How do you think about how you want to be remembered outside of externally-weighted indicators of success, and how does that shape what you're pursuing?
I love that we're moving to more meaning-based questions — it looks like a lot of people here who've had success following the business and automation content are now at the point of asking 'what the hell is all this for?' The fact that I've helped people get to that point is basically the answer to the question for me. I want to be remembered as the sort of person who helped catalyze people's best selves. The monetization is nice, and yeah, the $500K/month goal is part flashy because it gets clicks — people go 'whoa, isn't that half a million a month' — so it is in my interest, but it doesn't meaningfully impact my life at this point. What meaningfully impacts my life is the meaning of what I'm pursuing; the things I do day to day aren't necessarily financially related. I want to be remembered as somebody who gave far more than they consumed, as a net positive impact on the world, and also as a good partner and a good man — somebody who stood up for the right thing.
I do make a significant amount of money—around $300,000 per month—mainly from the school games (third-party revenue) and another community. I earn far more talking about the stuff than actually doing it, which is typical for an information product: leverage comes from teaching others, allowing them to achieve 100x results while I earn proportionally. What do I do with the money? I don't have guilty pleasures like cars; I invest it. I have friends aiming for tens or hundreds of millions in the S&P 500, but that's never been my primary motivator. When I was broke, an extra $10,000 a year would have dramatically improved my quality of life; now, extra millions don't materially affect it unless you have extreme comfort needs. I'm thankful my family immigrated from Eastern Europe around the fall of communism; they lived frugally, teaching me that a fulfilling life doesn't require a lot of money. Though I now make what most would consider a lot of money, I still find life enjoyable and fulfilling without needing wealth.
I'm glad you're saying this because I'm actually doing that right now. I'm literally writing this out because I've reached a point where I don't have enough time to meaningfully progress on the projects I want, simply because I made over $400,000 last month, showing that everything I've done has worked well. The last blog post I mentioned was in September 2024, when I made $100,000—more than I could have hoped for—and I was ecstatic. However, I evaluated whether I was truly satisfied and found I wasn't. Now, for June, I've made $400,000 in profit, which is a 400% increase compared to September 2024, representing a compounding monthly growth rate of 15% on a business that generates outsized income. I've spoken on stage next to titans like Hormosi and Sam Ovens, been invited to podcasts with Tai Lopez and Dan Martell, and my friend group now consists primarily of people earning several hundred thousand dollars per month. I've made near-guaranteed future income and can retire anytime I want. The youthful gamut I took—believing I could earn a full-time lifetime salary in a few months through entrepreneurship—has paid off. So the question for me is: what do I want? I've realized I don't care as much about money as most people do, now that I have so much of it. I've always not cared much about money. Therefore, I'm satisfied with the money and want to focus on things not directly money-related, like impact, the quality and strength of my relationships, and my health, which I've sacrificed to make money. I can't optimize for both money and health; impact is the big one. Thanks for asking that question. I appreciate it, and you'll see this soon. Okay, so I'm just going to do one more thing: I'm going to do my brand stats and then call it for the day. We're probably going to change the structure of these daily updates—I'll still do brand stats and Q&A, but I'm not sure about the live building yet. My daily updates channel is at about 9,000 subscribers, so we should hit 10,000 soon, and my Instagram is at 285,000. We have some sponsorships queued up, including one for Lindy that hit 1.775 million views. The YouTube growth has plummeted because I'm not posting, so I need to step back to buy a couple more hours a day to strategize and get back to content, since neglecting the top of funnel would starve the products I make. I'm going to cap this video at exactly 20 minutes and then work on my packaging.
You're worrying about the wrong thing—you're trying to solve a problem you don't have. Instead of trying to carve out the perfect life right now, first get to the place you want financially, then worry about carving that life out. In my case, scaling Left Click took us far beyond the point you're talking about; we hit $72k in one month. While scaling I saw varying degrees of work‑life balance and eventually worked 12‑14 hour days making $70k a month. Once I was making more money than 99% of people, I was in a better position to ask whether that life is truly what I want or just a hyper‑glamorized media image. From there I considered how to shave down the money I make per unit time to get a more reasonable workload. You’re approaching things backwards; start with the financial goal, then design the life you want. Rather than trying to get everything right at once, solve one problem at a time—career first, then balance and relationships. It’s much easier to tackle them sequentially than to try to get it all right on the first try; the probability of success is low if you try to do it all at once.
Yeah, I thought a lot about this. I just spent a month in Europe with my girlfriend, celebrating her break after medical school—she's now a doctor and doesn't get many breaks, so this was a big one for her. I tagged along for the ride and had some fun. While I was on that break, I was still doing Maker School and running a couple of my businesses, but not at the same level of intensity. [snorts] Despite maxing out my life in the relationships category, I was really lagging behind on health and career. I realized I was repeating the same mistake I'd made before—maximizing relationships or health at the cost of other categories. So now I'm trying to be much more consistent across all categories. I've realized that, at least in my business, to progress and keep it fun, I need some sort of goal. That's why the 1 million subscriber goal exists—some might call it naive, but it's a goal. The reality is I won't get in the exact perfect direction right away, but I need to get moving in a direction, then eventually sit down, recalibrate, and see if that's the direction I really want to go in, maybe change or pivot. So if I want to get a month like this—pretty cool because it's a direct reflection of how engaged and high-quality people find my content—I think that's a pretty good near-term goal to strive for, because if people like my content they're more likely to want to pay me money. Subscribers and views are more superficial, but financially not much has changed, which is nice. So I just want to push towards financials. Okay, almost had it to you—good to have you back. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO or AIEO agency, which is like AI optimization. Sorry, I'm realizing the sun is going to really crush me here—give me one sec. [pause] That's much better. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO agency. This is my current script: any comments? Hey name, just Google use case twice and check chat GPT—it keeps showing up instead of the company. So I put together a one-page doc on what exactly is happening and how to flip it. Hmm. I can see what you're saying. Do you want it? Yeah, what are you going to do—are you going to send this in the thing? Yeah, that really didn't work. My issue with stuff like this is: if you really had it and you really did just put together a quick one-page doc, you would have sent it right away. This was basically a gimmick that worked pretty well a while ago—maybe like two and a half years ago—but nowadays people's value radars are quite different; they want a lot more value up front. So if you can't send that value up front, people will notice unfortunately. So I know: if there was a way to actually generate the doc and then send it via LinkedIn, I would do that. You can make the doc seem human-written. You know, refer to them by first name like 'Hey Peter.' Uh, so I know you run XYZ business and you have yet to hear about me, but I put this together for you because I think I can offer a lot of value, and my mom always told me to give people value up front. I don't know—some silly like that. You could probably do that in the document, send it over, and have some success. But um yeah, the cool thing about LinkedIn is you can only really send like 20 to 30 of these a day. And links aren't treated the same as they are in cold email; you don't have the same deliverability impact. So you could absolutely just send the links. So, just send the value. Nick We seem to only vote for jesters and fake people in office. He would fit right in. Everything is a grift to these people. We do love the grift. Thank you. Insightful. Jared says, 'Hey Nick, glad to see you're back making this content. Question, how do you think about how you want to be remembered outside of externally weighted indicators of success? How does that shape what you're pursuing? Have come back to this question many times personally in recent months. Appreciate the values always.' Yeah, you know, I love that we're moving to more meaning-based questions, and it looks like a lot of people here who have had success following some of thebusiness