Is it true that learning, implementing, and creating an AAA takes time, or am I just slow?
Learning, implementing, and creating an AAA does take time; there’s no shortcut. You have to sit down and do the work. It’s not just you being slow—everyone is slow relative to those who started earlier and put in more work. Successful people usually spend two to four times as many hours as you to achieve four times the results, and there are exponential gains from putting in more time. He suggests looking at his YouTube output versus others: he has about four times as much content as a similar creator, which correlates with being four times as big. In short, results come from the amount of time invested.
These things take time. There is no shortcut in life — you have to sit down and do the work. You're not slow, or rather, we're all slow. People making a ton of money usually just started earlier and put in a lot more work than you have. You can genuinely predict a lot of someone's success just by how many hours they've spent on the thing: if someone started at the same time as you and is making four times as much money, they've usually put in two to four times as much time — there are exponential gains the more time you put in, so the more you put in, the less you need for the same results going forward. Look at my YouTube channel versus smaller channels and compare total minutes of content published — it's almost a one-to-one relationship. I have about four times as much content as another creator I know, and I'm about four times as big as he is. It really is mostly just a matter of how much time you put in.
I don't think so. It takes way too long to get up and running. When you're starting something for the first time and try to monetize through a brand like a YouTube brand, it takes three steps: build the skill, use the skill to build the brand, then monetize the brand. That's a very long path from where you are to where you want to be. A much simpler, straighter path is to build the skill and sell the skill — two steps instead of three, and you can do it immediately. It takes maybe 10 hours to build the skill nowadays, to get to where you can do something valuable with AI even as a total newbie, and you can sell the skill in another 5 or 10 hours. Building a brand isn't like that; it could take months or years to pay off. So if you're starting a business for the first time, stay away from building a brand initially and just reach out directly to people struggling with problems you know how to solve. It's far easier and more straightforward.
This is a core part of my Upwork outreach advice. Start by creating a high‑quality asset—whether it's a detailed Google Doc proposal, a spreadsheet, a workflow chart, a Loom video, or any combination. When you're brand new, building a workflow that solves a client's problem will take time, but after you've built 10 or 20 of them you won't need to start from scratch each time. You can reuse the closest previous workflow as proof of your ability, which eliminates the workflow‑building overhead and leaves you only to record the video. Recording a video after you've done a few dozen takes exactly the length of the video—if it's three minutes, it takes three minutes to record. So the process drops from ~30 minutes per application to about five seconds to pick a workflow, plus two to three minutes to record and send, bringing you to five or six minutes per application. At that rate you can comfortably do ten applications in an hour.
The focus regimen is just like your five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. Distractors involve small daily accountability and building momentum. I've done five product/five videos and only made it through about a week of comments; I'll continue farming them out, recording the first one today and then every 3-5 days, expecting a substantial decrease in churn. I'm jazzed about this. I wanted to run through as many questions as possible and do some live work to show my thinking. Since community is my primary revenue source, I should spend the bulk of my time on it—I already spend 1-2 hours each morning across communities, and should spend even more. An additional 45 minutes to an hour developing exclusive content to reduce churn by 5% over the next month would be crazy; if it works, I'd make about $100k, equivalent to $10k per hour. I'll leave it there; join Maker School to see these changes in real time, and check out make moneywithmake.com to go from working to working even better.