all right I'm going to show you how to make passive income by following a step-by-step plan to start a side hustle in 7 days we'll start with setting a goal and then kind of breaking that down into months weeks and days so you know exactly what to do every step of the way if you're new here I'm Mike I started several side hustles while working full-time as a doctor and they took off and they Set Me Free from my day job and now I'm sharing what I learned to help you do the same so day number one is to lock in your side hustle if you already know what you want to do then that's great but if you haven't you can check out our previous video here for some ideas this step is incredibly important because we need to understand that most side hustles will take several months to get going and if you don't fully commit to one then you're going to get distracted by shiny object syndrome every time you hear about a new side hustle idea because if you decide that you want to start a YouTube channel then go ahead and lock it in cuz you might see AI art side hustles and cryptocurrency and a BNB but you want to ignore all the noise and just laser focus on one thing if you're 70% sure that you want to do it then I say just go for it the side hustle that you pick doesn't matter as much you can find millionaires in every single field what matters more is your level of commitment so most people will try several side hustles before they succeed at one because with your first side hustle you haven't yet developed skills when I first started out building a notetaking app I was learning digital marketing but I didn't even know what sales calls were and I had little knowledge about Finance then when I went into my next project helping preds get into medical school I now had better sales and marketing skills then when I went into growing a YouTube channel I now had better design and operational skills and then when I went to selling courses I now had better teaching and product development skills and so it makes sense that our YouTube channel and study quests which is our course they're much more successful than our first Ventures because we had acred all these transformable skills so take the rest of day number one to fully commit and if you need to do a little bit more research I'd go ahead and do that I think that watching some day in the life videos of the side hustle that you're interested in would be a great idea all right so on a day two So based on your side hustle we'll now reverse engineer path to success what we're doing is looking at case studies of success stories and following their path and for this exercise I recommend you look at at least three three different case studies so when I was starting my YouTube channel I knew that I wanted to leverage my MD and make medical content so my case studies at the time were Dr Mike Al ABD doll and Dr K from healthy gamer right three doctors who had successful YouTube channels and I deep dived into their journey I went back and looked at all their first YouTube videos I listened to their podcasts and I tried to identify what worked for them so that I could do something similar and as my YouTube channel grew I realized that I really like talking about topics like self-improvement and productivity and learning and so my content slowly shifted away from Dr Mike which was mostly medical and shifted more towards aliab doll which was mostly productivity and so I took a closer look at Ali abdall to see what he was doing and I saw that he took sponsorships he was doing Affiliates and he made courses and so this helped guide me on my next steps so you can see that having case studies can act like your mentors and help you adjust in pivot as you grow and they help you see the big picture across a longer time Horizon So based on the case studies you can set a realistic achievable yearly goal you can get really disheartened if you accidentally compare yourself to your case studies like I remember when I was starting out I was looking at Dr Mike and thinking damn this guy's got over a million subscribers and I only have 100 but the reality is that he's been doing this for years and I'd only been doing it for weeks so don't compare someone's level one 100 to your level one it's just not an accurate comparison right so starting a side hustle without looking at case studies is like going in blind you definitely don't want to do that so take the rest of day two and deep dive into several case studies in your Niche all right for day three now we're going to set up our public portfolio it doesn't matter what side hustle you're doing I always recommend that you have some sort of public portfolio that people can go to and learn more about you and what you do and this is usually some sort of social social media page like a LinkedIn or an Instagram or this can be a library of your content like a blog or YouTube and yes this means you should be creating some content to document what you're doing not to get views right don't worry about views you want to use your content as proof so that people can see that you know what you're talking about I can't tell you how many times I've asked my students in study Quest why did you buy my course and not someone else's and about 90% of the time my students will mention that they've seen my content on YouTube they've seen that I've done my homework I'm an expert in what I teach and they feel confident in me that's the power of having a public portfolio so for day three I would pick one platform whether it be YouTube or X or Instagram or Pinterest right whatever you want but you want a place where people can go and learn about you so go ahead and get that set up it doesn't need to be perfect right just get it 70% done you can come back and adjust it over time and I will add that it's probably better that it's not perfect because then people can see your Evolution over time and proof that you're actually growing and staying up to date now on to day four today we'll map out your skills stack the amount of success you achieve is directly correlated to the quality of your skill set and this is true for any side hustle So based on your case studies you want to identify the core skills you need to develop to succeed in that Niche once you've identified the skills that you need you want to find a skill manual and level them up a skill manual gives you knowledge and guidance on how to get better at a skill so this can be reading books listening to podcast watching a targeted YouTube series or taking a course in general if you invest money then you save time and you level up faster the fact of the matter is that You' got to be constantly improving your skills and knowledge you simply won't succeed if you ignore this step but you'd be surprised that how many people don't do this I've had so many DMS from people saying hey I really want to be a full-time Creator I want to make passive income I've been trying for years and nothing's working like what can I do and one of my questions is usually what was the last book that you read or the last podcast that you listen to about passive income what skills are you working on are you taking courses for it and nine times out of 10 they'll not be actively learning and that just blew my mind like imagine if you're trying to get into medical school or law school and you never took the time to read or learn about Premed or pre-law topics well for one thing the admissions committee are going to see that you're not dedicated and not taking it seriously but if you lack knowledge you're not going to make it very far in med school or law school right I mean that's just a simple example with Traditional School but it applies to everything in life so the goal for day four is to find a skill manual whether it's a book or a course you want to make sure to do your research right check the reviews and then you want to dedicate 10 minutes a day day to just going through that material and applying what you learn on to day five now we're setting up our weekly systems so as we work it's just natural that we're going to fall off course life happens you get distracted you get busy people who start off a side hustle strong but aren't able to sustain it usually don't have a good weekly system in place and a weekly system is simple right at the beginning of the week you say what you're going to do and then at the end of the week you look back and say did I do what I said I was going to do right it's pretty straightforward but most people don't do this like think of an airplane right when you fly even one degree off the usual path then over a long enough time Horizon you'll end up in an entirely different place if you didn't then ask yourself why right are you making time for it do you have the resources that you need to actually get it done most often people will set up a weekly planning system but forget to set up a weekly review system and this can be dangerous not having a weekly review system is like flying off course and not course correcting you've basically spent all that time and effort doing the wrong things and headed in the wrong direction so take day five to set up your weekly planning and your weekly review I'm currently doing mine on Tuesday evenings because Wednesdays we have our team meetings so I want to make sure that I'm ready for those but you can choose any day you want just make sure that it's a time that doesn't change much from week to week right make it one of those regular recurring events events for you all right day number six we'll set up your daily systems so it's easy to get carried away from working too much or procrastinate and not do enough right we want to find a balance in between not be too far on either side of the spectrum that's where the daily system comes in and contrary to what you might see on social media you don't need to work 15 hours a day to make a s hustle work a more productive and more sustainable approach is to establish a set number of hours a day and then focus on optimizing those hours when you're first starting out and you're super busy with school or you have a full-time job or you have kids and you're trying to make your side hustle work I'd recommend dedicating 1 hour a day to making steady progress 1 hour of focused deliberate work is better than multiple hours of distracted pseudo workk and there are studies into the top performing artists and athletes that found that 4 hours of deliberate practice a day is plenty enough to help you stick to your daily Target I recommend that you find a pocket of time during your day where you aren't too tired and you're not distracted where you can make meaningful progress right this can be early in the morning or late at night when everyone is asleep right there's no one to distract you and this allows you to really focus all right on to day seven we'll set up our systems for Focus as we talked about in day six highly focused work is often more productive than working more more hours you don't need more hours if you can make your hours worth more and what we found that works incredibly well with our students is to treat Focus like a habit if we can get into the habit of focus every time we work we condition our brain to be ready every time and this is based on habit science that's exactly what you want to do you want to initiate your focused work in exactly the same way using the same routine every time so that it gets imprinted into your memory in that way and the evidence-based routine that we developed for this is called the focus checklist where each letter of focus stands for a specific action that you do in a specific order to prime your mind into a state of focus on command if you want a step-by-step guide on how to implement this method into your daily routine you can check out this video right here but zooming out that's the 7-Day launch strategy to get you started on your side Hustle