You said you jumped to 100% self-employment and struggled and had near eviction from a garage and all that stuff. Can you tell the story?
Yeah, I started entrepreneurship and I dove in with both feet. I was preparing to be a doctor. My family being immigrants from Eastern Europe sort of put all of that on me and were like, 'doctor or lawyer, buddy, that's it. We didn't sacrifice our whole lives in our home country to do that for you.' Which is kind of fucked, let's be real, but whatever. So I took the MCAT, I scored reasonably well, I applied to a bunch of medical schools — that was my path. And then I was like, 'you know what, why don't I try this whole business thing first?' I basically thought about it to myself and said, how much money would I make if I just went to the job force right now? Probably about two to three million dollars over the course of the next 30 to 40 years, assuming I was a median salary earner. How much money would I make if I was a doctor? Maybe six to eight million dollars. How much money could I make if I struck out and just did something cool for myself? And I was like, I think I could make more money than both of those combined and I think I could probably do it for way less work. My initial goal was, I would take one shot at the net every year for 40 years with a 2.5% average success rate — one of those would make me rich. I ended up getting rich within maybe three years, so three of those attempts, meaning my probabilities were off by a factor of 11 or 15. I was 15 times more likely to succeed than I realistically thought I'd be. That said, that was also probably about 15 times as hard as I thought it would be. Can't get something for nothing, right? Anyway, I just jumped right into it. It was pretty hard, but that's where all the white hairs in my head come from.
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'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 know one of the major issues here is you're at $3K a month and want to hit $10K a month, so the gap is $7K a month. But because you're at a middling income level, I'd imagine it's $3K a month, and you probably don't have anything else; you really want to hold onto that and save every dollar. If you wanted to grow from $3K to $10K a month, you'd have to spend a lot of your money and risk some of it. What I mean by this is you're not sure about starting from scratch on Upwork for $10–15 an hour. You know, if you did that, you'd probably spend somewhere between $200 and $400 a month just on connect costs, if you really wanted to take it seriously. That's like 12% of maybe 15% of all your money. That's the thing I personally think is probably stopping you from saying yes. But the reality is, you've got to spend money to make money. My recommendation would be to take everything you're doing here—whatever $3,000 USD minus your living expenses, whatever you have left over—and spend it on marketing, on sales and marketing. Upwork is a great example. We just had a guy in Maker School, Sai Satoru, who's absolutely one of the coolest guys in this group. He has a relatively similar situation as you do. From $849 a month teaching kids to $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. A year and a half ago, he was teaching English to 9-year-olds in Chiang Rai for $849 a month. It was stable, predictable, and the wrong life. But he dove in on freelancing and AI automation, and now he's made $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. Granted, it's in 12 months, so it's not the same thing, but keep in mind that the majority of that money is pushed into the future. I imagine the way Sai probably started was he started with a $500 month, then a $1,000 month, then a $1,500 month, then a $2,000 month. And also, this is just Upwork; there are a million different ways you can make money online with AI and automation. I'm not telling you you have to do this necessarily, but it is a very simple and straight-line path for somebody in your situation. So what you could do is the first couple months, go on Upwork, make a grand, two grand, three grand, and then take that money and graduate to more efficient marketing approaches as well—things like cold email and so on. So that's what I would do. And $10K per month might seem really scary, but think about it: that's just three positions like this at maybe half the time spent on each. You could absolutely do that. Thank you very much, MZ Maestro. Your brains are half algorithms at this point. Basically, yeah, that's how I feel.
You know what? I'm really happy you asked this question because I'm thinking of recording a whole video about it. Let me run you through my thought process. For anybody that doesn't know, I went to university for behavioral neuroscience, and my whole idea was to become a doctor. I spent a few years in various labs. Let me call this journey: I spent a few years in various labs. So a big chunk of my life was actually spent working with rats, believe it or not. I performed a ton of animal research with rats. My first or second year, I was an undergraduate research assistant; my job was basically to tend to these rats doing circadian rhythm experiments. I'd go in at 7 or 8:00 p.m., swap out their feeding tables, give them new food, refill their water, and we also had to play with the rats a certain amount each day. That was part of my job, so I would let them crawl all over me and snuggle them. It was really fun. The really sad thing is when you form an emotional bond to one of these cute critters and then see where they go at the end—they're dying, right? The whole point is you do these experiments, then chop their brains off and do a bunch of studies. Anyway, I did a bunch of that, then got more into academia and thought maybe I'd do research or stay on the doctor path, which would be medical research. I remember one shocking moment in my lab when I looked at my PI at the time—a brilliant, super intelligent guy. He was studying something I won't get into for doxxing reasons, but essentially he was working his ass off 12–14 hour days, begging for grant funding, and I was helping him write a grant application. It hit me: this guy works really hard and has been in school a very long time; I wonder how much money he makes. So I went through a moment: when you're a PI at my university, you can see everybody's salaries. I don't know if it's revenue transparency or income transparency, but they do it. That was pretty sweet. I went on that database, saw how much money he was making, and thought, 'You serious?' He had a bachelor's, then a master's, then a PhD, then a postdoc, then a second postdoc. He was all over the place—best schools on planet Earth, MIT style. I won't name the specific ones, but like the best universities on Earth. This guy was hustling his ass up, making like 80k a year. Keep in mind when I say 80k, I'm talking CAD. To be abundantly clear, CAD to USD is 0.7, so 80k CAD is about 56k USD. So this guy worked his entire life, making 56k USD while still putting in 12‑hour days. That's when it hit me: I have big dreams of doing cool research, spending all this time with animals, seeing a future laid out, but what would my life actually look like? Do I really just want to be relegated to begging for grant funding on my hands and knees? Probably not. So yeah, that's a little bit about my journey there. Um—I then spent the next year basically working my ass off to get what was called a research award: $4,500 for a three‑month research period. That $4,500 would be awarded for three months of work. I spent about two months applying, prepping interviews, trying to knock it out of the park, studying interview strategies and tactics, and I was so stressed out. I applied, got it, and was awarded $4,500. I did the math: working 30‑ to 40‑hour weeks at the lab for three months is 160 hours a month times three, 4,800 hours total. I was making under $10 an hour. Any way I looked at it, if I were to do any academic thing, I wasn't going to make much money. I ran through all the stuff, thought about it, and asked myself: Is this really what I want to do? Then I thought a little about medicine because my family is from Eastern Europe and the immigrant dream is that my son becomes a doctor, makes a ton of money, and secures the family. I thought a lot about that and started doing the math on how much doctors make. In Canada, the average family physician—where you open your own clinic or work in someone else's clinic, basically a business—has a median of about $220,000 a year CAD. So 220k CAD times 0.7 equals about 154k USD. That's a