Are you happy and fulfilled at this stage in life? What's your opinion on whether money buys happiness, and do you still have any insecurity, self-doubt, or FOMO comparing yourself to others and feeling inferior?
Do I feel happy or fulfilled with lots of money? Well, it's not necessarily the money that is making me feel happy or fulfilled, but yeah, I do feel happy and I do feel fulfilled. Part of me feels like it's just age — I've really matured and realized that you gain success on multiple axes of life, not just your finances. When I was young, I thought success was a catch-all term for how much money you made and whether you had enough money not to have to worry about looking at the pricing on the menu all the time like I used to. But I've come to realize that there are a lot of people far more successful than me on many of these axes. There are people out there that I dog on financially — it's not even close — who would probably have to make money for 10 years to make as much as I've made in a single month. Yet the abundance and diversity of relationships and experiences that they've had put me to shame. I'm like a baby compared to them. There are people out there that I crush financially, if you think about it as a great race — which many people do — but what is success really anyway? It's just some term used to be like 'I'm more successful and less successful.' Ontologically it doesn't really make sense. I dog on some of these people financially — their earnings are $20,000 or $30,000 a year for Christ's sake, and I make that in a couple of days. And then they're physical specimens — they've spent all this time and energy working on their bodies and sometimes their minds, and they're sharp as a razor, and I have nothing compared to that. So really, all financial success is just one small part of the more rounded spokes of a wheel. In order to be successful more broadly and holistically — which gets at what most people think the term success means but usually don't use in day-to-day parlance — I think you need to be great at everything. So I feel like I'm working towards that. 'Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal,' as coined by... it wasn't Hemingway. Anyway, I'll get back to you on that. Success is the progressive realization of me figuring out who quoted that. Anyway, hopefully that makes sense.
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.
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
More wealth makes it hard to tell if people like you for yourself or just your money; you test with stupid jokes to see their reaction. Many cozy up for the flashy bling, even if you're not flashy yourself. You're not more fulfilled than when you were sleeping in garages and making no money—fulfillment comes from working on stuff you care about, which you did then and do now. Your impact has grown, but your personal fulfillment hasn't, leaving you to wonder what that means for your craving for impact. When broke you could follow curiosity freely; now you constantly weigh financial effectiveness, which can lead to hard days.
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.