- Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake
of robertoblake.com
helping you create something awesome today.
Today, I wanted to talk about entrepreneurship,
and I wanted to tell you guys the story
of why I became an entrepreneur.
As of the making of this video,
I'm about 33 years old.
I grew up in an era in the '80s and '90s
where entrepreneurship wasn't something
that was glorified,
something that was rarely talked about.
But as an '80s kid who grew up watching
DuckTales, watching Scrooge McDuck
as my actual childhood hero and mentor from afar,
I think there was a part of me that always knew
that I wanted to run my own business
and that I wanted financial freedom,
that I wanted to travel the world
and that I wanted to be able to make
a real difference and impact somehow
in people's lives.
There were a lot of ideas I might have had about
what would make that possible,
what would make that a reality.
I didn't necessarily think that the path
that I'm on would be the answer because
most of what has let me be successful today
didn't exist in the '90s or in the '80s,
the internet being an example, or rather,
the modern internet.
Believe it or not, I think that
my success as an entrepreneur, in many ways,
comes from a dark place
with a light at the end of the tunnel
in the form of a positive outcome.
I became an entrepreneur because
what was unsatisfying about being an employee
is the fact that I never felt like I had
a sense of ownership over my work or my ideas,
so I had no control there.
I had no control over my time.
I spent time and energy on what somebody
dictated I had to spend time and energy on.
Whether I thought it was valid or not,
whether I thought it was the right thing,
it didn't matter.
That's what the job is.
I didn't have creative control.
I didn't have creative freedom,
in many cases.
I also didn't have the freedom
to voice my opinion or my views on something
if they were dissenting in opinion.
When you're in corporate American, oftentimes,
the job and your success is predicated on
appeasing the people above you, in the form
of your supervisors, your managers, your bosses.
Being a middle manager is rough because
you're literally stuck in the middle.
There were a lot of things that were dissatisfying there,
in terms of feeling no sense of control.
Then, the average salary in America,
it sounds great to everyone else in the rest
of the world, and I'm very well aware
of the 1.1 billion people who have to live
on a dollar a day.
Again, I know that I won the lottery
being born in the United States of America,
in the greatest age of entrepreneurship
in all of time.
I get that.
I don't take it for granted.
With that being said, the median income salary
in America is about $40,000.
While that may not put you at the poverty line,
people don't take into account that
the cost of living just keeps getting higher and higher.
We can talk a lot of rhetoric about living
within your means, but it's a lot more challenging
than anybody thinks.
Saving money isn't enough to keep you
from eventually being broke.
In addition to feeling a lack of control
in every other aspect of my life,
I also didn't feel like I had control
over my income, how much money I could make
in proportion to my effort.
I didn't feel any sense of financial freedom.
This took me to a dark place.
When you don't feel in control of your life,
you're more susceptible to a down spiral
in depression than anything else, I think.
Aside from chemical imbalances and things
of that nature, and those are real,
just being in life circumstances where
you feel completely devoid of any control
over anything can really poison your mind.
That's a place that I got to, and it was very hard
to claw my way out of it.
In fact, I don't think I did.
I think I hit emotional rock bottom.
I was thinking of ending my life.
Then I decided that I could imagine
a version of my life where I would be happy.
I decided that I was willing to do the work
that it takes to bridge the gap between
the reality that I was in
and the reality that I would prefer.
I decided that there was a thread of work
that was separating those things,
and I decided to commit to doing that work.
To accomplish that, I committed to being a freelancer.
I did gigs and I did everything I could
to make money online.
Eventually, I moved from being a freelancer
to developing and fleshing out a real,
practical business.
I grew and I grew and I grew
in proportion to my work.
I finally could have ownership over my ideas.
I finally could build out the personal brand
that represents me accurately and shows off
my skills, had a body of work that I'm proud of,
connect with people, build my network.
I now had more time.
I could learn new skills and new things.
I could evolve, I could grow.
I could travel, I could go to conferences.
I could learn from the smartest people in the world.
Again, it was a period of time
that really made a difference of being able
to commit that time and my energy into things
that I could see progress of that would move the needle.
I was no longer arbitrarily throwing eight hours
at something, and knowing that I'm only getting
X amount of dollars out of it.
I could now throw a certain amount of time
at something, and see a difference it would make
in my own life and see what it would actually produce,
and know that it was something that I wanted
and something that I had a vision for.
I could charge whatever I felt was appropriate for it.
That is what made the difference in my life.
That's how I decided to become an entrepreneur.
It wasn't something where I'd literally decided overnight.
It's something that I had to make
a genuine commitment to, and it took time.
I would encourage you, that if you're thinking about
becoming an entrepreneur,
if you are thinking about building a business,
you have to think about what is your why,
what drives you.
In my business,
I have an underlying philosophy that you may have heard.
It's create something awesome today.
I wanted to make sure that every single day
that I was investing time in a worthy goal,
a worthy outcome, because time is the thing
you don't get back.
I felt for many years that a lot of times,
my time was squandered or wasted in things
that were pointless or busy work
or didn't produce real value for people,
but only extracted value from them.
Those things didn't feel good.
They didn't feel comfortable.
They didn't feel authentic.
They didn't feel right.
I built a business around the concept
of creating something that's worthy of me
and worthy of my time and my energy
and my effort and my creativity every single day
so that I could be proud of the work
that I'm doing and so that I feel like
it could make any kind of difference
or impact or accomplish a goal,
whether that's helping someone else
grow their business, whether it's helping someone else
present more clearly, helping someone else
communicate their vision.
Those are the things that mattered to me.
I built my business with that in mind.
Now you understand why I became entrepreneur.
You understand that I had something inside of me.
It was there the whole time, but I didn't necessarily
know how to commit to it or didn't have something
that was strong enough, in terms of a motivating factor,
to make me make that commitment.
Ultimately, it came from a dark place.
It came from having to really get to a point
to where I had to put up or shut up.
It was a binary decision.
I'm so glad that I was on the right side of that choice.
The alternative was nothing.
The alternative was literally nothing.
I think that you have to understand
who you are, in terms of self-awareness.
It gets thrown around so much,
but the reason that I'm here today
and the reason that I'm successful is because
I was self-aware enough to know
not only that there is something out there
that would make me happy, that would make me satisfied,
that I could do, and that I also was self-aware enough
to believe that I had the skills
and the discipline required to do the work
to see that outcome through.
I wouldn't be success without that.
I wouldn't be alive without that self-awareness.
That's why when people like myself
or like Gary Vaynerchuk talk about self-awareness,
it's not a buzzword.
It's something that really is important
and will make all the difference in your life.
It might save your life.
Forget growing your business,
this will grow you as a human being
and it will possibly make an impact
in not only how you treat other people,
but how you treat yourself and whether
you give yourself a real chance and a real shot
at being successful at any endeavor.
Anyway, I know this video is a little different.
If you are someone who is striving
to become an entrepreneur,
I'd love to hear what it is you're trying
to accomplish.
What is it you're trying to build?
Let me know in the comments section.
Also, the thing that I have to stress
is when I was building myself as an entrepreneur,
I didn't have a mentor, I didn't have a guru,
I didn't have a Yoda, I didn't have anybody
to take me by the hand
and to walk me through any of this.
I feel like that might have made a difference.
The other thing I didn't have is I didn't have
a group of peers that I could talk to
about my journey and that I could ask questions
or that I could bounce ideas off of
or that I could even show something
I was working on and get some feedback.
I feel like if I had had those things,
that my entrepreneur journey would have,
one, it would have accelerated dramatically faster,
and I also feel like it would have made
all the difference in the world,
in terms of being able to maintain a positive mindset.
I feel like I would have grown faster
and I feel like I would have gotten a lot further.
One of the things that I did
within my business was I created
awesomecreatoracademy.com.
awesomecreatoracademy.com is my online
education platform.
I have courses and I have templates
and I have things of that nature,
but I also have a group mentoring program
that you can join.
If you decide that that's something
that you want to invest in and you wanna
get a subscription, you can go to
awesomecreatoracademy.com.
I'm gonna link it in the info card
and I'm gonna link it down below for you guys
so you can check that out.
It may not be for everybody, but I thought that
it'd be nice to know that if that's something
you're looking for, that it's available out there
and that there are people who want to help you
and want to grow with you.
If you wanna join us in that community,
I would definitely love to have you there.
We've helped grow over a hundred online professionals.
I think that we can help you, too.
In general, I always just make the things
that I would want for me, and then I'd just assume
that there are other people that want them,
and it tends to work out pretty well.
Anyway, like this video if ya like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome content on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching,
and don't forget, create something awesome today.
Take care.