In this video I want to discuss a deep work strategy as a procrastinator that helped me make $700,000 in 30 days.
That may sound a bit outrageous, but bear with me, it makes sense when you actually watch the video.
But to start, I procrastinate a lot.
But I've learned to view this as a good thing no matter how much society tells me that this is a bad thing, and I've realized that procrastination is my superpower to doing what most people think is impossible.
I wait until the last minute, but in that last minute I launch into the flow state, and my mind is impossible to distract from the task at hand.
And when I do this, you would think that the quality of my work isn't that good, but I've learned that the work is higher quality than if I were to do weeks upon weeks of scattered planned work trying to build out the project.
When there isn't any pressure to do so, and my mind isn't forced to solely focus on the things in life that help me build that project.
And I've discovered that this isn't a character flaw, this is a character trait.
It's just how some people are wired.
You only focus when focus is needed.
And you know this is you.
If you're bad at texting people back, you rarely did your homework on time in school, client work is put off until the last minute, this is me, that's me.
Or you struggle to make progress in business because you don't have someone managing you when it's time to publish a project.
This is something that goes so wrong for people that have been under a boss their entire life is that they've been managed, they have the employee mindset, they are told what to do and they only do what they're told.
So when it comes time to do their own thing, they're completely lost, they don't know what to do because they can't be their own boss.
If this is you, procrastination is the secret to get ahead of 99% of people, if you learn to harness that superpower.
The thing with this is that if this is you, you find it difficult to do work that doesn't result in direct feedback from that work.
This is why you love playing things like video games or doing sports is because you know exactly how well you're doing in the timeframe that you're allowed to do it.
So the problem here is that you're not treating your work or your life or the project that you're building as a game.
Even worse, society has made you feel bad for this character trait.
You constantly feel like you're falling behind others because you can't and shouldn't play the same game as them.
You don't need to change, you need to understand yourself, structure your life accordingly and make calculated decisions.
So to start, we need to understand my concept of tactical stress and how I've used that in my life.
In a nutshell, it's forcing yourself to survive.
You need pressure, setting a deadline to force you to work, investing in your business to force you to make money, booking the flight to force you to make a change.
Take the risk because that's not as risky as a comfortable, boring life.
The best decisions I've made in my life are the stupidest decisions.
I maxed out my first credit card at 19 for inventory on a business that failed fast.
I signed multiple leases on apartments that I never thought I could afford.
I got rid of everything I owned to fly across the country because I saw an opportunity.
I purchased an expensive software that cleared my bank account as a bet on my business success.
I built a landing page and accepted orders for a product before it was built.
I've done this with every launch because 1.
If it doesn't sell, I don't waste more of my time.
And second, if it does sell, I'm forced to build it out before the launch date.
Every time I took these risks, I gave myself two options.
One is to figure it out and two is to be crushed.
I had to choose between the two of those.
So understand that this isn't for the faint hearted.
This isn't for people who don't believe in themselves or their ability to learn and educate.
You don't need to know how to do it.
You need to have the desire to do it because that desire outweighs the knowledge of how to do it because the person with the largest desire is going to do whatever it takes to figure it out.
When I put myself into these situations, it was my quarterly powerlifting competition for my mind.
I put myself under my mental bench press max and forced myself to lift it without a spotter.
And an example I see often in the business space is a question like, should I purchase this software or should I purchase this course or should I purchase something or should I take the free option?
Or asking if they should even start because they don't like their current situation.
So the question is, should I start or wait for the pain of my situation that I want to get out of no matter what to become so great that I'm forced to start, but it's going to take two years for that to happen.
So what should I do? Should I start now or should I start when I'm forced to start?
And the answer here is obvious.
When I spent $1,000 on software, when that was the last $1,000 in my bank account, I was forced to learn and build with that software to make that money back.
When I spent $3,500 on a course, I was forced to make the teachings work to make that money back.
When I moved into an $8,000 a month apartment, I was forced to increase my income to make that feel comfortable resulting in $100,000 extra per month in my bank account.
Now, obviously one thing doesn't lead to another moving into this apartment doesn't automatically add $100,000 to my bank account.
Buying a $3,500 course doesn't automatically add like make me the money back.
I have to do the work required to get there.
This is just me throwing an anchor into the unknown and saying, hey, I'm absolutely dedicated to achieving this.
I'm going to put everything on the line.
Now I need to do what is necessary to achieve it because if you don't have that pressure, if you don't have that anchor that you throw out, there's nothing holding you accountable to do it.
And if you look at your current situation in life, how has that been working out for you?
And for the topic of this video, when I made $700,000 in 30 days, it was from a product that I had yet to build.
And so when I had that money, I had to build the product.
Of course, I gave myself enough time to do it, but it's just these tactical risks that you take that make you do the thing that you want to do and not allow yourself to procrastinate further than you have to.
So for clarity and those who may benefit from this and for those that clicked on this video because they're like, I want to make $700,000 a month, it wasn't actually 700,000.
It was $687,886 in May of 2023.
So just for clarity, it wasn't a flat 700k.
And a few things happened here.
I created a two week long cohort that was four calls long on one topic for $150.
Things like cohorts have scarcity baked in because there's an enrollment date.
It was increasing the price of another course at the time, which is more scarcity.
I had the usual sales from my other products.
I use the strategy I'll go over later to promote them.
And I have a pretty large audience at this point in my journey, and it wouldn't have been possible without putting in four years of effort into that.
So there's a few things here where this may not be possible for you right now, but it may in the future, if you set yourself up to be in the situation to get there.
But that doesn't mean that you can't use the strategy to make a lot of money doing your own thing in that amount of time.
So a side note here is that with digital products, you can build fast and do this often.
It only took me four to five hours to build the cohort material above.
With physical products, you have to build them as you sell or put a lot of time into product development, like when I launched my book.
This is why I heavily test ideas with content and digital products first, meaning I'm not willing to build something like let's say Cortex, where that's going to take $500,000 of my own money that's going to take, we have a burn rate of $30,000 a week, I'm going to talk about that more in the next video.
But I'm not going to do that unless I have full confidence that the idea will work.
And the only way I can come to the conclusion that that idea will work is if one, I have social media content that is validated, social media is a testing ground for ideas, not just a place to build an audience, it's a way to test marketing angles and anything else to make sure that you succeed in whatever it is that you build.
Then I can turn those into a digital product and then sell that because it doesn't cost me anything to make.
I have an audience, I can build that this is a logical progression for most people that are starting out in building a business, you start on social media and you validate any idea that you want to build, you go into a digital product, you sell that see how it does, then you turn the digital product into whatever it is that you want to build.
So Cortex comes from to our writer to our writer is like one of my top selling courses, it has a system in it, I'm using that system to build a software around it.
And so since to our writer has sold Cortex I'm assuming will sell and do pretty well.
Let's get into the actual lesson.
You're okay with where you are because you won't take the risk that forces you to a level you can't fathom right now.
There's a myth that floats around occasionally and I spread this myth in one of my previous videos but I'm here to correct it, it's that goldfish grow to fit the tank you put them in, but if you keep them in a small bowl, they never grow.
In reality, smaller tanks lead to poor water quality and less room to move freely so it's not that they never grow, it's that they suffer and die.
This is a slight but important difference.
So when you're in a situation and you never try to push past it, you never try to push beyond, you never try to take that risk.
It's not that you just never grow like the goldfish in a bowl, it's that the your environment your situation gets so polluted that you suffer endlessly.
So it's not that you aren't growing, it's that you just continue to suffer.
And if you want to escape that, then you need to get out of the bowl.
You need to push further, you need to take a huge risk.
Or what we're talking about here is taking a leap of faith.
The purpose of tactical stress is to launch yourself into the unknown, the land of infinite potential.
Because if you don't, entropy takes hold and you slowly begin to drown and suffer until the pain is so great that you have to do it anyway.
But you have to understand that when you launch yourself into these new situations, it's too much for your mind to digest, you're going to feel absolutely overwhelmed, you're going to feel very stressed.
But you can use that stress to focus, because this is what tactical stress does.
It maintains perspective.
When you're in a do or die situation, you have no option but to focus on your goal.
Distractions don't register in your awareness.
So you can't fall to them.
It creates a deadline, because most deadlines don't work because they aren't real.
If you spend money on something or accept money for something, you are forced to deliver a real deadline is created.
It creates narrow focus survival mode puts you in a temporary state of stress stress narrows your focus on the task at hand, which allows you to survive.
The only thing on your mind is achieving the goal you set out to achieve.
And it makes life enjoyable.
Since your goal is top of mind, anything you experience is filtered to aid in that goal.
The books you read conversations you have and content you consume all magically seem to help you dopamine floods your brain as pattern recognition gets pushed into overdrive.
If your life isn't enjoyable, or you aren't making progress, maybe it's time to finally take a leap.
Only give yourself two options when or die.
And if you understand that success is a result of skill and knowledge, not luck, I have trust that you'll figure it out.
I don't want to hear any excuses because that's just a prime example of a lack of skill.
Now let's actually dive into the deep work routine.
This isn't like a super structured deep work routine.
But this is how I fabricate urgency to start this will not work unless you take full control of your life.
The reason you show up to a job every day is because your survival is at stake.
If you don't, if you want to be free, you have to recreate this effect in your own work.
Most people quit because they have nothing holding them accountable to continue writing, building and selling toward their vision.
Everyone has a desire to be wealthy because they desire to do the work they want to do.
Yet most people suppress this desire because they've been conditioned to believe they don't stand a chance.
Or they just feel guilty for making money because they grew up in an environment, physical or digital, that had a terrible relationship with it.
The only reason that I was able to do this is because I had full control over my time and income.
In other words, I had a business.
Some of these strategies can help you at work, but you need a business to fully leverage the asymmetric payoffs that come from taking risks.
A business gives you the creative boundaries to increase your income as much as you'd like.
That isn't possible at 99.99% of jobs, and I'm guessing you aren't in a small minority that will make over $500,000 a year by working up the corporate ladder for 10 to 20 years when you can achieve that in one to three years of focused effort on building your own thing.
I've had multiple friends and students make that amount in that timeframe by trusting the audience building and digital product process I teach.
The question now is, what exactly do I do when I take a risk that forces me to survive?
I'm going to walk you through my quarterly planning process that led to making the $700,000 in 30 days.
But this isn't of course, that's just a hook for the video.
This is for whatever you want to achieve in life, whether it's making more money, or getting into a relationship, or moving across the country, whatever you want to do, what are your goals?
Do you have any? You should.
You can repeat this as much as you'd like, because you have to realize that you won't make that much money in the first few rounds.
You just don't, that's just not a possibility for you unless you have the resources to do so.
I'm not saying like, Oh, nobody can do this.
I'm just saying it takes time to build up to that level.
You'll know when you can do that.
So step zero, let's just go over how I structure my days, because you've probably read about my routine before, but the driving factor of it is this tactical stress on the micro level, right?
This happens on like a quarterly level, on a macro level on a micro level on like a day, week, month, quarter level, I have some form of deadline and urgency that is created that makes me work.
I build new projects in the first block of each morning.
Right now, it's my next book, I write for the second block of each morning.
I maintain different aspects of my business for the third block of each morning, I go on walks to clarify ideas and set intentions for my work in between blocks.
And I go to the gym as a hard cut off time for my work.
I have a life to enjoy after work, or at least I think I do.
So I know that if I want to enjoy my life, I have to get my work done before I go to the gym after my work is done.
The gym is my hard cut off time where I have other things planned.
If I want to enjoy my priorities, work isn't my priority.
My priority is the gym, my relationships, my rest, my free time, all the things that lead to the quality and my work.
So if my work is going to be good, I need to prioritize other things in my life.
Therefore, when my time for going to the gym comes, and that's the cut off time for my work, I better have all of that work done or else my entire system is destroyed, right?
My newsletter isn't going to get written, my other writing is going to suck, my projects aren't going to be built, my entire life is going to suffer because I'm not continuously pushing to not work.
Now to structure everything that leads to like what you do on a daily basis, we need quarterly projects.
If you don't sell your own product, you will be forced to sell someone else's.
And there is a mind virus in the online space.
It seems like everyone is selling something nowadays.
Look at this guy selling a product, he's a sellout.
I see this under many high level individuals posts, or like I saw on Ali Abdull's posts like a few like a week ago, they were just saying like ads, ads, ads, maybe he was promoting a bit too much.
But what these people don't realize is that Ali Abdull is both a business and a person, he is a one person business, he's distributing value, he needs to get paid, he's not working a job.
You don't see the importance of ads or promotions because someone is handing you a paycheck, you're not in control of your life.
And yes, you just need a product to make an income.
There's literally no other way, maybe a service, a product, whatever you need value to distribute in exchange for money.
So that's another problem with these people is that they don't understand people actually like their products, like the people commenting ads, ads, ads aren't customers, they're not the ones buying it because they don't see the value in it, because they don't have a goal that is different from the goal they're assigned.
And that's just how the economy works, buying and selling.
And sure, you can invest money to make an income and you can bank on that.
But if you don't have cash flow, if you don't have a lot of money to invest, then you're not going to see much substantial payouts.
It's just better to start a business.
Why would I invest however many dollars occasionally to have a million dollars that I can cash out in 50 years, when I can just spend two to three years building a business and make that every year, and then invest it so that I make 20, 30 X that amount in 50 years from now.
And when you're investing money and you don't have a business, where did you get that money by playing a role in a company that sells a product, you are selling a product to the whole like ads, ads, ads comments that you're commenting on to the people's posts, you're contributing to those for a business that you don't control and is probably more unethical than you
think. So my advice to you, if you're watching this is to just ignore the blind hypocrites and build a product.
Now, ever since I started my business, I've launched a product every quarter.
Why this is important. It gave me plenty of ideas to write about relating to the product because I was fleshing out the outline.
I wrote most of the product as tweets and newsletters to test what ideas and marketing angles work before I launched.
There's actually a review on my book on Goodreads.
Goodreads reviews are brutal, man.
There's one where it's just like this is just rehashed from his news newsletters, like saying my book was, it's quite the opposite.
My newsletters are rehashed from my book outline so that I can test and develop the ideas and see what works.
So the people that follow the newsletters, they get a sneak peek, they get the first taste of the book, they get to see it be built out in real time.
It's not that I just take my newsletters and turn them into a book.
It's that I write my book by testing the ideas in newsletters.
The next thing is that product launches are the most profitable part of your product's timeline, like a graph that shoots up fast, drops hard, and levels out at a certain number.
Third, I wanted to diversify my income streams.
When you're building an audience, one product can do well, but you wouldn't bet on one stock to make you rich.
Fourth is I became more experienced and had something more valuable to launch each quarter.
If you're doing this whole business thing right, you should have something new and better than the competition that you should launch.
This leads to a lot of people copying you to capitalize on your good ideas, but you still get the most sales and reputation quarterly launches keep you on top.
The online space is competitive.
Obviously, people just copy things left and right, they copy what's working.
So if you aren't the innovator, you aren't the one that's continuously staying on top, then you're going to drown.
But you think this is a lot of hard work.
This is what makes life meaningful, like we talked about before.
This is a good thing to do for not only your development, but your business development.
Next, I don't have to worry about being extremely successful with one launch because I know I'll be iterating on it within three months.
A lot of people wait to launch product because they're like, Oh, I don't know if it'll work.
I don't know if I'll make any money.
Just launch it. You're going to launch another one anyways.
And lastly, gave me quarterly public deadlines to hit.
I didn't have to guess when my next project was going to launch.
So I couldn't get stagnant with my business.
If I wanted my income to increase, rather than decrease, I had to launch product to survive.
And people often ask, What is the one thing that helped you get so far ahead of other people in this space?
And I would confidently say that it's launching a product every quarter.
It built my authority kept me focused and prevented me from trying to fuel a dead product.
So what kind of products can you launch in such a short time period?
This is the other important part.
Courses, cohorts, coaching, ebooks, templates and other digital products have a low marginal cost of replication.
And you can build fast with the technology available to you and is only available to you right now.
This isn't something you could do 10 20 years ago.
So at the start, these should form your brand and be the foundation of your cash flow.
Don't try to get complex with products until you have the cash flow until you have a base income by doing this.
And if you've watched any of my other videos on how creators evolve, you start with digital product to solidify yourself in business and then you go on to create more complex products, you can evolve beyond them, you don't have to sell them forever.
There's an incredibly good starting point for any brand or business.
Now, one question here is, do I need to launch a new product every single quarter?
Like do I need to literally build a new product?
The answer to that is no, you can combine products into a bundle and launch that you can add a new module to a current product and increase your prices, you would promote the price increase launching on a specific date, and you can run the same cohort over and over again, each quarter.
This is probably the simplest way to go about this.
And I would recommend having different topics for each cohort.
So you can attract customers with different needs.
The other thing is you can just release new things you can tack on something to the product, you can release a new feature, something like that, just launch something every quarter.
Now understand that this increases with your audience growth.
I'm if you've watched my other videos, I'm assuming you understand the importance of audience growth.
It's absolutely important to anything that I talk about.
Because when I launched a freelancing product around 500 followers, I made around $3,000.
And when I launched a branding product around 10,000 followers, I made around $10,000.
Three years later, as I accumulated all of that audience, when I launched a writing cohort, I made $700,000.
People who only sell one product and don't improve it end up marketing too hard and destroying their trust with their audience while making much, much less revenue.
Now there is a lot of nuance to product launches.
I've been a brand advisor for like three to four years now.
If you want to join Cortex University, the Builder program is where we help you do product launches, build these things.
But there's also the synthesizer and authority tiers for like whatever part of business you are in.
The lesson here is that your deep work sessions are fueled by your quarterly product launches.
Embrace procrastination at the start, you have time before the launch, work on the product outline and plan for one to two months leading up to your launch, set a public launch date, set a first promotion date three to four weeks before that, build the sales page to accept orders first, and then execute the launch and get the product built.
And if you watched the last video, the last Sunday video on the 12 rules that'll change your life, then you understand that projects are crucial for structuring your life and work.
If you feel lost is because you aren't doing this.
A project is the single thing that moves the needle towards your vision and goals.
If you aren't building something tangibly or creating something, then you aren't moving forward in your own life towards your own goals.
Now after quarterly product launches is public writing, that is the second thing.
In online business, you need three things, an audience for your work, a valuable product for that audience and good arguments to attract people to your audience and product.
Writing is the foundation of all three of those.
And I want to harp on this part again, a valuable product for that audience.
If you own a business, this video won't bother you in the slightest because you are reading it through an enlightened lens.
If you don't own a business, you may misinterpret it or only watch it from a one-sided viewpoint, especially if you have a bad relationship with money.
You have to zoom out and realize that people buy products because they want them and benefit their lives.
This isn't only about making as much money as possible.
It's about solving a problem in someone's life that is worth more than what you're asking.
And I'd also ask you to zoom out and think of all of the useless products that you buy yourself that don't benefit your life.
And then ask yourself why you don't apply that mindset to other areas.
If you can't see the value in a product that someone's offering, and you don't understand that people buy it because it benefits their lives, once you realize that, business makes sense.
You're fueling businesses every day.
If you aren't spending money every day, which I'm sure you are, you have to survive, just think for a second before you watch business videos like this one or other ones and being like, oh, that doesn't work.
Oh, he just wants to make a lot of money.
Oh, $700,000 in 30 days.
Oh, he's talking about selling to an audience.
Are you kidding me? What you're not understanding is that people in that audience want the product.
It's benefiting both people's lives.
People will spend $100 on drinks without batting an eye and destroy their health as an outcome, but won't spend $100 on their skill development that increases their earning capacity and therefore quality of life.
In to our writer, gotcha, I teach the three-point content ecosystem.
Write tweets to test ideas, write threads to expand on those ideas, turn any of those into a newsletter to nurture your audience and promote your products and use your newsletter to write new tweets and threads so you never run out of content ideas.
Now, I was actually talking about this the other day with my friend Nick Verge on Twitter and he asked about this process.
So I decided to break everything down in as simple as a way as I could.
So I'm going to throw this screenshot up.
I'm not going to read it out to you, but feel free to screenshot this because I feel like this is extremely valuable for people that understand it.
So after reading that, you understand that writing is the necessary foundation of this strategy.
I can't tell you exactly what to do because I don't understand your situation, but I can tell you what I do.
If you don't have a lot of time on your hands right now, you won't be able to do all of this and that's okay.
You don't need to for your first few product launches that replace your income.
So in terms of my writing routine, I write for 60 to 90 minutes every morning.
I start with my newsletter and write social posts as the ideas come.
I promote my newsletter once a day.
I don't post opt-in pages asking people to subscribe.
I post the actual newsletter as a blog post so people can read it, get value, subscribe, and see the products I promote in the newsletter.
This is how I get newsletter subscribers and sell my products whenever I'm not launching a product.
Then I focus my content during the product launch month.
I will write about whatever I want for two months leading up to the launch, then write only about the topics related to what I'm launching for the remaining month.
This is when I gain the most followers and authority when I'm dishing out value and launching a product that shows my expertise.
This is what people don't understand.
They're like, I don't want to sell something because I feel like people won't like it.
Selling something is what builds your authority.
It's how you change behavior.
It's how you get results.
You aren't authoritative because you don't have results.
You don't have results because you don't sell a product.
And then finally, I outline and build the product along the way but enforced to actually finish it before the public deadline.
Now, how do I stay consistent with writing?
Because I understand that if I don't write, my audience won't grow and I won't survive.
I keep myself in a constant state of good pressure that wakes me up in the morning and gets me writing.
If my audience doesn't grow, my product launch won't do well and I'm that much closer to getting a job.
Plus, as you build projects, you have much more on the line.
If I stop writing now, cortex as a whole will die.
I need money to build it and I will not let it die.
Now, once it's stable, I can take a break.
But I'm going to start a new project anyway so that my life can stay meaningful and not become mechanical and boring because I'm not pursuing something new and pushing further in my growth.
So the next thing is tactical promotions because so far, we have a public quarterly project that moves the needle toward our vision and goals.
This creates a real deadline, but only if you charge for the value you're creating under a business and daily writing to fuel the project success by building a tiered audience.
I write tweets and threads to attract the audience, funnel them to my newsletter and promote my products after I've given enough value.
Now, I'm not a fan of heavy marketing on social media.
I'm a fan of tactical promotions.
I only promote my products on social media during the last week of launch.
This keeps my profile clear of sales for all but four weeks out of the year.
People like that and often compliment the fact that I'm not pushy or salesy.
I have a soft promotion in each of my newsletters.
If you want to see these, just go read the newsletters or it's like in this video where I mentioned to our writer or Cortex University, I'm not like directly selling you on it.
I'm just mentioning like, hey, I have this here.
If it fits you and you see it valuable, you can grab it.
That's how I fuel previous products I built outside of launches.
I think people are tired of hard sales every day in their email and want a lot of value with the choice to buy something.
They don't want to feel forced.
And last, leading up to the product launch, I promote more and more each week.
Most of my income is made in the one to two days before the launch because that's when scarcity kicks in.
This is what people get wrong and this is what I have to ensure people on in Cortex University or the people that I help that when you're launching something, you're going to make a few sales scattered out here and there.
But when the scarcity kicks in, when the enrollment dates about to close, when the sale is about to end, when Black Friday is about to end, and you send that email out or you let people know, hey, it's about 10.
That's when you make the most money.
That's when you make a majority of the money from your product launch.
It's like the last few hours and most people can't stick that out or they get discouraged and quit the promotion because they're like, yeah, nobody's biting.
And it's like people will bite along the way a good amount of people.
If you have a lot of people going to the page, but most people are going to buy in the last minute.
So that's my entire strategy.
That's what holds me accountable to write every morning.
That's how I've 80 x'd. Yes, that's correct.
My income since having a web design job five years ago.
If you quite literally plan for iteration and persistence and force yourself to do the work with proper strategies, failure is a myth.
Thank you for watching.
Enjoy your weekend. Check out the stuff in the description.
One thing if you made it this far, I'm not supposed to be promoting this yet.
But Cortex writers bootcamp, if you want access to Cortex, we are adding one year access to Cortex on as a bonus to the writers bootcamp, we are not ready to launch to the public and take on a bunch of people, but we have had beta testers and we're ready to take on a few more people.
So we're offering a writers bootcamp where you can learn how to build an audience for your business, worker career in 30 days, learn to write, and as a bonus to it, not the main curriculum, you get yearly access to Cortex, which is valued at around $299.
So if you're genuinely interested in Cortex, this is my first time promoting this, but go check it out.
Link in the description or go to bootcamp.cortex.co.
That's it for this one. Thank you for watching.
Bye.
