so I became a millionaire at the age of 26 and it kind of happened accidentally and by accidentally I mean it was never the goal now in this video I'm going to break down my own journey from zero to my first $1,000 from my first $1,000 to $100,000 and then from $100,000 all the way to a million and so if you are interested in getting rich becoming financially free having time freedom having autonomy over your own time and what you do hopefully by hearing me kind of talk through the stages of my own journey there will be stuff that you can apply to your own as well and just quick flag that this video is going to change locations a little bit because there is currently construction work going on in my house and so I had to like find a different location to film most of the video in the whole becoming a millionaire at 26 thing actually happened somewhat accidentally it was never the goal i never set out to try and become a millionaire so from age 18 to 24 I was in in med school for 6 years i was I was studying at Cambridge University and then my starting job as a doctor age 24 I was making about 3k a month GBP if I could just have an extra 2K GBP or 3K GBP that would be like doubling my salary that would be amazing then in medicine I'll be able to work three or four days a week cuz the happiest doctors I knew were the ones working part-time and that was the goal everything that happened beyond that point was kind of accidental well sort of accidental sort of on purpose but my point is that I didn't set out to try and become a millionaire the concept of making a million quid was so far out of reach uh that I just didn't didn't even vaguely think about it i think for me being in the UK having a single parent mom who was a doctor and like basically where everyone I knew was a doctor kind of like the upper limit of what I thought it was possible to earn was like 100 grand a year weirdly I think had I been born a few years later into a culture of YouTube and the internet and stuff where you see people being like "Oh yeah I just had a million month oh I just had like an eight figure profit month what the freak?" It's like okay it sets the target so much higher than what it was for me and I think for me had the target been 100 grand or 200 grand or 100K a month or 10K month like any of these numbers that like a lot of people on on YouTube throw out I would have been completely paralyzed and not even known where to begin okay so at this point we've established that the goal was never really to become a millionaire the goal was to just make an extra £3,000 a month which is about $3,500 let's now talk about how I got to the first $1,000 age 13 was when I made my first dollar on the internet and through doing like random ass bits and bobs in terms of like a bit of web design a bit of web development a bit of private tutoring that was how it took me like 5 years to make that first thousand online these days it should not take you 5 years to make your first $1,000 online it was a very different time back then there weren't as many tutorials available there were a lot less business books on the market around how to make money online the internet thing was still kind of new back then and so these days I think that if you are serious about trying to make money you can get to your first $1,000 within about 6 weeks of starting maybe 90 days but like most people can do it within six weeks at least in my experience and what I've seen from friends of mine who have been on this journey all right so how do you make this first thousands well I have a few rambly thoughts let's go to me from yesterday so if you are looking to do that first $1,000 and you want like some ideas of where to begin figure out a way to create a digital product like a PDF or a spreadsheet or a template or a something and figure out what expertise you have that other people would find valuable that you can sell for $10 you were trying to create a $10 PDF or a $10 ebook if you have any shred of life experience and you had a gun to your head and that the gunman with a gun said you have to write uh 5,000word ebook in a weekend or something but it can be on anything you want you probably find a way to write a 5,000word ebook on anything you want now in that world where you have a 5,000word ebook on anything you want uh you could probably find a way to sell it to friends and family for like $9 or $10 like you know that's a easy enough way to get started with stuff ask yourself what are you good at what are the sorts of things that your friends come to you for advice on you could probably sell that as a service where you're training someone how to do the thing over a Zoom call it doesn't have to be for a lot of money i I have a friend who's a lawyer he could either sort of tutor kids for their interviews for law school um he could do that for like I don't know $20 an hour over Zoom if he wanted to do like contract reviewing he could do a service where it's like "Hey I'll review any kind of any kind of contract for you." uh for I don't know $100 or something like that like you can you can always find a way to turn whatever expertise you have into like a valuable like Zoom call for someone else and then you can charge for that Zoom call i think that's another very easy thing to do the thing is like making that first $1,000 is really easy anyone can do it getting to 100,000 is really hard and that's when you have to start to actually add value and figure out like something that the market actually wants but even if you have something that the market doesn't actually want given enough time with enough hustle anyone with a pulse could just make $1,000 right so it's that that's the easy bit so I would say if you're in this journey of trying to get rich I mean start with the first dollar then the next 10 then 100 then a,000 and by that time you'll learn so much about the process of how to make money on the internet that hopefully you'll then be able to survive years in the trenches going from 1 to 100K oh by the way quick thing if you're watching this before Saturday the 28th of June I am hosting a completely free online workshop called the summer reset the whole idea is that we'll get together on a Zoom call and we're going to be reflecting on the first six months of 2025 and we're going to be setting goals for the final six months of 2025 i've been running these completely free workshops every quarter for the last couple of years we have had literally thousands of people give them glowing endorsements and glowing reviews because it's an amazing way to reflect on how far you've come along this year and to make a clear set of goals for the next 90 days the next 6 months if you are interested in signing up there'll be more details in the video description thanks all right so a couple of days ago I did a in-person event here in Hong Kong where I live and there were 100 people who showed up and people were asking me questions and a bunch of the questions were around "How do I start my first business?" I found myself recommending the same set of books to about 15 different people now if you have not yet made your first $1,000 on the internet if you have not yet started your first business this would be what I consider sort of almost like required reading because these books will just completely give you a firmware update and completely change your life the first one if you are at this early stage of the process is Million-Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan uh that is a book that came out last year or two years ago something like that it's really good and it is a step-by-step guide on to as as to how to figure out your first business idea and how to start making money from that business idea everyone I've ever met who has read that book and has actually done what Noah recommends in the book has ended up making $1,000 on the internet i know lots of people who have read the book and not taken action on it because they're scared and I know lots of people who have recommended the book to you and they've never even read the book and those people have not made $1,000 on the internet so like if you're at this point in the video and you want to make money on the internet literally it's not it's not that hard just read Million-Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan at that point once you've read Million-Dollar Weekend you might like to listen to the audio book for The Millionaire Fast Lane by MJ DeMarco you might like to read.com Secrets by Russell Brunson you might like to read $100 million Office by Alex Wosi but to be honest you don't need any of these to make your first thousand on the internet you just need to read million dollar weekend and follow the advice that Noah gives because that is the most up-to-date advice about how to actually get your first,000 also as a side note at some point we are going to be running our own 6 week challenge to help you make $1,000 on the internet for the first time so if you are interested in potentially joining that challenge which will be sort of hosted by me and will take you through different business ideas and stuff there'll be a wait list down below we're not sure if we want to do it yet but if we do then I mean either way it's going to be linked down below so join the wait list and we'll let you know if it happens and if you're enjoying this video then you might like to check out Grammarly who are very kindly sponsoring the video now most people know Grammarly as a spelling and grammar tool but it's actually so much more than that it is a full AI writing assistant that works wherever you work so that you can craft quality writing faster whether that's in your email or on documents or anywhere else that you need to communicate as someone who works with a remote team I'm constantly writing Slack messages and emails to share project updates and one way in which Grammarly helps is that it seamlessly integrates with Slack so that hopefully my communication can be clear and get the point across effectively the first time around but where Grammarly really shines for me is when I'm writing my weekly newsletters and using the sidebars feature within Grammarly Pro that lets me make tweaks with just a few clicks instead of spending hours and hours editing my newsletters so it'll make these kind of suggestions and then if I like the suggestion I can go with it or if I don't like the suggestion I could pick something better another pro feature I really like is the setting goals feature and this lets you customize your writing voice so that everything you write has the appropriate style and yet still sounds like you one thing that sets Grammarly apart from other AI tools is that it works seamlessly within your browser there is no copying and pasting required and also because it's not trying to replace your writing but just sort of enhance your writing and sort of like suggest little tweaks to it it doesn't sound so much like getting an AI to fully write a complete draft for you which is super handy these days where people can kind of tell when stuff has been written by AI if you would like to check out Grammarly you can sign up and check out Grammarly Pro using my link for 20% off which is at grammarly.com/06 al06 and that link is in the video description and you can also scan the QR code on screen right now if you would like so thank you so much Grammarly for sponsoring the video and uh let's get back to it there is another major fear that holds people back and this is the fear of business administration okay so starting a business is one of those things that is it's it's weirdly straightforward it does sort of depend what country you're in because for example if you are in Pakistan which is where I'm from and you are trying to start a business and accept payments on the internet it's actually non-trivial like it's hard to set up a PayPal account you need like a proper proof of like proper proof proof of business blah blah blah blah whatever but if you're in most like developed countries you've got services like Stripe you've got services like PayPal it's really not that hard to start a business i think um in the in the UK for example anyone watching like anyone can register a business and it costs about 10 quid £10 to register a business you just go on company's house you register a business wait congrat congratulations you're now a business owner for a lot of people they think of business as being this like scary thing like "Oh I've got to be manufacturing stuff in China or I've got to be building rockets or I've got to be like building an the ultimate iPhone app that all my friends will use." It's like those are really really hard businesses but if you wanted to do private tutoring you could just set up a business if you wanted to set up a lemonade stand you don't even need to set up a business you can just literally go on the street and sell lemonade i think a lot of people also have this weird kind of rule following mentality of like oh but I couldn't possibly sell something on the internet unless I'm a registered LLC and unless I've spoken to an accountant and unless I've registered it as a company and unless I've got a business bank account and a business card you actually don't need any of that stuff um I think people are way too worried about like will the government come after me if I'm like a 19-year-old making 50 quid on the internet it's like no the government's not going to come after you if you're a 19-year-old making 50 quid on the internet i think in the the law in the UK is that you can earn up to like a thousand pounds a year like taxfree without even having to declare it or something like that beyond that point yes once you start making real money then yes you do have to register a business and talk to an accountant and stuff but step one should be to start making real money and then step two is to worry about all of the admin costs associated and administration associated with quote starting a business really the reason people don't start businesses is because they're scared they're scared to put themselves out there um but they can hide behind oh I haven't yet figured out uh oh I don't know any accountants all right then i guess I can never start a business you know it's it's a very easy way to just never face the fear of putting yourself out there to to pretend that the reason you haven't started a business is because you don't know what the appropriate LLC or escorting structure for the business is which which is genuinely stuff that I've heard from friends and from students of mine in our YouTuber academy it's like bro stop make your first thousand dollars and then worry about whether you need to set up a corporate entity and a business bank account for that kind of stuff i wouldn't have started the business if I'd been held back by the fear of administration you can always like once once you have money you can always pay an accountant to figure it out until you have money you got to find a way to make the money man like that's that's just that's how the thing works i was really not scared of starting a business because I didn't even think of it as starting a business like if for example you imagine selling hot dogs at the local like summer fair do you think of that as starting a business if you imagine like I don't know trying to sort of you've got a bunch of books in your house and you're selling them on eBay do you count that as you call that starting a business if you imagine do you doing like private tutoring for your friends like your friend's mom hires you to teach the kid physics or something cuz she knows you're good at physics and you get paid 20 quid in cash do you think of that as starting a business it's like the word business is just unnecessarily scary for people it's just like you're offering a thing and you're charging for it if you think of it as like I am starting a business i don't know when when I started selling these like medical school courses I I wasn't thinking of it as a business i was thinking of it as like I have something to teach i'm going to make a website people are going to hopefully fingers crossed pay me and then I'm going to teach them the thing that's it like it it didn't it to me it didn't feel like a business with a capital B this idea of business with a capital B again just holds so many people back because it it sounds way scarier than it is if I told people if if I'd if when I was 18 and I started that business if id thought of it as like I'm starting a business I would have probably yeah that but that that probably would have held me back um once it started to make like 10 grand then it was like oh I should probably register this as an actual business and then I went online and googled how to register a business and you know all of all of the stuff but I'd been making sort of tiny amounts of money on the internet for like years at that point made my first,000 on the internet without registering a business made a few hundred pounds here and there from private tutoring without registering a business you can just do stuff you can just make money and you can worry about the admin associated with starting a business further down the line okay everyone wants to be like a six and seven and seven figure entrepreneur but you want to start out by being a one figure entrepreneur right you want to make your first dollar you don't need to register a business to make your first dollar you can just make your first dollar on the internet ideally if you're starting an online business business then once you've made $1 then you think okay cool how will I make $10 and then you figure out a way to make $10 once you've done that you're like "All right cool now how do I make a $100?" And you figure out how to make $100 once you've done that you figure out a,000 once you figured out $1,000 I'm going to say I'm just going to straight up say at that point you can start doing the research into registering a business because now congratulations you're a four-f figureure entrepreneur you have made $1,000 on the internet now it's time to Google or chat GBT or whatever depending on what country you're in to understand what you need to do do you need to declare it on your freaking self- assessment tax return do you need to file it with the IRS do you need to register a business like all of this stuff comes but you don't need to worry about any of that until you've made like at least $1,000 and then once you made that thousand you can decide okay cool then the next milestone is 10,000 and then the next milestone is 100,000 and then and then the next milestone after that is a million and I think that sort of baby step way of going about it is really the way forward cuz I just think that first okay here's here's the map right you've got the first,000 the first thousand makes you a fourfigure entrepreneur then you've got one $1,000 to $100,000 i'm going to call that the trenches you are now in the trenches that's it's really hard being in the trenches it's really really hard pretty much anyone with a pulse in a developed country can make their first thousands on the internet i'm going to stand by this like yes if you're a 12-year-old in Pakistan which is where I'm from it'll be difficult to make thousands on the internet even then I know plenty of 12-year-olds in Pakistan are making thousands on the internet any adult in a developed country with access to the internet and like a Stripe or PayPal account can make $1,000 on the internet it's that's like that's like ridiculously easy anyone can do it then when you get to 1,000 to 100,000 that's when it gets really really really hard once you're at $100,000 and your business is doing has already done 100,000 in revenue it's actually not that hard to grow it because you've added at least $100,000 worth of value to customers lives and they've paid you 100 grand for goodness sake like that's quite a lot of money and then you know trying to go to 150 200 300 500 even a million becomes much more doable because you've done the hard bit so now I'm going to talk about my journey from $1,000 to $10,000 and $10,000 to $100,000 that happened from around age 18 to around age 22 so that was a 4-year period in the trenches okay so we've established that the whole goal was earning an extra 3K a month i set this goal when I was about like 18 19 years old um so this was like 5 years before I graduated med school and so then I'm thinking okay cool my goal is an extra 3K a month how do I make that extra 3K a month at the time I was private tutoring for £15 an hour hang on I've got something in my eye one sec it almost looks like I'm crying i don't know why I'm crying anyway at the uh at the at the time I was private tutoring for like £15 an hour so to make an extra £3,000 a month what is that like that's like 200 hours yeah i would need to do 200 hours of private tutoring while being in med school and I was like okay well you know that seems a bit unsustainable in an attempt to make money I at the time when I was about 18 I got scammed out of like £1,000 of my life savings and I was like I need I need to find a way to make money i landed on selling courses for medical school applicants as like the initial vehicle to to make money i charged initially about £60 for a student and I would get them into a classroom and teach them for for and and teach them for the whole day at the start I had like two or three people in like the local mosque and you know would rent the conference room there um for a day and I would make like what was it i think we had a class of like eight people and so I made about £400 in a day and I was like "Oh sick." £400 in a day that's really cool and then eventually I was able to get it to a point where we would have classrooms of 30 students so 30 students paying £60 per day was £1,800 and so in a day I'd be making £1,800 quid and then by doing two of those or like one of those on a Saturday and a Sunday during the summer holidays that was getting me to my goal of of 3k a month so for the first few years while that business you when that business was doing well around when I was age 20 to 24 um I was making about £40,000 a year in profit from the business which is about which is which is just over 3k a month weirdly um and so that was kind of the vehicle initially it was really a case of how do I find a way to make this money in a way that doesn't just require me to show up for oneonone onetoone tutoring for £15 an hour so I made my first thousand let's say like sort of pre the age like like before the age of 18 through a combination of private tutoring and a combination of like selling web design services on the internet on like the Fiverr equivalent back in the day like doing freelancing and stuff it took me about 5 years to make $1,000 uh then when I was 18 I tried to buy a dodgy MacBook from some guy on Craigslist and I lost the $1,000 so that was like worst day of my life oh my god I've lost my whole life savings etc etc and then from 1 to 100K in the trenches that was when I stumbled on this business idea of teaching courses to help people get into med school so in the first year of that business it made about £8,000 which is about $10,000 in the next year I think we did about 70k in revenue GBP and I think I took home maybe like 20k profit 30k profit something like that and then the next year after that we we sort of plateaued at about 150k GBP revenue where I was making about £40,000 in profit each year so that was how I went from 1 to 100 100k and that process took about 4 years while I was in med school and I was grinding in the weekends and the evenings and the summer holidays to create the materials for this for these courses and writing all the booklets and finding a printing company to print the booklets and booking conference rooms in hotels and up and down the country i ran a course in Singapore with a friend i ran a course in Amsterdam with another friend it was really fun like I felt like man I'm a proper businessman like you know taking the train or like taking the plane from Singapore to teach a course um in a classroom uh we had a few deals with schools but it was quite a lot of work um and often there would be days where you know my friends at uni would be hanging out in my room and I would be on the computer replying to like customer service emails eventually I stopped doing everything myself and I started hiring my friends to become tutors and so I remember a day where we were we had a course in Manchester manchester was like you know a three-hour drive from Cambridge where I was at university and two of my friends had taken the train to Manchester at like 5 in the morning to get there in time to teach the course and then it turned out that the booklets that we needed to get printed just hadn't been delivered and I was like "Oh my freaking god." like you know they'd been printed and they'd been handed over to the to the delivery company but the guy who was meant to be delivering for the delivery company had run out of credits on his like job uh iPad thing and so he just chose not to deliver them the books to the hotel and so we had these 30 kids in a classroom with two of my friends completely empty-handed empty-handed at like 8:00 in the morning where the clothes was the course was due to start at 9:00 so I think that day I happened to have a a a pile of spare books in my bedroom in Cambridge and I was going to do stuff with friends that day but I just canceled everything i hopped on the train and I personally took the train 3 hours to Manchester to deliver hand deliver these books this is not the only time this happened like one of the most annoying things about running like classroom courses is just the the delivery of the books we had a handful of occasions over the years where I'd find out the morning of or the night before that like the books haven't been delivered and then it would be a god okay all right i guess I'm taking I guess I'm taking the train all the way to Birmingham to deliver some books and you know that's what I mean by in the trenches uh that was the grind of 1 to 100k in revenue trying to teach these classroom courses with kids on the weekends for the BMAT and the UKAT exams and then we started medical interview prep and stuff and it was really fun and really exhilarating and it taught me so much about business and I made so many mistakes along the way but that was the trenches that was one to 100k for me yeah so with that business I made a lot of mistakes i realized that teaching a course and just by myself was kind of boring but teaching it with someone else was was super fun um and I knew that like some some of our competitors always had like two instructors in the classroom and so I just asked my friends being like "Hey do you want to earn some money on the weekend and teach a course with me?" They're all like "Yeah cuz students want to earn money on the weekend." So then it would always be me and a friend for for the first couple of years uh I think there was one day where I couldn't do it but we had a course cuz I had some family thing and I said hey you know two of my friends why don't like you guys have taught this enough times are you guys going to be okay if if I'm not there and you just teach it yourselves and they were like yeah sure no problem and then I was like oh that's really cool that was when I realized that I could make money by building the system and my friends could make good money i think I was paying them like a few hundred quid for the day um they were delighted by the the amount of money they were making um and I didn't have to then teach the course to make the money that was when I first sort of decoupled my time from money and and got that leverage so while I was in the trenches um one thing that was slightly annoying about this is that I did have to sacrifice other things in my life to make time to run this business for the most part the only thing I really had to sacrifice was watching TV like I set myself the rule that I'm never going to watch TV on my own and so I just saved hours and hours every week by not watching TV and instead like working on the business there were a few occasions though where I had to blow off friends because I was doing like a business thing um like uh during the holidays stuff would often be would be happening with friends on the weekend or a friend would be having like a birthday party or something but because I'd committed to teaching one of these courses I would be like "Sorry I've got to go to Manchester that day to teach a course on helping kids get into med school so I can't come to your birthday party." It happened seldom enough that to me it wasn't that big a deal but I do remember there was one one moment I think it was in my fifth year of uni i was I was I was like like 23 years old or something and um one of my friends Sah had was was visiting from America cuz he was doing like an exchange program and he'd brought some new friends over one of them was a was a very attractive girl who I was like oh you know she's pretty you know I'd maybe like to get to know her a bit and so Sahel and his friends were all like chilling in my room and I wanted to hang out with them but I had a customer sport nightmare where someone like complained about something or other and I was like oh crap is I think I think we had one of these things where the books didn't arrive and so I had to just sit on my computer for 3 hours while there were these people including this like hot girl uh in my room and I just had to be there answering customer support emails yeah they kind of left afterward sort of when when they realized there was nothing interesting going on my room and I was just sitting on the computer uh that still sticks out in my mind as being a you know that's that's not ideal if you're running a business it's not ideal that it gets to the point where you're sacrificing hanging out with friends uh plus or minus a hot girl for the sake of answering customer support emails it's always going to happen um there is not a single business owner I know even the ones who have teams and everything where you know occasionally there are emergencies where you have to sacrifice a personal life thing for the sake of the business um but that was kind of the moment where I was like "Yeah why why am I doing all these customs customer support emails?" Like I just didn't realize this was like four or five years into the business i just didn't realize that there like it was possible to outsource that stuff that was a big mistake that I made um which I have not made since which is that I actually I actually could have just hired someone again one of my friends to just do customer support but because I thought I had to do everything myself and I didn't know how to delegate and I didn't have any systems or operation like or like uh templates or anything I was sort of I was the bottleneck for absolutely everything um I then a couple years later discovered the book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gober and that book was the thing that like made me realize holy like you can actually outsource things you can hire someone you can like delegate things and I just did not know how to do that beyond saying hey Jake Malle Katherine Asman Harun James Akib whatever like do you guys want to teach a course on the weekend that was sort of the limit of my delegation so while I was in the trenches I was doing everything myself once I started my YouTube channel and then started selling like online courses off the back of that it's it's sort of I'd had the knowledge of the mistakes that I made with that medical school admissions business to know that I need to start delegating things sooner rather than later the other thing that I had to sacrifice to an extent so um when I was 23 uh I I started my YouTube channel and initially I started my YouTube channel as a content marketing driver for the business i was like okay if I do videos helping kids get into med school then some of them will think I'm legit and they'll sign up to one of my courses because I was still running my courses at the time and then the YouTube channel started to grow and this was around the time when I had my med school finals and my final exams now in that mode you know we all have the same 24 hours in the day right there's 168 hours in the week something had to give uh I could have chosen to spend a lot of time studying for my exams but I wanted to continue growing the YouTube channel when it comes to like medical school finals you either fail or you pass or you get a distinction and a distinction requires you to be in like the top 10% and then I was like okay do I want to try and study so much to try and get top 10% or top 15% and based on like my my grades and stuff at the time because it's like an amalgamation of everything it would have been possible but just I would have had to really really really grind to try and make it into the into the into the uh distinction territory and so I actively decided you know what it's not worth it i don't want to spend an extra 20 hours a week grinding to attempt to get a distinction instead I want to spend those 20 hours investing into my YouTube channel because it had a little bit of momentum i had a few hundred subscribers i was making the videos and I was like I can feel like this is going somewhere this is much more fun and so I kind of did the minimum viable study that I needed to do to pass the exam i sort of told myself at the time if I'm really doing this strategically anything above a pass is wasted effort and someone might be saying well you're you're a better doctor if you're better at your exams and it's like it's it's just not the case like the exam grades correlate so little with performance on the job um that that thought crossed my mind but it didn't cross my mind for very long i was like no you know this these exams are a game of like memorizing the right sort of information um I did I did very well in the clinical exams the ones that are actually relevant to being a doctor got like 80 something% in those but for the written exams the ones that require you to memorize random details that are very almost never going to come up as a doctor I decided I was only going to aim for a pass for those and I managed to scrape a pass by like 2% i was like thank God for that it worked out um but it was definitely a case of strategic sacrifice to focus on growing the business while I was while I should have been studying for my med school exams i'm not saying this as a sort of way of giving advice to anyone else like if if you're in med school and you really want to be a doctor you should care about the exams but something's got to something's got to give if you want to do multiple thing I I I had a friend who was like super super into playing rugby it was like playing rugby at a semi-professional level you know he also had to sacrifice some exam grades i had a friend who was super into rowing and rode for the university she also had to sacrifice some exam grades like anything you want to do outside of work requires you to sacrifice the exam grades a little bit and it's just a personal decision as to is that something you want to do for me at the time I decided that back in 2018 growing my 2017 actually growing my YouTube channel to me was more important than getting an extra few percentage points in my medical school finals um other people wouldn't have made that decision i'm not trying to tell anyone what to do i'm just sharing the journey in case it's vaguely helpful all right so we talked about the 0 to 1,000 that was me aged 13 to 18 then we talked about 1 to 100K that was me like 18 to 23 and then age 23 when I started my YouTube channel I sort of I over overlapped for a few years um with my courses business and my YouTube channel and I was still doing like the medical school admissions stuff and still teaching courses on the weekends and filming like an online course on how to get into med school and you know all all of this stuff so there was a little bit of overlap but in 2019 I got an offer from someone to buy that courses business it was not for very much money uh but at the time my YouTube channel I think had like 200,000 subscribers and I realized I didn't enjoy helping kids get into med school anymore it just it was I was already working as a doctor i was like I don't I don't just want to be doing this med school admissions stuff all my life and so I had the chance to sell that business and I sold that business to a guy who then became a friend and mentor and then that friend and mentor actually was the one who was like "Bro your YouTube channel is growing really big like why are you still doing the editing yourself?" And I was like "Well I tried outsourcing it to like the Philippines or something but the editor wasn't very good." And he was like "How much did you how much how how much were you paying?" And I was like "I was paying like $5 an hour." And he was like "Dude you can't expect to get good results for paying $5 an hour." And then we he sort of looked at my numbers for the YouTube channel and he was like "You could afford to hire an editor for like £3,000 a month at the time." And I was like "That was like 100% of the income of my YouTube channel it was making about 3K a month." Then that was the goal ironically 3K a month um and he was like "Dude you've got to hire a full-time editor." And it just so happened that around that time a guy called Christian emailed me saying "Hey I would like to be your editor." um my rate is I think like 2500 pounds or 25,500 euros or something uh and so I mean I put out put out a job description etc um and managed to hire this guy Christian who then was my first editor and was with the channel for like 4 years and I was paying him 100% of what my YouTube channel was earning this was while I was still working as a doctor so I you know I didn't need the money from the YouTube channel it was just sort of income on the side but it was because this friend and mentor Rohan said to me "Hey you've got to you've got to hire your first employee that I took the plunge." And I'm so glad I did because immediately it massively freed up my time to make Skillshare classes and to make more YouTube videos and to get more sponsorships and so those were the things once I'd outsourced the editing to Christian that then took the business from 100K to 300K and then 300K to 500K and then in like 2020 in the pandemic um I was still working as a doctor but like everyone was on online and so our online courses business started to do really well and that was the year I set up my YouTube course um basically the whole pattern of my life in terms of how I've made money is that I've done a thing and then I've taught a course teaching people how to do the thing initially it was like I did well in my GCSEs and A levels and then I started t tutoring people on how to do well in their GCCs and A levels and made some money that way then I got into med school by doing well in the exams and then I started tutoring people how to do well in the exams and then I built a YouTube channel and then I started teaching people how to build a YouTube channel so it's just this whole you know some people some people would say this is a pyramid scheme because you're just sort of teaching the people behind you i would say this is how teaching works like you do something and then you coach other people or teach other people how to do the thing and so um in like 2020 when I was 26 we launched our YouTuber academy and that year the business made like $1.2 million in revenue and so technically for the first time on paper at least um and in my business bank account uh I became technically a millionaire i've spoken to other friends about this who are who all have businesses and they broadly agree that like like the first 100k is the hardest the the only thing holding you back from the first thousand dollars is your own emotions like you're just scared right you're scared of the admin you're scared of like putting yourself out there you're scared that your friends and family will freaking laugh at you you're scared of thinking you think you think you have no value and therefore why would anyone want to buy anything from me you're afraid to sell you're like "Oh my god selling a used car salesman sleazy." Like it's all of these emotional barriers that hold people back for the first $1,000 but if you can just get over yourself and just get over the emotional barriers Abdal's first law anyone with a pulse in the Western world who's an adult can make $1,000 on the internet fairly easily you just need to get over yourself and break through the emotions then the one to 100K is really freaking hard that's like the trenches some people are in the trenches for years some people never get out of the trenches some people just breeze through the trenches but those are like the rare few i did not breathe through the trenches i was in there for years grinding away in this courses business but then once you once you break 100k at that point you you know enough about business to have made 100k like it's really hard to make 100 grand but once you've done that everything becomes easier and then from what I from what I hear every tripling starts to become hard like 1 to 300 is easy enough but then three to 300 to a million becomes harder and then 1 to 3 million becomes harder um our business these days does like a few million in revenue and profit and we've never broken the 10 million mark so that's kind of like the next stage i also hear it's really hard to break the 10 million mark because there's a lot of you know for a business like this where a YouTuber with a YouTube channel and courses one to $3 million in annual revenue is like a very good place to be according to one of my mentors Ollie Richards if you're trying to break beyond that to like the 10 million category you then have to learn how to run ads and you have to have a bigger team and you have more costs and you do high ticket and stuff so for each different business model there are different like levels of like plateau and sweet spot and like trade-offs and yeah but that's how I became a millionaire but I think had I set out to become a millionaire it probably wouldn't have happened cuz I would have held myself back by overthinking and over analyzing and overarning and stuff but because I was just focused on initially man I just want to make money on the internet and then after that man I just want to make 3K a month those very modest goals helped me get through those early stages without too many emotions holding me back and so that would be my advice if you want to make money on the internet so hopefully if you're at this point in the video you got some value out of it if you did I would love to hear in a comment down below what did you like about this video is it kind of rambly kind of all over the place but I want to do more stuff that kind of helps you guys cuz tbh at this point in my YouTube life I don't need more money like I'm not actually doing this to make more money the thing that I now do this for is because I I feel good when I'm helping other people like if someone comes up to me on the street in Hong Kong and they say "Yeah some kid came up to me he was I've been watching your videos for 4 years and um he he found them found them very inspiring." In in a very selfish way I enjoy the feeling of the stuff that I make on the internet being useful to other people even though sort of obvious obviously everything is multiffactorial and this YouTube stuff still makes money but I really try my best to not think of the videos as making money because when when I think of the videos as like the point of doing it is to make money it just sucks the motivation out of it because like I've got I've already got enough money i don't need more of it it's not going to change my life etc etc what I find personally very fulfilling is when I do something sort of teach something on the internet or share some of my experiences and people are getting genuine value from that so if you are at this point in the video I would love to hear in the comment you know in a comment down below what value did you get from this sort of video and what would you like to see more of i've been doing YouTube for 8 years now the thing that keeps it fun is like seeing the comments and seeing the messages from people who say that the who say that the stuff is useful um so I would love it if you can leave a comment down below and if you haven't yet seen my video on how to get rich that talks about the unhealthy obsession that I had with it while I was in med school that sort of relates to a lot of the stuff here uh check out that video over there thank you so much for watching and we'll see you hopefully in the next one bye-bye