And where are all the viewers of your niche going wrong? Questions that will help you find your positioning/unique selling proposition

Any South Africans in here? If so, I would love to meet up. I’m in Johannesburg and run a Skool course and mastermind in the financial planning and finance space.

https://youtu.be/CHx24Y8HdYg

(Update, the video is getting about 20k views a day now so while the over 10k statement is accurate it's still growing rapidly) Here’s the video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-CYdjX5_A There are a couple things that have led up to this moment and as much as I would like to tell you it was an overnight thing it's unfortunately an accumulation of years worth of work. I’m still at the very beginning of my journey and there is still a long way to go which is super exciting to think about. But here’s what’s led to this. I have been making videos for around 10 years, not consistently and only a couple a year, but I have tried a lot, from gaming videos, to finance and comedy and a bunch of other stuff. None of it worked. I just tried to emulate (often poorly) the creators I watched. This is an embarrassing but important first step because I learnt how to edit and tell a story with these very bad videos. I went to film school and studied screenwriting, and became a competent writer and learnt the fundamentals of storytelling, these apply not only to feature length movies but also to Youtube videos and educational content. People resonate with stories, not just straight information. I then got a job as a journalist and video producer and really got to put in the hours writing multiple articles a day and producing, filming and editing a few videos a week for a year. This was miserable and I didn’t like what I was doing but it was great practice to get better and better at these skills. I also had the opportunity to work with and learn from some very experienced and brilliant people which was great and helped with figuring out my vision. I also had the pleasure of working with @Andrew Kirby and his team, and spent a lot of time chatting with @Wiktor Romanowicz which taught me a lot about the content game and contextualised a lot in my mind. I also followed the journey of people like @Hamza Ahmed and analysed the way he and others created content which was the most effective and (very importantly) the most helpful to people so they would stay and absorb the content. And this leads to another important point.

I was watching Andrew's lesson on productizing yourself, and it make me think about why am I not where I planned to be by now in terms of being a creator and online consulting. And why am I not getting things done that I needed. This also came about because I was invited to join a mastermind this week, that I DESPERATELY want to join, but I simply don't have the affordability. And the frustration is, I know this is what I need as my next evolution. Then while out for a walk I was pondering this thought and its solutions intensely. Allowing nothing else to be considered. It felt quite surreal, my surroundings seemed almost frozen in time. Then it dawned on me, @Andrew Kirby is where he is because he is controlling his emotions. His most popular video is literally the one where he explains this. He made a Mental Momentum Course too. This brings me to a quote form Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” So what am I changing? Today I decided to control my emotions. To control them so I DO what is required to achieve my goals. No more dopamine binges when I am "down" or "bored", instead I will just take action and build my dreams, so I can get the tasks done that will bring these dreams into reality. At the end of the day, it is I who changes, not the exterior world.