The Foundation of Success: Building on Joy and Passion

Max's story is one of self-discovery and the importance of building a foundation of joy and passion in pursuit of success. He shares his experience of having to focus on what truly made him excited and enjoyable, rather than trying to pursue a path that he didn't genuinely care about.

If Max could go back in time, he would focus on building a solid foundation with something he enjoyed, rather than throwing discipline at it. He believes that having a strong foundation of passion and joy is essential for achieving success. "Make your joy the foundation," he advises, "make that the foundation and then build discipline on top of that and then build other things on top of that."

This approach is crucial for individuals who are considering pursuing a career or activity that they may not truly enjoy. Max shares his own experience of realizing that he didn't have to pursue coding if it wasn't something he enjoyed. He emphasizes the importance of listening to one's intuition and making choices that align with their true passions.

The Value of Focus

Max highlights the value of focus when pursuing a passion or interest. By focusing on what truly makes him excited, he is able to create content that brings joy and satisfaction. "I would rather make content on something I'm doing regularly," he says, rather than trying to force it into a specific format or style.

This approach also extends to his personal brand and business ventures. With a smaller team and lower expenses, Max has the freedom to create content that he wants to make, even if it doesn't appeal to a large audience. "I don't need every single video to get a crazy amount of viewership," he says. Instead, he focuses on creating content that resonates with him personally.

The Impact of Freedom

Max's decision to focus on his passions has also given him the freedom to pursue new and exciting opportunities. He recently completed a 100-day Muay Thai challenge, which not only improved his physical health but also sparked his creativity. "I just did a hundred days," he says with excitement, "and I ended up doing a Muay Thai fight at the end of the hundred days."

This experience has given Max the freedom to talk about topics that are truly meaningful and exciting to him. He no longer feels constrained by the need to create content that appeals to a large audience or meets specific expectations. Instead, he is able to share his passion and enthusiasm with others, creating a more authentic and engaging experience for his viewers.

A Message to Aspiring Content Creators

Max's story offers a valuable lesson for aspiring content creators who may find themselves struggling to stay motivated or focused on their goals. His advice to "make your joy the foundation" is clear: pursue what truly makes you excited and passionate, rather than trying to force yourself into a specific mold or style.

For those who are considering pursuing a career in development or another field that they may not enjoy, Max's message is particularly relevant. He urges them to listen to their intuition and make choices that align with their true passions. "Don't do it if you don't enjoy it," he says. "Only do it if you enjoy it."

By building on joy and passion, individuals can create a foundation of success that is sustainable and fulfilling in the long term. Max's story serves as a reminder to prioritize what truly matters and to stay true to oneself in pursuit of goals and aspirations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's about time I thought I would make this video and just talk about a couple of things that have been on my mind for a minute okay so this is not like an April Fool's joke or anything that I did a while ago where I said I'm quitting YouTube and it was just an April Fool's joke but what I am quitting is I'm quitting being on the content treadmill that I got on with YouTube I realized a lot of things about life and I had lots of learning lessons over the last few years as I was growing clever programmer and I'll also kind of share what I see as the future and what I'll be doing on Clever programmer and what I will be doing in general uh probably outside of clever programmer and this video is for a lot of people like it's not just for developers I want to make this video for even other content creators if you're a YouTuber and you're a content creator and you're maybe a developer who's creating content on other channels or thinking about creating content I think this could be something useful for you and valuable for you to know I'm gonna be a little bit all over the place I'm sorry but I'll just stick to like what I want to say whatever's coming to my mind and uh and I and I hope it'll make sense but a few years ago I mean lots of years ago right when I started my coding Channel about six or seven years ago I was really excited about it really passionate about coding because I was coding every single day and um I was coding about 14 15 hours a day and always had these crazy epiphanies and discoveries that I wanted to share like when I was a beginner I was like oh my God I just wanted Fibonacci Sequence I have to share with somebody when I learned the recurse recursion and I remember being at McDonald's with uh uh like my ex-girlfriend a long time ago and like literally stopping at McDonald's and going like and she was like annoyed by it you know because I would talk so much about coding all the time and I like stopped her and I sat her down at McDonald's and we got fries and I was like 19 or 20 or something like that at that time and I was like I just learned recursion it's crazy I have to show you and I sat her down and like opened up my napkin and then I like Drew out recursion I showed her like how it worked and it was so epic I was having so much fun I think she wasn't having that much fun and I broke it down exactly how it worked how I thought it worked because it just clicked in my head and I was like it's crazy just like how it unfolds all the way down until the base case and then it goes the other way oh it's beautiful it's amazing all right so one of the coolest things on planet Earth I want to like kind of figured it out and and I was a lot slower than everybody and I was dumber than everybody and so like you know other my friends would understand it and like after one's class session they've been like oh yes recursion it makes so much sense and for me it didn't make any sense it was something like that I had to spend like eight hours you know for so many days in a row and then two weeks three weeks later it finally clicked it I was like oh my gosh awesome I was sharing it with her and I was so fascinated I was blown away but I remember it was so I was so excited about that time right and I think that was the time I I wanted to share all these things and so what I did is I created a channel and that was brilliant timing for that channel because right when I was passionate about it I started creating content and so then every day I would share something that I was excited about so whether it was like an R programming language video I made a long time ago or I started teaching python because I was learning Python and then right when I got a job I started showing people how to get a job and it was it was all very passionate and real and very exciting then that was like 2016 27 some of it was 2017 then 2017 things changed because 2016 I was like a student and living this normal life and then at the end of 2016 my channel started taking off and I was starting to get like people following me and all that stuff and around the end of 2016 start of 2017 I had a bunch of people hitting me up like hey let me do your marketing and work on your marketing funnels and let's launch a product and you should launch a course and this is how you make money and you should do this type of business model and I was also pretty interested in you know I was looking to zero to launch by ramit seti and all this stuff and I was excited and I know if you're on this developer Channel you're gonna be like what the hell are any of these things like I just want a code that's fine if you want to do that just go away from this video because like there's probably not going to be anything of interest to you because I'm not really going to be talking about coding that much in this video but I hope that some of it could still resonate with you because our passions change and I kind of want to talk about that and so that was a lot of fun for me that was that was a lot of fun because I would learn the stuff and share it and then implement it and then I got into like learning business because I was growing the YouTube channel and I was growing a course-based business online digital course business I was like this is exciting so I was learning about email lists and email marketing and content and content strategies and um how do you do a product launch successfully and how do you build a hype for it how do you deliver the product and how do you pre-sell a product and how do you fulfill customers and how do you upsell and how do you have customer retention so customers actually stick through and enjoy the product and the services you provide how do you lower the refund I mean everything business related and along with that came other things like managing a team um hiring an assistant hiring an editor then we need to scale so like getting more creative creators and then more and more and more and more and until I realized that it was just this constant thing of I have to do more I have to skill more I have to make more money the next month than the previous month because I have a payroll to pay now and I have to I have to I have to I have to and from back when like things were because I got to do them and because I wanted to do them and me going to Dunkin Donuts to solve a coding problem because I was trying to solve like the literal schemer book from like 6 p.m to 5am I was doing that you know I was like all because I wanted to do it and then at this point I didn't really want to do that stuff anymore and um everything was just a burden and so around like 2017 if you watch some of my videos like earlier kind of in 2017 like or mid 2017 I started to like kind of look depressed or sad or low energy because I was like I'm just being I feel so forced to be doing these things so that was great and then happened and then I ended up launching a course at the end of 2017 profitable programmer and that launch went great and we had a ton of students enroll and I decided to leave Chicago at that time and go to LA and then after that it was just like go go fast like be in a fast place like la get a bunch of creators you know be around bunch of creators hire a bigger team like par um you know and then because I got kind of new into like money and status and fame and all of those things were very new to me I didn't know what to do with them so 2018 I was like partying and spending a lot of time dating and just doing a bunch of random that wasn't actually productive for my business or my health and um yeah I just had to prove people wrong and I'd show people what I could do and I got to show people what who I could be and and it wasn't the right way to spend a year but that's how 2018 went and you could see my content is like very little content that I did um and then as 2019 was like crazy 2019 started kind of crazy at a breaking point because at the end of 2018 I kind of got depressed and it was I was really sad I lost my entire team everybody was like pretty much like you know what you everybody left the team and quit and so that 2019 I had to build all over again from scratch and then grow and so that made me realize okay I have to live a life of more purpose I have to do things that are aligned and I have to focus on discipline and building consistency and showing up for my team and being somebody who's reliable being somebody who people could count on and so then that became my focus starting in 2019. and I got some of the team members back whose trust I had lost I had I showed my character over time and discipline and I started getting more consistent again with content and here here's where things started to go started to change because see 2016 it was all about like coding and that was my passion 2017 it was about like proving these business Concepts right and kind of make them work and 2018 was like partying and discovering myself and seeing who I am and just a bunch of different stuff right like really going to the extreme and then 2019 I went back into being disciplined back into being all of that but at that point what happened was I was doing all those things it was discipline and I was being consistent I started this 30-day challenge where I wouldn't miss a single video every single day I would drop a video and start building the audience back up again and started dropping Banger content I dropped a Python tutorial and like boom things were blowing up in 2019 again but see the interesting thing is I wasn't really passionate about coding anymore like truly truly truly passionate about coding anymore and it was a really scary thing because I'm like well I've been spending so much time building up this channel I can't quit now and everybody around me was just like your 100 000 subscribers 200 000 subscribers like are you stupid you can't change now you can go do other things like you have to just keep going and keep going and I'm like but I'm not really feeling it that much anymore you know it's not something that drives me or excites me that much like I like coding but I don't get to do it my whole time is spent managing a team building a team um customers and meetings and all this other stuff and so I'm focused on self-development and business and Leadership and all this other stuff and like I'm excited to talk about it but now I don't have a platform to talk about it I have a platform to talk about what I wanted to talk about two years ago and then I was just stuck talking about it in 2019. then I felt kind of stuck talking about in 2020 then I felt stuck talking about it and everywhere I would look in every big um person I would look to you know whether it was Alex hermosi or any of these like big people again you might not know them if you're in the coding space but like these people in the marketing world right let's just say they were saying Focus one thing stick to one thing winners just stick to one thing over a long period of time and that's how they win and that's how life is supposed to be you just focus you cut everything else out and you just got to be disciplined and it's just you being distracted and broke people are distracted don't get distracted and so all those things built up and it's obviously fault of my own as well just built up a lot of pressure in my mind to be like you know what I have to just keep growing this thing this is the only thing I have to grow and so even I was disconnected I was like well I could still be disciplined and it's still valuable for people and it could still bring value to people and I still have a lot of knowledge to give so then I just stay diligent and focused and I'm like even if I don't enjoy it other people get value out of it so I just should keep doing it keep doing it keep doing it so I grind it all of 2019 and did that and then 2020 we built a big team and had crazy Revenue coming in every single month only to realize that we were losing money and bleeding money every single month um and then a bunch of team members left at the end of 2020 and that was pretty bad and kind of awful and then 2021 was similar experience it was just like we have to make like hundred thousand dollars a month or have to make like 150 000 a month like there's no other choice we have to do that but then the depressing part at the end of the month there was a month I think 2020 2021 I'm like losing track of some of the years but like there was there were there was months where keep in mind I'm this kid who came from Pakistan who like didn't really have anything growing up you know went to a religious school where they beat the out of you like all this random stuff and I'm not saying I was like from a you know poor family but we were like middle class we were like low middle class and you know um my family was doing like slightly above minimum wage jobs and we were doing you know okay but to go from that to like you're growing a channel and you have all this all these subscribers that you have all this income coming in and you have all this all these students that you're taking care of I was like this is crazy and so we were hitting months that were like 200 250 000 in a month and I was like this is unreal but the crazy thing was the expenses that month were like 260 000. like imagine that just imagine that I mean it's crazy right to imagine I think it's even crazier for people to understand you can make more than like forty thousand dollars or like sixty thousand dollars in a year like that seems so crazy right so you're making 260 000 in a month but here's a pathetic part on 250 000 50 000 that you're making you're spending two hundred and sixty thousand or two hundred fifty five thousand and so I was actually more broke than a normal person like a normal person just doing a job at McDonald's was richer than I was and that was a very sad moment because there was so much Financial pressure that I was feeling in that time it was crushing me literally crushing my soul underneath and the financial pressure was like we gotta run all these ads because we have 25 people on the team and they feel like my friends and they feel like my family and I can't fire them so I have to just do things to make money I have to do it for them and I have to I have to have to have to and at some point it just got to a point where we couldn't keep it up anymore and I kind of was like Crush under got crushed under the pressure and then you know 2021 or something along those lines we had to just let go of everybody on the team and kind of start over from scratch and once I did that I started feeling peace again and kind of Joy again I started enjoying things but still the problem remained which was like I was just trying not to lose all the success I had built and I just kept sticking with the coding Channel and encoding content and and again it wasn't like my day-to-day passion anymore it was something I just did because I thought it brought value to other people and so that was 2021 2022 2023 and so imagine like you know spending one year of like real passion and six or seven years out of just sheer discipline and focus and consistency and and project management and like and that's how I got to a million subscribers and you know some of you look at my content you're like no I I don't know like you guys are really smart you probably can feel by my energy and you've seen videos really see really that into it I mean again when I'm doing the videos it's not like I'm faking it I'm enjoying the videos but over it's like I fit I would figure out how to kind of enjoy when I was in the middle of it you know but it wasn't something I obsessed about because I didn't do it on a regular basis to this day I still sit down sometimes and if I have an opportunity to code or build an app I'll have one of my developers on the team and I'll just sit down with them on a meeting and start building up with him and before I realized six hours have passed and so I enjoy that when I when I'm in that zone then I like talking about it but for the last six years I wasn't coding I had to like build the business and grow the channel and like everything that was coding and a lot of lessons I learned from that and it's like if I was making like like who was I making 250 000 a month for if I was losing 250 000 like my income is zero right I'm broke the income is zero yes there were years where we had like profit and stuff but I I would reinvest aggressively but like you know and I always laughed and I would say like it's interesting how many ways there are to make zero dollars and so at the end of the day there's no income coming in and I'm still somebody who has like you're making zero dollars so why not like you could if you you could make 250 000 and then make zero dollars and have all that crazy stress that comes with having to make that money and managing a team and AD spend and all this stuff or you could just be at zero dollars like AKA just have no expenses and also be making no money like it's the same thing but one of them is a lot less stressful right and so then I'm like why am I doing this like going at such a crazy pace and so those were a couple of big realizations that I've had over the last few years and then now what it has come to essentially is like what I've been really excited to do is show people how to grow their YouTube channels what I've been really excited to do is even more than that honestly is I want to make content that challenges me because for me it's boring to keep making the same content again and again top five programming languages top five highest paying programming jobs three tips developers didn't know Tick Tock app but let's build LinkedIn let's build this and let's build this and let's build this it's like it just doesn't fulfill me right it's like boring it's easy and you felt that way right in life where you figure out something and then at some point it feels boring and you kind of want a new challenge and that's why we like even coding because there's always a new problem to solve and so it was killing me to have just the same problem trying to just okay we got to keep solving this problem over and over again and so the direction I'm heading in is one where now thank God I'm not in a in a position I've gotten myself out of a position where um I don't need um I I like I've gotten myself out of a position where I don't need literally any of the viewers money I don't need any customers money I don't need YouTube ads uh spent to give me money um I don't need sponsorship money like none of those things are necessary and so now I'm like what do I actually want to do and what comes to me is I want to pursue creatively challenging things that interest me that are hard that are exciting you know and so um you know like ran like for example Joma Tech is a great example how he just went the route of like chasing his Creative Vision you know and I'll give you a simple example of my like I love that type of stuff love that type of crazy content and um recently I made a video on Clever programmer and if you look that's the last video that I made with all my a heart and effort and um it's the chat GPT one and I even edited it in in on my channel it crushed it because on the clever programmer Channel I don't really get that many views I actually get very little views um per video like 10 day 10K views or 8K views and that video I was on um Chad GPT built my app in minutes and that video in one month got like 600 000 views and if you watch that video you can see that I'm enjoying myself making that video I'm enjoying the art behind it I'm enjoying the storytelling behind it and if you watch that video you'll enjoy it and it's funny and it's kind of crazy and it's wild and so like that to me is creatively challenging and fulfilling and so if there happens to be some kind of creative challenge something that's fulfilling in the coding World I'll make a video you know on this channel but I I my gut feeling is you're not gonna see a lot of content for me on this channel for now like there might be some random stuff I want to share like this and I might drop it but um mostly I want to be making videos on my personal brand rafikaze that's the one I want to grow and I have lots of crazy ideas that I want to pursue and so some content I want to make on chess because I love chess and so I've been making content on that there's going to be some other content that's going to be like really crazy um like so think like some some kind of crazy challenge or something people are really curious about you know and um I don't assure that that much yet because sometimes when I share I get the high of just sharing it and then I end up not doing it so I'll keep it to myself for now and then once it's real you'll see it live on my personal brand Channel like rafikaze and so that's what's that's what's exciting me so I want to pursue that and then I want to you know if there's something that excites me in the coding world to talk about I'll talk about it from time to time or sometimes I want to share with you or if you guys like this video then maybe I'll make more like these because I'm just like what would I do if like literally I didn't care about like having to support a team or a payroll or any of that and you just focus and even now we have a now we have a very lean team um yeah so and and I spent all day today cutting like software expenses because I'm like what I need to do over the last next 10 years is put myself in a position where I can maximize how many risks I can take because the more risks I can take the more chances I get at one just fulfilling my own self and having less regret in life two I maximize my flow state um and and obviously my growth and so I want to do things that maximize my growth right which is taking risk so how do I put myself in this position to take those risks well how I do that is by not having ridiculous overhead not having a ridiculously large Titanic sized team to support because then it goes from what's the thing that I want to do that fulfills me that can also bring value to everybody else like you it goes from that to how do I get this team member paid next month because if I don't do this you know like if I don't make money and I'm Not The Rainmaker that they think I am they don't get paid they don't get to put food on the table right and it's not that dramatic because people are very resourceful right and so it's like if you can't make it they'll get a job and everybody on my team is so talented that like if they bounce they'll have a job Max in one week like everybody is a killer like if they weren't before they are now everybody's super talented on the team now um and so yeah it's like I it's like now that I don't have that pressure I want to pursue the things that I want to pursue and enjoy and you know if I could go back and this is where I think it could be valuable for you but it's like if I could go back man I would just focus on what's like I would really make the foundation with something I enjoy like I would really really really really really make that the foundation and not go from like this Duty passion like this discipline like there's nothing wrong with discipline but it's like what do you throw a discipline at right they find through discipline at the thing that fed me and made me really excited I would have been like 10 times a bigger Channel without even needing all that team because honestly the one of the reasons I needed such a massive team is because I didn't want to do any of those things that I was doing like they were not fun they were boring as to me and so I was like that's why I had a big team that was the reason I was just paying everybody to like hey you do all the stuff that like I really don't want to do and now that it's like I'm doing all of the things that I really want to be doing I'm like not like no I want to edit like I want less editors I want to edit and so my message to you is just can you make your joy the foundation make that the foundation and then build discipline on top of that and then build other things on top of that you know because the last thing I want you to do is like spend six years trying to become a coder when you really just didn't like it and you only were doing it because you're trying to impress your friend or you're trying to show your dad they're smart enough to be able to do that but like you don't actually like it you don't actually enjoy it you know what I mean um yeah so I would I would say spend time thinking about that so spend um spend time thinking about what you want to truly do and then build on top of that you know I think that's going to be a beautiful thing like you can't see it but I have my 1 million Subs plaque like that's pretty cool but I kind of I don't want to kind of built the wrong thing because that's a pretty bold statement but I kind of built the thing that I wasn't that passionate about you know I'm okayly passionate about it like I can enjoy it certainly but is it's not something that I was doing on a regular basis and I'd rather build a brand and a channel on things that I'm doing on a regular basis like I just did 100 day Muay Thai Challenge and so like I'd rather make content on that right like because that's top of my mind it's exciting to me just did a hundred days spent 100 days and um so I did 100 days of Muay Thai and I ended up doing a Muay Thai fight at the end of the hundred days so that's exciting to talk about I did a hundred day I went from couch potatoes to running a marathon in 100 days like that was exciting so I would want to talk about that and that's something I have the freedom to talk more about on my personal brand and now that I have a smaller team and lower expenses I don't need every single video to bang it crazy amount of viewership so that could get crazy amount of money or whatever like I can I can make content that I want to make even if it gets like 2 000 views like this video like it's probably gonna get like 1300 views you know because I'm not talking about coding and I'm talking I'm putting it on my coding Channel but I just don't care because if one it makes me feel good just to talk about this and two because I think I just want one person to listen to it and get value out of it like a person who is maybe gonna create content or is a content creator and might not ever comment on it but watches it and is like holy like I was going down that path and it helped me change and I'm not going to pursue that path and I'm gonna go into like what makes me excited and passionate and um yeah and then for somebody who's becoming a developer but they realize like that's not their thing you know they don't really enjoy it they're doing it for lots of other reasons like don't do it if you don't enjoy it only do it if you enjoy it like your joy of it should be the foundation that's my message to you I love you well I'll see you byeit's about time I thought I would make this video and just talk about a couple of things that have been on my mind for a minute okay so this is not like an April Fool's joke or anything that I did a while ago where I said I'm quitting YouTube and it was just an April Fool's joke but what I am quitting is I'm quitting being on the content treadmill that I got on with YouTube I realized a lot of things about life and I had lots of learning lessons over the last few years as I was growing clever programmer and I'll also kind of share what I see as the future and what I'll be doing on Clever programmer and what I will be doing in general uh probably outside of clever programmer and this video is for a lot of people like it's not just for developers I want to make this video for even other content creators if you're a YouTuber and you're a content creator and you're maybe a developer who's creating content on other channels or thinking about creating content I think this could be something useful for you and valuable for you to know I'm gonna be a little bit all over the place I'm sorry but I'll just stick to like what I want to say whatever's coming to my mind and uh and I and I hope it'll make sense but a few years ago I mean lots of years ago right when I started my coding Channel about six or seven years ago I was really excited about it really passionate about coding because I was coding every single day and um I was coding about 14 15 hours a day and always had these crazy epiphanies and discoveries that I wanted to share like when I was a beginner I was like oh my God I just wanted Fibonacci Sequence I have to share with somebody when I learned the recurse recursion and I remember being at McDonald's with uh uh like my ex-girlfriend a long time ago and like literally stopping at McDonald's and going like and she was like annoyed by it you know because I would talk so much about coding all the time and I like stopped her and I sat her down at McDonald's and we got fries and I was like 19 or 20 or something like that at that time and I was like I just learned recursion it's crazy I have to show you and I sat her down and like opened up my napkin and then I like Drew out recursion I showed her like how it worked and it was so epic I was having so much fun I think she wasn't having that much fun and I broke it down exactly how it worked how I thought it worked because it just clicked in my head and I was like it's crazy just like how it unfolds all the way down until the base case and then it goes the other way oh it's beautiful it's amazing all right so one of the coolest things on planet Earth I want to like kind of figured it out and and I was a lot slower than everybody and I was dumber than everybody and so like you know other my friends would understand it and like after one's class session they've been like oh yes recursion it makes so much sense and for me it didn't make any sense it was something like that I had to spend like eight hours you know for so many days in a row and then two weeks three weeks later it finally clicked it I was like oh my gosh awesome I was sharing it with her and I was so fascinated I was blown away but I remember it was so I was so excited about that time right and I think that was the time I I wanted to share all these things and so what I did is I created a channel and that was brilliant timing for that channel because right when I was passionate about it I started creating content and so then every day I would share something that I was excited about so whether it was like an R programming language video I made a long time ago or I started teaching python because I was learning Python and then right when I got a job I started showing people how to get a job and it was it was all very passionate and real and very exciting then that was like 2016 27 some of it was 2017 then 2017 things changed because 2016 I was like a student and living this normal life and then at the end of 2016 my channel started taking off and I was starting to get like people following me and all that stuff and around the end of 2016 start of 2017 I had a bunch of people hitting me up like hey let me do your marketing and work on your marketing funnels and let's launch a product and you should launch a course and this is how you make money and you should do this type of business model and I was also pretty interested in you know I was looking to zero to launch by ramit seti and all this stuff and I was excited and I know if you're on this developer Channel you're gonna be like what the hell are any of these things like I just want a code that's fine if you want to do that just go away from this video because like there's probably not going to be anything of interest to you because I'm not really going to be talking about coding that much in this video but I hope that some of it could still resonate with you because our passions change and I kind of want to talk about that and so that was a lot of fun for me that was that was a lot of fun because I would learn the stuff and share it and then implement it and then I got into like learning business because I was growing the YouTube channel and I was growing a course-based business online digital course business I was like this is exciting so I was learning about email lists and email marketing and content and content strategies and um how do you do a product launch successfully and how do you build a hype for it how do you deliver the product and how do you pre-sell a product and how do you fulfill customers and how do you upsell and how do you have customer retention so customers actually stick through and enjoy the product and the services you provide how do you lower the refund I mean everything business related and along with that came other things like managing a team um hiring an assistant hiring an editor then we need to scale so like getting more creative creators and then more and more and more and more and until I realized that it was just this constant thing of I have to do more I have to skill more I have to make more money the next month than the previous month because I have a payroll to pay now and I have to I have to I have to I have to and from back when like things were because I got to do them and because I wanted to do them and me going to Dunkin Donuts to solve a coding problem because I was trying to solve like the literal schemer book from like 6 p.m to 5am I was doing that you know I was like all because I wanted to do it and then at this point I didn't really want to do that stuff anymore and um everything was just a burden and so around like 2017 if you watch some of my videos like earlier kind of in 2017 like or mid 2017 I started to like kind of look depressed or sad or low energy because I was like I'm just being I feel so forced to be doing these things so that was great and then happened and then I ended up launching a course at the end of 2017 profitable programmer and that launch went great and we had a ton of students enroll and I decided to leave Chicago at that time and go to LA and then after that it was just like go go fast like be in a fast place like la get a bunch of creators you know be around bunch of creators hire a bigger team like par um you know and then because I got kind of new into like money and status and fame and all of those things were very new to me I didn't know what to do with them so 2018 I was like partying and spending a lot of time dating and just doing a bunch of random that wasn't actually productive for my business or my health and um yeah I just had to prove people wrong and I'd show people what I could do and I got to show people what who I could be and and it wasn't the right way to spend a year but that's how 2018 went and you could see my content is like very little content that I did um and then as 2019 was like crazy 2019 started kind of crazy at a breaking point because at the end of 2018 I kind of got depressed and it was I was really sad I lost my entire team everybody was like pretty much like you know what you everybody left the team and quit and so that 2019 I had to build all over again from scratch and then grow and so that made me realize okay I have to live a life of more purpose I have to do things that are aligned and I have to focus on discipline and building consistency and showing up for my team and being somebody who's reliable being somebody who people could count on and so then that became my focus starting in 2019. and I got some of the team members back whose trust I had lost I had I showed my character over time and discipline and I started getting more consistent again with content and here here's where things started to go started to change because see 2016 it was all about like coding and that was my passion 2017 it was about like proving these business Concepts right and kind of make them work and 2018 was like partying and discovering myself and seeing who I am and just a bunch of different stuff right like really going to the extreme and then 2019 I went back into being disciplined back into being all of that but at that point what happened was I was doing all those things it was discipline and I was being consistent I started this 30-day challenge where I wouldn't miss a single video every single day I would drop a video and start building the audience back up again and started dropping Banger content I dropped a Python tutorial and like boom things were blowing up in 2019 again but see the interesting thing is I wasn't really passionate about coding anymore like truly truly truly passionate about coding anymore and it was a really scary thing because I'm like well I've been spending so much time building up this channel I can't quit now and everybody around me was just like your 100 000 subscribers 200 000 subscribers like are you stupid you can't change now you can go do other things like you have to just keep going and keep going and I'm like but I'm not really feeling it that much anymore you know it's not something that drives me or excites me that much like I like coding but I don't get to do it my whole time is spent managing a team building a team um customers and meetings and all this other stuff and so I'm focused on self-development and business and Leadership and all this other stuff and like I'm excited to talk about it but now I don't have a platform to talk about it I have a platform to talk about what I wanted to talk about two years ago and then I was just stuck talking about it in 2019. then I felt kind of stuck talking about in 2020 then I felt stuck talking about it and everywhere I would look in every big um person I would look to you know whether it was Alex hermosi or any of these like big people again you might not know them if you're in the coding space but like these people in the marketing world right let's just say they were saying Focus one thing stick to one thing winners just stick to one thing over a long period of time and that's how they win and that's how life is supposed to be you just focus you cut everything else out and you just got to be disciplined and it's just you being distracted and broke people are distracted don't get distracted and so all those things built up and it's obviously fault of my own as well just built up a lot of pressure in my mind to be like you know what I have to just keep growing this thing this is the only thing I have to grow and so even I was disconnected I was like well I could still be disciplined and it's still valuable for people and it could still bring value to people and I still have a lot of knowledge to give so then I just stay diligent and focused and I'm like even if I don't enjoy it other people get value out of it so I just should keep doing it keep doing it keep doing it so I grind it all of 2019 and did that and then 2020 we built a big team and had crazy Revenue coming in every single month only to realize that we were losing money and bleeding money every single month um and then a bunch of team members left at the end of 2020 and that was pretty bad and kind of awful and then 2021 was similar experience it was just like we have to make like hundred thousand dollars a month or have to make like 150 000 a month like there's no other choice we have to do that but then the depressing part at the end of the month there was a month I think 2020 2021 I'm like losing track of some of the years but like there was there were there was months where keep in mind I'm this kid who came from Pakistan who like didn't really have anything growing up you know went to a religious school where they beat the out of you like all this random stuff and I'm not saying I was like from a you know poor family but we were like middle class we were like low middle class and you know um my family was doing like slightly above minimum wage jobs and we were doing you know okay but to go from that to like you're growing a channel and you have all this all these subscribers that you have all this income coming in and you have all this all these students that you're taking care of I was like this is crazy and so we were hitting months that were like 200 250 000 in a month and I was like this is unreal but the crazy thing was the expenses that month were like 260 000. like imagine that just imagine that I mean it's crazy right to imagine I think it's even crazier for people to understand you can make more than like forty thousand dollars or like sixty thousand dollars in a year like that seems so crazy right so you're making 260 000 in a month but here's a pathetic part on 250 000 50 000 that you're making you're spending two hundred and sixty thousand or two hundred fifty five thousand and so I was actually more broke than a normal person like a normal person just doing a job at McDonald's was richer than I was and that was a very sad moment because there was so much Financial pressure that I was feeling in that time it was crushing me literally crushing my soul underneath and the financial pressure was like we gotta run all these ads because we have 25 people on the team and they feel like my friends and they feel like my family and I can't fire them so I have to just do things to make money I have to do it for them and I have to I have to have to have to and at some point it just got to a point where we couldn't keep it up anymore and I kind of was like Crush under got crushed under the pressure and then you know 2021 or something along those lines we had to just let go of everybody on the team and kind of start over from scratch and once I did that I started feeling peace again and kind of Joy again I started enjoying things but still the problem remained which was like I was just trying not to lose all the success I had built and I just kept sticking with the coding Channel and encoding content and and again it wasn't like my day-to-day passion anymore it was something I just did because I thought it brought value to other people and so that was 2021 2022 2023 and so imagine like you know spending one year of like real passion and six or seven years out of just sheer discipline and focus and consistency and and project management and like and that's how I got to a million subscribers and you know some of you look at my content you're like no I I don't know like you guys are really smart you probably can feel by my energy and you've seen videos really see really that into it I mean again when I'm doing the videos it's not like I'm faking it I'm enjoying the videos but over it's like I fit I would figure out how to kind of enjoy when I was in the middle of it you know but it wasn't something I obsessed about because I didn't do it on a regular basis to this day I still sit down sometimes and if I have an opportunity to code or build an app I'll have one of my developers on the team and I'll just sit down with them on a meeting and start building up with him and before I realized six hours have passed and so I enjoy that when I when I'm in that zone then I like talking about it but for the last six years I wasn't coding I had to like build the business and grow the channel and like everything that was coding and a lot of lessons I learned from that and it's like if I was making like like who was I making 250 000 a month for if I was losing 250 000 like my income is zero right I'm broke the income is zero yes there were years where we had like profit and stuff but I I would reinvest aggressively but like you know and I always laughed and I would say like it's interesting how many ways there are to make zero dollars and so at the end of the day there's no income coming in and I'm still somebody who has like you're making zero dollars so why not like you could if you you could make 250 000 and then make zero dollars and have all that crazy stress that comes with having to make that money and managing a team and AD spend and all this stuff or you could just be at zero dollars like AKA just have no expenses and also be making no money like it's the same thing but one of them is a lot less stressful right and so then I'm like why am I doing this like going at such a crazy pace and so those were a couple of big realizations that I've had over the last few years and then now what it has come to essentially is like what I've been really excited to do is show people how to grow their YouTube channels what I've been really excited to do is even more than that honestly is I want to make content that challenges me because for me it's boring to keep making the same content again and again top five programming languages top five highest paying programming jobs three tips developers didn't know Tick Tock app but let's build LinkedIn let's build this and let's build this and let's build this it's like it just doesn't fulfill me right it's like boring it's easy and you felt that way right in life where you figure out something and then at some point it feels boring and you kind of want a new challenge and that's why we like even coding because there's always a new problem to solve and so it was killing me to have just the same problem trying to just okay we got to keep solving this problem over and over again and so the direction I'm heading in is one where now thank God I'm not in a in a position I've gotten myself out of a position where um I don't need um I I like I've gotten myself out of a position where I don't need literally any of the viewers money I don't need any customers money I don't need YouTube ads uh spent to give me money um I don't need sponsorship money like none of those things are necessary and so now I'm like what do I actually want to do and what comes to me is I want to pursue creatively challenging things that interest me that are hard that are exciting you know and so um you know like ran like for example Joma Tech is a great example how he just went the route of like chasing his Creative Vision you know and I'll give you a simple example of my like I love that type of stuff love that type of crazy content and um recently I made a video on Clever programmer and if you look that's the last video that I made with all my a heart and effort and um it's the chat GPT one and I even edited it in in on my channel it crushed it because on the clever programmer Channel I don't really get that many views I actually get very little views um per video like 10 day 10K views or 8K views and that video I was on um Chad GPT built my app in minutes and that video in one month got like 600 000 views and if you watch that video you can see that I'm enjoying myself making that video I'm enjoying the art behind it I'm enjoying the storytelling behind it and if you watch that video you'll enjoy it and it's funny and it's kind of crazy and it's wild and so like that to me is creatively challenging and fulfilling and so if there happens to be some kind of creative challenge something that's fulfilling in the coding World I'll make a video you know on this channel but I I my gut feeling is you're not gonna see a lot of content for me on this channel for now like there might be some random stuff I want to share like this and I might drop it but um mostly I want to be making videos on my personal brand rafikaze that's the one I want to grow and I have lots of crazy ideas that I want to pursue and so some content I want to make on chess because I love chess and so I've been making content on that there's going to be some other content that's going to be like really crazy um like so think like some some kind of crazy challenge or something people are really curious about you know and um I don't assure that that much yet because sometimes when I share I get the high of just sharing it and then I end up not doing it so I'll keep it to myself for now and then once it's real you'll see it live on my personal brand Channel like rafikaze and so that's what's that's what's exciting me so I want to pursue that and then I want to you know if there's something that excites me in the coding world to talk about I'll talk about it from time to time or sometimes I want to share with you or if you guys like this video then maybe I'll make more like these because I'm just like what would I do if like literally I didn't care about like having to support a team or a payroll or any of that and you just focus and even now we have a now we have a very lean team um yeah so and and I spent all day today cutting like software expenses because I'm like what I need to do over the last next 10 years is put myself in a position where I can maximize how many risks I can take because the more risks I can take the more chances I get at one just fulfilling my own self and having less regret in life two I maximize my flow state um and and obviously my growth and so I want to do things that maximize my growth right which is taking risk so how do I put myself in this position to take those risks well how I do that is by not having ridiculous overhead not having a ridiculously large Titanic sized team to support because then it goes from what's the thing that I want to do that fulfills me that can also bring value to everybody else like you it goes from that to how do I get this team member paid next month because if I don't do this you know like if I don't make money and I'm Not The Rainmaker that they think I am they don't get paid they don't get to put food on the table right and it's not that dramatic because people are very resourceful right and so it's like if you can't make it they'll get a job and everybody on my team is so talented that like if they bounce they'll have a job Max in one week like everybody is a killer like if they weren't before they are now everybody's super talented on the team now um and so yeah it's like I it's like now that I don't have that pressure I want to pursue the things that I want to pursue and enjoy and you know if I could go back and this is where I think it could be valuable for you but it's like if I could go back man I would just focus on what's like I would really make the foundation with something I enjoy like I would really really really really really make that the foundation and not go from like this Duty passion like this discipline like there's nothing wrong with discipline but it's like what do you throw a discipline at right they find through discipline at the thing that fed me and made me really excited I would have been like 10 times a bigger Channel without even needing all that team because honestly the one of the reasons I needed such a massive team is because I didn't want to do any of those things that I was doing like they were not fun they were boring as to me and so I was like that's why I had a big team that was the reason I was just paying everybody to like hey you do all the stuff that like I really don't want to do and now that it's like I'm doing all of the things that I really want to be doing I'm like not like no I want to edit like I want less editors I want to edit and so my message to you is just can you make your joy the foundation make that the foundation and then build discipline on top of that and then build other things on top of that you know because the last thing I want you to do is like spend six years trying to become a coder when you really just didn't like it and you only were doing it because you're trying to impress your friend or you're trying to show your dad they're smart enough to be able to do that but like you don't actually like it you don't actually enjoy it you know what I mean um yeah so I would I would say spend time thinking about that so spend um spend time thinking about what you want to truly do and then build on top of that you know I think that's going to be a beautiful thing like you can't see it but I have my 1 million Subs plaque like that's pretty cool but I kind of I don't want to kind of built the wrong thing because that's a pretty bold statement but I kind of built the thing that I wasn't that passionate about you know I'm okayly passionate about it like I can enjoy it certainly but is it's not something that I was doing on a regular basis and I'd rather build a brand and a channel on things that I'm doing on a regular basis like I just did 100 day Muay Thai Challenge and so like I'd rather make content on that right like because that's top of my mind it's exciting to me just did a hundred days spent 100 days and um so I did 100 days of Muay Thai and I ended up doing a Muay Thai fight at the end of the hundred days so that's exciting to talk about I did a hundred day I went from couch potatoes to running a marathon in 100 days like that was exciting so I would want to talk about that and that's something I have the freedom to talk more about on my personal brand and now that I have a smaller team and lower expenses I don't need every single video to bang it crazy amount of viewership so that could get crazy amount of money or whatever like I can I can make content that I want to make even if it gets like 2 000 views like this video like it's probably gonna get like 1300 views you know because I'm not talking about coding and I'm talking I'm putting it on my coding Channel but I just don't care because if one it makes me feel good just to talk about this and two because I think I just want one person to listen to it and get value out of it like a person who is maybe gonna create content or is a content creator and might not ever comment on it but watches it and is like holy like I was going down that path and it helped me change and I'm not going to pursue that path and I'm gonna go into like what makes me excited and passionate and um yeah and then for somebody who's becoming a developer but they realize like that's not their thing you know they don't really enjoy it they're doing it for lots of other reasons like don't do it if you don't enjoy it only do it if you enjoy it like your joy of it should be the foundation that's my message to you I love you well I'll see you bye\n"