You quit your 9-5…NOW WHAT?!

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here. So, as many of you know, I literally read every single one of the comments that's ever posted on my channel. I read them all, and one of the most common recurring questions I get are comments like, "Graham, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I just know I don't want to work a nine-to-five. I know I want to be my own boss. I know I don't want to work for the man, but besides that, I'm totally lost."

You got me interested in real estate, and I'm thinking about getting my real estate license, but should I do that or start a website, start an app, do affiliate marketing, Amazon FBA? Should I wholesale real estate, invest in real estate? What do you recommend? I'm totally lost.

And that is such a complex question to ask. It's a lot deeper than me just responding in the comments section and giving my thoughts. So, because of that, I'm gonna make a video addressing everybody who's confused about what you want to do with your life and just giving you some ideas of things to think about and which direction you should take.

So, here's where I recommend you start. My first and biggest piece of advice is to first determine the type of life and lifestyle you want and then reverse-engineer it. Think about how much money you realistically need to have in order to live the lifestyle you want. Think of everything you want to achieve—think of the house you want to live in, the car you want to drive, the things you want to have. It doesn't all need to be materialistic, but you can think about the vacations you want to take, the experiences you want to have, and determine how much that's going to cost you.

You could think of it in two ways. You can think of it, first, how much money you need to be worth to feel comfortable to do all these things and how much you need to make every single month to pay for those things. Be as specific as possible, from the house you want to live in—how much is that going to cost you every single month?—to the car you want to drive; how much is that going to cost you every single month? To the vacations, to the things, to everything. Break it down and determine what number you need to make and be worth to be able to afford those things.

But determining first the type of life you want is the most important, and without that, you're aimlessly just going out there, trying to earn money in like bits and pieces, with no real goal behind it. And as we all know, if you don't have anything you're working towards, you're pretty much just treading water, trying to like pack here and there without really any purpose behind it.

And it's so easy to get burnt out when you're earning money without any sort of purpose or drive behind it. So, please determine first what type of lifestyle you want, and then we're gonna reverse engineer it.

So, after thinking about all of this, and preferably writing it down, you need to consider how much risk you're willing to take to make that happen. You also need to think, "How soon do I want to make that happen?" Is this something where you're okay working 20 years to slowly make that lifestyle a reality? If it is, then the path that you're gonna take is a lot different than somebody who’s just said, "I'm taking a ton of risk," and they want this to happen as soon as possible, and they're willing to basically risk it all on just having this happen in a few short years.

So, a lot of this determines on your risk tolerance, how soon you want to achieve this, and what you're comfortable doing to make that a reality. So, just to give you some examples here, if you're willing to take a ton of risk to make that lifestyle a reality, maybe consider starting a business or something with a really high failure rate where most businesses don't succeed, but the ones that do do really well. This could be a great way for you to get that lifestyle you want, but you're gonna have to take the risk to get there.

Otherwise, maybe consider something like real estate investing. It's slow to start off with, but as your money compounds and begins to grow, it can grow to something huge in 20 or 30 years from now. So, it just depends on how much risk you're willing to take to get the lifestyle you want.

So, obviously consider all of this and determine exactly what risks you're willing to take in order to get the lifestyle you want, and then plan accordingly from there.

So, the next thing to consider after this is how many hours are you willing to put into this and how hard you're willing to work. If you guys have read "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss, it's an amazing book about working four hours a week and what he's done to achieve that. To some people, that is the dream; that's all they want to do is work as little as possible and just do other things, and they were just not involved with work whatsoever.

For these people, it's about creating a passive income source. There are other people who love to be busy, who once they find something they're into, it's all they want to do. I'm that person. Generally, when I find something I really like, I get this weird tunnel vision where it's all I want to do. For me, this past year, that's all just been YouTube. I mean, it's stupid how much I've wanted to do YouTube this year and how much fun I've had with it.

I felt the same way too with doing real estate for many, many, many years. It was just like tunnel vision; it's all I wanted to do because I enjoyed it so much. But I know myself enough to know that I don't want to be the type that seems to be forced to work 12 hours a day every single day. If I do that, it's because I want to do that, and not because I'm forced to do that.

So, I know any career I want to do has got to be something where I can work as hard as I want or as little as I want. Because trust me, I have days where I don't want to work at all or weeks I don't want to work at all, and I don't. Other times, it's all I want to do, and I'll work like sixteen hours a day on something, and I'm totally in it, and I totally love it. So it's really important to figure out which type of person you are.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being the person that doesn't want to work a lot; just means you have to create something passive where you can work really smart and efficiently, then someone else who's just working all the time and who hopefully loves what they do, so it doesn't really feel like work. But really first determine what type of person you are and how much work you're willing to put into this, and then again, plan some sort of career or business around that.

So, the last thing to consider is what are you willing to sacrifice to make that lifestyle a reality? How badly do you want it? If you want it more badly than going to the pool and drinking beer and stuff like that, Grant Cardone says all these people going to the pool and quitting doing weekends away, these people are doing it. If you want more than that, that's how badly you have to want it.

You do have to want it enough to be able to put everything else aside to make that a reality. Otherwise, what's gonna happen is that other little things are just going to be so distracting, and you're not going to be able to give it its full attention. And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way, but you need to consider what you're willing to give up and how badly you want it in order for it to actually work.

If you don't want it that badly, then you don't want that. But there's nothing wrong with that, but you should take that into consideration. At least know yourself enough to know what you're willing to sacrifice or what you're willing to give up to make that dream a reality.

For me, when I first started doing real estate, I just did real estate. I mean, I didn't really have many friends when I first started, and all I did was work. Yes, it was super lonely for the first few years. I didn't really go out; I didn't really have any friends. I just worked, and again, there was nothing wrong with that. That's what I was willing to give up at the time to pursue real estate because that's what I wanted to do, and I had so much fun doing it, and that was my priority.

Just the same thing, like I really want a Lamborghini of some sort. I've wanted one for such a long time, or like a manual F430. I've wanted one of those for a long time, but you see, instead I have the Lotus, but I've got five properties instead that I bought. So, like for me, the priority is getting real estate, and I'm willing to sacrifice. It sounds so crappy to say I'm willing to sacrifice buying the Lamborghini just so I could buy more real estate.

So, that's how badly I want it. I want to create the passive income more so than I want the immediate gratification of the Lamborghini because I know that's gonna happen at some point. But until then, I've just decided real estate is my priority. So, you need to decide in your life what's not a priority and what are you willing to give up in sacrifice to make that lifestyle you want a reality in the future.

So, once you've considered all of that, you can begin creating the type of career that's gonna support the lifestyle and the end goal that you want. And again, now that you already know where you want to be, and you've got your goal, you could then work backwards to try to support that goal and determine what you need to do in order to get that.

It's all about just working backwards from your end goal in order to make that happen. And once you do that, you can finally move forward by picking something that aligns with exactly who you are.

Now, with that, you should totally do something that you enjoy doing because this is one of those things where if you don't enjoy it, there are so many other distractions out there that are gonna keep pulling you from one direction to another. It's gonna be so hard to commit to something, and it's gonna be really easy to get burnt out after a while because when you're doing something just for the sake of money, it's really hard to stick with it.

It's something where I see so many people do real estate just for money, and they get burnt out after a few months because they work all the time and they don't get paid for it. And they're just like, "This sucks! Yeah, I'm gonna do something else," and they move on to something else. Make sure you do it because you really enjoy doing it; at least you should have some sort of enthusiasm or passion for it.

It's gonna make it so much easier; you're also not going to be resentful if you really enjoy something and you're really excited about something, if you have to make sacrifices along the way. I knew if I hated selling real estate and I was just like, "I couldn't hang out with my friends," or "I couldn't go to the pool and have drinks with the boys," and go to Vegas, as Uncle Grant would say—all these people going to the pool, I would be miserable. And that defeats the entire purpose of working towards your goal.

If your goal is 15, 20 years away and that means you have to be miserable for 20 years to get there, is that really worth it? Then I would re-evaluate what you're willing to do, what your end goal is, if it's worth it, and if there's other ways to get that without being miserable. Because there are so many different career paths out there, and there's so many different things that I'm sure you can find something with your passion and that you're into, so that it never actually feels like work.

I have been so fortunate that throughout my career of real estates and even just doing YouTube videos and stuff, it's rarely ever felt like work. That has been the joy of my life—to be able to do something that I love and then I have so much fun doing it. It's a Sunday night, 10:00 p.m., I'm making a YouTube video because that's what I want to do, and tomorrow morning I'm gonna wake up and do real estate because that's what I want to do. That's what I find fun.

So I would highly recommend to find something that also aligns with your interest that you can't imagine not doing. I can almost promise you that there's something out there with your passion that aligns with how hard you're willing to work and the sacrifices you're willing to make, and how much money you need to make, and how soon you want to make that, that can fit into the lifestyle you want.

If you start looking into it and you start moving towards that, once you've created your end goal, and if you find yourself jumping from idea to idea to idea to idea—like I see so many people do—and it's so easy to get caught from one thing to the next, try thinking of this video again and starting from the very end of what you want and then reverse engineering that, slowly moving down the list from what it is described and then determining which of your ideas is best going to support that and with what you want to do, which one you should pursue.

Hopefully, this gives you just a little bit more clarity into the type of career you really want, what you're willing to do for that, and what you really want out of life. Because I would say most people don't even think of their end goal; they just know, "I want to be worth a million dollars," or "I want five million dollars," or "I want to make twenty thousand dollars a month," without ever thinking what that's actually going to do for them.

Like I know for me, to have the lifestyle I want is not going to be twenty million dollars. I mean, that would be nice. I would love that, but I'm not gonna bust my ass, be miserable for twenty million dollars, if that's not gonna bring me any more enjoyment than, let's say, for a million dollars as well.

So at that point, it's just a fine balance between doing what you want with things that align with what you want to do and things that end up bringing you more enjoyment in your life that help move you towards what you want to get.

So, as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching this. I really appreciate it. If you haven't already clicked subscribe, we gotta have a talk about why you haven't clicked subscribe. And also, while you're smashing that subscribe button—because I know you just smashed that subscribe button—also love it if you smash that notification bell. Go ahead and do it so YouTube can sometimes tell you when I post a video and you don't miss out on that.

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Thank you again for watching, and until next time!