Lessons - Facing and Overcoming Challenges | Evan Carmichael - Entrepreneur, Author & Youtuber

Failures, pick failures that you've had, how did you navigate those, how did you circumvent those like how did you in the darkest point in any point in your life, it could be personal professional, how did you navigate that and then get through it. So the biggest failure I had was I quit on my business partner. So this is why I tried and courageably keep going and believe and all because that was me because I needed it because 20 year old and that badly needed that message. We were not having success. I was a year in on this business. I turned down my dream job to take this company opportunity. All my friends were getting rich, doing all this stuff. And I was too poor to go hang out with them. And I was too embarrassed to tell them that I was broke. Right. They want to hang out. And I can't because 20 bucks for pizza and beer and then like bowling night or whatever would be too much. Right. And so I said, I can't I'm hustling. I'm living the entrepreneur life, you know, not like that. I can't I make 300 bucks a month. Guys, I can't afford this. At some point, it just got to a breaking point where I can't handle this anymore. You know, I'm I'm I'm busting my butt like every day wake up. It's dark. I go to my partner's condo. It's dark. I leave and go home right being salad for lunch every day at just day and day out. If you weren't working hard and you're not getting results, that's fine. You can kind of understand. But when you're grinding every single day all day and have no other life and you're still not getting results. I don't know. I think at some point it just beats you down this to say I can't take this anymore. So at a family event, Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever, I told my business partner like I can't do this anymore. I need I need to feel like I'm a valuable person. And just this isn't working. And so I quit. And then I I cried like crazy had stuff kind of my eyes, my nose, you know, I was just totally lost. And the next day woke up and felt I can't quit yet because I'm going to regret if I quit now. I know again when I'm an old man at 40, I'm going to regret this life changing decision. But I can't keep going the way that I'm going. I have to find something else because this is not working as it is. And that's where I had a aha moment that kind of at my bottom, which was I'm not the first guy to try to build software before and sell it like who's done this. And the first guy thought of was Bill Gates who started Microsoft. So I thought, okay, how do Bill Gates do it? I'm going to learn his story and maybe this something I can learn from it. And I did it looked at how Microsoft got started not not how to make a mix an extra million dollars now like who cares, you know, makes a million dollars a second just just sitting around. How do you go from zero to one? That's what I wanted to do. And I looked at a story and copied that strategy and shortly after had my first deal for 13 and a half thousand dollars in my business. And, you know, grand scheme of things. That's not a lot of money, but holy cow, when you're making through in bucks a month and you get a 13. My deal. My dude, it's, it's, it's like, I was rich. It's like I won the lottery. You know, I have, I have, I have dollars hitting my bank account. I felt rich and more important is like, hope, like, oh my gosh, something finally worked. Like, maybe this could actually happen light at the end of the tunnel. And then I just modeled that strategy to keep getting more and more and more growth. So if you think about what do I do now, like what saved me back then modeling success, I don't have to be the guy to figure out all of my own. I can model somebody who's done it. What have I done for the past 20 plus years is teach people how to model success. You know, I'm like, I'm still talking to 19 year old Evan profiling famous people and say, here's where you can learn from them to apply to your situation. You know, it's funny though. Like, you've always, you've always gone into situations. Like, I guess in the software company, you did a pupil, you could model. But when you were starting your own brand and you're creating content. I don't think there was a model, but you still figured it out. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, Scott. And I think that's why it took so long. Yeah, that I didn't model somebody. I think I think you could, like, people ask me, who's your, who's your hero? Who do you want to be most like? And my answers, Princess, die. That's my, that's my model. And I just like, there's a lot of things about her that I think can apply. How does it apply to like my 2022, you know, business, YouTube, etc. That's, that's the challenge. But I think if I applied it earlier to my situation, it wouldn't have taken me five years to get five thousand subscribers. I would have been able to get there a lot faster. Every time I haven't known what to do, and I asked myself, who's done this before? And maybe you can talk to them, but I didn't have any connection. So I'm not calling up Bill Gates to say, hey, Billy, what do you think? But, but the bigger they are, the more their stories are out there for you to learn. And so if I was smart enough to go back and say, I'm building a brand, like the idea of a brand Scott was not something that was in my vocabulary, you know, I wasn't thinking about, wasn't anyone's vocabulary. It's kind of new. You know, make some videos and hopefully help somebody, right? That was really the start. So if, you know, there were no big parallels in YouTube, but I could have pulled from other other people who were, who were big at the time. I could have pulled from Oprah who had her TV show. I could have pulled from people. If I, if I had the smarts or the role models, I guess, to think about it. So again, like this is what I'm trying to help people, you don't have to take as long as I did to get here. You can go a lot faster.