In this motivational monologue, Dan Willis of millennialmotivator.ca urges entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to critically examine the prevailing narratives about career success. He contrasts the traditional promise of a college degree leading to a stable 9‑to‑5 job and a comfortable retirement with the reality that higher education often fails to guarantee employment or financial return for many millennials and Gen Z. Willis argues that the surge in entrepreneurial identity stems from this disillusionment and from idolizing public figures who have succeeded through an entrepreneurial spirit. He warns against the pervasive get‑rich‑quick and overnight‑success hype promoted by infomercials and self‑help content, emphasizing that true entrepreneurial success typically involves years of relentless hustle, building infrastructure, and enduring hardship. Willis challenges viewers to scrutinize any claim that entrepreneurship is easy, to research the full backstories of successful creators, and to adopt a mindset of persistence, consistency, and resilience. He concludes with a call to action: investigate at least three admired figures, verify the grind behind their achievements, and share findings, reinforcing that entrepreneurship is hard but rewarding for those who persevere.
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You need to challenge everything as an entrepreneur. Stick around, we're going to talk about why. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I am Dan from millennialmotivator.ca, helping you learn how to create, engage, and inspire. If you're new to the channel, go ahead and click that subscribe button down there and the little bell. You'll get notified when I go live. I put out videos here Monday through Saturday helping you learn how to use the internet, grow your business, be a better entrepreneur, social media, digital marketing, community, all kinds of great stuff. So what are you waiting for? Click that subscribe button and the little bell. Today though, we're talking about why you as an entrepreneur need to challenge everything. For those of you that have been looking around, you'll notice that there's quite a few more entrepreneurs than there used to be, and a lot of this comes out of where society has brought us, What we need to do to deal with that, and why you need to challenge everything that comes your way. Let's get to it. Alright, so first things first, guys. Entrepreneur is not only a buzz phrase, it's a buzz career right now. It seems like everybody and their uncle is an entrepreneur, and I, as an entrepreneur, don't have a problem with that. I'm fine with that. I'm actually really okay with that. I love the idea of everybody out there being solo, being independent, working in the world, providing their skills, their experiences as a solo person, as a solo entity in order to fulfill one bigger action, right? So I would rather have a team of entrepreneurs that one of them is the creative guy, one of them is the leader, one of them is the— you know, I'd rather have all those bits and pieces as solo entrepreneurs with their own skills, experiences. It just— I find the product ends up better. Now, Why is everybody an entrepreneur these days? Why is that? Well, I'm gonna tell you a little story. Once upon a time, there was a promise, okay? And the promise goes like this: you're born, you go to school for 12, 13, 14, you know, up to 20 years. Great. You get your college degree, you've got your diploma in hand, you find yourself a cute little honey, you marry her, you head out into the world, you You get a job because you've got the diploma. Great. You work 9 to 5 from then until you're 55, 60 years old. You kick the bucket. You have 2 and a half kids. You've got a dog. You've got the white picket fence. You mow your lawn. You go retire. You take up golf. You sail the world. You kick the bucket and off you go to the pearly gates. That's the story. The reality is in this generation, it's a lie. It's a flat-out lie. I've done videos in the past on what I feel the college diploma is really worth these days. And for those that are firm proponents of the college degree, college education, I, I always make the caveat for the people that want to be in academia in some way. So if you want to be a teacher, a lawyer, doctor, scientist, mechanical engineer, these are all academic careers and pursuits. Great, I completely understand you going to college. If you want to be in business though, If you want to go get your liberal arts major and have an entry-level position in a company, you get what I'm saying, right? Yeah. And even if you want to go get a role in academia, you go get your diploma, your teaching degree, your engineering degree, and the reality is it's not a guarantee you're gonna get the job. Oftentimes people now are hearing, what have you done? What's your experience? Where you been? The reality is the reason why the millennial generation, Generation Z, wherever we are now with the The people coming out of high schools, coming out of colleges, the reason why so many of them want to be entrepreneurs is they don't see the return on investment with college. They go, okay, if I go in and I give $40,000, $60,000, $80,000 over a 4-year program, I come out with a degree, there's no guarantee I'm landing the job that I want, A, to pay back that college tuition that I now am saddled with the debt of, and B, I don't have a job that affords me the lifestyle that I was hoping to have coming out of college, university, etc. So a lot of people are saying there must be another way, there must be a better way. And where do they look? They look to the successes of the world. Now the reality is most major successes out there are entrepreneurial in some way, shape, or form, whether it's an athlete, an actor, a musician, or a businessman. Most of them got there through an entrepreneurial spirit. Okay? Even— and I know people are saying, well, athletes have jobs with teams. I guarantee those athletes learned how to market themselves, brand themselves. Bust their butt, hustle hard, grind to get to where they are. That's true of an artist, that's true of a CEO of a company, that's true of an actor or an athlete. It's all the same part and parcel. An entrepreneurial spirit. The desire to constantly use your own skills, traits, and abilities to further yourself ahead. So it's no surprise that as people are looking for opportunity, and they're looking to the people that they idolize, they're seeing, oh, these people are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs. And so I too will go be an entrepreneur. I love that idea, that idea of I see success and so I'm going to pursue a similar model. Now, why do I say you have to challenge everything? How do these 2 concepts tie together? Well guys, here's where the rubber hits the road, okay? People will tell you the age-old story that I told you at the beginning here, and you need to challenge that. And for obvious reasons, if somebody says, well, you go to college, you get a good job, you work until you get a pension, you retire, you have a good life. The end. You challenge that. You go, okay, well, is that true? If I if I go to college, am I going to get a diploma? Who knows? The number of people that have an undeclared major, they go to college for a couple years, they end up leaving or dropping out because it doesn't work. There's lots of different things that can happen, right? Who knows? Even once you get the college diploma, do you know that that's going to get you a job? No, right? You're not assured of that. Okay, moving forward. Do you know you're going to find yourself a spouse or a partner that you're going to love to be with for? the rest of your life. No, you don't know that. You don't know if you want kids. You don't know if you're gonna have kids. You don't know if you have kids whether or not you're gonna be a good parent. You don't know how your life is gonna turn out. So you challenge that false promise that's been given to people for hundreds of years, at least 100 years, right? Now the same thing, and this is where the Challenge Everything comes from. I need all of you out there that have your engineer or your, your entrepreneur hat on, I need you all to just pause for a moment, okay? And this is not like large disclaimer, okay? This is not me discouraging you pursuing entrepreneurship in any way, shape, or form. But I'm asking you, in the same way that you realistically look at the false promises of past generations, stop for a moment and challenge what you are being told right now about being an entrepreneur. Because I'm hearing a lot of scary trends coming out of people's mouths. The idea that in some way it is a simple process to strive to be an entrepreneur who provides for themselves or a family or a lifestyle that they want, that it is easy in some way. Okay, I want you to challenge that. The reason I want you to challenge it is because I find most of it to be self-help motivational nonsense. There are truths out there, and I'm not, I'm not discrediting that. The people that are out there that are telling you, show up, work hard, Don't quit, be consistent, drive like crazy, and keep going. Even when it sucks, even when you're failing, keep going. If you're hearing that, you can challenge it by trying it. And I promise you, you're not gonna see a success story out there where people haven't gone through that, where it's crappy, it's hard, it's not a fun experience at first, and you have to build something through a lot of sludge and a lot of mud to get to where you wanna be, okay? But that's often not the promise you're hearing. What you're hearing is a promise from guys like the ads that run before this video of, Hey, I've got this little thing here. You see this mug that I've got? It made me $10,000 this weekend. Pay me $500 and you too can make $10,000 this weekend. Challenge that a little bit. Don't sour yourself to what it is to be an entrepreneur because some guy on an infomercial, essentially what's the equivalent of an infomercial before this video, told you you could be a millionaire overnight. In 6 months, you're going to have a business of $100,000. Hey, look at what we did in one weekend. We built a business of wolf mugs that sold $40,000 worth in the first weekend. Here's the reality, guys. That guy there has been through crap. I promise you. That entrepreneur, challenge it. Take a look at where he's been and what he's done, okay? Take a look at how all of these claims of you are going to do it, it's going to be easy, you're going to make it, it's going to be big. Challenge them. Take a look at where these guys came from. I promise you what you're gonna see with just about every entrepreneurial story of success out there is this: they started with bupkis. They busted their butt for years and years and years figuring out a system, how it works, how to build it, how to grow it, and then helping other people do it, which is where they are now. And I'm not opposed to that, them teaching people how to do it. What I am opposed to is them saying, look at what I've got, you can have it too. It's simple. Just do this and overnight in the first weekend you can be selling $10,000 worth of stuff. The reality is that's not true. What they don't tell you is they've built a social network, they've built a mailing list, they've done— they've got all the backend, they've got a team that's working with them now from previous gigs. They, they've built an infrastructure and a plan around it, right? So where do these 2 ideas meet? Challenge everything as an entrepreneur. What I'm telling you is this, guys, and it's something that seems to have gone out the window with the promises of grandeur. that seem to have popped up. Entrepreneurship is hard, okay? And I want you to challenge me on this. This is a promise I am giving you. This is the promise I will give you, is that being an entrepreneur is hard. You will want to quit because you will not be making millions of dollars out the gate. You will struggle. There will be trials. But being an entrepreneur is about seeing those trials and pushing through them. Not just going, okay, well, this is great, everything's good, you know, I made $10,000 my first weekend selling a sewing machine. That's not how it's gonna go. You're gonna struggle, you're gonna have hardship. And I see a lot of it since I came here on YouTube. I see people that are amazing creators, amazing. A lot of the channels I looked at, I love it, the stuff— I love it, the stuff that I'm seeing. But people are so frustrated and they hear success stories like Peter McKinnon or Casey Neistat and they go, oh, Oh man, how come I can't? They're so lucky. Why isn't that? The reality is, take a look at who those guys are. Peter McKinnon's story, he'll tell you. He went through years and years and years of crap jobs that he hated, that didn't fit, that didn't didn't just click the right way. And then eventually he ended up through all of that where he is now. Same thing with Casey Neistat. Same thing with Sarah Nici. Same thing with Roberto Blake. All of these guys. All of these bigger names, PewDiePie, go look at what PewDiePie was doing before he started his YouTube channel. He hated it. He worked with his mom and dad at their company. Like, guys, please, if somebody is selling you a bill of goods, if somebody's saying being an entrepreneur is easy, you'll have tons of success, quit your job, go be it today, please challenge that. Challenge it. Now challenge the promise I'm going to give you. Being an entrepreneur is hard. It's going to take hustle. It's going to take grind. You can't quit. You're going to have to be consistent. You're gonna have to be persistent, and at the end of the day, if you can cut it, if you can push through, if you can find that will to get through the mud, you will find success. You will. Best way to challenge me on this, guys, is to go look up at least 3 of your favorite people out there. Doesn't matter who they are— athletes, millionaires, artists, musicians. I don't care who they are. Go look them up and look at their story. I promise you, There was hustle, there was grind, there were trials, there was crap times. Check it out, challenge me on it, let me know down below. Question of the day: did you find somebody that got to where they are successfully? And I'm not talking the guy that won the lottery and then blew it all, right? I'm talking somebody that's built a career as an entrepreneur that got there with hustle, grind, and hard work. That's the promise I give you. Challenge things as an entrepreneur, guys. Don't buy the get-rich-quick scheme. Don't buy that it's easy, it's simple, anybody can do it. Anybody can do it. It's not easy. It's not simple. You have to push through. You have to persevere. Have a great day. I will catch you guys tomorrow with another video. See you then.
