How YouTube Changed My Life in 3 Years (From Pharmacist to 7 Figures)

So, I went from $300,000 in student loan debt to making seven figures on YouTube in 3 years. No inheritance, no connections, no trust fund, just a gray bedsheet, a mediocre camera, and a system that I figured out the hard way. And I know that a lot of people are stuck in a similar situation to the one that I was in, and I know that a lot of people want to start on YouTube. So, today I'm going to be breaking down every single turning point and breaking down the most important lessons that I learned so that you don't have to make the same mistakes that I did, and you can learn the lessons faster. Okay, so let me take you back to where this all started. I'm living in Bellingham, Washington, just outside of Seattle. I'm a freshly graduated pharmacist making around $10,000 a month, and on paper that sounds great, right? But here's what the paper doesn't show you. I had $300,000 in student loan debt, and I had six roommates. Yes, six. And I was stuck inside of a pharmacy box for minimum 12-hour shifts where I couldn't even step outside to take a breath of fresh air. No, like literally I could not step outside. That was against the rules. And I'm not going to lie, for the first few months I was actually happy because I grew up poor. Like Section 8 housing poor, trailer park poor, even homeless at one point poor. So, going from that to making $10,000 a month meant that I could actually buy stuff. I could go to restaurants. I didn't have to tell my friends that I couldn't afford to come out with them anymore. But that initial high faded fast. Then the pandemic hit and everything got worse. Most of my staff quit, some were scared of getting sick, others wanted to collect unemployment and get paid to do nothing, and I was doing three to five people's jobs by myself. And one day the air conditioner broke, so I was literally sweating, running around the pharmacy trying to get everybody's prescriptions ready. Oh, and we also got robbed three times in a 6-month period because everyone was wearing masks, so you couldn't even identify who was doing it. And so, on top of being super stressed and overworked, hating my job, I was also in fear of my physical safety. And then one day, I checked my student loan balance, and it was over $300,000. I spent $300,000 so that I could stand inside of a box 12 plus hours a day, do five people's jobs, and also be in fear of my physical safety. But honestly, I'm pretty mentally strong, and through all of that, I just powered through. But there was one thing that was actually my breaking point. One of my coworkers had been working for the company that I was working for for 40 years. And there was a day where she actually hit her 40th year with the company. And on that day, I happened to be working. And the company did absolutely nothing for her. Zero recognition whatsoever. The only thing they did is they sent out an automated letter to her, basically saying she could select some sort of gift from a registry that's probably worth about $5 or less, and she would get that gift shipped to her for free. That's it. Nothing else. The manager and I actually ended up buying her a cake, and if we hadn't done it ourselves, she would have gotten zero recognition. So, think about this for a moment. She spent 40 years of her life working for a company, basically dedicated her entire life to the company. And when she hit her 40th year, she got zero recognition. She was literally just a cog in a machine. And that was my breaking point. That's when I knew that something had to change. And so, I started looking for a way out. I started typing into YouTube and Google how to make money online, or what side hustles make money, and all kinds of different stuff like that. And like most people, I fell for the flashy marketing, the Lamborghinis, the I make 50K a month from my laptop on the beach stuff, and I bought courses from people like Kevin David, who I'm pretty sure was just copying other people's courses and then reselling them. I bought Tai Lopez's SMMA course. I tried social media marketing, and I even got a few clients, but nothing was sustainable. And then there was selling physical products like Amazon FBA and Shopify. So, here's one of the products that I had. It was called the Booty Blaster, and it was basically this workout band thing that you strap to your leg, and it was supposed to work your glutes. And I lost a bunch of money on that one, and I'm not even going to show you what the product looked like because it's just embarrassing. But, here's the thing. Every single one of those failures taught me something. The business models all worked. My mindset was the thing that was wrong. And then I found Sam Ovens' Consulting Accelerator course. And what I liked about this guy is he didn't promise easy. He basically said, "Becoming a successful entrepreneur is going to be painful. You're going to need to improve yourself as a human being first." And that hit me differently than anything else that I'd heard because everyone else was basically saying that I deserve to make money, and making money was super easy, and basically just telling me what I wanted to hear. But, Sam basically said that I shouldn't be trying to make money. I should be trying to become a person who deserves to make money. And that was the mindset shift that changed everything. Now, right around this time, a friend of one of my roommates invited me to this rich guy's house. And this guy had multiple luxury cars in his driveway. Beautiful house, three dogs that are different colors, and I'm not even trying to make this up. They were named Obama, Trump, and Hillary. And basically, they were a husband and wife content creator team, and they were targeting businesses with software, and they were making serious money. Like, $10,000 in a couple of hours type of money. And at the end of the night, he was gracious enough to hang out with me even though I was a nobody, and he pointed at a camera, and he said this, "If there's one thing you take away from tonight, know this. This camera will make you rich. Don't forget that." And I took that to heart. I went home, I set up a gray bedsheet behind my desk as a background. If you watch my early videos, that's what you're seeing, a literal bedsheet. And I put books on my chair to raise it up so the camera wouldn't show my bed in the frame, and I started recording. And around the same time, I met a guy named Sam. He'd moved to the US from Lebanon, and he couldn't get a normal job because of immigration stuff. So, he was forced to start a business and he was making a good six figures a year teaching photography on YouTube. And he took me under his wing, taught me the ropes, and that's when things started clicking. And my first banger video was called the most useless degrees. It got over 4 million views and I started getting traction fast. This is when I hired my first virtual assistant Paulo, who's now my general manager by the way. He basically handles thumbnails, editing, scripts, emails, comments, everything. And within months I was making $10,000 a month on YouTube. Then it was 20,000, then it was 30,000, and I was already making two to three times more than what I made as a pharmacist. But I was afraid to quit my job at that point. I had spent so much time going to school, spending all those years getting my doctorate and taking out a massive amount of student loans, and I was afraid to quit. Even though I was making way more money from my side hustle than my job and I was spending way less time on my side hustle, I was still afraid to quit. I was thinking that maybe it's just a temporary thing and maybe people are just, you know, watching YouTube more because it's the pandemic. All these excuses popped into my head. And because of this I got stuck around $30,000 a month for a long time. I simply just did not have the bandwidth to scale the business beyond that. But eventually I saved a little bit of money up and I took a big leap and I decided to actually quit my job. And I'll tell you that was one of the scariest and best decisions that I've ever made. And the thing that actually was the turning point that made me quit my job was when I actually took a trip to Puerto Rico with my best friend. And we actually stayed in a hostel and I met people that were in this hostel. They were actually working remotely making really good money while they were traveling. And they actually told me how much their expenses were and it really wasn't all that much. In fact, I was paying way more money to live in Bellingham, Washington than they were to travel the world. And to be honest, I was very risk-averse, but that really appealed to me. I could travel the world and spend way less money than what I was actually spending living in a place that I didn't really want to live. So that is when I decided to quit my job and I was making 10 to 30k per month from YouTube and I started traveling the world, right? Puerto Rico was first, but I also spent a lot of time in the San Juan Islands. I went up to Canada. I traveled to Thailand, the Philippines, etc., right? I went to the Philippines, for instance, and visited Paulo. And life was good, but I hit a wall. You see, I met other YouTubers who had way smaller channels than me, and they were making way more money. And I'm sitting there like, "What the heck am I doing wrong?" And here's what I figured out. I was thinking like a content creator, not like a business owner. I was making most of my money from AdSense, which are basically the ads that pop up on your channel. So, I read this book called Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, and it completely changed how I thought about monetization. I started layering in affiliate marketing more, digital products, coaching, sales funnels. And my income went from 30K a month to 100K a month. Same channel, same audience, same number of videos, just completely different monetization. And that's when I realized that subscriber count means absolutely nothing when it comes to revenue. So, now I'm making 100K per month with the same amount of views that I was making 10 to 30K per month with before. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, I was actually kind of running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I was doing everything. Scripts, ideas, editing feedback, emails, managing a team of 10 to 15 people. It was a mess. I was making great money, but I was burning out. Then I read this book called Traction by Gino Wickman. And this is the book that took me from 100K per month to 300K per month and beyond, while reducing my work to about 4 hours a week. I implemented a system called EOS, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And I gave everyone my team clear roles, clear responsibilities, and clear metrics, and I started removing myself from every process that didn't require me. And all I had to do was show up for one general meeting each week, and then record videos, and that's it. I didn't have to write the scripts, I didn't have to come up with the ideas, I didn't have to do the thumbnails, I didn't have to do the editing. It was all automated for me. And here's the thing that blows people's minds. The content was actually better than when I was doing everything myself, because now I had specialists handling each piece instead of me half-assing everything. And because of this, we were able to actually scale the business to even having a million-dollar month. So, I went from a gray bedsheet studio to having a million-dollar month. And look, I'm not special. I'm not smarter than you. I literally grew up homeless living in Section 8 housing playing Runescape at the public library. I just figured out a system. Content creation for traffic, proper monetization for revenue, and operations to scale. Traffic, revenue, scale. That's the whole thing. So, if you're sitting there right now in a job you hate, if you're drowning in debt, or you just feel stuck, I've been there, literally. And I'm telling you, YouTube changed my life. Not overnight, not without pain, not without a lot of failure along the way. YouTube is simple, but it's not easy. But getting YouTube down changed everything for me. And because of the fact that I appreciate the mentors that I had so much and the knowledge that they shared with me, I actually do completely free live trainings myself, and I'm doing one this week. So, click the link in the description and the pin comment below. This will be a Zoom call live with me where we will go through literally exactly how I get views and how I make money from YouTube. And then at the end, I'll answer literally any question that you have about YouTube for as long as you have questions. So, yeah, click the link in the description and the pin comment below to attend that, and I look forward to seeing you there. Now, if you want to go deeper on exactly how the system works, one of the most important things is the video idea. And in this video, I talk about exactly how you can come up with the right video ideas. So, click right here to check that out.