This Week:
- Moving to a different villa with the guys that stayed after last week’s event.
- Getting back into the routine again and having some great dinner conversations.
- Why I’m deciding to pivot my YouTube channel again.
May 2025
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 5/1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Where In The World Was I?
- 🇮🇩 Bali, Indonesia
Metrics From The Week
Sleep is slowly recovering. Recovery is still struggling 😅 I’ve still been training pretty hard.
Villa-Hopping
Moved to another villa with 5 of the guys that stayed after last week’s event. This place also had a staff, but they just came once every other day to clean unlike the last place.
But I think part of the reason why it was on the cheaper end was because there’s no actual road/street to get to the villa. This place was the first one built in the area and so we had to walk through the construction zone every day 😂
But to my surprise this ended up being a highlight.
Every time we walked by, the locals building the other houses would smile and say, “hello! good morning!”
There will be no way I can capture or convey this feeling through words, but man, it was such a mental reframe seeing 1. people be happy, smile, and wave at you, and 2. people building for probably 14 hours a day, all day, sleeping on wood panels in their makeshift shacks making eye contact as you walk by, saying hello! with a big smile.
It’s a feeling that must be experienced.
Videographer #2
We got another videographer for the day.
Morning Muay Thai.
Went to Atlas Beach Club. They say it’s the biggest beach club in the world apparently. It is massive.
It was kind of funny because we got there, sat down, and one of the guys went, “wait, why are we here again?” and we all laughed because no one in the group drinks or goes clubbing.
We just went for the content but they wouldn’t allow the big camera inside 😂
Then had dinner at Zai Cafe. The vibes here were insane and the food was also incredibly good.
Then to Seseh beach the next morning.
We also got some hilarious (and insanely cool) FPV drone shots running on the beach.
Back To Routine (Mostly)
It felt good to catch back up and get back to some stable work behind the laptop.
I got another deep dive report delivered and a bunch more outreach done.
Focus Mode
It did feel good to get back into it, but I would say I’ve been at maybe 70% of my normal capacity lately. It’s been a bit harder to focus during the non-deep work parts of the day.
It definitely hasn’t been helping that after waking up, I would sit by the pool for a couple minutes, drink some water, and would eventually cave and open up my messages (WhatsApp and email) which almost always just destroys my focus for the morning.
And some of the afternoons have been kind of hit or miss.
Wait a second…
Also, I went to 7am Bakers one morning, ordered an espresso, and sat down.
As I was taking out my laptop this guy walks in and meets/sits down with the guy sitting two tables to my left in the corner.
I kind of do a double take as my brain processes.
Then I go “wait a second, oh my god that’s Dan Bolton” 😂
For context, I’ve analyzed his videos and channel on YouTube as part of my reports I create for creators. He makes really raw+authentic videos but also runs a high-ticket coaching business and has made $10,000,000 from YouTube as his inbound.
On his way out I stopped him and introduced myself.
I felt a bit nervous honestly. I don’t exactly feel like I “idolize” him or follow him closely, but I definitely see him as way more experienced.
We had a little chat for a couple minutes, he was super nice, then he headed off.
Bali is wild 😂
Gym
Fortunately there was this fantastic gym basically right next to the villa we were staying in. Full high quality gym, recovery center (sauna, ice bath, steam room, and pool) and restaurant.
Expensive ($100 for a week), but man is it nice to have an insane quality gym with all of that right next door.
This content is not ready to be made public yet.
Channel Pivot
I skipped a YouTube video upload this week. I had to prioritize this report that I promised and had already dropped the ball heavily with it (took me 12 days I think because I started before last week’s event with the guys, whoops).
It got to be Wednesday afternoon (I post on Wednesdays at noon eastern which is the end of my day Wednesday) and I had nothing recorded nor planned.
And additionally, the past two weeks (and even more, I think I’ve talked about it here a bit), I’ve been struggling to see this current YouTube direction as working for what I’m trying to build.
I did another deep GPT strategy session with some of the info I took away from a conversation with some of the guys the past week and decided something needs to change.
There’s a lot to it, but very simplified, it’s kind of this short term vs. long term problem.
Long term I like the life lessons and life systems content, but this builds more towards a personal brand and longer term coaching path (that I’m not actively pursuing right now).
But short term in some ways I really need to start building some authority behind the YouTube strategy path I’m actively working towards, but I see this more as “work” and less as something that just comes out naturally to me. That idea has caused this inaction and fear to commit to one thing because I just foresee the further I go down this path, the more I see the same burnout that I came to that got me on this path.
And I just don’t see this strategy of balancing two somewhat overlapping target viewers working, which is also showing up in the metrics.
So I decided I just need to get over this fear of commitment and double down on one. Not forever, but for now.
In some ways I feel bad for kind of changing directions, for all the people that found me and subscribed or followed for the self-reflection type of content, but I think doubling down on the YouTube strategy is what I need to do right now.
Then I can broaden back up again later.
We’ll see how it plays out.
Dinners
Had some great dinners with the guys.
And last night we went out with 5 other guys that we met at Nirvana, the social/wellness club last week.
I still haven’t quite processed how I felt about this night.
I mean it was great, I had some great conversations, but it was also a little unsettling.
Maybe the best way to describe this feeling is this contrast that was slowly unravelled last night…
One of the guys (met at Nirvana) was complimenting my Instagram page, how good the photos are, and just everything overall.
He went “bro you look like you’re doing $100k a month with this” 😂
And hearing this was this weird duality.
On one hand I was super appreciative of him and the compliment.
But at the same time it felt like this poke in the butt, the fact that I’m not doing $100k/mo, not even $10k/mo or $5k/mo.
The fact that I in some ways (not all) feel like I’m still standing at the starting line, ground zero, square one.
It’s this (positive) social pressure that I can’t quite describe.
This other guy I was talking to last night also made this small comment that I picked up on at some point.
He’s doing pretty much the same thing as me, but more of the “formalized” path, scaling info product businesses using YouTube. He said he’s got a team, already got some fantastic results (scaled someone from something like $4k/mo to $40k/mo), and is doing five figures right now.
I was mentioning how I got into this and how I’ve been coming from the software engineering side of business instead of the online business side of this space that most people come from.
Ah I can’t remember exactly what he said, this won’t be right, but it was something like “how are you not already killing it? you literally built your own software” (compared to) “there are 19 year olds that take one course and call themselves growth operators.”
I almost felt embarrassed.
I’m obviously not giving you the entire context of our conversation, this didn’t come off as harsh, the same guys gave me a lot of really valuable ideas and feedback for me which I really appreciated.
But that moment stuck with me.
It was this duality, appearing as if I’m making $100k/mo and in reality slowly and slowly wading in over the course of the conversation, sharing more about where I’m at to a point where I basically said that I’ve done a lot of really in-depth free work, got a lot of great positive verbal feedback, and just starting to get actual videos posted, but haven’t quite bridged the gap to getting paying clients.
The more that I go down this path, the more I learn that the biggest things that have held me back are:
- My own mind.
- And either not knowing exactly what I want, or wanting too many things.
So anyways, this is why I love this place. I’ve never found a place where you can meet such high level people, who also value the same things, that will push you to grow and fulfill your own potential.
What’s Next?
Moved places, but it’s gonna be much of the same. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, as they say.