buy him whatever he wanted she was making so much more money that she even had a large chunk saved up with plans on starting her own business she said thank you all of this was possible because of you and this brought tears to my eyes I felt something stirring within me and it was at that moment that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of
my life I want to be a teacher this concludes the first part of our story now before we start the second part I do want to quickly give a shout out to the sponsors of today's video Taylor brands the reason I'm able to live such a free and fulfilling life nowadays and help teach people like Stella is all because of this business that I've built around my passion of teaching and I know a lot of you have a strong desire to build a business down the line as well if you do then one of the
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next but I was absolutely sure about two things number one freedom is far more important than money I will be happier doing something that pays less but gives me more freedom and time to enjoy life and number two I want to replicate that experience I had with Stella I want to teach self-improvement teach people how to fish so that they can achieve great things on their own down the line but even though I knew these two things I decided to only focus on the first point see at the time I actually didn't think I could
make enough money teaching people to sustain myself I didn't see how I could do both at the same time I didn't have the know-how like I do now so I decided to simply pursue with the elusive dream of achieving passive income online because I figured okay I can make enough passive income to pay all the bills then I can do whatever I want I could relax and not have to worry about surviving and then I can maybe start a coaching business or something along those lines so that was the plan I started going to the
local Starbucks from my laptop every single day you guys might have heard this story one of my other videos right I would dress up in a full suit because he got me into that same crazy work ethic mindset I had back in my sales days and I would just work in Starbucks every single day for months and months and months I was completely new to the world of online businesses and passive income and all that sort of stuff and this was before there were so many resources out there teaching people how to make money online
you guys don't know just how lucky you are because I was spending most of my time on forums reading about how to build these online businesses as compared to what you guys have now entire channels with hundreds of videos dedicated to showing you step-by-step how it's done and it was tough the first thing I tried was something called affiliate marketing using Amazon basically if you can get people to purchase something on Amazon using your link you get a small small percentage of the profits so I started building a bunch of different websites reviewing a wide
variety of different products like vapes and perfumes and drinking games and all of these websites were complete failures well to be fair the drinking game website wasn't a complete failure because it was actually where I made my first online sale I remember this clearly the first time I ever made money online was by selling a beer pong table that someone actually bought after reading my review on the best drinking games to play at parties and Amazon paid me like $15 for that sale but then literally the next day they sent me an email saying that
websites about drinking or smoking paraphernalia are not allowed and they closed down my affiliate account but I still felt pretty happy because I knew that it was now at least possible for me to make money online if I could make 15 dollars in a day then it's possible to one day make a hundred and fifty dollars in a day I kept thinking about this to myself and I kept on trying but like six months into this journey I started running low on funds I only had a couple thousand dollars left to my name so I
ended up getting a part-time job so I could they afloat I would still work on my online business stuff on the weekends in Starbucks but during the weekdays I'll be canvassing out on the street in the lower parts of Brooklyn basically my job was to get people to sign petitions for political parties and one day I stopped this guy in the street and he refused to sign but he was like hey man you you look like you really know what you're doing why are you canvassing on the street and I told him about my past
and what I was working on now and how this was a part-time job I was doing to help fund my ventures he was like wow I actually have a close friend who has a successful online business he sells Kindle books he makes thousands of dollars every single month passive income and I was like oh my god please please tell me more how did he learn how to do this well he learned it from an online course he bought and I was like okay that honestly sounds so much more fun than creating websites because I'm just
not tech savvy at all so please give me the link to this course so he gives me the link and I purchased of course that very day and I binge-watched all the lessons and within two days I was writing Kindle books now my commutes my part-time job was very very long I lived in Queens and it takes almost 2 hours on the subway to get to the lower parts of Brooklyn where I had to work and this meant I had to spend an additional two hours to get back home so every day I had about
4 hours on the train all to myself and during this time I would pull out my laptop and write an entire book every one to two days now these weren't like a hundred page novels these were short little 20 to 30 page books and it actually wasn't too difficult for me to do this because during all of this time I was still very very much obsessed with self-improvement so I would write books on important self-improvement topics such as social skills confidence and body language things like that I would basically repackage what I have learned from
books and also what I have learned from the streets of the Bronx into these short little self-improvement books that I would then sell on Amazon Kindle for 2 to 3 dollars each and I did this every single day for an entire summer I published dozens and dozens of books and eventually the results started to show people actually started buying my books to be honest I thought they were pretty good especially compared to all the other nonsense that was on Amazon Kindle at the time and it also sort of scratched that age that I had when
it came to my passion of teaching self-improvement after about six months of doing this I was actually able to make over a thousand dollars a month passive income and this was a huge achievement for me this was genuine passive income I would wake up every morning and look at my account and see that I had earned like thirty dollars and I was hooked I knew that I never ever wanted to work a normal job again because this way of making a living allowed me to literally make money while I was sleeping this was the ultimate
form of freedom that I had been searching for now after breaking a thousand dollars a month passive income I started to realize that had really let my social life suffer I had basically isolated myself from all my friends for years in the pursuit of my career but now that I was making some money every month I had enough time to focus on rekindling my social life so I started hanging out with a lot of my old friends from back in the day before I had dropped out of college and one day I was having a
conversation with a close friend of mine Kelly now she was about to graduate and she was talking to me about all the problems she was facing how she was nervous about finding a job how she wasn't really sure what she wanted to do with her life and because I had spent so much time managing a sales team and teaching self-improvement and writing books on self-development my immediate reaction was to just start giving her advice so I said look Kelly it's quite simple all you gotta do is apply to a bunch of jobs and give it
some time and by gathering enough experience as you gain a better picture about what you want to do in life bla bla bla bla bla something along those lines and she stopped me and looked me in the eyes and said you know what Richard sometimes people just want you to listen to them if you have an answer for every conceivable question in the world you should just go onto YouTube and make videos I'm sure people will want to listen to your valuable advice over there obviously she was being sarcastic and was playfully mocking me in
the moment but when she said this something clicked in my head I was like oh my god Kelly you are absolutely right that is the perfect idea see I sort of enjoyed writing the Kindle books and all but not that many people were buying them maybe only a couple of hundred would ever benefit from the contents of my books if I really wanted to pursue my passion and teach people on a large scale YouTube would be perfect for that plus I felt like the idea of creating videos was way more fun than writing books so
that very day I sat down and I picked the name for the channel and I started working on my first video and about one week later I uploaded it onto YouTube and the rest is history and that's the story of how and why I started this channel it's been a wild ride so far we recently passed 2 million subscribers and I genuinely want to thank you for helping me get to that point because honestly this career has given me the life of my dreams it's given me the freedom that I've been chasing after 4 years
and it's given me the chance to do the one thing that I love doing most which is teaching every time I receive an email or a direct message from one of you telling me about how watching my content has resulted in some sort of progress or success in your life it reminds me of that day Stella pulled me aside and thanked me it gives me that same special tingling sensation that I felt many years ago I hope that I'm able to continue to make content for you like this for years to come and for those
of you that say things like I don't know how to thank you for the work you've done honestly the best thing for you to do the best way to give back is to simply take what you learned from me and all the books you read and all the other self-improvement channels on this platform take the knowledge and apply it to your life start seeing success and maybe one day send me an email telling me about all the great things you've done that's the best way to give back hope you guys enjoy the story and besides
that stay tuned
