Improvement Pill here recently I've been having strong urges to share some of the
stories from my past I've always liked telling stories they're interesting
they're memorable and they are the single most effective way to pass down
lessons to the next generation so today I'm gonna tell you a special story the
story behind why and how I started this channel when I was 19 years old I
decided to drop out of college I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at
the time but I knew one thing and that was if I stayed in college I would waste
two more years of my life and still be stuck without a clue as to what I wanted
to do and by pure chance I ended up somehow landing a job as an old school
salesman working door-to-door yes they still do that selling Internet and TV
packages in the Bronx of New York City and thus began what I consider to be the
only real schooling I ever went through in my entire life
because it was on the streets of the Bronx that I learned about true work
ethic I learned how to push myself to keep on going working 12 hours a day all
alone in a hundred plus degree weather being baked alive with a full Sudan it
taught me how to deal with rejection man I've yet to face something as
demotivating as spending 12 hours a day knocking on doors getting yelled at and
having doors slammed in my face only to go home having nothing to show for all
the hard work I had just put in there were plenty of days at least once a week
where I would make no sales which basically meant I had just spent 12
hours working without earning a dime this taught me how to never give up in
the face of failure it exposed me to different people in different cultures
I've met tens of thousands of people while on the job and I've been inside
thousands of different homes in the hands-down most diverse city on this
entire planet and this showed me just how different some people are but also
just how many similarities there are between all sorts of people of different
ethnicities ages and levels of income the job taught me how to be charismatic
how to calm down screaming old ladies who are threatening
to call the police on me and how to talk with such finesse that they'll be
cooking dinner while filling out the paperwork to buy my internet package an
hour later but most importantly of all it taught me the joys of being a teacher
see after working my butt off for a couple of months I became
one of the top performing salesmen in the office my boss saw some potential in
me and I was promoted my new job was to continue to go out and make sales but to
also train other new salespeople at the same time and at first I was pretty bad
at it see teaching someone how to be a door-to-door sales person isn't only
about teaching them how to be good at sales you also have to teach them about
all the other stuff I mentioned before you had to teach them how to be mentally
tough how to be optimistic in the face of failure and how to speak with finesse
in a way it's sort of like what I do now it was sort of like teaching
self-improvement and boy was it tough see in the beginning every single person
that I took under my wing quit in less than a week I was very discouraged I
thought maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a teacher but my boss said that this
was perfectly normal that there was a learning curve to teaching just like how
there's a learning curve for doing sales and he continued to give me more and
more people to Train this went on for a couple more months and I got better and
better at teaching people all of these skills and mindsets and that's when I
met a very special girl someone who I'll never forget for the
purposes of this video I'm just gonna call her Stella Stella was a single
mother she had her son at the age of 17 with a stereotypical scumbag father who
ended up running away and leaving her with all the responsibilities her
previous job was working as a cashier making minimum wage and she decided to
try her hand at sales because well she needed to make more money to support her
kid she wanted her kids to have a good future and she told me all of this on
the very first day I met her so I knew exactly what I was working with I knew I
couldn't let her down so I took her under my wing and I brought her onto the
field every single day for weeks and weeks and I worked with her intensely
making sure to pass on all the little tricks and skills and mindsets that
brought me success in the past she was the first person that I truly taught
with all my heart because I knew if I let her down I would also be letting her
son down and eventually the results started to show she started making a lot
of sales on her own in fact there were plenty of weeks where she performed
better than me that was so happy because she was the first person I ever coached
successfully fast forward many many more months and I was managing a sales team
of 12 people and we were ranked number one for the entire Northeast region of
the US for an entire winter bringing in over 1
million dollars worth of revenue for our client and because of this achievement I
was given the opportunity to open up my own office on Wall Street and at this
point in time I thought I had made it I thought I would be happy but in reality
what I had worked my butt off for over a year trying to achieve was a big fat lie
see after opening up the office I found myself working even more hours every
single day totaling up to something like a hundred hours a week and I wasn't even
making much more than before because I had to pay for the rent and all the
other utilities for the new office and worst of all the one thing that I truly
loved about the job which was teaching was something that I no longer did my
new responsibility was to deal with more of the backend issues and compliance
with the clients I was basically stuck in the office all
day doing paperwork and this soon caught up to me because just a couple months
after opening the office I woke up in bed one day looked at my phone put it on
silent and went back to sleep I was burnt out I told the rest of my team
that I had reached my limit and I shut down the office the next day this was
the biggest failure of my life because I had spent so much time working towards
this goal thinking that it would bring me happiness only to realize that it
just didn't but I did learn one thing and it was that money wasn't gonna bring
me happiness freedom was far more important and that's something that has
stuck with me to this day anyways about a year later my sales team had a reunion
we threw a party at a karaoke joint and Stella came by to say hi and as the
night was ending she dragged me outside and told me about what she was doing
with her life now after I had shut down the office she ended up getting a job at
a furniture store doing sales and she said because of everything I had taught
her she was now the number one performer in the entire store making about $80,000
a year a huge jump from the 20,000 she was making before as a cashier and she
looked me in the eyes and told me that because of my efforts
she was now able to send her son to a good school she could afford to pay for
a bunch of extracurricular activities and buy him whatever he wanted she was
making so much more money that she even had a large chunk saved up with plans on
starting her own business she said thank you all of this was
possible because of you and this brought tears to my eyes
I felt something stirring within me and it was at that moment that I knew what I
wanted to do for the rest of my life I want to be a teacher this concludes the
first part of our story now before we start the second part I do want to
quickly give a shout out to the sponsors of today's video
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get 20% off any of their services now back to the story at hand so at this
point in my life I was unemployed I had about ten thousand dollars saved up I
was sort of lost as to what I needed to do next but I was absolutely sure about
two things number one freedom is far more important than money I will be
happier doing something that pays less but gives me more freedom and time to
enjoy life and number two I want to replicate that experience I had with
Stella I want to teach self-improvement teach people how to fish so that they
can achieve great things on their own down the line but even though I knew
these two things I decided to only focus on the first point see at the time I
actually didn't think I could make enough money teaching people to sustain
myself I didn't see how I could do both at the same time I didn't have the
know-how like I do now so I decided to simply pursue with the elusive dream of
achieving passive income online because I figured okay
I can make enough passive income to pay all the bills then I can do whatever I
want I could relax and not have to worry about surviving and then I can maybe
start a coaching business or something along those lines so that was the plan I
started going to the local Starbucks from my laptop every single day you guys
might have heard this story one of my other videos right I would dress up in a
full suit because he got me into that same crazy work ethic mindset I had back
in my sales days and I would just work in Starbucks every single day for months
and months and months I was completely new to the world of online businesses
and passive income and all that sort of stuff and this was before there were so
many resources out there teaching people how to make money online you guys don't
know just how lucky you are because I was spending most of my time on forums
reading about how to build these online businesses as compared to what you guys
have now entire channels with hundreds of videos dedicated to showing you
step-by-step how it's done and it was tough the first thing I tried was
something called affiliate marketing using Amazon basically if you can get
people to purchase something on Amazon using your link you get a small small
percentage of the profits so I started building a bunch of different websites
reviewing a wide variety of different products like vapes and perfumes and
drinking games and all of these websites were complete failures well to be fair
the drinking game website wasn't a complete failure because it was actually
where I made my first online sale I remember this clearly the first time I
ever made money online was by selling a beer pong table that someone actually
bought after reading my review on the best drinking games to play at parties
and Amazon paid me like $15 for that sale but then literally the next day
they sent me an email saying that websites about drinking or smoking
paraphernalia are not allowed and they closed down my affiliate account but I
still felt pretty happy because I knew that it was now at least possible for me
to make money online if I could make 15 dollars in a day then it's possible to
one day make a hundred and fifty dollars in a day I kept thinking about this to
myself and I kept on trying but like six months into this journey I started
running low on funds I only had a couple thousand dollars left to my name so I
ended up getting a part-time job so I could
they afloat I would still work on my online business stuff on the weekends in
Starbucks but during the weekdays I'll be canvassing out on the street in the
lower parts of Brooklyn basically my job was to get people to sign petitions for
political parties and one day I stopped this guy in the street and he refused to
sign but he was like hey man you you look like you really know what you're
doing why are you canvassing on the street and
I told him about my past and what I was working on now and how this was a
part-time job I was doing to help fund my ventures he was like wow I actually
have a close friend who has a successful online business
he sells Kindle books he makes thousands of dollars every single month passive
income and I was like oh my god please please tell me more how did he learn how
to do this well he learned it from an online course he bought and I was like
okay that honestly sounds so much more fun than creating websites because I'm
just not tech savvy at all so please give me the link to this course so he
gives me the link and I purchased of course that very day and I binge-watched
all the lessons and within two days I was writing Kindle books now my commutes
my part-time job was very very long I lived in Queens and it takes almost 2
hours on the subway to get to the lower parts of Brooklyn where I had to work
and this meant I had to spend an additional two hours to get back home so
every day I had about 4 hours on the train all to myself and during this time
I would pull out my laptop and write an entire book every one to two days now
these weren't like a hundred page novels these were short little 20 to 30 page
books and it actually wasn't too difficult for me to do this because
during all of this time I was still very very much obsessed with self-improvement
so I would write books on important self-improvement topics such as social
skills confidence and body language things like that I would basically
repackage what I have learned from books and also what I have learned from the
streets of the Bronx into these short little self-improvement books that I
would then sell on Amazon Kindle for 2 to 3 dollars each and I did this every
single day for an entire summer I published dozens and dozens of books and
eventually the results started to show people actually started buying my books
to be honest I thought they were pretty good especially compared to all the
other nonsense that was on Amazon Kindle at the time and it also sort of
scratched that age that I had when it came to my passion of teaching
self-improvement after about six months of doing this I
was actually able to make over a thousand dollars a month passive income
and this was a huge achievement for me this was genuine passive income I would
wake up every morning and look at my account and see that I had earned like
thirty dollars and I was hooked I knew that I never ever wanted to work a
normal job again because this way of making a living allowed me to literally
make money while I was sleeping this was the ultimate form of freedom that I had
been searching for now after breaking a thousand dollars a month passive income
I started to realize that had really let my social life suffer
I had basically isolated myself from all my friends for years in the pursuit of
my career but now that I was making some money every month I had enough time to
focus on rekindling my social life so I started hanging out with a lot of my old
friends from back in the day before I had dropped out of college and one day I
was having a conversation with a close friend of mine Kelly now she was about
to graduate and she was talking to me about all the problems she was facing
how she was nervous about finding a job how she wasn't really sure what she
wanted to do with her life and because I had spent so much time managing a sales
team and teaching self-improvement and writing books on self-development my
immediate reaction was to just start giving her advice so I said look Kelly
it's quite simple all you gotta do is apply to a bunch of jobs and give it
some time and by gathering enough experience as you gain a better picture
about what you want to do in life bla bla bla bla bla something along those
lines and she stopped me and looked me in the eyes and said you know what
Richard sometimes people just want you to listen to them if you have an answer
for every conceivable question in the world you should just go onto YouTube
and make videos I'm sure people will want to listen to your valuable advice
over there obviously she was being sarcastic and was playfully mocking me
in the moment but when she said this something clicked in my head I was like
oh my god Kelly you are absolutely right that is the perfect idea see I sort of
enjoyed writing the Kindle books and all but not that many people were buying
them maybe only a couple of hundred would ever benefit from the contents of
my books if I really wanted to pursue my passion and teach people on a large
scale YouTube would be perfect for that plus I felt like the idea of creating
videos was way more fun than writing books so that very day I
sat down and I picked the name for the channel and I started working on my
first video and about one week later I uploaded it onto YouTube and the rest is
history and that's the story of how and why I started this channel it's been a
wild ride so far we recently passed 2 million subscribers and I genuinely want
to thank you for helping me get to that point because honestly this career has
given me the life of my dreams it's given me the freedom that I've been
chasing after 4 years and it's given me the chance to do the one thing that I
love doing most which is teaching every time I receive an email or a direct
message from one of you telling me about how watching my content has resulted in
some sort of progress or success in your life it reminds me of that day Stella
pulled me aside and thanked me it gives me that same special tingling sensation
that I felt many years ago I hope that I'm able to continue to make content for
you like this for years to come and for those of you that say things like I
don't know how to thank you for the work you've done honestly the best thing for
you to do the best way to give back is to simply take what you learned from me
and all the books you read and all the other self-improvement channels on this
platform take the knowledge and apply it to your life start seeing success and
maybe one day send me an email telling me about all the great things you've
done that's the best way to give back hope you guys enjoy the story and
besides that stay tuned