A couple of years ago I quit my corporate 9-5 job, I sold my home in Chicago, and I moved to Portugal because I decided that it was time for me to start living on my own terms.

In the years leading up to this decision, I started to really think about my health, my relationships, and the larger goals that I have for myself.

And throughout my 30s this idea that my time is not unlimited made me really question my life.

And I kept coming back to this idea that sitting at a desk in an office is not the way I’d prefer to spend my life. I want life to be as optimal as I could possibly make it instead of following the traditional path that leads so many people to be tired, depressed, and burned out.

I wanted to be in supreme physical condition. I wanted to spend more energy nurturing relationships with people. I wanted to create a life where I spent time doing work that I feel naturally called to do.

Because in their minds, the only path available to them is to climb the career ladder in whatever industry, or area of expertise they been pigeonholed into, and they just have to accept that this is the way things will be until they’re 65 and ready to retire.

I refused to believe that this was the only reality for me, so as I contemplated leaving my job and moving to another country, I knew that I needed to find a way to not only make a living, but also create a lifestyle that I actually want to live.

I’m in the process of creating that lifestyle. I won’t say that I’ve made it yet because I’m still very much in the journey, and I have an amazing group of people in The Focus Algorithm private network who have joined me as they also design their own ideal lifestyles.

And from everything I've learned, what I can say is that for everyone out there, whether they want to branch out completely on their own or just create a better career or living situation for themselves, posting on YouTube is one of the highest-leverage plays that a person can make.

It might sound ridiculous at first but I really do want you to hear me out.

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There are lots of ways that people can create economic opportunities for themselves.

But for the majority, I believe the most accessible pathway to living on your own terms is to simply package what you already know into a product or service, then use the internet to connect with the people who might be interested in your offer.

I use the terms “product” and “service” very loosely, but I want to be clear that this doesn't entail being an entrepreneur if that’s not what you want.

It could be as a contractor or consultant.

It could also be employment at a corporation. You can package your skills and experience to be bought by an employer just as it might be bought by a client, or a customer.

All you’re doing is selling what you know.

One of the tragedies of modern life is that people don’t understand the value of the information they possess inside of their minds.

You probably struggle with the notion that you have ideas and deep knowledge that will resonate with someone.

But if you start talking publicly about your professional knowledge, your life experiences, or things that you genuinely find interesting then some people will designate you as an expert in that particular topic.

Someone out there is looking for the solution to a problem that you’ve already solved in the specific way that you solved it. They’re desperately trying to find the answer to something that you’ve already figured out.

You’d be surprised at how many people might reach out to you if you started sharing your expertise on video, and attaching a call-booking link to it.

By sharing your knowledge, you’re not only doing something good for the world by helping other people, but you’re also creating opportunities for yourself. You're inviting people to enter your world.

You’re literally creating opportunities to get lucky. You’re creating opportunities for the right people to discover you. Most importantly, you're creating opportunities to generate income purely based off of your knowledge.

Being able to monetize your knowledge simply by sharing it online with others gives you the ability to either completely circumvent the traditional corporate 9-5 system, or to create a parallel income stream that unlocks flexibility to live closer to your ideal lifestyle.

So share your knowledge, your experiences, your passions online. Pick something you naturally obsess over, then start sharing it online.

When you record yourself speaking about these things, you're converting stored knowledge into an intellectual property asset that you can then monetize at scale and in perpetuity.

And what’s good about this is once you put it out there, it will always work for you. It’s an asset that you can leverage over and over again to attract new opportunities, if you do it correctly.

And speaking of doing it correctly, the platform that you use to do this matters a lot.

This is where YouTube comes into play.

You may have noticed that its harder than ever to stand out.

In today’s world, almost everyone has a college degree, everyone is optimizing their resume with Chat GPT, and everyone on short-form social media is posting about the same things.

So if you want to attract new opportunities to attain economic flexibility that gives you the lifestyle that you want, then how do you actually stand out? How do you make people gravitate towards you and not everybody else?

The short answer is by building a personal brand.

We're officially in the 2nd quarter of the 21st century.

We’re in a time where having a personal brand is far more valuable than any amount of tailoring your resume, or offering your products and services at the best rates, or whatever other things everyone is still focused on despite none of it really moving the needle forward.

I must repeat myself here...

In the very near future, people who use the internet to build a strong personal brand will outcompete everyone else who is still playing by the old rules and don’t use online assets to differentiate themselves.

Because brand precedes everything else. Brand builds trust, which is particularly valuable considering that you really can’t trust most information that you see online.

And YouTube is the single best platform out there for building a personal brand because it is a long-format platform.

The problem with short-format platforms comes down to something called “context collapse” which is essentially just everyone gravitating to the same style and format to the point where everyone sounds the same.

YouTube, in my experience is the one major platform out there, where you can talk about your ideas in depth, you can let your personality shine through, and you can reach other people who are intently looking for the knowledge that you’re providing.

I’m going to give you two examples of how personal branding on YouTube could work, because I think when people here the term, they immediately jump to this idea of being an influencer.

you have 5 candidates who are all basically equal across the board. Their resumes read the same. Their personalities are similar. They all talk about the great things they’ve done in their careers.

But you cannot fully trust what they tell you because it’s easy to pad a resume and it’s easy to shine in an interview.

But what’s not easy to fake is building a portfolio that demonstrates expertise.

Only one candidate also has a YouTube channel where they have a portfolio of videos going in depth, teaching about the subject matter, doing tutorials and walk-throughs, or demonstrating different tools that they’ve created to address a particular problem.

This person has build a personal brand as THE guy who does the thing you’re looking for.

In this case, which candidate would you trust more?

You see a million different ads of people claiming that they’ll help you solve the problem. But you’re stuck in analysis paralysis because everyone is saying the same thing. You can’t tell who’s a snake oil salesperson and who’s legit.

But then you come across someone’s YouTube channel, and they have dozens of videos explaining how they experienced the same problem that you had, and how they went about solving it.

And over time you feel more comfortable that you’re dealing with a real human being, who actually cares, and knows what they’re talking about.

What this person has done is, in a world where there’s too much generic information, they used the long-format of YouTube to go into a level of detail that differentiates themselves as the person who has the solution to your problem.

In both of these cases, YouTube allows one to create a personal brand that attracts the right people and opportunities into their life.

If you want to create more freedom for yourself and to start living on your own terms then the quickest pathway to doing that with no starting capital is to use the internet to sell your intellectual property.

And posting on YouTube will be the thing that sets you apart from everyone else, because it will allow you to use long-format content to build a personal brand that does the selling for you even while you sleep.

If you're currently trying to navigate your next chapter, and design your lifestyle for better health, more peace, and more economic freedom, then join me and the select few others in my Private Network who’ve made the decision to level up.

Or schedule a one-time consultation with me today and I’ll help you build your "knowledge monetization” strategy.