Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais: 

Hey visionaries, welcome back to the Your Biggest Vision show. Welcome to the 50th episode of the your biggest vision show. I am so excited to be here with you guys today and share five of the biggest lessons I have learned from 50 episodes of this podcast. As a person and as a, as an entrepreneur and as a business owner. Um, it’s taught me so much and I just want to share everything with you guys today from, from the behind the scenes look and this is going to be a really good episode for you if you are somewhat new to me or new to my business because I really want to recap holistically how this happened. So from kind of the beginning of my business when I decided to start a podcast with why I decided, which hopefully will help you if you are thinking about starting something on your own, especially if it’s a podcast or like a youtube channel or something like that and how you can get to a decision that makes the most sense for you. 

We have already done an episode recapping some of the incredible interviews that we’ve had on this show that was actually episode 40. So we will link to that in the show notes. If you’re listening to this, you also can just go back in and listen to that. And that’s where we had the podcast producer and the podcast transcriptionist who is also my sister. She came on and she talked about her biggest takeaways from it. It was a really great episode. So if you’re kind of looking for that, if you really want a summary of some of the interviews, then I recommend checking that out. But today I want to talk to you about the behind the scenes lessons and learnings from my perspective. So my name is Leah. For those of you that don’t know me and I am the founder of a website called Urban 20 Something. 

I am a business coach for entrepreneurs and I also am the host of course, of this podcast. My business coaching and my programs very much go with the um, I guess the logistics of business, the strategy of business. I do a lot of email marketing, a lot of digital marketing and a lot of business strategy. And this podcast is really meant to be more of the platform that comes with the mindset of entrepreneurship and giving you tips and tricks to really hold your vision strong and high and, and, and close to your heart even when things get hard. And it doesn’t always seem like you’re on the right path because I’ve definitely been there and every single person that I have interviewed on this show in one way or another has been there as well. You know, the truth is none of us are going to have anyone in our lives ever that will care about our visions as much as we do, not our spouses, not our parents, not our children are best friends. 

And it’s not because they don’t care about your vision. You know, a lot of us are very blessed with great support systems that do care about it. But at the end of the day, it’s honestly the blunt truth is it’s not your friends and family’s job to care about your vision or your goals or your dreams. It’s yours. And I don’t mean that in a harsh way. I’m not trying to hate on anyone. It’s actually meant to be a really freeing realization because it makes you realize that if you are ever going through a moment where you feel like your friends and family don’t understand what you’re doing or they don’t really support you or you’re just not exactly sure why they’re not agreeing with you or you don’t know how to talk to them about it, the truth is it’s not their job to, they don’t need to support you. 

It is your job to pursue your vision. They have their own life, they have their own things to deal with, and the best thing you can do for yourself and for others is really put yourself first and really take care of yourself. And that’s what the show is all about. This show is about helping you become the best version of yourself and live out your own dreams so that you can be a more supportive spouse, partner, friend, sibling, child, parent. And it’s really based on the belief that the greatest way you can serve the world and give back to the world and the greatest way you can serve God is by making the most of yourself and what you were given and what you were born with and the dreams and the passions that you have. But you can’t always do that if you are feeling like things are working against you or you don’t have the right tips and tools to keep moving forward in pursuit of that because life gets in the way. 

So that’s really the purpose of this show. I started the Your Biggest Vision show almost three years after starting my business, not probably actually about two and a half years into it. And I did this in a way that allowed me to start it with an audience already in place. And I think that that’s a really important point because a lot of times I see people wanting to start a podcast or they want to start a youtube channel and it’s a good idea. You know, I love that people are so creative, but it can be hard to grow those platforms if you’re just starting from that platform. So what I was able to do was start a website and build an audience and an email list and then when I launched this show it was really a natural flow into a different way to communicate with my existing audience, if that makes sense. 

So I would recommend having an audience in place, specifically an email list before you launch anything bigger on top of that because you want to be able to have an audience ready to go and ready to listen to you so that you can really grow your platform and your content in a faster and more efficient way. There’s nothing worse than working really hard on a bunch of content to put out there and you know, really giving it your all and then feeling like no one’s listening. And I think that that can happen if you don’t have the audience and the content in place to begin with. Um, so I started at the beginning of 2019 in a good place business wise, last year, 2018 I had done a lot of creation of programs and courses. So let me backup a little just in case you guys are a bit new to me. 

So when I started my business about three and a half years ago, or a little over three years ago at this point, I did not know it was going to turn into a six figure business like it has. I started it as a blog because I was going through a confusing time. So at the time I was working as a paralegal and I thought I wanted to go to law school and I was accepted into law school and that was sort of my life plan. And I realized on a whim that I did not want to go to law school. I was not going to do this. But it was really scary for me because I didn’t know what else I wanted to do and I didn’t know what other career paths I could have. You know, I had been working toward law school for six or seven years at that point. 

So it was really scary and vulnerable to feel like I was starting from ground zero and erasing all these years of hard work. And to me it was so much about living a fulfilled life, specifically in New York, I’ve always loved New York and I always wanted to move here and at that point I had lived here for about six years, but I had been in college and I still hadn’t really just like stepped into my own life here yet. And if I wasn’t going to law school, I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen. As you all probably know, New York is not an inexpensive place to live. It’s quite pricey. And so if you don’t have a plan, a job, a purpose, it’s also not an easy place to live. It’s expensive. Your apartments are really, really small. The atmosphere is competitive. So if you don’t really have that purpose or that why to live here, it can be really, really difficult to endure and make happen. 

And in my eyes I had sort of felt like I had this quote “solid why”, which in the end wasn’t true because I didn’t really want to go to law school, but it was a really clear cut path for how I could make this dream life in New York work for me. So when I decided against it, that was a really scary time because I felt like not only had my career path just slipped away into my fingers, but so did my life in New York, which is what I had always inpatient. And I decided to blog about how I was going to find that life even though I didn’t really know how. And thus urban 20 something was born, it was really just about me to be about me as an urban 20 something year old, trying to figure out her purpose, trying to figure out her career path, trying to figure out how she could live the way she wanted to live. 

Um, you know, in a really it coming from a place that was pretty clueless. So that’s how it happened. And for about the first year, it was just a blog. I traveled during that year. I also got a new job since I wasn’t working in the legal fields anymore and I blogged about it all. I blogged about how I was learning to, to try to find a different path and trying to travel and then eventually trying to make extra money around my nine to five job because I was still sort of chasing that dream life in New York and you can’t turn it on one salary. And that’s when things really started to take off for me. So I would say that my, my blog became a business at around year two. That’s when I started to monetize it. That’s when I started to take it a bit more seriously. That’s when I started to see the power of the community and the platform I had created and really found so much fulfillment connecting with other 20 somethings, 30 somethings, 40 somethings who were in a similar boat.

Where they had kind of followed a status quo path. But we’re really unfulfilled and we’re now on a quest to figure out their own fulfillment. But they weren’t exactly sure how to do that. And along the way I realized that my blog wasn’t just going to be the vehicle to tell my story, but my blog was actually going to be the business that fulfilled the dreams that I always had. Hey Mom. My mom’s tuning in, you guys, she’s so cute. 

So that’s sort of what it became. And I got, I feel so blessed that this thing that I thought would just be a, you know, a way to vent about my confusion in life while I found my dream career ended up becoming my dream career. 

And so after that, after I started getting really serious about it, I realized I needed to, to scale it and to give it my all and to really go all in you guys. And I could do a whole podcast episode on what it really means to go all in. And I probably should because a lot of times I hear people saying they’re going all in, but their actions aren’t quite reflecting it. And I was definitely one of those people. So around that time when I started realizing its momentum, I said I was going all in and by saying going “all in” in quotes, I mean that I started making some sacrifices. Like I would not go out so much on the weekends to work on my business. And I tried to set a timeline for when I would leave my nine to five job potentially in a few years and I started taking more e-courses so I could learn more. 

So I was learning more, but I still, now looking back can see that I hadn’t really gone all in. And honestly you guys, this is one of the things I would do differently. I don’t have a whole lot of regrets, but this is something that looking back, I know I didn’t do right and that was that I just didn’t go all in. And so when I finally did decide to go all in, what that ended up looking like was investing pretty much all the money I had, actually not pretty much investing all the money I had, all the money I had saved during those first few years of working out of college into an entrepreneurship program, into a Facebook ads training for a year, a year long Facebook ads, mentorship. It meant getting an all new branding on my website. It meant actively deciding that I was going to learn more about online business and entrepreneurship and risk taking and the psychology behind fear as possible so that I could be one of the best in this field and I could rise to the top and I wouldn’t just be someone that could help you start a blog or make a few extra hundred dollars. 

And not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I knew my decision to go all in was about becoming one of the best. So I needed to learn from the best. I needed to learn as much as I could. I needed to get fierce with my deadlines and I really needed to push myself. And from there that ended up being a year, a whirlwind of a year. It was a little longer than a year, but for simplicity sake it was pretty much last year, 2018 going completely all out on in every sense of the word. I gave myself six months to quit my nine to five job, I gave myself six months to get my income up above my nine to five job before I quit it. Meaning I did whatever it took to make that happen. It also meant that I, you know, like I said, I continued investing in myself. 

I invested in myself a ton last year. Almost everything that I made, I invested back into my business. I also created several programs so that I could scale my business more. I created my signature program Scale Your Side Hustle, which has since gone on to have dozens and dozens of lives, changed people’s side hustle, started and scaled and then put their jobs. So that was fun. That was hugely fulfilling. I also went on to create a starter program for side hustlers called Start Your Side Hustle. I created an email marketing program called Limitless List and that’s really what I meant by going all out last year. I knew that I needed assets, I knew that I needed to be able to scale. I knew that I needed to have a professional brand and I knew that it needed to invest in myself and that’s what last year looks like for me and it was an intense year, but it was one of the best years of my life, which is actually crazy to say because the part of the story that I haven’t yet shared was that at the beginning of last year you guys weren’t really catapulted all of this going all in. 

What made me go from dabbling to all in was the sudden and tragic passing of my amazing father, and I’m not going to go too deeply into this because I cry every single time I talk about it because it’s still the worst thing in the world. But his passing did really wake me up to how precious life is, to how proud I was to be his daughter, to how powerful I am as a child of God and how much I really believed in myself. And when I got honest about all of those things, all these fears about whether or not I could do this, whether or not I was good enough to do it, whether or not I should be investing in myself became so second to how much I did believe in myself and how much I did want to do this right and do this big. And that’s really when I went all in.

So saying last year was one of the best years of my life. Also means it was one of the worst years of my life. And often that happens. That comes with the law of polarity, which is something I talked about on last week’s episode. If you want to go back to episode 48 but for today, I am just sharing my business evolution. So last year, after really going all in, I was able to quit my nine to five job. I was able to start getting to five figure months. My business really took off in the most spectacular of ways. And so at the beginning of this year, I felt really excited about the programs I created, the audience I had built in, the momentum I had gained and the income levels I had reached. And so I started asking myself, I started asking God, I started journaling. I started asking my audience, what is a new way that I can connect with others? 

What is a new way I can share more of the message that I really felt excited about sharing? And at the time I knew so clearly that what I really cared about sharing was how to keep going when things feel like they’re working against your goals. Because hello, I had just spent a whole year doing that. I had spent a whole year doing everything I could to get my business off the ground while in intense grief, while in therapy, while feeling like I had days that I couldn’t get out of bed while feeling like I had an emotional handicap because I had gone through all this sense of a lack of self worth after losing my dad and feeling like maybe I didn’t deserve to have a dad, so how could I deserve to have a successful business? It was really hard, you guys. And I had to push through a lot of that in order to keep my vision going. 

And the truth is a lot of times it felt lonely. And that’s not because I didn’t have my fiance there supporting me or my mom there supporting me, even my dad reaching down and supporting me. It wasn’t because people didn’t want to help me, but it was because I had a responsibility just like you listening to this do to pursue vision and it’s only your job to do it. It’s not your friends and family’s job to do it. It is yours. And so I needed to push through and sometimes feel the loneliness and sometimes feel the pain, but know that I had a duty to myself to keep doing this and I’m very proud of what I was able to do. But I also went through a lot of pain. Honestly, I still do. This still isn’t easy. I’m still not over my grief and I’m still working toward my next goal every single day. 

So I wanted this. I wanted, I craved a new way to talk about being a visionary, being an entrepreneur, taking risks in your life and how to keep doing it even when the going gets tough and you’ve sometimes feel like you’re in the game alone. And after a lot of thought, you know, I kind of did too much, like purposeful thinking about it. Looking back, I think I made too many like pros and cons lists and surveys and stuff. And at the end of the day, I think I just needed to listen to my gut and give myself a little time to understand what it was I really wanted to do. And honestly it pretty much happened one morning I woke up and the name Your Biggest Vision came right to me and the understanding that it was going to be a show. I will say at first I didn’t know if it was going to be a podcast or a video show so I was a little bit concerned about actually the medium. 

But it was clear to me that my job from there wasn’t just to go all out on Instagram or all out on Facebook or create a whole new youtube channel or write a book or you know, all of the other ways that you can sort of continue to get yourself out there. I wanted to do a show and I wanted to highlight other people that had gone through any challenge, you know, not just, I didn’t want it to be about grief. Grief was sort of my extreme version of the challenge that got in my way pursuing my vision but challenges get in my way everyday that pursue my vision. You know, like something breaks in my apartment and I have to deal with that or I experienced self doubt where I’d get a mean comment on Instagram or um, I don’t make as much money one month as I thought that I was going to, you know, this stuff happens all the time to all of us. 

So I just wanted to share more stories. I also wanted to share more transparently my story so that people knew that, you know, it’s just, you’re not alone and it’s always worth fighting for it. It really is. So I woke up that morning, the name Your Biggest Vision was very clearly like stamped in my head and I knew it was going to be a show. And so I like called my sister at like six or six 30 in the morning. She’s such a trooper and I was just like, oh my God, guess what? I figured out this is what I want to do. And she just totally got it and she was really happy for me. I even… something about just being able to say, hey, visionaries every week really lit my heart up. I can’t explain it, but that was very clear to me and so she was super excited about it. 

My mom was really excited for me about it, and so I just knew it was right and I couldn’t help but think that my dad had some sort of something to do with me figuring this out. And then that’s how, because I didn’t know if it was going to be totally a podcast or a video or a youtube channel or I wasn’t quite sure that that’s how I then got the idea to do what I do now, where I do one live version of it a week, which is what you’re listening to right now. If you’re on live and I do this every Monday on Instagram live and on Facebook live, we turn it into a podcast episode that is released on iTunes the following Tuesday, and then we do a weekly interview release on Thursday. So it all just really came together. And from that that showed me that you know, your gut really does know more than you give a credit for, especially those of you who have been in business for at least six months, maybe even a year. 

By then you know more than you think you do and a lot of times it can just take a little bit of getting quiet to get to your next step or your next answer because it is sort of in your gut. But with that, I do want to go now into the five lessons I’ve learned since then. I just wanted to share the behind the scenes of how this evolved, what my thought process was behind it and you know what you might be able to take away from that as well. Since then, I have had the complete honor and privilege of interviewing over 20 entrepreneurs, risk takers, groundbreakers, really leaders in a lot of different fields, which is what’s so great about it. You know, visionary, being a visionary is not just about being an entrepreneur. It is about believing that there is something better for you out there. 

Now, for the most part, I do interview business owners about their beliefs in their being a better career out there or a better business out there or a higher income out there. But we’ve also interviewed people that have gone through extreme health transformations. We’ve interviewed people that are leaders in their specific fields. We’ve interviewed people that just, you know, have gone through a lot to fight for their own vision. I have really been able to interview some of my huge role models, which has been such a gift. It was a dream come true to interview some people like Alexa Von Tobel who I’ve looked up to for years and years. I interviewed Nicole Lapin. Hers hasn’t come out quite yet, but that was another huge dream comes true because I have also looked up to her, to her for years interviewing Farnoosh Torabi, Ann Shoket, David Nagel, Ruth Sukup. 

You know, some of these people that I have watched from afar since before my business started in wondering, you know, what it would be like to be that, to be on that in that situation where you are teaching people, where you’re changing people’s lives, where you’re inspiring people, you know, nothing gives me chills more than people just being inspired to take action on behalf of themselves. Being in the place of having financial independence, of being able to work wherever you want of traveling more, all these types of things that just let me up for years. Being able to talk to these people and really knowing that I kind of am one of them now has been a huge reward and has made all the difference for me. And so I just really want to thank you all for being on the journey with me for tuning in on Monday, for tuning in on iTunes, for leaving your reviews. Please do leave a review if you haven’t already. I read every single one of them. Again, it really helps shape this podcast and help us, you know, share the work, spread the word even more so. I hugely appreciate that. With that, let’s go into the five lessons I’ve learned on this journey. Let me just take a quick sip of water. 

Okay. Lesson number one from 50 episodes of my podcast, you will never stop being a beginner. So after I just shared my story with you guys, you kind of know my business evolution and I felt like I was a beginner for a long time. I shared that I was a blogger for a year and that’s really all I even thought about my business as looking back. This was more of a mindset issue than anything else. It was just me that needed to decide that I wasn’t going to just blog and that I was going to treat it like a business. But I didn’t have that awareness at the time. At the time I just felt like I was still learning a lot and I felt like a beginner at SEO and I felt like a beginner at blogging and a beginner in social media and a beginner at just so many things. 

And you know, I kind of accepted that for what it was. But, especially in the early days, the beginning part was really hard. I had analysis paralysis about every blog post. I wrote every social media share, every way my website looked. I was constantly questioning if it was good enough or if it was something that was holding me back from getting out of that beginner stage, which again, looking back now, it was just a frame of mind. I should have not considered myself a beginner. But those few first few blog posts in particular, I remember having so many people proofread. I don’t even, you know, remember really what they were about. They don’t really have anything to do with what my business is now, but I just felt so elementary and so new. 

And you know, now when I run, start or Scale Your Side Hustle, and some of my students ask me similar questions, like, is this a good first blog post or I’m working on my first blog post. Should I have three blog posts up before I start my website? That’s what I’ve been working on. I just want to be like, oh my God, no, no one’s gonna know what your first few blog posts are anyway. I don’t even remember what my are. It doesn’t matter. You just have to get started. You just have to put content out there. The best thing you can do for yourself is start today, even if it’s crappy, like nonetheless, because you’ll get better and more people will get to know you. The best thing you can do is give yourself the gift of time, not perfection of your content. So I like thought I knew all of this because I teach that now and I have not really been a beginner for two years. By the time I started this podcast, however, I felt exactly like I did all those years ago. 

Every single time I looked, I listened to, you know, I have four episodes recorded before I released the podcast and I was questioning all the editing. Did I have a good enough microphone? Should I have written a script for each of them? Which as you can see, I don’t do, I don’t like scripts. I’ve tried doing that. It’s not for me. I write outlines of episodes and then just speak from the heart, which makes so much more sense to me. But at the beginning I thought that maybe I needed to do things in a really specific way. I was wondering if I had the right graphics to share. Did I need social media accounts? Should I be promoting these a certain way? Oh, this stuff that kept me from putting my first episode out there for way too long and it was so funny to one day sit back and realize, oh my God, I’m being a total hypocrite. 

I’m doing exactly what I tell my beginner business owners not to do. Your beginning content is not about the quality. It is about how soon you can get it out there. Now I’m not saying, I’m not trying to give you the advice to totally go fail, but my guess is if you’re listening to this, you’re probably a pretty ambitious person and you wouldn’t put content out there that wasn’t pretty good to begin with. So give yourself the gift of time and allow it to be just pretty good. Not Great, not perfect, and be more timely. So this was a huge lesson for me and it’s something I still am trying to remind myself of now all the time when I tried to do new things. Don’t overthink it so much, Leah. Push Yourself, put yourself out there. You are always going to be a beginner. 

And I think that, you know, accepting this is such a blessing because it takes so much pressure off of you to have things overly ready or overly perfect or in any way, an expert level. And it’s just a humbling lesson every time. And it also really connects us all because we’re all beginning in some way, shape or form. And so even if you are really truly beginning your business from ground one or step one, just know that a lot of entrepreneurs you look up to are probably feeling like beginners in some of their own way too. So you’re not alone. And if you reached out to them and share that, I bet that they would resonate with you more than you might think. 

Okay. Lesson number two I’ve kind of alluded to, but it’s worth clarifying. We are all in the same boat. So one of the most exciting parts of this podcast has been, as I mentioned, interviewing some of the people that I looked up to for years and years and years and really feeling like I am now sort of in the room with them or at the table with them and feeling like they are more appears to me now than me just, you know, drooling over their latest feature and Forbes or whatever. And yes, I, you know, I’m not trying to be overly cocky here. I obviously know I have so many ways I can grow and learn and I do try to do that and I’m very humbled by the amazing guests I’ve had. But it is a huge lesson for me to really see that, you know, just a few years ago, I felt so helpless in my cubicle behind my desk screen in that bad fluorescent lighting over air conditioned environment, watching these people just dreaming of what it would be like to be in that situation and dreaming of what it would be like to have a platform, to have a business, to have a message that I was really passionate about sharing, to have people that I had changed their lives to have a business that allowed me to work wherever, to be someone that really was notable to other people. 

And now being on the other end of that, having a podcast where I’m able to interview them, you know, being able to feature them, being able to communicate with them, being able to help them promote things from my business that allows me to work from wherever that has an unlimited income cap and all the things I dreamt up for so long. A is such a stunning reminder that we are all in the same boat. You guys, no one is above you. If you have someone you look up to, you can do what they’re doing and what it is that you admire. No one is better than you or more privileged than you. Some people may have started with different things than you. I’m not trying to be up to here. I do know that, you know, I was born into a lot of privilege that other people don’t see and I’m very grateful for it. 

A lot of that privilege and a big thing I tried to do on this show is acknowledge that privilege because I know not everyone has it and it has shown me that we all have the power to transcend our current realities and get into a new one. We all have advantages. We all have things that we can use in order to lift ourselves up and go to the next level or the next place. Uh, you know, you guys know how passionate I am about really trying to eliminate any victim mode from your mind. I worked really, really hard on that last year when I was going all in and when I was really ramping things up. I like censored myself like crazy. And now looking back and seeing the results of that. The results of never allowing myself to pity myself or to say that there was something I couldn’t do or to focus on things that weren’t working ever. 

I mean to the point where people around me were probably annoyed, I probably sounded like, you know, sometimes emotionless cause I only would focus on the good things and the things I had going for me because that was the only thing that served me. You know, it worked you guys like now if I got me here, now I’m on the other side of that computer. Now I’m on the other side of that situation. Now I’m in the arena with the people that I worked up to so much. And I really do think that that’s because I focused on the things I had, the assets that I had to get me there. And I became roofless about, you know, refusing to focus on any things that, anything working against me or anything, not helping me. So it was a bit extreme, but I’d worked. And the takeaway I want to share with you from this is that anyone you look up to is someone you can become. Anything you admire about someone else is something you can have. You do have more than you probably even realize you are capable of more than you know you are capable of anything. I really believe that and I hope that you almost obsess over the things that you do have going for you in order to get you there. 

Okay. Lesson number three, high achieving does not equal highly successful. So this is a takeaway both from my story stories I see from my clients and some of the people I’ve interviewed here. And in fact Jesse Johnson who is interview will come out on Thursday, that’s episode 51, her and I talked extensively about this. So I’m going to repeat it one more time. High achieving does not equal highly successful. So one of the things I hear a lot from people that come on the show and people that want to do some sort of entrepreneurial endeavor is they all have this commonality of being high achievers. 

You know, maybe they were really good at school growing up or they got really good jobs out of college or they were really good at a sport or they just were really ambitious. You know, it’s not like they were all perfect or anything like that, but they had a history of being really good at something grades, school, working, saving money, whatever it is and where it makes a difference between if that high achieving nature is going to make you highly successful or not is whether or not you start accepting that your achievements are always things you need to hand to yourself. They’re never handed to you. And where this gets tricky is that some of us may have grown up as high achievers but with our rewards handed to us, whether that was our parents rewarding us for making the honor roll or our coach rewarding us for working really hard at sports and us making varsity or a theater teacher giving you the leader role or a college accepting you in. 

When you were growing up, when we are maturing, a lot of our high achievements can result in rewards that are given to us. But this can be a really dangerous pattern. And this is what I see to be the biggest differentiation. That’s the right word between high achievers that become successful and high achievers that don’t, it’s that they never realize consciously or unconsciously that they’re still waiting for their achievements to be handed to them. So let me put this in a different way. If this isn’t making a ton of sense to you right now, this is a really simple way and something that I did as a high achiever, but not as a highly successful person for a long time. And so you might be doing too. I always knew I wanted to live in New York, like I said, and I always knew I wanted to be wealthy and make over six figures. 

You know, I just sort of like… who doesn’t want that? But I wanted it to the point where I just accepted it as my destiny and as something that was inevitable to happen to me. Same thing with having a lot of savings. And being able to retire comfortably. I just for some reason, assumed they would happen to me. And looking back now, that’s because I had always been really responsible with personal finances. I had always have achieved my goals in personal finance and this rewarded in “mini successes” quote for me. Um, this were awarded and even my dad, you know, praising me because he was a CPA and he really valued personal finance. This was rewarded than me saving more than a lot of my peers when I was younger. This resorting to me being able to do certain things not others were able to do because I saved a bit more money. 

However, that was not going to be enough to get me to these big financial dreams. I had really envisioned for myself that was not going to be enough to land me a really nice apartment in New York City or to get me to a six figure job or to get me to extreme savings or extreme retirement. And so I had to finally wake up and realize that just because some of my achievements had been given to me and my rewards had been given to me did not mean and actually would not mean that my high achieving nature with personal finance would result in the successes that I wanted. I needed to be far more proactive about it and go out there and get them for myself. Just because I maybe would hit a six figure salary does not mean that New York City was going to gift me with a million dollar apartment. 

Just because I got a really good job or saved money doesn’t mean that I was going to be set for retirement for life. Do you know what I mean? So anyone out there is thinking that you know, you just know you’re going to be financially okay. You know that you’re going to have a fulfilling career and you’re just sort of waiting for it to happen because you’re a really high achiever. You might want to question yourself and really ask who are you waiting to give you things? Life is not going to give you things. You have to go out there and get it. And I think that this is where a lot of high achievers stay stuck because they’re still sort of waiting for someone to give them their reward or hand them their goal or you know, some sort of scenario to just present itself because they achieved enough and it just doesn’t work like that. 

The successful realize that they’re only… They are only going to be the ones giving themselves their successes and their achievements no one’s going to be doing for them. So you have to really be honest with yourself and think, okay, I want to have a six figure salary job. I am working in an industry where most people don’t make six figures before they’re 30 and I’m 25 and so I want to make it before then. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to start a side hustle? Are you going to start your own business so you can make six figures far before then? Are you going to change industries? Are you going to go to graduate school? So you can make it sooner. I don’t, you know, there’s no right or wrong answer, but it really is about being honest about where you’re at and where you want to be and realizing that any achievement that you want is something that you need to go get for yourself. I hope this makes sense. I hope the personal finance example clicks because I think a lot of people just assume they’re going to be financially okay and they’re not really asking these bigger questions about when are these things going to happen for me and how I can I make them happen for myself. 

The Fourth Lesson from my 50th episode is that something that I kind of always thought would be true, but I realize more doing this, which is that people really do want to help each other. And here’s what I specifically mean about this. In being able to interview so many successful people, all these sort of ideas about people working harder than you or being better than you are. Having something figured out that you don’t, they’re really not that true. Uh, you know, everyone is so different that if you, you need to figure out what equals success for you. 

And I think it can be really easy, especially in the easy days to think that unless you are doing the morning routine of the world’s highest performers and unless you’re, you know, running six times a day and meditating and singing Kumbaya and journaling and, um, you know, sending out 15 sales emails and getting a professional website down, you’re not gonna make it. The truth is there’s so many people that have probably achieved what you want to achieve, whether that’s having a seven figure business, putting their nine to five job, being able to work exclusively from their laptops, they’ve all done it differently. And now I have gotten, I’ve learned so much from my mentor, so I’m not trying to say that, um, you know, you shouldn’t learn from others and adapt strategies and habits that work for you. You 100% should that’s what members are here for. And I will always have mentors in my life. 

What I’m saying is that, we all really are here to just help each other. And there’s room for everyone at the finish line and this episode, these interviews, hearing how everyone has fought for their unique vision has made me realize that they are just doing what works for them. And if they can share that so that it works for someone else, that’s all they really want to do. They’re not sharing this to some better than anyone else or because they are better than anyone else. None of that has anything to do with your success or their success. It’s just about sharing what works for you in case it can help other people. And with that, I really want to encourage anyone listening to this to push yourself to do reach out to the people that you admire or you know, comment on people’s Instagrams or send them emails and ask them, how did you get through this or I really admire this. 

Do you have any tips on this? Join people’s programs, be in masterminds, connects with other people. They all only want to help you and they can help you. And after, you know, learn from so many different people and hearing so many different ways to be successful. It’s just made me hungry to learn from others than ever and maybe more excited to do so because it’s really cut out any, any nerves around competition that I may have had and I hope that you hear that in these interviews as well. 

The final of the five lessons I’ve learned from these 50 episodes internally and externally, that is simple, but I still just want to say it as powerfully as possible and give it the space to marinade and resonate with you is that you are doing better than you think you are. You are doing better than you think you are. I promise. I promise. Being a visionary is hard, you guys. Believing in yourself sounds easy. It’s not, especially when you’re doing something that you’ve never done before. We all want to say we believe in ourselves, but really having the faith to go for something that is completely new is not that simple. So just by trying, just by considering, just by trying to improve yourself and your finances, your career, who you are at all just by listening to this episode, you are doing better than you think you are. You’re probably doing better than you were a year ago or six months ago. You’re probably doing better than some of the people you went to high school with that aren’t trying to improve themselves. You are amazing and you are so much further along than you might realize and I just want you guys to end this episode feeling really fulfilled with what you’re doing, feeling really proud of yourself and feeling really powerful and feeling really equipped to go toward your vision. 

That’s my whole goal and I mean after having done 50 episodes, sharing my story and hearing from you guys and interviewing others, I am more sure than ever that you have the power to make your vision come true. Let me take a sip of water. So with that, I’m going to wrap this up and thank you all from the bottom of my heart for being part of these 50 episodes. And here’s to 50 plus more. If there’s anything you ever want to hear from us, please let us know and I would so, so, so appreciate it. If you would leave us a review on iTunes, it helps so much. I read them all. We take, you know, any feedback we can from you guys and you can always email us at help@urbantwentysomething.com because we just want to make the next 15 even better and we’re so grateful for your support and I hope that you all have a great week here is to your biggest vision. 

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