The True Cost Of "Success"

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So chances are, if you're watching this video right now, I have a feeling you're probably more ambitious than most. You probably set pretty high standards for yourself, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to get there. I am the same way. I think most of us deep down really want to do something that stands out. We want to live up to our full potential, to accomplish what we want, and make the most of the limited amount of time we have on the planet.

On the surface, that sounds amazing. After all, who doesn't want to be successful and make a ton of money, and one day be so rich that you don't even need to think about the extra cost of adding avocado to your food order? But the reality is that that type of success usually doesn't come without a cost. As with most things we do, there's going to be a trade-off in terms of what you must give in order to get.

Like if you want to get physically fit, then you must give up junk food. If you want to get out of debt, then you must give up discretionary spending. Or if you want to watch this YouTube video, you've got to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. There we go, I had to mention it! Points being: you can't just get something for nothing. There absolutely needs to be trade-offs and sacrifices made along the way in order to get there.

So, this video is going to be a very truthful, honest look into all the sacrifices that I have personally made along the way in order to get to where I am today, without sugarcoating anything. Also, by no means is this video meant to sound like I am complaining or asking for any sort of pity whatsoever. I realize how lucky I am to be in the position I am today. I don't take anything for granted, I wouldn't change a single thing, and I have zero regrets. But I do want to share what it's like on the opposite side of the coin that not too many people talk about, because it's really not as glamorous.

My first sacrifice towards building my career was giving up any sort of consistency in my life. For the last 12 years, every single week, I've worked different days. I've worked different hours, and I made a different income. When I first started working as a real estate agent, my schedule was completely unpredictable, more than just a few hours in advance. Even though I could make my own schedule, it really just revolved around the lives of others.

I could be planning to leave the office at 8:00 p.m., and then all of a sudden get a call from someone wanting to see a home at 9:00 p.m., and I would be there. Or I could be planning to finally sleep in the next morning, but receive an email at 11 p.m. asking to see homes at 8:00 a.m. the next day, and I would do it. They knew I had to make those accommodations as I built my career, because I understood that if I didn't do it, there would be someone else who would.

So, I just accepted that my schedule was going to be an absolute mess in order to get what I wanted, which was to build up a name for myself, and also build up a loyal clientele that would use me again and again. Also, with that type of schedule comes a very inconsistent income. When I first started, I would have months that would go by without earning a single penny, and that absolutely takes a toll on you.

After working several months of not earning anything while working 10 to 12 hours every single day, you start to doubt yourself. You start to worry that everything you're doing is wrong, or that you're not good enough, and you start getting very frustrated. All of those feelings are completely counterproductive to actually doing good work. But eventually, though, I would close the deal; I would sell a house, and that would more than make up for all the months I went without earning anything.

But that also meant that I couldn't get too confident either, and think that just because I sold a big house, all of a sudden now I could finally slack off and relax, because I had no idea how long I would have to make that commission last for. It could be another few months before I sold another one. So, that type of inconsistency is something that, as a business owner or entrepreneur, you're going to have to get used to, and you're going to have to accept.

I think you do give up a sense of tranquility just knowing how much money you're going to make and having any sort of consistent, predictable schedule. Secondly, given that type of unpredictable schedule, I've absolutely had to sacrifice a big portion of my personal life in order to pursue a career. I've noticed that when you're working for yourself and setting your own hours, there's never really a time you clock out. There always seems to be a shortage of hours in the day to get everything done that you need to. There's always the feeling that you could be doing a little bit more to get ahead, and because of that, you end up working a lot and keeping yourself very busy.

But as much as you can love something, unfortunately, maintaining a social life in conjunction with that becomes very difficult to do if you don't prioritize it. I've let a lot of great friendships fall to the side because I've been so focused on productivity and trying to get everything possible done. I'm not gonna lie, there were times that I did prioritize friendships and having a social life, and I ended up having a miserable time because I couldn't enjoy myself.

The entire time, I was just thinking about how much work I have to do afterwards, how much is just going to set me back, and how much work I now have to catch up on. All of that really just ruined the fun, and I couldn't really be in the moment and enjoy myself because of how much work I knew I still had to do. Not only that, but as someone who's self-employed, you usually just end up working really weird hours.

Sometimes I'll be so busy in the morning, and then I'll have an afternoon that's completely free, and then I'll be really busy again from 7:00 p.m. until midnight. Or sometimes I'll just be working weekends and then I'll just have a random weekday Tuesday completely open. That type of schedule doesn't really align well with most other people who have the normal weekends off or weekday evenings off, and that really just made having a social life that much more difficult.

At a certain point, I just accepted that for the time being, staying extra focused on my career is the sacrifice that I'm going to need to make, and I'm gonna have to give up a bit of a social life and personal life now so that I can have more free time in the future. Thankfully, I have a really great group of friends who understands this, but there were so many times that would go by where I would just realize to myself, “Wait a second! I haven't hung out with any of my friends in a very long time. I haven't done a single thing for myself to go and relax, and I need to go out and do this."

And this is now what's going to be important to me. The third one of my biggest personal sacrifices that I made for the sake of success, and also something that almost everyone can relate to on a certain level, is giving up my free time. I'm talking about the time of the day where you could afford to do absolutely whatever. Maybe it's just surfing the TV for a few hours to see what's on, or popping on a random movie, or taking an afternoon nap, and just lounging around all day.

Because when you're in the midst of just trying to get ahead and working really hard, those sort of activities just become a luxury. You would think that once you get to a certain point, all of that just becomes easier to do, but it doesn't, because once you start seeing results and you start seeing the rewards for all the work you put in, you then want to work even harder to sustain and grow it, because that's where you start seeing exponential growth.

Imagine it as though you're in the process of making fire, and you've spent the last twenty minutes trying to get it to light, and then all of a sudden it takes off. That is not the point in which you slow down. If anything, that's the time to focus even harder to make sure it continues getting bigger and doesn't go out, because if it does, then you'll need to start all over again from scratch.

Usually, building a career and being successful works exactly the same way. I really think at the end of the day it just comes down to this: how badly do you want it, and what is the most important to you? Like, is going and watching five hours and four minutes of TV a day, like the average American, more important to you than working on something that can improve your future?

Is sleeping in those extra few hours worth postponing whatever goals you've set for yourself? Or if you give yourself permission to slack off a bit each and every day, how is that going to impact your future 20 years from now? When you start viewing every little thing you do as having an impact for the rest of your life, you start realizing just how limited your free time really is, and you start treating it like a very rare commodity.

Now, looking back, I have not regretted any of the times I've stayed up late, I've woken up early, or I've not wasted time watching TV, or seeing what random people I don't care about are up to on Facebook. I do realize that I've given up a lot of carefree leisure hours that I could have just spent relaxing, because doing that is so easy, and it's just nice. Even now, I'm still trying to find the balancing act of figuring out when it's okay just to slack off and to take it easy and not do anything productive whatsoever, and just spend hours watching YouTube videos or going and laying out in the backyard doing absolutely nothing.

Please, doing that is something that I've absolutely had to sacrifice a lot of in order to get to where I am today. So forth, another big sacrifice that I made over the last 12 years is giving up the ability to travel for fun or go on vacation. I'm gonna level with everyone here and admit that I have yet to visit anywhere outside of North America. Almost all of the travel I have done has either been for work, been driving distance of where I live, or been to visit family.

I have always wanted to take a few months off to travel Europe, Asia, and Australia, but I've always been at the point in my career where if I take time off to go and do that, I would lose a lot of the momentum that I've spent years building up. As a real estate agent, that career physically required me to be there in order to meet clients, show homes, and make money. If I took time off, that meant potential commissions I would have to forego, which meant the opportunity cost of me going and traveling could run in the tens of thousands of dollars.

So, I just figured that would be a short-term sacrifice I would need to make so that long-term I would have the money and resources to go and travel as much as I wanted. Positively, since I've chosen to delay my vacations, I can now travel in much better accommodations today than I could have ten years ago. But even now, travel is incredibly difficult to do with my current schedule. I really want to keep this channel consistent; I do not want to miss an upload, and I'm not ready to quite give that up yet in order to go travel.

So, that's definitely a sacrifice that I made along the way, knowing that that will help me just build a better future. Mark my words, one day my dream is to travel the world as long as I want, without any time constraints or any place to be. I would love just to travel and fly anywhere around the world on a whim and stay as long as I would like. Then when you've seen everything you need to see there, go off and travel somewhere else, and then repeat the process for really as long as you can.

Being able to go and do that has only been possible by making the sacrifice of not traveling sooner, and now all of that is possible to do whenever the timing is right. Lastly, my fifth sacrifice, which somewhat ties into the fourth, is the delayed gratification of not giving in to your immediate wants and desires. Even though I'm naturally the type of person who lives below their means and enjoys living frugally, I'm still human, and I still have moments all the time where I just think to myself, “How cool would it be just to go and buy the Lamborghini?"

I am always wondering how cool it would be just to go and buy a three million dollar house and have a very massive mortgage. There have always been those temptations out there for me to say, “Okay, let me just go buy it because I can.” But in the back of my mind, there's always little voices saying, “You could always buy it later. Go invest right now. If you invest and decide you still want it a few years from now, you can always go and do it then.”

That's what I've always done. Instead of going and buying an expensive exotic car when I was 21 years old, I went and bought a rental property. Instead of going and spending my money renting a beautiful home up in the Hollywood Hills, I instead chose to buy a fixer duplex in an up-and-coming neighborhood because I knew that would make a great long-term investment and would save me a lot of money. Then when I finally saved up enough money for the purpose of buying the Lamborghini I told myself I've always wanted, I instead just chose to buy another duplex with that instead.

I've also made a lot of smaller little sacrifices along the way just to help expedite that process, like driving a Toyota Prius as a daily driver for nine years instead of going and getting a luxury car, or not going out to expensive restaurants and instead eating food at home, or not getting avocado on the side because that's more expensive, and not going and buying Starbucks coffee. Now, this all might seem like nonsensical few dollar charges that aren't going to make a big difference, but I will tell you those charges do add up over time. Sometimes, those charges will carry forward into other aspects of your life as well that you're not as careful of, and then you just spend more money.

So throughout my entire career, I've always delayed gratification, waited to buy things, lived below my means, opted for less expensive alternatives, always reinvested my money, and given up a lot of luxuries for the sake of having more money to reinvest in having a better, brighter future. Those sacrifices weren't always easy in the moment, but looking back, I wouldn't have changed a single thing. All of those were completely worth it to help get me to where I am today, and I'm extremely thankful that everything has turned out the way it did.

Like I said, none of this is meant to sound like I'm complaining or have any regrets or are ungrateful for all of the amazing things that have happened, because I am extremely lucky and thankful for just the way everything has turned out. But I also acknowledge that in the moment, a lot of those sacrifices are not easy to make, and a lot of people don't think of them when they think of what they want to accomplish. That's going to take a lot of work and time to get to. But I do have to say, it's been entirely worth it because that will give you so many more options in the future that you will have to pick from.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you guys enjoy videos like this, as always, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and hit the notification bell. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram; I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there. Also, feel free to add me on my second channel; it is called The Graham Stefan Show. I post there every single day that I'm not posting here, so that means if you want to watch a brand new video by me every single day, feel free to add me there.

And lastly, if you guys want free stocks, I have a link in the description from Webull, where if you deposit $100, they give you two free stocks, and the second stock is worth up to a thousand dollars. So if you want to go ahead and do that, just feel free to go ahead and do that. And thank you again for watching, and until next time!