The Business Of You

I was finally making a lot of money, yet deep down I was miserable.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been a builder. I would build with Legos, with pen & paper, with words & imagination. Building is a part of me that brings me joy.

When you’re building something that does not get you closer to the life you want, the build process loses its fun. It becomes a chore. It makes you miserable.

Sitting in front of my computer would trigger an insane level of anxiety. Crying randomly every week became my routine. Applying myself to building the product’s vision had lost its meaning.

Life had become everything I wanted to avoid.

Waking up on weekdays feeling excited. Going to the beach every day. Spending hours having fun without being guilty. That’s the kind of life I wanted to have. And that’s the kind of life I have now.

I’ve never wanted a business for the sake of it.

I wanted a business so I could enjoy my life.

A business where I could make enough money to support the lifestyle I wanted to have.

Have time, energy, and money, to invest in my hobbies and projects. Like traveling the world and meeting cool people. Or creating my own fantasy stories.

You cannot do that unless you build a very specific type of business.

Successful entrepreneurs will tell you to find a starving crowd and maximize for profit.

I say make your business an extension of yourself so you can maximize for life.

Your Product Is Your Daily Life

Entrepreneurial advice out there is outdated. They will you tell to identify a starving crowd, come up with a solution for their problems, do market research, validate your idea, test and develop a product.

That approach has helped thousands of entrepreneurs make millions.

It has also helped thousands of entrepreneurs (and their employees) hate their life.

When you follow this outdated mentality, you spend all your time and energy to understand someone else’s problems and learn how to develop solutions for them.

Their life becomes your life. All for the sake of money.

How about your problems? Your dreams?

Are they not important enough for you to spend at least the same amount of time learning how to solve them?

That’s right, you don’t have the time for that. You’re too busy living your life for someone else’s dream.

You go to bed and you’re frustrated. You wake up and you’re frustrated. You talk to your friends and family and you’re frustrated. You wait for the weekend so you can party and “live a little bit” to cope with that frustration. Frustration coming from not living your life the way you wanted.

If you can’t already see the problem with that, I don’t know what else to say.

When I say make your business an extension of yourself so you can maximize for life, this is what I mean:

1. Define what kind of life you want to live
2. Acquire the skills & mindset to get you there
3. Document your journey online.
4. Turn your daily life into a product.

You do the first 3 for enough time, and eventually you build an audience.

People start paying attention to you because they too want what you have done for yourself. That’s the power of documenting online. You’re selling your lifestyle.

You solve your own problems, based on the kind of life you’re striving to have, and you turn those solutions into products to help solve your audience’s problems.

The more you do for yourself, the more you’ll do for others.

Your pursuit of the life you want becomes the business that allows you to keep pursuing it.

Your Life’s Vision

Real businesses take years to build. If you want to create a business that gives you freedom, you need to build something that lasts.

Forget about shortcuts, easy hacks, the most profitable ideas, and trending businesses of whatever year we’re in. This is advice for lazy people who want quick fixes for big problems.

Big problems require big commitments. Commitment takes time. Years on end of trial and error.

The only way to endure that long is to make your business your life’s work.

I have come to believe that 90% of people don’t understand what their life’s work is. Heck, they don’t even know what it means.

Your life’s work is your purpose.

Most people believe their purpose is a mission. Something they need to fulfill on this earth. It’s a duty they have. And so, they make their lives a chore.

That couldn’t be more wrong.

To live means to enjoy, to be joyful, to prosper.

That’s the whole point of life.

What does enjoyment mean to you? What makes you joyful? How can you prosper?

Those are the questions you should be focusing on. Those should be what guides you. That’s your purpose.

When you create a vision of what your life can be, guided by the right purpose, you have something to strive for. You find your life’s work.

From your life’s work, you extract a business that is an extension of yourself.

The Business of You

The first step is knowing the kind of self you want to be. You define your life’s vision so you have clarity on where you want to go. Once you know that, you can define the path you need to take to get there.

In other words, lead your life with intention.

From the process of walking that path, challenges will arise. Those challenges are the problems you face that keep you from living your vision. The obstacles in your way to live the life you want.

While walking your path, you will solve those problems. One by one. Because that’s your life’s work. Your purpose depends on it. After all, the reward is your life itself.

Every business needs a product. And yours will be no different. The difference is where that product comes from. With your business as an extension of yourself, your product becomes what you do on a daily basis.

Your thoughts, ideas, systems, resources, frameworks.

By leading with your life first, your business becomes a consequence of it.

You make your business an extension of yourself, and so you maximize your life.

You become the niche. You become the market. You build, market, and sell to yourself.

The Gap

You have your vision. From it, your path is born. While you walk it, obstacles arise.

When trying to overcome these obstacles, you will notice the gap. The gap stretches the distance between where you are and where you want to be. It makes you trip on your toes and fall on your face.

The quicker you can bridge that gap, the faster you can keep going on your way.

On your path to your purpose, the gap is a matter of perspective.

Ever since we are born our perspective is shaped. From our parents, to our family, our teachers, and friends. We’ve been absorbing who they are, what they believe, and how they do things.

They too have gaps, but most of them don’t even know.

Their gap is themselves.

Your path is a collection of small things you need to do every day.

Decisions to be made, actions to be taken.

When we face obstacles, what we really face is a limitation in ourselves.

A limitation in our mindset and our skillset. These two combined shape our perspective.

Most people don’t grow because they don’t want to. They’ve grown comfortable with their own limitations. They are used to how they think. And they are used to what they know.

That’s what creates the gap.

To bridge the gap, you need to bridge yourself. You are at a certain place and you want to get to another place. You are someone and you want to be someone else.

For that to happen, you need to mold your mindset. To mold your mindset means to change your perspective on who you believe you are.

Are you the person that will be stuck? Or are you the person that will get there?

Your daily life becomes a push and pull. A dance between belief and action.

Mastering the process of changing yourself is the most important step in your journey.

You learn something new to mold your mindset, and you use it to take your next steps.

Belief and action.

Personal Presence

To sustain a lasting business in our modern days you need an audience.

If you’re going to turn your personal business into your life’s work, you need people to know about you in order to buy from you. They must see the transformation you’ve had, a transformation they desire for themselves, so they desire to follow along.

Content is the front door for your audience.

Your content is collected from the work you’re doing to live your life’s vision. Your content also is your life’s work. This is the beauty of making your business an extension of yourself.

Everything required to keep your business running and thriving comes from you. Mission, product, content. You do one thing, which is to live your life, and you are gifted with everything else.

You take what you’re already doing and repurpose it in the form of content. You collect your stories, mistakes, transformations, failures, and wins. You document your journey. You share your lifestyle.

Those that are like you will be pushed towards you. They too want your lifestyle. Some may already know that, some may not. They too have a gap. You’ve bridged yours, now you should help them bridge theirs.

If content is the front door for an audience, writing is the front door for content.

You should write for yourself, to bridge your own gap. And you should write for your audience, to help them bridge theirs. This is how you maximize your life. You merge all the foundational aspects of living your vision into one.

Your Ideal Lifestyle

This is how I am able to work 3-4h a day and spend the rest of my time by the beach. That’s how I maximized my life. To spend more time doing the things I actually want to do, instead of working on someone else’s dream.

I’m not anxious anymore. I don’t cry randomly every week anymore. I don’t despise the build process anymore.

Sitting in front of my computer to write and work on my vision makes me excited.

When I wake up I’m excited. When I go to bed I’m excited. When I feel tired from living my day to its fullest, I’m excited.

This is what I teach my students in Purpose Mastery.

Ideal life vision. Lifestyle design. 4h work days. Creating a business around yourself.

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown.

Gabriel