Transcript
00:00:00This video is all about how to make your full-time job optional so that you can quit if you want,
00:00:04you can go part-time if you want, or if you just really love the job, you can of course stay full
00:00:08time, but at least you know deep down that you don't need the job to pay the bills, which is the
00:00:12most freeing feeling in the world. If we haven't met, hello, my name is Ali. I used to be a doctor
00:00:16working in the UK, but on the side, I managed to build a business that made my full-time job
00:00:20optional. And I've been documenting that entire journey here on YouTube since 2017, from being a
00:00:25broke medical student to then working full-time as a doctor during the pandemic, to now being a
00:00:29best-selling author and entrepreneur. And I can tell you that when you make a job optional, it is
00:00:33absolutely life-changing. So this video is split up into three parts. Firstly, we're going to talk
00:00:37about why exactly your job is not already optional. Then we're going to talk through the freedom profile
00:00:40matrix to help you diagnose the issues with your job or your business or your career. And then thirdly,
00:00:45we're going to talk about the income versus asset equation and how to actually get started with
00:00:49making your job optional. So we got to start with why is the job not already optional? And primarily the
00:00:56reason for that is that we have expenses. You got rent, you got food, you got bills and stuff.
00:01:04And so let's say, just to keep the numbers around, you got 3k a month in expenses. I'm modeling this
00:01:11off of back when I had a real job, when I was single and had no kids. Let's say 3k a month of expenses,
00:01:16but obviously edit the numbers as you like. Because we have expenses, we therefore need income.
00:01:21Ideally, our income needs to be greater than our expenses. Otherwise, we end up in debt and that is not good.
00:01:26And so the reason why we have a job is because job gives us income, which allows us to pay for our expenses.
00:01:33There's some level of profit, shall we say, which if you're smart, you can put into investments, some of it,
00:01:40or you can use some of it for like fun and life. But the real problem is this expenses category.
00:01:45This is why the job is not optional. Now, there are a couple of different ways to solve this.
00:01:49Number one is you could just delete your expenses, right? You could get your expenses down to zero.
00:01:53When you are a child, a job is optional for the most part. I'm assuming if you're watching this,
00:01:57a job was optional for you when you were a kid. Your expenses are basically zero because your parents
00:02:01are covering your expenses. How else do you get your expenses to zero? You could get your expenses
00:02:04down to basically zero. So you could become a monk. You could go to a monastery. You could live off
00:02:08the fat of the land. You could like have a bowl and request arms from the people in surrounding
00:02:13villages and stuff. Now your expenses are zero and your job is truly optional. But that's probably not
00:02:17what we are thinking about when it comes to, I would like to make my job optional. So really for people
00:02:22that want to make their job optional, it's like what they're basically saying is I would like to sustain
00:02:26a certain level of like monthly expenditure to sustain my lifestyle and travel the world and live in a
00:02:31nice place and all that jazz. But ideally, I don't want to have to go to work in order to make up for
00:02:36those expenses. So what do we do? Well, if we're not open to reducing our expenses to zero, we then need
00:02:41to figure out the other aspect of this equation, which is the income side. You could also get income
00:02:45through universal basic income. Probably not going to happen anytime soon. But you know, when our AI
00:02:49overlords take over the world, governments around the world will hopefully switch to giving us all a
00:02:54universal basic income, some kind of stipend that will cover our expenses. But that is not happening
00:02:58anytime soon. So we can't really rely on that. So how do you make your job optional when you need the
00:03:04money? This is like the frickin conundrum of modern life. If you need the money, what the fuck do you do?
00:03:11All right, here's the thing. Here is my hot take. My hot take is that it's not actually about making
00:03:16your job optional. The problem with the job is the fact that your job does not have the freedom that
00:03:22you would ideally like. So the job itself is not the problem. Like for example, Ed Sheeran has a job
00:03:27where he has to record some music and he has to go on tour. And that's his job. Most people say it's a pretty
00:03:32good gig. One of my friend's dad's, his job is that a few times a year, he has to fly to mainland China
00:03:38and he meets with hedge fund managers because he has this like newsletter that hedge fund readers like
00:03:45read. And so his job is to assess the performance of the hedge fund or something. It takes him a few
00:03:50days a month to do that kind of work. And he gets to travel to cool places. He gets to be wined and
00:03:55dined by these fancy hedge fund managers. He gets to talk to them about finance and he makes loads of
00:03:58money doing it. If you had that kind of job, that's a pretty good gig as well, because it is a high
00:04:02freedom job. So it's not the fact that the job is the problem. It is actually the characteristics of
00:04:06the job that are the problem. Now, I think every job or every method of generating income, you can kind
00:04:12of map it to what I call the freedom profile. And it's like, what are the factors that we're looking
00:04:16for in work? Well, there is fun, there is flexibility, there's fulfillment, and there's finances. So these
00:04:23are the four Fs, fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances. Now, if you have a good amount of these
00:04:28things that you're looking for, then you have a high freedom profile. If you don't enjoy the balance of
00:04:34fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances that your particular job gives you, you have a low freedom
00:04:39profile. Now, these are not like value judgments. It's just like, is it good for you or is it bad for you?
00:04:43Do you personally like the freedom profile that your specific job or career has? Or do you not like?
00:04:48And so my contention is that if you had a high freedom profile job, where your job gave you enough
00:04:52fun, enough flexibility, enough fulfillment, and enough finances, you wouldn't be looking for
00:04:56something new. But if you are looking for something new, it's probably because your job does not have
00:05:01those things. And so at this point, it's worth pausing and rating. If you imagine rating it out of 10,
00:05:05how would you rate the fun of your job out of 10, the flexibility out of 10, the fulfillment out of 10,
00:05:10and the finances out of 10? Now, there are certain jobs that have a very high freedom
00:05:12profile. I've got a friend who is a remote software developer. He works for some big US tech company.
00:05:17He lives in Romania. He makes an insane amount of money, finances at 10. He's got loads of
00:05:21flexibility. He doesn't actually have to, I mean, he has to attend like one meeting with his manager
00:05:25once a week, and then maybe one like engineering standup or whatever. And he has quite a lot of fun
00:05:28because he enjoys writing code. The thing he's kind of missing is fulfillment because he's working
00:05:31for a company. He doesn't really believe in the product, but he's like, you know what? I feel
00:05:34fulfilled enough from like doing the tech stuff. That's actually a really good gig. He's not
00:05:37looking to change anything about his setup because he's got these four Fs and they're sort of high
00:05:41across the board. Alternatively, you could have careers with a very low freedom profile. So for
00:05:45example, I have a friend who's a corporate lawyer, works like 16 hours a day. Finances are 10 out of
00:05:5010. Fulfillment, he tells me is like a one out of 10. Flexibility, he tells me is a one out of 10.
00:05:54And fun, he tells me it's a five or six out of 10, depending on what's going on and stuff. So that
00:05:59would be a low freedom profile. In fact, maybe it's not even high and low. Let's slightly refine
00:06:03this. Maybe it's actually a good freedom profile or a bad freedom profile. You know, this is,
00:06:07I don't like it. And this is, I do like it. So if you're watching this video, I'm assuming
00:06:11there's something about the freedom profile of your own job slash career that you don't
00:06:15necessarily enjoy. A job slash career, generally you can define as working from someone else. But
00:06:22one thing that we often talk about here on this channel is you could choose to start your own
00:06:26business where you are working for yourself rather than for someone else. So let's say you could be a
00:06:29freelancer working for yourself with multiple clients. You could be an agency working for yourself
00:06:34with multiple clients and a couple of team members. You could start a software business. You could start
00:06:38a online education business. You could make YouTube videos. You could start a tech startup. Like
00:06:42there's all sorts of different businesses you could start. And the key differences between a job and a
00:06:45business is just a job. Someone else is the boss. And in a business, you are the boss. So, but
00:06:50otherwise the work is broadly, broadly similar enough. The thing is, even if you were to start a
00:06:54business, there are businesses that have a good freedom profile for you. And then there are
00:06:58businesses that have a bad freedom profile for you. I suspect you, your ideal business would
00:07:02not involve starting a factory. I have one friend who runs a factory. It's not particularly fun. It's not
00:07:06at all flexible. He says it's not very fulfilling. And the finances are actually really tough because
00:07:11the margins on factories are razor thin because he's competing against China and Vietnam and India and
00:07:15Bangladesh and stuff. The factory would be a poor choice of business if you were to start it. But then
00:07:20there are businesses that you can start that have a high premium for freedom profile. For example,
00:07:23freelance web designer. I have a friend who's a freelance web designer. He charges like somewhere
00:07:26between 15,000 and 50,000 US dollars for every website he makes. He taught himself to code over
00:07:30the period of about six months, became active on Twitter, found a couple of clients, and now he's
00:07:34a freelance web designer. And now he's using AI for everything and it's great and stuff. And so he has
00:07:38quite a lot of fun. He enjoys web design. It's a lot of flexibility because the clients don't really
00:07:41care when he's doing the work. It's fully remote. So 10 out of 10 flexibility. Fulfillment. He finds
00:07:46that if he works with certain types of clients, it's more fulfilling than others. So if he works with
00:07:49like education businesses or like nonprofits, he really enjoys it. Unfortunately, they tend to pay less
00:07:53money. If he works with corporations, he enjoys it. He finds it less fulfilling, but they pay more
00:07:57money. So, you know, it's still a little bit of a trade-off. It's not like starting your own
00:07:59business is this magic bullet for fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances all across the board,
00:08:03all on day one. There's still a little bit of a trade-off and the finances are pretty reasonable.
00:08:06He was previously working in like private equity or something. And so he's not quite making as much
00:08:11money as a private equity partner would be, but he's like working. He's making enough money for
00:08:14himself to be happy. So he would rate the finances probably an eight or a nine. But overall,
00:08:18that is a good freedom profile for him because it is a good balance of fun, flexibility,
00:08:22fulfillment, and finances. So given that we kind of have to do something to make an income,
00:08:26it's either some kind of job or some kind of business. We ideally want to pick one of these
00:08:31that has a freedom profile that we like. A job or a business is not the only way to make money.
00:08:37In a way, these are correlated with your time. Time plus work. A business less so, but a job certainly,
00:08:43like you're being paid for your time and you're being paid for your work. But the business,
00:08:46you're being paid less for your time. Again, depending on your billing model,
00:08:49more you're being paid for the work, for the outcomes that you deliver. There is a third
00:08:52of generating income, which is passive income, which everyone loves the idea of. Passive income
00:08:56is generated from assets. Assets are things that put money in your pocket. So for example,
00:09:00let's say you have a house and you put it on rent. Obviously, you are generating passive income from
00:09:05the rental yield on that house. Let's say you bought some stocks and shares and they are generating
00:09:10dividends and or growing in a capital appreciation over time. That can give you some level of passive
00:09:14income. All right. So once you've made any amount of money, you're going to want a place to invest
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00:10:29Trading212 for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it. Let's say you write a book titled Feel
00:10:34Good Productivity and it's available in bookstores all around the world and it's been translated into a few
00:10:38different, like 35 different languages and it's sold a few hundred thousand copies. And each quarter,
00:10:42you get royalty checks because you wrote the book once. I mean, it took you three and a half years
00:10:45to write the book, but you wrote the book once and now it has created an asset that is putting money
00:10:49in your pocket every single quarter. Passive because it's now decorrelated with your time.
00:10:53Of course, you had to put in the work to write Feel Good Productivity or to, I don't know,
00:10:57have enough money to buy a house or to build a house or have enough money to buy stocks and shares.
00:11:00You know, you had to invest something in it. You don't just get it for nothing unless you were gifted
00:11:04it by a parent because your parents are rich or whatever. But you either have to buy an asset or you have
00:11:07to put in the work to create an asset, assuming you're not going to inherit the asset. And so really,
00:11:12ideally what happens is that you got work, your work gives you income. You use that income to pay
00:11:17off your expenses. That generates, shall we say, profit. You invest some of that profit, invest into
00:11:23assets. Over time, those assets give you more income and then you spend some of that profit on
00:11:28having fun and games and all the bigger things in life. So this is basically the equation. And the more
00:11:32assets you have, the more assets you own, the more your income starts to come from assets rather than
00:11:38work. And so more of the income equation comes from assets, then the work equation goes down. And then
00:11:43eventually the job becomes optional or even the business becomes optional. Whatever the thing is
00:11:49that you are doing for work. Work becomes optional, shall we say. I think the ideal situation that a lot
00:11:53of us are aspiring to is where work is optional. That doesn't mean we're going to quit our jobs. That
00:11:57doesn't mean we're going to stop running our business. That doesn't mean we're going to just stop
00:11:59working because work is a thing that generates us fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and some amount of
00:12:04finances. Humans need work to flourish. Maybe flourishing should be another F. Flourish. Flourish.
00:12:10That would be fun. When people retire, their chances of having a heart attack and depression go through
00:12:14the roof because suddenly they lose this big sense of purpose. But it would be nice if you didn't have
00:12:20to do the work. It would be nice if you could do whatever you choose to do. And so the way you get that
00:12:24is, well, either you have so many assets that work becomes optional or the other definition of
00:12:29retirement is where what you are doing for work is what you would choose to do anyway, even if you
00:12:35didn't care about the money. So for example, a lot of authors, successful authors fall into this camp.
00:12:40One of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson writes amazing books. Brandon
00:12:43Sanderson works all the time. He works eight hours a day and plays video games four hours a day and hangs out
00:12:46his family like eight hours a day or whatever the thing might be. Brandon Sanderson does not have to work
00:12:50because he's made his millions already from the fact that he's got all these successful books. He could
00:12:53retire if he wanted to, but he just freaking loves writing. He's not doing it for the money. He's doing
00:12:56it for the vibes. In that context, work is optional for Brandon Sanderson, but he's doing it anyway.
00:13:01And the thing is, you don't need to have already made it financially or be officially financially free
00:13:05in order to find work that you would choose to do anyway. Whatever work you're doing,
00:13:11there will be some percentage of it that's in the camp of work. I'd do anyway, if I didn't need the
00:13:19money. And then there is work that I'm only doing this because I need slash want the money. And so
00:13:29then goal number one is how do you make so much money from your assets that you don't let the
00:13:32work becomes fully optional. But then goal number two is how do you move this line? Given that we're
00:13:36going to need to work to make money to buy the assets anyway, and also given that work is a key
00:13:41part of what makes a fulfilling life. How do we make it so that as much of the work as possible
00:13:45is work that you would do anyway, even if you didn't care about the money, and as little
00:13:49of it as possible is work that you are only doing because you need the money. This is the
00:13:52question. But I think that kind of changes the equation away from man, I hate my job. How do
00:13:58I quit my job to be like, actually, either we increase the finances, use that money to generate
00:14:01more assets. And then the amount of time we spend on work can decrease because our assets
00:14:05are generating passive income. Or in addition to that, how do we also make it so that we're
00:14:09actually enjoying our work so much that we choose to do it even if we didn't care about
00:14:12the money. For example, for me, even if I didn't care about the money, I would still
00:14:15make YouTube videos because I enjoy it. I like to think I'd care less about the views. But this is why I'm
00:14:18doing a video like this one, for example, it's fairly under optimized, not sure how many views
00:14:21it's going to get. But I would do this sort of thing, even if I didn't care about money, I would
00:14:24write books, even if I didn't care about the money, because it would be vibey and fun. I would do
00:14:28talks on stage and workshops and stuff, even if I didn't care about the money, because it's vibey
00:14:31and fun. I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't do sponsorships. Unless it was like, I don't know,
00:14:35Apple or something. We interrupt this video to bring you a message from our sponsor is a thing that I'm
00:14:39doing for the money. I'm going to be honest, I believe in the product, of course, and I use it
00:14:42anyway, which is why, you know, it's not that bad. But it pays the bills. But if I had like a zillion dollars in the bank,
00:14:47I wouldn't need to have advertising on my videos, for example. But beyond that, there's actually very
00:14:51few things that I'm doing that I am doing for the money rather than for the vibes. It's worth making
00:14:55this list in your current job or in your current business. What is the stuff that you actually enjoy
00:14:59doing that you would choose to do anyway, even if you were retired? And then what are the things you
00:15:03would choose not to do if you could? Maybe it's attending the meetings, maybe it's doing the
00:15:05performance reviews, maybe it's having a manager, maybe it's like dealing with direct reports,
00:15:08maybe it's dealing with bureaucracy, maybe it's filling out the metric scorecard once a week,
00:15:12whatever the thing might be. There's aspects of your job that you're doing kind of because you have to,
00:15:16and then there are other aspects of your job that you're doing because you want to.
00:15:19The other nice thing, and this is why I think like building a business is a good thing is because
00:15:22when you have a job, you generally have less control over your work setup compared to if you're
00:15:28working for yourself. If you're working for yourself like I am, you know, there's still things I need to
00:15:32do for the business to stay out of jail and stuff. But I've got the ability to hire people who can then
00:15:36do the stuff that I don't really want to do. And that's great, because now my list of things that I
00:15:39really want to do goes up to close to 100%, which is also interesting, because the stuff that I want to do
00:15:43that I feel energized by is also the stuff that generates the most money for the business. And so it's just
00:15:46like a nice virtuous cycle that works. I think everyone should at least try and start a business,
00:15:50even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur. There's not that much difference between an
00:15:53entrepreneur and employee. It's just that an entrepreneur has multiple clients and an employee
00:15:56has one. You are already an entrepreneur. You are already running your own business. It's just the
00:15:59business of you. And you are contracting your time to the highest bidder, i.e. your employer. And yes,
00:16:05it means that your salary is sort of weathered against like the impact of the business.
00:16:09Being a business owner is way more stressful than being an employee for the most part, because profit and loss of the
00:16:12business. If the business crumbles, then my employees still get paid. I'll be the one who loses out. If
00:16:16we have to give refunds to people, the employees still get paid. I'm the one who loses it out. So
00:16:19you know, it's not like it's a panacea or whatever the word is. It's like there's trade-offs. It's
00:16:22sort of like with electric cars. There's a stat that when someone drives an electric car for the first
00:16:26time, they are way more likely to buy an electric car in the future. Very few people go electric and
00:16:30then switch back to a gasoline powered car. Similarly, very few people start a business and that
00:16:35business is successful. And then they go back to having a job. It just, it tends not to happen that way. It happens in some
00:16:41situations. Sometimes if you're, if you're being offered a job at a cool place, you like the idea
00:16:44of, and you want to learn skills as vibey and great. Uh, you want to be part of a bigger mission. I can
00:16:48see myself, if I stopped wanting to do the business, wanting to work at like open AI or anthropic or
00:16:52Google or YouTube, like, you know, these sorts of companies or Apple, that would be cool. I probably
00:16:56wouldn't see myself working for the local accountant or working at a local hospital. I'd want to do
00:17:00something a little bit bigger, a little bit more interesting. So, but for the most part, when you speak to
00:17:03business owners, they don't want to go back to having a job. And so this is why I think everyone should try
00:17:08entrepreneurship at some point in their life anyway, because you take your income generation
00:17:12into your own hands far more so than when you're an employee, where really the income generation is
00:17:17handled by the business and the other people in the business. And you're like one contributor to that
00:17:22income generation when you're doing it yourself, it's more stressful. Sure. But it also makes you
00:17:27learn, learn a lot more. And it also means that, uh, you have more control, but it's just, you know,
00:17:31harder to succeed in that world. So again, it's all just, it's all just trade-offs.
00:17:33Starting a business is trading a 9 to 5 for a 24/7. So this is a thing that you do hear quite a lot
00:17:45amongst business owners. You also hear that they wouldn't have it any other way, which is interesting.
00:17:50It is trading a 9 to 5 for a 24/7. The thing I miss most about having a real job when I was working
00:17:54as a doctor is that I could genuinely switch off from work when I got home. I did not like,
00:17:58I physically could not interact with the patients in the hospital. As you get more senior,
00:18:01that actually becomes less of a thing because now you have to have, you're worrying about the patients
00:18:03overnight because you're responsible for them. And so in a way, a 9 to 5 at a senior level where
00:18:08you're earning lots of money is not truly a 9 to 5. It's more like a 996 with quite a lot of like
00:18:12staying up at night thinking about it. In fact, I would say the more money you earn in any field,
00:18:15whether it's a job or a business, the more it becomes a 24/7 because you're always sort of thinking
00:18:18about it. But in many ways, yeah, starting a business is indeed trading a 9 to 5 for a 24/7.
00:18:22Having kids is a 24/7. Being married is a 24/7. These are not things that fit neatly into
00:18:27like a box on your calendar. But for the most part, people with kids don't regret having kids
00:18:31and people who are married don't regret being married. And similarly, for the most part,
00:18:34people who start businesses, provided the businesses is like at a certain point of success,
00:18:38do not regret starting the business. Another phrase I like, I think it's from like a famous
00:18:42economist or something. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Everyone I speak to who wants their
00:18:46job to be optional because they have like a low freedom profile career or whatever. It's like,
00:18:50we all want what we don't have. There was a really good thing I watched from Alex Ramosi the other day,
00:18:54like on his YouTube Shorts channel or whatever. There was like, you know, entrepreneurs remember our
00:18:58wish that they could go back to a 9 to 5 sometimes. Employees want to be entrepreneurs. People who have
00:19:02like a remote business love the idea of having a team. People who are solopreneurs want to have a
00:19:06team. People who are like having big, big, big businesses like long for the time when the team was
00:19:10smaller. A lot of us generally want what we don't have. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
00:19:14And so my opinion on this is that if you're at this point in the video and you haven't yet started a business,
00:19:19you're probably the sort of person who probably should start a business, even if the only reason
00:19:23to do so is so that you don't like die with regret that this is a thing that you could have done that
00:19:27you, I don't know, were too chicken to do or like were too scared to do or were too like anxious to
00:19:31do or whatever the thing might be. If you don't want to start a business because you're like, you know
00:19:33what? Actually, I'm quite happy with the freedom profile of my job. Amazing. More power to you.
00:19:37But in general, for the people that watch my stuff, I actually think starting your own business or even
00:19:40giving it a go is a very worthwhile skill because like worst case scenario, it doesn't work out.
00:19:44Okay, cool. You just go back to a job, but now you go back to the job with like way more skills than you
00:19:48needed previously because when you're, when you have a job, especially if you're at a big company,
00:19:52you're a very specialized role and probably you are not interfacing with sales. You are probably not
00:19:56responsible for income generation unless you are literally in the sales and marketing team or unless
00:20:00you're a partner at a law firm or accounting firm or whatever, whatever the thing might be. So you're
00:20:02probably doing the work rather than selling the work. The hard part about building a business is
00:20:06actually not in the doing of the work. It is in the selling of the work. When you're an employee,
00:20:09the only time you need to sell the work for the most part is when you're negotiating a raise or when you're
00:20:13trying to get a job offer handed to you, that is the, that you're spending 1% of your life selling.
00:20:18When you're a business owner, you're spending like 70% of your life selling and the skills of selling
00:20:22are skills that are in many ways way more valuable than the skill of actually being able to do the work.
00:20:26So even if you do start a business, you get it to a couple of grand in revenue, maybe 10k in revenue.
00:20:31Maybe you join a program like ours, like Lifestyle Business Academy, whatever you learn skills,
00:20:35you learn the skill of sales, and it means you are way more valuable in any future job that you go to,
00:20:41uh, compared to if you just stayed in that job. How do I actually start the business? That's a whole
00:20:46other video, but I would say that there are kind of two paths here. Path number one is you can do it
00:20:51yourself. And path number two is you could get help. The do it yourself path is the path that I followed
00:20:56for the first like 10 years of my business journey, where you just kind of figure it out. You watch a
00:21:00bunch of YouTube videos, you read some articles, you listen to the podcast. Loads of people out there
00:21:03now are giving very free, very, very good free business education on the internet. You can watch some
00:21:07videos on my channel on how to get started. You can watch videos on Alex Hormuzzi's channel. You can watch a Dan
00:21:10Martell. You can watch Cody Sanchez. You can watch loads of people giving advice on how to start a
00:21:14business. Information is not the problem. You can talk to AI. You can literally go to Claude or Chad
00:21:17GPT being like, Hey, I want to start a business. How do I do it? And it will actually give you pretty
00:21:20reasonable advice. That is option number one. You could just do it yourself and figure it out in the
00:21:23same way that like, how do you learn any, any kind of skill? How do you learn how to be a plumber?
00:21:27You could figure it out or you could do it yourself or you can get help. How do you learn the guitar?
00:21:30I learned the guitar by watching some YouTube tutorials and then signing up to an online course from
00:21:34justinguitar.com back when in, back in like 2013. And that was how I learned the guitar. That was
00:21:39sort of like the DIY approach or alternatively you could get help. Now there's various different
00:21:44forms of help available. You could sign up to someone's course, pay a few hundred dollars. You
00:21:48sign up to a video series, you watch the videos, you do the work, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to
00:21:51start a YouTube channel, you can figure it out yourself or you can sign up to my part-time YouTuber
00:21:54academy course. It's like a thousand dollars. We offer scholarships to people who can't afford it. It gives
00:21:57you the roadmap on how to start a YouTube channel. And loads of people have done that and they have succeeded on YouTube.
00:22:04So our lifestyle business academy, our most recent thing is like an online business school that it has
00:22:08a course component, but it also pairs you with a dedicated one-on-one coach who acts as your mentor.
00:22:14And then it's sort of like a course can give you like the generic instructions and then the coach can
00:22:19help personalize it for whatever the thing that you're doing is. I currently spend about $250,000
00:22:24a year on coaching because I have other coaches and mentors who I work with to help grow our business
00:22:29from 5 million a year to 10 million a year in revenue. I don't really watch online courses because
00:22:32there's not that many online courses for that sort of thing, but I work with my coaches and, or you could
00:22:35join a community of other people who are like also doing the thing. So I pay $60,000 to join a
00:22:41mastermind from a guy called Tucky Moore. And we get together once every four months. The last one was
00:22:45in Australia. The one before that was in California. And that is a community of other million dollar
00:22:49plus entrepreneurs. And we sort of exchange ideas. So that's sort of the help approach there.
00:22:53Now these numbers sound absolutely insane, but because, but like once you get to the point where
00:22:57you're making millions from your business, then it makes a lot of sense to spend 50,
00:23:0160, 70, a hundred grand on mentorship and community and coaching and this sort of thing.
00:23:04But there are lots of these different options that are available. Interestingly, our Lifestyle
00:23:07Business Academy gives you all three. You get a course, you get coaching and you get community all
00:23:10in one. People get a lot of value from it. So you can check it out, link down below if you want to
00:23:13try it out. But these are basically like the two ways to go about learning anything. If I wanted to get
00:23:17better at the guitar. Yeah. If I had, if I had loads of time, I could just watch more YouTube tutorials,
00:23:21but really if I wanted to get better at the guitar, what I should do is just hire a guitar teacher because I can afford it.
00:23:25And because my time is at a premium, but if I was a student and I had no money, but loads of time,
00:23:28why would I get a guitar teacher? I'll just figure it out. So those are broadly the two
00:23:32paths that are open to you. And if you decide you want it, like there are loads of people making
00:23:35million dollar businesses without paying a penny for any resources. There are, I would say even more
00:23:38people making million dollar businesses who are actually paying for mentorship and help along that path.
00:23:43So there are a bunch of people out there just on this note who are like paying for a course,
00:23:46paying for a coach, paying for a community. It's all scammy. The only people that benefits are the
00:23:51creators of the courses. I would never buy a book on anything because the only person the book
00:23:55benefits is the author of the book. I would never go to university because the only person benefiting
00:23:59is the university itself. You probably don't think that, right? You probably think that university is
00:24:03fine. I know plenty of people who went to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale and Stanford,
00:24:07MIT, who are struggling to get jobs, even though they got first class degrees and 4.0 GPAs at those
00:24:11fancy universities and paid loads of money for it. Does that mean university is a scam? Well, no,
00:24:14not really. Like you should go in eyes open, right? Would you think it's a scam to pay $20 for
00:24:19a book that's written by someone who started a business that's telling you what they've learned along their journey?
00:24:23Probably not. You know, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, has a book. You can pay $10 to get the book
00:24:28or like $5 for the audio book or whatever. And you can learn the business lessons that Phil Knight
00:24:32has learned over the last 50 years of building Nike into one of the world's most valuable companies.
00:24:35You probably don't think that's a scam. We got to like really try and figure out like,
00:24:39what is this idea that like paying for education is a scam? Because you're probably okay paying for books.
00:24:44You're probably okay paying for university. So it's not even the cost, right? Because a book is like,
00:24:48I don't know, $10. University is, shall we say, $100,000, if not more. Ultimately,
00:24:52these are all forms of education. One of our team members here at Sparkle Studios is doing a part-time
00:24:56masters at a university. She's paying like tens of thousands of dollars to do this part-time
00:25:00masters. So once a week, there is a Zoom workshop where the facilitator teaches a Zoom workshop on
00:25:06whatever the topic of the masters is, like AI or something. Most people would think, okay,
00:25:09that's reasonable. But it's basically an online course. That university is basically selling an online
00:25:12course. They're just charging $20,000 a year for it or $30,000 a year or whatever it is. And the reason
00:25:17people think it's not a scam because loads of people have signed up to this part-time masters,
00:25:20even though it's basically an online course with like one live Zoom session every week,
00:25:24is because it is a masters. So it gives you some CV points. You get some letters after your name.
00:25:29Okay. What is the value of the letters after your name? Does it actually increase your likelihood of
00:25:34getting employed in the future? Maybe, but maybe not. Depends what kind of job you're going for.
00:25:38If you're trying to become an executive at IBM, then okay, do an MBA. I have a lot of friends who run like
00:25:41multi-hundred million dollar startups. And even a couple of friends who run like billion dollar
00:25:45plus startups. If they see someone with an MBA applying for their jobs, they will actively
00:25:50blacklist them from that particular job because they see an MBA as being a negative signal. Of
00:25:55course, some online courses are scams as well. And of course you hear the stories and that kind of
00:25:58thing. So it's just like, you've got to go in with your eyes open. I have lots of friends who run
00:26:02online courses. Pretty much all of them are like, do it in a good way. Like the courses are really good.
00:26:07They really know what they're talking about. They have a very liberal refund policy. They're not doing
00:26:10the scammy marketing tactics. So what we shouldn't do, I think is to throw the baby out with the bath
00:26:14water and say all forms of online education are a scam because also you don't believe that. You
00:26:18believe books are fine. You believe university is fine. Even though many people argue university is
00:26:21truly a scam. We shouldn't think that just because there are some people that use dodgy marketing
00:26:25techniques that like the entire industry is bad. So I think we just really need to question where
00:26:30do these beliefs come from? I speak to so many people that are like, oh, online courses are a scam.
00:26:34Are they? I think it's worth doing a little bit of critical thinking about this whole,
00:26:38like all coaches are scammers, all online courses are scammers. All right. So with all that said,
00:26:41if you're still at this point in the video, firstly, thank you for watching. And if you haven't yet
00:26:45checked out my five step plan on how to go from zero to $100,000 a year business, there is a very
00:26:50simple roadmap. It's in this video right over here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye.
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