Taking a step back (what happened)

hey so right off the bat I want to acknowledge that this is going to be a much different pace than my usual videos because I'm not scripting it out word for word I'm not trying to find the perfect way to say every sentence I'm not playing to the YouTube algorithm I'm not trying to enhance retention in any way this is purely a video that I'm making not thinking about the YouTube algorithm this is just me talking to you and I have a few bullet points that I want to openly talk about and that's really it so if you're a longtime viewer of the channel you're a business owner you're an entrepreneur and you want to learn about what's going on and maybe incorporate some of these things in your own life as well great keep watching and if you're if Vier of the channel who just comes for the personal finance content that won't be this video uh that'll be next week's video I'll resume with the normal content for next week it's just this video is going to be a a bit different so uh that that's the warning going into this this this is different okay so now that we got that out of the way for those who are unfamiliar with me it's been a long time since I've talked openly to a camera about myself usually shot away from that I mostly wanted to keep it on Personal Finance saving money real estate topics that have to do with the economy so this video let's bring it back and for those who are unfamiliar with me or my background I'll bring you up to speed because that might help provide some context since I was a kid for some odd reason I have been weirdly obsessed with two things and that's saving money and working like I remember as a kid I would be obsessed with trying to find rare coins like did you know know that quarters earlier than a certain year are silver well I became obsessed with trying to find those quarters because I thought I could make money doing that I was also the type of kid who would just save all the birthday and Christmas monies like you know your grandma would go and give you 20 bucks when you saw her every now and then well I would just save those up it it was difficult for me to want to spend the money I say that because I've had this tendency to find like very specific interests and just dig really deep into them like when I was 12 years old I got a saltwater aquarium because I was obsessed with these aquariums at the fish store and I'd see the saltwater fish and I knew I wanted them and when I got one of those tanks when I was 12 years old for saltwater fish I became obsessed with it I would spend all of my time after school on reef aquarium forums talking to other hobbyists about keeping fish and coral alive it was what I was enamored by thankfully it actually turned from the internet to real life because uh shortly after that I ended up getting a very part-time job working at this Marina aquarium wholesaler where I'd helped them out and in the beginning I got paid in free fish and coral and then as it evolved I actually ended up making some pretty good money for being a teenager like there were some days where I'd make as much as1 to $120 again in a single day at 15 years old because I was getting paid $1 for every picture that I photographed photoshopped and helped put on their website and I just work there as much as I could because I loved it so much and here's a cool story by the way almost 20 years later I had the owner of that company come on my podcast the iced coffee hour to talk about it and that was a full circle moment because here is the person who gave me a chance at a very young age getting to talk about that experience so here's a quick clip of that just for fun who was doing the job before Graham me you were yeah most part yeah that was a pretty easy guy to work for for the most part I just wanted my deadline if if you reach your deadline and you you know you did a good job I think you got a little whiny sometimes when I ask you to re-edit photos sometimes you got kind of whiny about it I mean he was making like at at the end I think he was making like a buck of coral all right so the point I'm trying to make here is that for whatever reason working at this age kind of ruined it for me in terms of school workk or doing anything else that wasn't related to doing something I thoroughly enjoyed that I saw in some way as building towards a greater future or a career it made it really impossible for me to want to do homework when I knew I could do something else instead that made money that I had a lot of fun doing so as a result of that I really let my schoolwork slide I would just do the bare minimum basically not to flunk out of high school uh it was hard for me to see the point it wasn't that though was struggling with it it's just I didn't want to be there I didn't want to do it I wanted to follow what I felt was right for me obviously in hindsight as a teenager there's only so much you can conceptualize about the importance of Education uh and that kind of bit me a few years later because when I was 16 years old they ended up selling the company to a new owner owner I did not get along with the new management it wasn't as fun as I liked I didn't have the freedoms that I used to have I I just felt like I was being bossed around all the time I felt like I actually knew the business better than them and we'd have disagreements on ways to handle certain orders and the way we should be running certain things and I left and I know it was I'm sure they saw some like 16-year-old kid who's like why is this kid telling us how we should be doing our business but you know what jokes on them because the company ended up shutting down afterwards so uh you know any I'm not saying I'm right but I'm just saying it didn't last much longer after I left it was going downhill and I jump ship anyway this was a really weird time for me because here I was with work experience but I had really terrible grades I had a lot of knowledge on aquariums but that's only going to go so far and I just knew that I wanted to like secure a future I wanted to do well I wanted to be successful so in my mind I landed on investment banking again keep in mind that at the time I decided Ed I want to go into Investment Banking I must have been almost 18 years old and I thought I knew everything I had a whole bunch of confidence so I just decided I'm going to cold email every investment firm within a 10m radius of where I lived and just ask for a job my whole pitch here was that I was just really enthusiastic I really wanted to learn I would work for free I would do anything they wanted me to I just wanted to get my foot in the door and gain experience and surprisingly it actually worked the job I ended up getting was pretty much like starting at the bottom of the barrel it was doing data entry work and doing uh inter Office Mail deliveries I mean it was super simple stuff but after about 6 weeks or so I quickly learned the corporate 9 to5 was not for me it felt like they really stifled all creativity any individualism they wanted to stamp that down and so I made the decision to leave that because I didn't feel good about it that of course is when I came across the idea of becoming a real estate agent and so that's what I started to do I realized I could take my licensing classes online and what I thought I would do instead of cold emailing investment firms I was just going to go to open houses every single Sunday and just talk to other agents and get their experience and keep in mind this was the beginning of 2008 so the real estate market had just peaked and it was about to go down for the next four years so a lot of the agents that I met were really dis enaging of me getting in the industry a lot of them said that business was drying up it's not as easy as it was before I missed it by a few years and I should go to college instead and gain some more experience I just didn't believe them so I just kept going and eventually I met an agent at an open house who was super encouraging and was saying like now is the perfect time you're going to be starting off at 18 and by the time you actually build up a business you're going to be like 22 23 years old all your friends are going to be getting out of college but you will have 4 years of work experience you could be makinging $100,000 a year you could be doing really well and this is the perfect time to do it because you don't have a lot of overhead expenses you don't have a family you have no kids like you really have nothing to lose at this point and he offered me the opportunity to work underneath him and just split whatever business I brought in 50/50 and I thought this is an incredible opportunity of course I jumped on it and that's what I did without exaggeration I would spend 12 sometimes 13 hours a day 7 days a week doing the deals that no one else wanted all the little tiny commissions that agents would lose money on those are the deals that I did because me earning a few hundred doing a leasing commission to me a few hundred may as well have been a hundred grand like that was a lot of money and I was ging experience and just being able to meet people I did anything I could but here's the thing though over time that business really grew it's like it wasn't just one deal that person would refer me another person and then I'd close their deal even I'm talking like leases like them renting for $2,200 a month like I would help them find a place and I would get a commission usually 5 6% of whatever their lease term is for you know a year two years but then that person would refer me to another person would refer me to another person and that business grew and I just saved practically all my money that I possibly could over those next four years and in 2011 I ended up buying my first house and it was a foreclosure in San Bernardino County and it was 60 59,500 00 I sunk $122,000 into it so I was all in this house $72,000 and that was also around the same time where business really began picking up and I ended up purchasing two more properties shortly after that that were also these foreclosures because the market was so bad and even though a lot of people were telling me now it's a bad time to invest the Market's going lower the Market's you know kind gone like it's not going to come back I just saw these as such good opportunities it's what I knew after that the market turned around the business I was doing grew every single year by like 50% I was seeing crazy high returns because the clients that would lease for me would go and buy a house for me and then they would refer me someone else who wanted to buy a house and once I started going from leasing to more selling and representing buyers of properties my income skyrocketed and then in 2015 I became one of the first agents to join the oppenheim group which is now selling sunset on Netflix and honestly in terms of numbers like every single year had been better than the last I think it was around this time when I was 25 years old that I really just began gaining confidence as a person because I started to feel like what I was doing wasn't just dumb luck it was consistent I was able to build a business on mostly referral at that point and things just kept getting better like I saw progress and that gave me a lot more Security in myself that if I could do this once I could probably do it again and continue doing this and it was going going to be okay all of that extra business though allowed me to buy a fourth property in Los Angeles and after I fixed it up when everything was said and done I was able to hit a million dollar net worth by the time I was 26 and it was really due to just three factors one was having a good income second was not spending that income and three was investing as much of that income as possible and that magic 3 just was this winning combination for me that really set things off then of course is where you come in to play because in late 2016 I started making YouTube videos now prior to then really going back to like 2007 give or take I watch YouTube videos as my form of entertainment like it was so cool to see these creators on the platform share themselves with everybody watch them grow as a person and just feeling like I was a part of that journey and I've always wanted to do that I always thought it would be so much fun to be able to turn on the camera and talk to people but I thought to myself honestly no one would want to watch me I thought I'd embarrass myself uh in front of a whole bunch of people I thought friends would find out that I have a YouTube channel and like laugh about it I was like really embarrassed and as proof of this I even made a post on Reddit saying that I didn't have the Charisma to be good in front of a YouTube channel and I wanted to invest in the channel instead because I had money and I thought you know maybe I could just buy someone's ownership in a channel and help them grow it from like a business standpoint because business was something I was always really interested in it's like how to save money how to grow a business that was my interest so I thought maybe I could combine that interest with my love for investing into YouTube uh and no takers unfortunately so I thought after years of putting it off and saying ah no one would want to watch me I made my first video and that was posted on December 26 2016 as soon as I did that I realized that nothing bad happened I didn't quite embarrass myself even though the video is private and fairness because I just I was swearing in that video and I just I I didn't like that so uh I kept posting though at first I started posting once a week and then after a few weeks I realized my videos did better if I posted twice a week so I started posting twice a week and then I thought what if I posted three times a week so within about three months of starting this is beginning of 2017 I started posting three videos a week every Monday Wednesday and Friday for almost seven years I would work full time as a real estate agent usually from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and then after 7:00 I would go home and I'd work on YouTube videos until 1:00 in the morning and it was me planning out videos filming them editing them and then scheduling them out I just loved it it's it's all I wanted to do really I would just go through all day as an agent just looking forward to having a b night time so I could make YouTube videos it was silly I just loved it but thankfully with that schedule within a few months we hit 10,000 subscribers within a year we hit 100,000 subscribers and a year and a half after that we hit 1 million subscribers which to me was like we're in an alternate universe that like you know we would be able to hit a million subscribers on a finance Channel because that just doesn't happen it's it's it's Finance like it's not supposed to be that it's supposed to be like a really Niche channel so the fact that it could reach a million people was mind-blowing it really wasn't until everything shut down in 2020 that I fully committed to going full- time on YouTube and that to me was uh pretty obvious because everything in real estate was shut down so it was like kind of by force that with everything shut down and we're inside I'm just going to double or triple down on YouTube and that's exactly what I did I went full force on my second Channel ended up starting a podcast I ended up hiring Jack who is now the co-host of that podcast and he' helped me edit the videos on the second Channel between all the channels by the way I was doing three videos a week on the main channel three videos a week on the second Channel One podcast a week and then there were also times where I was doing like three Vlogs a week a live stream a week there were sometimes like 11 videos every single week that would go out consistently and I did that for years up until recently okay so now that I've brought you up to speed here's what's going on because some things have obviously changed for the longest time ever since I started working I have been terrified of giving something up not working more not being open to New Opportunities because for whatever reason I was terrified of it going away I know it sounds sometimes ridiculous but even as a real estate agent I mentally just prepared that each commission I earned was going to be the last commission I ever made and so I budgeted off the mindset that if this is the last money I ever make how am I going to make this last as long as possible I get it's completely illogical it makes no sense it's probably not healthy but since I only got paid if a client bought or sold a house or completed a transaction I didn't like relying on that and I didn't like that being the reason I would make money or not make money it just felt largely outside of my control now on the one hand this mentality was invaluable from a financial standpoint because it meant that I saved a lot of money during a time where the markets consistently hit all-time highs it allowed me to invest a lot of that money and I would not be here today if it were not for that scarcity mentality of you know paying attention to every dollar as though it were a million but on the other hand it made me terrified about not working with certain clients or not going above and beyond not working every single day all the time 24/7 because I just kept thinking it could all go away on a moment's notice so you know while everything is working like I should just be as diligent as I can and give everything 120% no matter what even here on YouTube for the longest time I was under the impression that more videos were better and so I just thought hey if I post one video and it did well let me post two let me post three let me post seven well if I'm doing seven 10 must be better so I was just like hey the more the marrier as much as I could physically do I'm going to make that many videos I also kind of felt guilty because I knew people had become accustomed to a certain schedule I didn't want to let those people down I thought that people relied on those videos as like part of their normal everyday scheduling and why would I take that away from them and then I also felt uh you know a sense of guilt like uh you know I'm in such a great position a lot of people would love to be in and it's something that like I've you know aspired to be where I am now and I'm like why would I post less if I'm capable of posting more so just grind through it this is the reason why for the last seven years I have done nothing other than figuring out how to maximize every hour of the day there's not a moment that would go by that I wasn't thinking about work how to optimize how to make something better how could I improve looking back on all the previous work that I've done and thinking how could I I optimized this retention was low here why was it low how could I improve that and then just diving head first into the YouTube algorithm to see what would work what didn't work I would just get obsessed with this it was kind of like I was spinning a whole bunch of plates at the same time and as long as I kept my focus on just spinning those plates I could do it it was sustainable but as soon as you threw something else in there that I wasn't prepared for whether that be just a meeting or going to a breakfast or something really light like the video uh maybe takes takes longer to do and like it pushes back the other thing or a podcast comes up in the middle just like anything else would completely throw off my schedule and I would just think okay now I'm just going to sleep less because I got to make up that extra 30 minutes and I'm just going to pull from sleep but then that's going to make the next day worse it was bad this also meant that it was pretty much impossible to turn my mind off like even though I could be physically present for a conversation or for a meeting or whatever it might be in the back of my mind I'm thinking through like thumbnail ideas and title ideas and thinking like huh you know that comment is pretty good maybe I should pin that comment and how I would respond to you know this comment just it's just my mind was constantly going and I could not shut that off now In fairness this the the same thing was also happening as a real estate agent I'd constantly think about properties and like oh maybe I should make an offer on this so that's probably just the way my mind works but this though was probably like double the Badness that it used to be at least then it was manageable this was just consuming now thankfully that did in a way make for a really successful career but I also think that's only sustainable for so long until eventually something has to give of course at this point you might be thinking but Graham why don't you go and just Outsource all of the work just go and hire employees why don't you go and just all the busy work you don't need to do that all you have to do is just go up and film trust me I thought about that in 2020 I hired Jack who is now the co-host of the podcast uh at the time to edit my video videos in the second channel of the gram stefen show because I was spending so much time on this channel that you're seeing here that the second Channel video editing was was slacking I would really do the bare minimum to slap it together just to get it out because I was so short on time those were days I was working like 15 hours a day so Jack came in edited those videos freed up some of my time to spend more time on the main channel here and then he also did a lot of the work on the back end for the podcast he has Coffee hours so that all I would have to do is show up talk to the guest a little bit make sure the cameras were all good and then he would do everything else on the back end so that was certainly a huge help but the main Channel which is this was really really difficult to let go of because the thing is it's not like I disliked the work here I like I really enjoyed it I loved it it was something I just wanted to immerse myself in but it was very timec consuming and when I get on something it's just becomes obsessive like it it becomes everything I think about is all I want to do so it wasn't as though was like a chore like the main Channel work here was something that I'd look forward to every day so it seemed weird to want to Outsource that but I tried to a certain degree there was a time I think in 2021 where I wanted to look into Outsourcing some of the research and scripting of the videos but uh after getting some scripts back I just realized like this isn't me the channel from the beginning was mostly based on just me filming in a halfon converted garage talking about topics that I'm interested in it was never meant to be like this big conglomerate Corporation with a whole bunch of employees it was meant to be just like hey a dude sitting uh in a room uh on a Saturday night with a sleeping dog and cat here just talking to a camera that was the point of the channel so it seems like Outsourcing that took the soul away from it and uh I decided not to do that it was also really difficult because I had such a tight video deadline like I would often wake up 5:00 a.m. 5:30 to be able to have a video out the same day by 3:30 and so having a script writer it was usually on current events that were happening that day so unless someone was physically present with me and could write in like the same style as I speak it would just take too long like it's faster just for me to write at myself and if the point is to save time I I may as well just do it myself so I did so I just continued running just by myself with Jack editing the second Channel videos and podcasts and that worked for a while now I did however hire Alex sometime after that in 2021 to help run the Vlog Channel he edited some of the podcast clips and he took over editing some of the main Channel videos but it was really weird for me because editing the main Channel videos like this was my mind's way of decompressing because it was a time where I could just zone out focus on the content and relax so when Alex took that over it was like I had no time to decompress it was really strange because K I was offloading what would be 6 hours of work a videotimes 38 20 hours a week of editing and I just use that time instead of decompressing instead of finding a way to relax I Ed that time to fill it up with more work so now that I had a free 18 to 20 hours a week I found a way to then optimize that 18 to 20 hours a week doing other things so I was just as busy I guess anytime I tried to Outsource anything it just felt like this really futile attempt because if I save time I'd feel lazy if I wasn't doing something so I would purposely find the highest level work that I could to fill that time to justify hiring it out because otherwise I may as well do it myself I don't know I think I was in a really weird head space at that point because I would calculate and optimize like every single task I would do and then think if I wasn't doing that what else could I do with that time and if I found a better use of that time I would have still have a hard time Outsourcing it because I felt like well I could do both concurrently so if there's enough hours in the day I could do both of them and usually that's faster than training someone else to do it so I'll just keep doing it myself and uh here's here's my rambling okay so I've gone on for this we'll continue anyway all of this really just got bad enough to the point where I was calculating the cost benefit of spending an hour working or spending an hour going to the gym is it going to make sense to have lunch in an afternoon or work that afternoon it didn't make sense to do a podcast in the middle of the day during Market hours because uh you know maybe something could happen in the market I could make a video on it it didn't make sense to travel anywhere uh because I would be spending idle time at the airport without something I could actively work on so I would only go and travel if I knew I'd have a video to edit so that I didn't waste any downtime I was like hyper focused on this I just think that after like years of doing that I started to get burnt out it wasn't enjoyable anymore and I started to acknowledge that it wasn't healthy to be this extreme I think for me I just stopped in enjoying the process it stopped being about hey we're having a whole bunch of fun doing this and more about optimizing and more about the algorithm shifted this way and let me make these videos because this is going to do better and if it didn't do better what's wrong with the titles and thumbnails and just everything was on my mind and it just got to a point where I think it started to overflow and I was unhappy and when I'm unhappy on something like that I could tell the work suffers and when the work suffers people notice that this is not good so if we if we could stop that and return back to a place of really enjoying the videos which is where this channel started to begin with that's where it should be now to complicate the situation even more and confuse me even further I've had this habit of asking people who are more successful than me what they would do if they were in my position and a lot of these people are worth hundreds of millions of dollars I look up to them I take their advice very seriously and when I ask them this question they say well you should be building out a team you could be hiring all these people you could be leveraging this you could be building out the network you could uh you know you should be building this Empire and this and that they throw all these things and I start thinking to myself wait a second if someone who is more successful than me uh you know decades older than me seems to know a lot more than me is telling me these things that probably right but you know what I'll tell you firsthand the more Adventures I tried to do and the more I tried to take on the more miserable I became the more unhappy I was and that was really difficult for me to comprehend because this is their advice I'm asking for their advice it seems on the surface it's the correct advice why was I'm not enjoying that why did that not feel good to me I guess just this idea of starting a thing and then being responsible for this idea and bear the weight of growing it did not sound appealing to me whatsoever for any amount of money I think in my mind I just felt like I was doing something wrong if I wasn't trying to like maximize growth or scale or start all these different things and try to like you know be competitive and all I I just felt like you know that's what you should be doing that's what you're always told to do it's like the natural progression you want to like do this thing and then do it even better and then like improve over here and uh yeah just not me but when I began optimizing instead for happiness just I guess my entire perspective shifted so what changed well I guess the answer here is twofold one when I started the channel I had a whole bunch of knowledge and experience that I could share with everybody that was new for me to talk about I was also working full-time as a real estate agent and I was actively buying and selling properties uh and renovating them as well so there was always something that I could pull from to talk about on the channel and that's what kept things really fresh and interesting but in 2020 everything shut down and I basically just locked myself in a room for 3 years talking about nothing else than what was going on in the markets and I was not gaining the experiences that I should have as a person to become just a well-rounded individual but second in terms of the actual change I would say this occurred uh about a year ago when I took a 5-day trip to New York City at that time I went with Jack and Alex and we filmed the most expensive listing in the United States we recorded a few podcasts and I was able to film with Barbara corkran and really near the end of that trip it just sunk in that like hey this is the work that I really enjoy it was really happy for me to be able to do all these things like I wasn't stressed out I got to meet new people I got to hear different perspectives and this was one of the few times that I felt like I was still accomplishing something without feeling like I have to be in 100% overdrive mode to make it happen that little spark ignited a conversation that I had with Jack because up until that point the iced coffee Hour podcast was doing good but it wasn't doing great and a lot of that was because of me I was the one holding the podcast back because I couldn't travel to guests my main Channel took priority over anything else and going and traveling to the east coast from the West Coast sometimes it's like a day of travel filming there a day of travel back and it's like three days that were kind of like gone so it was like it was highly inefficient and I wasn't able to do it a lot of the guests as well would have to revolve their schedules around coming to me coming to us in person around the schedules of the main Channel videos which really just meant that they were free to come like weekday or weekends usually after 7 p.m. I couldn't film before that they come here and it really limited the amount of guests that we had but I think in that moment I just asked myself if I optimized for happiness instead what would I be doing and my answer was I would be traveling more for the podcast I would be giving that more time I would be posting Less on the main Channel I would be talking about the topics that I was more interested in myself instead of topics that I knew would do well from an algorithm standpoint and if I wanted to be the happiest version of myself which I would also argue makes the best version of you I mean if you're happy you're just going to do better work in general uh I would be doing that and so I thought you know what I'm going to give it a shot I know it seems like I'm exaggerating here maybe making it to be a bigger deal than it is and it probably is okay but when you've been doing the same thing for seven years straight without changing the schedule whatsoever it's terrifying to change anything like I honestly thought if I didn't post three videos here every single week the channel was going to die I thought the views were going to take a nose dive the algorithm would deprioritize my channel I may as well just like syn that ship drive it all the way down to the ground if I stop posting and uh I just bit the bullet and I went down to two videos a week and surprisingly nothing happened the channel didn't die views did not nose dive off a cliff the algorithm did not punish me and when I realized that like nothing bad happened I went down to one video a week and to my utter amazement everything is still just as good if anything views went up on a per video basis when I started posting less which is something that I never thought would happen I thought for sure this would just be a stab to my channel that like you know you always hear about algorithms just like hey the algorithm changed and like that was it I thought that would happen if I if I started posting less posting once a week nothing has changed this allowed me to shift my focus and attention to interviewing some really incredible people who a year ago it would have been impossible for me to have traveled to go and see them and I'm seeing this now that like I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything it's 100% worth it and it's also cool to see the progress on that that when you focus on something you see so much more Improvement like since then the podcast has now almost at a million subscribers and we're routinely doing over for 50 million views a month on that channel I'm also proud to announce that I've taken my health a lot more seriously lately like I've cut out almost all processed foods and sugars I go to the gym usually 5 to seven days a week I have a lot more energy I'm trying trying to get a little more sleep and I'm proud to announce hey Ramsey I'm proud to announce that I've lost like five pounds of belly fat which which this has been sitting on me for like five years and I would say like I'm the best shape I've been in since 2019 which says a lot because the last few years I I've definitely not been as healthy as I should have been I've also had the extra time to indulge in some Hobbies like the reef aquarium I've been painting some art like these three pieces I did for the hallway or these I just kind of messing around with acrylic paints I started landscaping and turning this area with half dead plants into this I took on some Home Improvement projects like painting the garage and even though I still struggle with trying to optimize every moment of the day and sometimes I wake up and I'm like panicked because like I feel like I should be doing more more I'm proud to say that I'm managing that it's it's at an acceptable range it's not like a like a full-on panic like it used to be but it's uh I'm coping I'm doing better now another aspect of this is that I'm finding myself having much better relationships with uh friends Families my fiance since I could mentally be there not just like physically be present and like run through the motions even though in my mind like thinking like work and all this sort of stuff like I could actually be there and I think it's just like making for a much better life in general I'm also able to go and experience like different cultures in different parts of the world to get a much broader understanding like Macy and I went to Japan recently which is a place I've always wanted to go to ever since I was a kid like this has been the one place for me that's like at some point in my life I want to be able to go to Japan like that was always the Pinnacle and to be able to do that recently and just and see Parts outside of the US just gives me a much greater appreciation for just the World in general and seeing how things work and operate meeting new people it's just like those are such Priceless experiences this is all just really allowed me to step back and just recognize something that we all hear people talking about and that would just be the word enough like if money were the only focus here I would be doubling down on the amount of content that I'm producing I would hire out the team I would try to Outsource as much work as I can I would try to start different companies and try to like you know maximize value of every hour that I could possibly work and try new things get my hands and everything but I think I'm at a point where I just recognized we're like I'm I'm truly happy with where I am at this point in my life even if that means sacrificing long-term growth unless of course it's just out of a place of enthusiasm and passion and what I'm doing which lately has been in like I know it's random I know artwork in the aquarium I I know it's silly but uh those two things I've just had a lot of fun doing and and guess what they make they make no money maybe one day if someone wants to buy artwork for me maybe that's it maybe that makes money but uh besides that they don't make money look in a weird way I've just had this really difficult time separating work from my personal life because usually my personal life is work and it's hard to find a balance between the two because usually if you prioritize one the other suffers but this is the closest that I've been to to finding a good match to being able to have a great relationship with my fiance to be able to have a great relationship with my parents to be able to see them more often to be able to see friends more often to be able to you know just grow as a person and that's something that uh you know unfortunately I don't think I've quite done to this degree in a very long time just because I've been so consumed with like doing one thing I have a feeling at some point there's going to be something else that I'll want to like Focus 100% of my attention to and every big thing I guess has just naturally progressed from the last whether that be from like aquariums to then getting into real estate to then going and buying properties to then going and making YouTube videos and it's always been like this natural progression where it's like so evident what the next thing is and I got like shift into it this time I think that next thing for me is just acceptance of being grateful practicing gratitude and having appreciation for everybody that just comes along with the journey I'm definitely not saying I have it all figured out because that would be far from it still got a lot of work to do but I at least feel like I'm heading in the right direction and that's the update that I want to give you if you watch my channel if you enjoy it maybe that helps in some way Maybe not maybe this whole video is just me rambling way too long by like I said I'm doing a video here where I'm not thinking of algorithm I'm not thinking of retention it is just me talking to you and that's what this entire video is meant to be now in terms of what's to come next I'm really excited to say that we have some incredible guest coming up in the ice coffee hour and I don't want this to seem like this plug but like hey spending a lot of time on the podcast recently and we're like we we have like 10 filmed episodes already that we're just like strategically releasing so if you want to go and follow that over there like I'm I'm traveling anywhere we need to to get the best guest possible and I think that's become evident over the last eight months that anywhere we need to be to get you just a good guest even if it loses money like sometimes we'll spend thousands of dollars getting like last minute plane tickets uh just to go and see a guest for an episode that'll lose money but it makes a great episode so uh feel free to go and subscribe to that I'm also going to continue posting here once a week every Wednesday unless of course there's like this crazy topic that I really want to talk about like sooner than that then I'll post sooner but for the most part once a week and beyond that get married this year so there's that and as far as like other big uh like business Endeavors or topics you know I'm really just letting things unfold and letting things come without forcing it so uh with that said thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it uh hey hit the like button subscribe if you made it all the way over here at least do those two things and check out the podcast the coffee hour that would make me very happy and if you want to follow the stories I do every now on Instagram maybe some art that I'm doing just follow me on Instagram just GP Stefan that's it so thank you so much and until next time

Channel: Graham Stephan

Views: 655,654

Keywords: investing, investing for beginners, investing in your 20s, how to invest, how to invest in real estate, how to invest in stocks, stock market investing, stock market investing for beginners, stock options, robinhood, robinhood app, best stock trading app, how to be a millionaire, how to be a millionaire in 3 years, credit score, credit score explained, credit card, credit cards for beginners, passive income, how to build wealth, how to build wealth in your 20s, real estate 101

Id: LWLd9SyaVYw

Length: 37min 49sec (2269 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024