Transcription
There was a time not too long ago. Then I had exactly €6 in my account. I spent my time working minimum wage night shifts in a gym. I came home at 1 AM, slept until noon, stimulated my brain away, and got lost in meaningless content and some video games. On the weekend, I somehow numbed myself with friends and celebrated, even though there was actually nothing to celebrate, if we're being honest. I couldn't even pay the €360 rent for a studio apartment in the worst part of town without my parents' help, and besides, it looked like a dump permanently. Fresh out of school, I thought the world would open up to me. Instead, I slowly began to wonder where I had gone wrong. I never really wanted to go the conventional route. I wanted to build something, inspire other people, produce videos, basically do my own thing. But I had given up that childhood dream at some point, and now I was paying the price. My life wasn't really how I wanted it to be, and even being unemployed and having to move back in with my parents was a better option for me than continuing down this path in this dead-end job. Exactly this moment was my wake-up call. I realized how much I had let myself go. With a few hundred euros in my account, which I had saved up months before, I decided to quit. I knew it was time to change something. I realized no one would come to save me. No one would give me anything. If I wanted a different life, I had to build it myself. Some people hear self-improvement or personal development and immediately roll their eyes. For them, everything is cringe and embarrassing. But let me tell you one thing. If you believe you can become successful while clinging to a skeptical, closed-off, or limiting mindset, then you are lying to yourself. Here's what I learned. If you want to achieve something significant, you have to change at the root, in your innermost being. You have to become the person who is competent enough to solve that task and truly achieve that goal. For years, I asked myself, why don't I earn more money? Why isn't this working? Why is life so unfair to me? But gradually, it clicked. If you don't have stable foundations, it doesn't matter how hard you work. You won't arrive. You have to put your ego aside and start from zero. Let go of the beliefs that work against you and reprogram your thinking from the ground up. You have to already be the person in your head that you want to be, before you gradually become it in reality. This specifically means undoing years of conditioning and freeing yourself from stories and beliefs that are unconsciously holding you back. I started taking sports seriously again and devoured any knowledge that had anything to do with self-improvement or making money. Simply everything that even had the potential to improve my life in some way. I quickly realized it wasn't just about knowledge, but primarily about implementation. I forced myself daily to do the work, even and especially when I didn't feel like it. I removed almost every stimulation from my life and only got a dopamine hit from things that truly moved me forward. Gradually, my thoughts began to change, and my habits became stronger. After several months, the first successes also appeared, so I was ready to go all in. I had a rough plan of where I wanted to go. So I decided to lock myself at home and do everything to truly make this dream come true. I created a strict routine and used every waking moment to maximize my chances of success. So, wake up, work, work more, then gym, and then even more work. 10, 12, sometimes 14 hours a day. And this wasn't a short phase; it was sometimes weeks or even months at a time. I barely saw my friends, hardly spoke to my family, and the world outside my room increasingly disappeared. No weekends, no days off, no work-life balance, always just the same routine over and over again. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't healthy, and above all, it wasn't Instagram-worthy, but it was reality. Because that's usually what it looks like when you want to achieve something out of nothing. Sometimes you need such phases, and work-life balance, in my opinion, is more visible on a macro than a micro level. And then there was that one moment. For years, I had published videos on YouTube that hardly anyone watched. I remember one evening when I came home from my commissioned work as a videographer at midnight. I still had to edit a YouTube video because the upload date was the next day. Every cell in my body wanted to sleep, but I had made a pact with myself. I was on the verge of not doing it. Why bother? No one will watch it anyway. What's the point if I edit and upload the video now? But something in me said I had to push through. So I stayed up until 3 AM and finished the video, and again 100 views, until one day I woke up and the view count was suddenly at 1000 views, then 10,000, and then the video started to grow even more. This particular video went viral for the first time, and many people became aware of my channel. It was the glimmer of hope I so desperately needed. About 2 years later, it came, the day I reached 100,000 followers. I had put every bit of energy into this channel for several years straight, but there was one thing I still hadn't achieved, and that was the magical mark of €10,000 per month. I no longer had a minimum wage income and could live well from it, but I knew that if I wanted to achieve this goal, I would have to do different things than what I had done so far. The thing is, reach alone is no longer enough these days. More reach often doesn't mean more money. Reach is more like an engine, and the real money comes from the vehicle. Most influencers you know probably don't earn the amounts you think or that they portray online. My wife and I knew we could use what we had learned over the past years to build a real brand. A real company, one that pursues the same mission as our videos: to inspire, motivate, and improve other people's lives in some way. A month of product development, supply chain optimization, and web design later, and it was launch day. We had put everything into this product. We had invested most of our money in this business, and now it was supposed to show if it was worth it. I would like to say now that it was an immediate success and took off, but it wasn't. It never is. The first month was solid, but we were still miles away from the 10k mark. After all these months of hard work, I stared at my screen. I thought, was that it? Was it all for nothing? Is it really all over? But instead of getting discouraged, we looked for ways to improve. Once again, I absorbed all the e-commerce and marketing knowledge on the internet and spoke with people who already had more successful brands. And slowly but surely, sales also increased. No rocket launch, but real, tangible progress. Months later, it happened, the first month with over €10,000 in pure profit. We had finally reached our goal, but that was just the beginning. The revenue became more stable, and the work really started to pay off, and I was, of course, overjoyed and nothing but grateful, but I didn't rest. Now that I had seen these sums myself, all the limits in my head had dissolved, and I saw the world through a completely new lens. I now knew that to be good at something, you don't have to be a genius, and you don't really need much talent either. The only thing you need is consistency and the will to become better at your endeavor every single day. And an opportunity presented itself on the horizon. Black Friday was approaching, and I had heard from many people that some companies make more revenue in the fourth quarter than in the three quarters before. So we decided to take that seriously, locked ourselves in an Airbnb in a foreign city for a month, and prepared everything day and night. Months of planning were supposed to pay off in just one quarter, and they did. In the last month of the fourth quarter, we had our record month. The company we had founded two years earlier at the dining table had now sold over 10,000 books. No education, no degree, no outside help. Just two people with a mission, a lot of optimism, perseverance, and countless trial and error attempts. When I saw the balance sheet for that month for the first time, my feeling was honestly different than I thought. Even when our current company, after years, broke through the 1 million euro revenue barrier, it wasn't like in the movies. I didn't feel like I had made it, like I was through, or like I had achieved anything significant. The next day, I wasn't on a yacht or in a sports car, and to be honest, it didn't really change anything. Sure, it all sounds impressive when you can tell it on the internet now. It's a cool story, but does it really mean anything? The answer is not really. Sure, money solves money problems, and many of our problems are indeed money problems. That's true, but the feeling doesn't change. The number doesn't suddenly make you successful. It doesn't change your feeling. Numbers just remain exactly that. Numbers, they define neither success nor happiness. But what really counts is the freedom they can bring you. It's not about the numbers on the screen. It's much more about what they enable. Sure, you might treat yourself to something. It sounds cool when you can say that, and it certainly earns respect in certain circles, but the true value of income that is over 10k or over 20k is a bit more peace of mind. The ability to shape your life according to your own rules, to be able to get up when you want, and to be able to provide for your loved ones. The true profit is not the money, but the skills you have to acquire and the person you ultimately become along the way. In this whole entrepreneurship game, it's not about who is the smartest, who works the most, or who has the best idea. It's simply about starting, trusting yourself blindly, taking one step after another, and falling down as often as possible. Because the one who gets up again despite everything is the one who can only win in the long run. Before the video ends, two more things. First, it's very important to me to say that just because I've earned 1 million euros online in total so far, it by no means means I'm a millionaire or anything like that. There are expenses, there are taxes. I'm still far from it, there's still a lot to do. I really want to keep it 100% real with you and not portray myself as more impressive online than I actually am, like many other people who talk about making money online. I still thought it was cool to mark this milestone and celebrate that I've at least played Level 1 of this whole entrepreneurship game. But there are people who do that in a year or in a month, and for me, there's still tons to learn. And speaking of learning, if you want to learn how to build a personal brand, i.e., how to generate attention online and convert it into money, basically exactly what I have done and am doing, then you can learn it, and that from me personally. We have a new core offer where I help people build a personal brand in close cooperation. So, if you're interested in something like that, first link in the description. I've spent over half a year on this video. For the cutaway shots alone, I felt like I traveled to three continents and ten different countries. But if I could motivate or inspire even one person, then it was all worth it. Stay healthy, may all your dreams come true. See you in the next video. Peace.