Hey Nick, earlier in your agency or automation career, how do you stay on schedule when filtering stuff out like family and other distractions that are out of your control? If you were in this situation, what would you do? I've thought of going to a coffee shop or library, but my PC setup is nice and would bottleneck my workflow on a MacBook. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I find that people generally do not respect my time or schedule, which creates unnecessary emotional issues and problems in the agency itself. It would be ideal for all of us to have our own place with peace and quiet, but the reality is we start in a situation where external distractions or circumstances disrupt the flow of crucial inputs needed like outreach and sales calls. If you were in this situation, I've thought of going to a coffee shop or library to work, but my PC setup is quite nice and would bottleneck my workflow on just a MacBook. Honestly, I think people who make their ergonomic setup super complicated are just coping; I operate fine with a MacBook and make tons of money, so being a bit slower with it isn’t a huge deal—maybe 20% slower at most. Personally, I would just get out of the situation. I lived with my family for a very long time; coming from an Eastern European background, family values are similar to more collectivist and Asian cultures where it's expected that the person in the household lives with family until about 30 before starting their own family. That was never something I could do while taking the risks I wanted to take; every time I tried something, I’d feel a reflexive pullback, like a crab‑in‑the‑bucket effect, not because my family are bad people but because they just want the best for me, and when you risk things it's hard to get the best for yourself. So I just get out. I have many friends who have lived with their families far longer than they should have due to financial issues; I think if they had left earlier and exposed themselves to the need to make a few thousand bucks a month to pay rent, they would have happily traded that money for peace of mind and the ability to control their own life. Let’s be real: most of us have families and other people vying for our attention, so staying on schedule is difficult. You basically need to erect boundaries if you live in the same household, or just get the hell out and find a place where you can spend all your time and energy focused on yourself. Hope that helps and doesn’t destroy your dreams. As an example, my very first apartment was a garage I found on Craigslist for $650 a month—a retrofitted garage with light insulation, a pull‑out bed, etc. I told my family I was moving there, they wanted to help, but I insisted on doing it myself. They eventually came to see it and were surprised, but I really enjoyed it; it was probably the catalyst for some of the biggest self‑improvement I’ve ever done. I had no money but found a way to make it work, and I think everybody else can too.
You know, the reason I've always been hesitant to do a day-in-the-life vlog is because my days are pretty boring. For the most part, I'm just sitting in front of my laptop doing the same revenue-generating activities I tell you to do. These activities might look a bit different now that my brand has taken off and been very successful—I now have more distribution and leverage, so I spend more time on the brand than on my agency. But generally, I wake up, sit in this chair, and type for about ten hours. It's boring, right? There's no real day-in-the-life for people who are 'on the up and up,' at least in my case, since my business model is entirely digital. If I were a door-to-door sales guy or traveling the world for high-ticket deals, it would be different, but I don't really think a day-in-the-life vlog is that valuable. It's more entertainment—like me sucking my own dick, which is pointless. Or like showing me at the gym for two hours, which I get can be motivating for people who want that lifestyle, but I'll be real: I don't think a lot of people want my life. Sure, I have a ton of money and I'm making a big impact; it looks cool from the outside, but there's a lot of work behind it. Work tends to be the separation line between those who don't have stuff and those who do. I could get philosophical, but I won't go super deep. However, a friend once told me something that stuck with me: 'Everybody on earth gets paid exactly the amount they deserve.' It blew my mind because it sounds like one of those unnecessary alpha-male bro sayings, but pragmatically, it's true. You get paid $5 an hour for a shitty dishwashing job you don't want to do; at some level you deserve that because you haven't taken the actions to get a $15 or $20-an-hour job. If you're in a partnership where someone treats you unfairly—giving you 30% and taking 70% while skimming you off the top—it's your fault; you're getting paid exactly what you deserve because you could have avoided that partnership, enforced better boundaries, or become more valuable than 30%. Likewise, if you run a business and your average order value is $500, you deserve that $500 because you were unable to position the product better to make more money. It's unreasonable to assume otherwise—that's how the economy works under capitalism. Just like when you start a new game, if you're bad at it, you just haven't spent enough time getting better. When you get your ass kicked in Super Smash Brothers, it's because you deserve it. That's one thing I'll mention that I don't think a lot of people realize.
No, no problem. I'm happy to I'm happy to answer. Yeah, it's a ton of money for sure—more money than 99 whatever percent of the world make. I did the math, and I think I'm probably one of the top few hundred earners in my country right now, which is stupid. So, yeah, it's kind of nutty. But I'll be honest: I've been acclimatized to a higher income lifestyle now for the better part of the last few years because it's not that I just made the school community and went from broke to really rich. That's not the come-up story. I ran an agency before this that also put me at like the top 1% income-wise. So, you'd have to go pretty far back to see Poor Nick. I have some photos. I'm sure I could show everybody here, but uh, yeah, like the if if we're talking the difference between poor Nick and then let's say the difference between Nick when he was making like $15,000 $20,000 a month, the major differences were quality of life purchases. I started being a lot more open to paying money for experiences and knowledge—so like buying programs and courses and that sort of stuff. And then also my health. A big big shift for me was when I booked this Muay Thai uh private coach who was like the owner of a Muay Thai gym and I would go into the Muay Thai gym and I just found like I wasn't getting the sort of like I really wanted to get really good at this and it was very important for me at the time uh you know to be able to defend myself and whatnot. So I paid like 600 bucks a month for this guy, and I remember just like when I told all of my friends at the time that I was doing my tie they're like wow like what are you doing group classes? I'm like no I'm doing private coaching. They're like teaching private coaching. How expensive was that? I was like it comes out like 600 600 700 bucks a month. They're like, 'You're spending $600 a month.' And I remember that for me was like, 'Oh yeah, I can just do that. That's incredible. I can actually spend money on like the top tier knowledge distillation from experts now.' And that was really cool. Aside from that, slightly nicer housing, of course. But I've never really been big on that. Um, I got a car, which is cool. Previous I was driving this old little manual stick shift Saturn Astra and it was like a fun car and stuff but um just a pain in the ass in the winters out here in Calgary just cuz you got to be a little tighter with the control if you don't want to like spin out on a hill and stuff. So now I have some you know four-door symmetrical all-wheel drive thing that just I don't even have to think about. And then uh yeah in recent months Ubers have been really helpful. Um what I've realized is you know all the time that I typically spend driving um I can just repurpose uh for Ubers and then I can just do work while I'm in the car. And when I say work, I just mean like respond to posts on school or something and just do little things that otherwise would have taken me time. Like when I'm at home or in the office, I can just do them while I'm Ubering or I can have a call with somebody or whatever. So, you know, on average it's like 30 minutes a day, right? So, I've actually been able to buy some of that back. And then better foods and stuff, too. Yeah. So, I'm not really big on the the material wealth and I don't really think I ever will be, but hopefully that answers your question there. Oh, uh, obviously the the peace of mind is really big. The peace of mind knowing that like I'm going to be okay no matter what happens. That's huge. I used to really really stress about that. Okay, brand stats. Let's just really quickly cover this. Uh if you guys don't know what this is, it's an unbroken chain of stats that I've been tracking for the better part of the last uh very long time where I track my main channel which is at 177,263 and I do my Instagram which I track using a tool called Blast Up. Gets my follower count in real time. I think it's 312,000. This appears to be lagging. Oh, it's not lagging. 314,326. And then what's my daily updates channel again? Anybody remember it? Let's see. 12,156
I wake up extremely early—usually around 3:00 a.m. I spend a few minutes in bed deciding how to use those valuable hours, then I roll over, grab my laptop, and start with community management. My community generates a disproportionate amount of revenue (around $110 k per day), so I prioritize responding to relevant posts and doing “roasts” for Maker School and my own site, where I record short videos critiquing Upwork profiles or offering quick fixes. This not only provides value but also reduces churn and makes me more sticky with the audience. After community work, I do a daily balance check: I review my bank accounts to see how much money I’ve made in the last 24 hours and keep my focus on money as the core metric. Finally, I run an inbox‑zero session, going through every email and replying to anything that isn’t obviously junk. This routine keeps me aligned with revenue‑generating activities and ensures I stay grounded in the financial health of my businesses.
You have a bunch of goals, and for the most part, the biggest thing that will ever stop you from achieving those goals is yourself. So I guess you're starting to work on these early. What you need to do is make it less of a big deal. The way all of this works—mental friction, stress, burnout—are self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe in them and take them seriously, constantly looping them in your head, the probability of them occurring goes way up. I'll give you an example: our forefathers, 200-ish years ago, were working-aged men crammed into mines, stooping over with a crusty loaf of bread and maybe another 300-calorie meal, working 12 to 16 hours a day, mining, blowing things up, many dying. If you asked them if they were super stressed or about burnout, they'd have no idea what you meant. For them, life was just get up, go to work, come home, and spend whatever few hours with family. The point I'm trying to make is that the only reason you're even thinking about this is because our culture has been overloaded with these concepts recently. We've really given in to therapy culture—which I'm not knocking; I know many people who go to therapy, and I've tried it myself, though I found it mostly useless. We've just been overloaded with the propensity to dwell on the negative things in our lives over and over, to the point where 17-year-olds now worry about overthinking, procrastination, and doing bad things they shouldn't. At the end of the day, just live your life. Work on the stuff you want to work on. If you don't allow these negative concepts to enter your mind, you'll go a lot further than if you constantly feel bogged down by them. So just don't go through those negative loops. Don't worry too much about mental friction. Obviously try to optimize your life, but if you think about stuff like this all the time, it will just hurt you. I'm sorry I couldn't give more concrete advice, but I think if you took even 1% of what I said, you'd find yourself much more successful. Also, anybody who has ever achieved massive crazy outcomes—or at least the vast majority of them—typically ascribes to some sort of mentality like this. I could spend my entire life hustling right now, trying to spend the most effort ever, but it wouldn't really matter all that much because the world is way bigger than anything I could ever hope to aspire to. So why not just take it day in day out, try my best to show up, and treat it like a video game? I think you'll go pretty far.