What millionaires know about growth that you don't

Like, you're not making any progress in life, and if anything, you feel like you just keep running into the same walls over and over and over again. And if anything, it feels like you're further from where you want to go, then closer. Well, if that's you, then I feel you and I relate to you because that's me as well some days, and has been a lot of days as I've been on this journey of entrepreneurship for about eight years now. And if you don't know who I am, I'm 26. My name is Devin Gnup. I have made over $4 million in my career in business, made a couple million dollars with YouTube and then with Info Products, made another couple million dollars with it. And I'm on pace to, you know, get to where I am making tens of millions of dollars a month, and I'm trying to get to that place. And so I feel very relatable to you guys in the sense of, like, you know, you have big, lofty goal and you're trying to get there, and you don't know fully how you're gonna get there. You know, there's lots of stories and case studies out there, but you're kind of trying to figure things out. And so a lot of times in my career, I felt like I've made, you know, I. I go on Instagram and I scroll and I just see some, you know, people that are way younger than me, that are way dumber than me, that are making millions of dollars, and it just makes me feel like shit. Like. Like I literally just went on YouTube and I'm seeing some guys like, 25, a year younger than me. He's making whatever, like, made $30 million, you know, and so it makes my 4 million feel like it's nothing, you know, or like, I have this one person I know kid that I know that I've talked to a few times. He's making, like, a million dollars a month, and he's, I think, 16 or something like that. And it just makes me feel like I haven't done jack shit with my life. And I'm, like, super far behind. And so I get it. Like, I feel like, you know, you feel like you're not moving, making any progress, and, you know, you may feel even worse than that because maybe you may not have had any success behind you or anything. At least I've been doing it for eight years, and I tried all sorts of different shit, and I've had some success along the ways. You know, I'm not gonna act Like, I've had the most incredible success, but, you know, I've done some pretty cool. And, you know, I'm like, right now in Oceanside in a beautiful apartment because I wanted to go last minute. But what I will tell you is I feel like there's a lack of progress. A lot of times I'm going to tell you through this video how I've, like, ventured through that mindset, how I've navigated it because it's fucking dark. And, you know, you. There's not always a blueprint or a roadmap. And so my goal is to kind of give you guys some. A little bit of some inspiration inside this video and tell you some real shit. So the first thing I will say I got like a few notes here is that, that a lot of times progress is invisible. And a lot of the things that we are doing to have success is typically, it's like that iceberg effect. If you've ever seen that meme where it's like the iceberg and it shows, like, you know, like an iceberg has 20% above water, and then 80% of the mass of an iceberg is typically below water. And the same thing when it comes to entrepreneurship and success. So a lot of these people are saying with these crazy success success stories online is you're seeing the iceberg effect happen. You're only seeing 20% of, like, the actual circumstances. If you're looking at my life, you're only seeing like 20% of things. And my goal on this channel is to give you the 80% they don't see because the 20%, it's like, you know, looks cool. You know, you see the. The watches, the cars, the lifestyle and the travel, and that looks cool. But there's 80% that you don't see. And so it's like that a lot of the progress of any of these people you see have this massive amount of results. And success online is just many, many sleepless nights and maybe that you are getting sleep and priority prioritizing sleep, but many days of just working your face off to do nothing. Like, I was thinking about this earlier, I've been on like, like, lately I've stepped into the stage of doing lots of meetings in my life, and a lot of my progress comes from meetings, and it has very little direct correlation with. To the amount of money that I make that day. So, like, I'll get on some meetings. Like, sometimes I do have some effect, like where, you know, things have kind of slowed down a little bit. I kind of reinsurge some energy or some different momentum or go a little bit of different path or come up with some different idea and it will get a result within like a few hours or maybe a couple of days or that week. But a lot of times, typically I'm building things that I'm not going to see the result of for months or even years. A lot of business development is very like just linear and it's very slow, it's very, very slowly moving versus making. You know, sometimes you make a viral video and it gets millions of views overnight and that's cool and get a lot of dopamine. But a lot of like, you're building long term success, it's invisible. It feels like you're not doing anything actually in the grand scheme of things. But it's more the habits and the discipline that you have as a person that sets you up for that success and of becoming that person. And I just remember hours and weeks and months of just sitting there listening to like this personal development content, not seeing any actual physical change in my life, listening to it's like all this mindset content and about how it's like, you know, you need to think bigger and you need to like believe in success and you need to have these daily disciplines and you need to go on walks throughout the day and you need to, you know, hit 75 hard or whatever. You know, the list goes on of like all these things. You start going to the gym and I would look at these things and I would do the things, I would go do the action. Like I would go to the gym and I'd be done with it. And I'm like, I still don't have a six pack. You know, it's like I'm not jacked yet. And you know, saying it out loud, especially things like a fitness thing, it's like, yeah, of course. No, you just went to the gym once. You need to go to the gym every single day for three months, for six months, for a year, for, you know, multiple years, for a decade. And that's when you see the incredible results. Like, like, I don't know, a really jacked guy that you see at the gym. They probably didn't just go for the first time, they've been going for years. And that's just the, the person that they become from doing the gym for years and years and years. And it's like whenever you see these people that are massively successful, if you look at me or if you look at people that are way more successful than I am, it's just a common. It's a culmination of just doing this thing for years with no physical, like, immediate result or immediate outcome. And it's like you do the thing you. And you don't get the feedback until, like, months or years or, you know, sometimes like five years later, you're like, oh, I'm starting to finally see the byproduct of that. That comes with, like, health. That comes with your. Your financial side, your wealth, and your, you know, material success. That comes with relationships, and then that even comes with your own personal happiness as well. And a lot of times, a lot of these things, like going to the gym. You go to the gym and it feels like you're making things worse. You know, your muscles are tired. You actually can't pick something up after you go to the gym because you've, like, exhausted the muscle. And now it's like, to pick something up, it feels like things are heavier. And that's the exact same thing with, like, relationships with wealth, with finances, with happiness is a lot of the things that are good for us, that are making progress are actually, you know, moving backward. It's a step in a different direction. A step in a different direction feels like we're moving backwards. But sometimes in order to, like, not keep running into the same wall, we have to take a step back, move to the right, and then we can go forwards or we have to step sideways. And so a lot of the times, if you feel like you're moving backwards in life, if things are gonna, you know, you're. You're taking something from a productivity, from a business standpoint of, you know, some sort of new thing, like some new jiu jitsu move or something. I don't know. Then it's gonna feel like you're moving backwards. And that's actually a good thing. If you do something, if you take some sort of advice or lesson from somebody that's further along than you, if it feels like you're moving backwards, that means it's probably working. That means that something new is happening. You know, if your muscle feels weak after going to the gym, that's a good thing. That means you're getting stronger. That means you're tearing the muscles so then they can regrow and rebuild. Same with the relationship. You know, sometimes you have to have conversations that you don't really want to have, and it makes the relationship not feel good. But that's progress. That. That pain or that. That. That tough conversation you had to have is progress. It doesn't feel like it in the moment, it kind of sucks. You know, like, hey, like, you haven't been taking the trash out. Or, you know, like, hey, like, I'm not happy in this relationship. Those conversations aren't hard to have. We're a business relationship. Hey, like, I've asked you to do this thing, and you're not doing it. Not fun conversations to have. Sometimes you have to let somebody go and find someone new. It feels like you're moving backwards because now you have one less person at your company. But in reality, if that person wasn't good working with you, and you have to let that person go, even though it feels like you went from zero people to one person, back down to zero, it feels like you're moving backwards. Now you get to hire another person, and then that person, a lot of times can be better than the previous person if you hire better and you learn from what you did. And in reality, it feels like you're moving back, but it's a step towards progress. If you're going to go climb Mount Everest, you don't just go straight to the top. You don't just go show up to, you know, Mount Everest, and you're just like, hey, guys, let's go. And then you just go straight to the top of the mountain. In fact, what you're actually doing is you're going to different camps, and they. What they do is they get you used to that elevation, and then you go back down to a lower elevation, and then you go up to another elevation, and then you go back down, and then you go up, and then you go down, and it feels like you're moving backwards. But ultimately, in that progress of climbing Mount Everest, that is progress, because you're getting your body acclimated to the elevation of otherwise you would just. Most people would die because their body isn't used to the lack of oxygen and the pressure that changes with the. With the elevation, and people are gonna die. Like, progress is moving backwards. Progress is going up the mountain and back down the mountain, and it doesn't feel like it's progress. If you look at the grand scheme of things. If you look at a graph or a map of elevation gain, you're going up and down. You're like, oh, like, you know, you just went up and then you just went down. It feels like something is not being made progress, but it's just a step in the process of climbing the mountain. And the same with success, same with business, same with relationships, same with your health. You have to make a step backwards. You have to eat Food that you don't like. When it comes to nutrition, you have to, you have to eat food that doesn't fill you up as much. Sometimes to make progress in your nutrition, you have to have those hard conversations in relationships to make them better, to make progress. In order to have progress in relationship, you have to have the hard conversations that you don't want to have. And that is what you start to realize is progress, is those hard things, is those, is that realizing that, you know you have to take a step backwards. And a lot of it too is now that you've kind of made that big decision or that big change, then it's the maintenance of that change because you can't just go to the gym once, get weaker arms, and then you're just freaking jacked. You got to keep going for weeks, for months, for years in order to get to the body that you want or the lifestyle that you want or, you know, the, the mindset that you want. It takes time to build those things. And so what you have to realize is that growth is boring. Growth is painful. Growth requires patience. And it requires you to consistently go to the gym no matter how you feel. You know, obviously you can take a day off once a week or whatever, sometimes, but if you take too many days off, then you're actually moving backwards in a not good way. You're reversing the growth that you have been having. And so a lot of it is maintenance. A lot of it's doing the same thing over and over and over again, regardless of how you feel. Like the, of me posting on this YouTube channel you guys are watching, if I don't post on the channel, the channel is not growing. It doesn't necessarily reverse my growth because I've gotten to a certain stage of subscribers. I don't really just lose subscribers, thousands of droves of them, overnight. But if I stop posting, the momentum starts to slowly die down. And so the more I post, the more the momentum builds up. And just as me posting or uploading on this channel changes the rate of the growth of this channel. So if you want to be somewhere faster, it's probably not going to happen in weeks or months like you want it to. But if you keep doing something, you know, year over year over year, you're going to see progress. You know, let's say just as an easy example, like just over a year ago, I never had any luxury watches in my life. Then I bought my first luxury watch about this Rolex, which conveniently was on this dining table, or not dining table. This island, in this kitchen. And then what I did was after I think it was about 10 months or so, I bought my second watch. And then now, you know, hopefully in like six months or so I'm going to buy my next one. And then, you know, my goal is to get like a collection of watches. And that's just kind of like, you know, you start with one and then you get another one and then you get another one and, and then it starts, you know, you're able to kind of start accumulating more as you're starting to build relationships, as you're kind of able to start making more money. And a lot of like the, most of the, like, most of the money that I've made in my life out of the last like eight years was in the last like two years or so. Like I think 90% of the money I've made, maybe 80%, I don't know, between 60 and 80%. I haven't done the math. But a larger portion of the money that I made has been in the last two years out of the last eight that I've been doing it on, on this progress. And it's just because you become more skilled as, because you develop more skill sets. And it's like the longer you do things like, especially if you ever like look at like compound interest, the longer that you have your money in something that has a compounding interest, the larger the gains that you are getting. You know, year 51 and 52 are dramatically different than year one and year two of the growth. You know, if you have like a 10% interest rate that you have, you put a thousand dollars into something, the first couple years, you're only making $100 a year off the money that you're making that you have in there. But after you add in like you know, 50, 60 years, you know that money is generating tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, you know, millions of dollars over year, over year. The longer that that thing has been there. And that's the same thing with all of these different pillars in your life. When it comes to wealth, when it comes to relationships, when it comes to happiness. A lot of like the huge amount of growth in personal happiness that I've had or like personal fulfillment has been recently. Recently I feel extra fulfilled in life. And that's because it's like I've been doing this whole personal development self help thing for, you know, years now, almost a decade. And as I've just been doing it for over time now, things are really starting to click now. I'M starting to really comprehend things because I've just had all these data points over all these years, and then they all kind of stack and compound and into this understanding of, of my like, of my understanding of personal development, of my understanding of myself, of my understanding of my purpose in life. And this is going to be like, now compared to, like another decade from now when I'm in my late 30s is going to be entirely different because I'm going to have another decade stacked on top and I'm going to be, you know, I probably won't be like two times better, three times better, five times better. I'll probably be like 100 times better in personal fulfillment and my comprehension of that category as time goes on because of the compounding of these, of this understanding of this, of this knowledge that I have and just the amount of experiences. And same with the experiences. Like, like this year I have been to, I don't know, like, 30 or 40 different trips that I've done this year. Whereas the year before, I think I did like 20. And then the year before that maybe like 15 and 10 and I don't know, like five, the year before that, something. And then maybe like two, you know, like two trips a year is what I was making probably back in like 2017 or something like that, maybe four. But yeah, like, the amount of, like, trips that I've gone on, the places that I've been, is constantly been increasing. I don't want to get to a point where I'm doing like 300 trips a year. That's not what I want to do. But, you know, it's like I'm getting to like, a state of, like, where I'm just able to constantly travel more. I have more friends and more places. I have the financial flexibility to do more things. Like, I can spend $2,000 on a week at a place and not have to, like, stress about it too much. I have just significantly more understanding of myself. Like, I used to stress out whenever I'd go travel to places and try to work and run a business at the same time. And then now it just kind of develops like, you know, mental models of how to do it. I've developed better practices. I also, you know, in a way, have gotten jaded from novelty a little bit more. So I don't care as much if I go to a new place about, like, trying to milk out every ounce of being in that place. And I've come to that. That understanding with myself. And so over time, it's like, you know, it's it's become, become a lot easier to live life traveling and doing things because I've just done it more and more and more and I've just become more experienced with that. Like now I have running shoes so I go on runs when I go to places. I used to only work out at gyms and you know, then I would go travel. My working out just dove off a cliff because I, it was harder to go find a gym everywhere I would go. But then once I changed the types of workouts I was doing more body weight stuff and more running, then I was able to kind of go and do that a lot easier. And so, you know, a lot of the things, it's just like it, it just gets better over time. There's always like little nuances, all these little contexts that you're missing out on. And whenever you do something new, basically you're just restarting the clock of like learning and, and there's, that's actually like a good thing. Progress feels like it's moving backwards before it moves forwards. And so you know, to wrap this all up is if you don't, if you're not where you want to be in life, good. If you're not getting the results that you want, good. If you're working hard and you're not like seeing the byproduct of all this work that you're doing, good. But as long as you're showing up, you're being consistent with showing up. You are constantly learning new things every single day. You yourself are growing as a person day by day. Even though you may not see tangible, physical, you know, material things appearing in your life right now, but you are giving it your all every single day. And Even if that's 10% some days, but you're still showing up regardless of how you feel, whether it be in your relationships and your health, in your finances, in your own personal self development, then that means you're on track. It may not feel like in the moment like you're growing and again growth is backwards. A lot of times it's go backwards to go forwards, but you're making progress. And you know, this video is a little bit of some just tells from me doing it myself and then also a little bit of just like some little bit of push just keep going. And you know, it may not happen as fast as you wanted it to originally, but if you keep showing up and if you keep really just trying at the end of the day you will start to start to see a byproduct of the of the results of, of all this time. It's like going to the gym. Eventually you're going to find a better way to do a workout. Eventually you're going to find a better way to like, kind of really work a muscle. Eventually, you're going to meet incredible friends at the gym that you can work out with consistently. Eventually, you're going to find a better way to recover. Maybe you might burn yourself out, and that's progress, actually, you know, you're learning how not to burn yourself out in the future or the potential risk of over exhaustion and finding out better ways to not over exhaust yourself. And the only way you find that is through doing it. And, you know, sometimes you move backwards to make a huge leap forward in your growth and your understanding of something. So keep showing up, keep going, and watch other videos on this channel. That's what I got.