How I Traveled The World For 3 Years And Created A 7 Figure Online Business
Yuli Azarch | May 4, 2017 | 9 Comments on How I Traveled The World For 3 Years And Created A 7 Figure Online Business
I just checked the calculations and the combined revenue of my 2 active companies where I have my focus and I am involved on in the last 12 months hit $1,342,556! Woohoo. (Excludes some other income-producing activities, which I either stopped doing in the last 12 months that are not calculated here or are simply unsellable assets. Includes months which were not so good as well)
If I decide to sell everything I have in the next month, without any additional growth, combined with personal assets of mine, I can officially become a millionaire before turning 27! Woohoo.
An important note though: In the last 3 years, I have been traveling around the world non-stop. I have an amazing lifestyle. I visited a total of 24 countries in that time. I have seen the 7 world wonders during that time:
I haven’t spent more than 6 weeks in any single place in the last 3 years. Crossed so many experiences from my dream bucket list. And I am pretty sure I work less than the average guy in terms of the number of hours per week.
Another important note though: Just 4 years ago, I was in debt, my health was not good, and I was still living with my parents. I could not work more than 1-2 hours a day on the computer without immense amounts of pain, struggling like hell.
How the hell did I get to where I am today?
I want to be here as practical as I can for you so you can take some actionable things for yourself. Below are the top routines and things I would have loved to know more than 3 years ago that I know & believe in now and needed someone telling me to my face earlier that helped to get to where I am today (Or slapping me in the face with those things would have been probably better!)
1. Set BIG goals
Read it again. SET FUCKING BIG GOALS! If you have ever heard any personal development product you probably heard about goals. It is too easy to hear something too often that you take it for granted. Setting BIG goals is the #1 thing I can attribute for my growth. It is where you envision what you want, and it is where you set the target you are going after. It all starts with your goal. If you don’t know where you are headed, how will you get there? I don’t think I said it enough: The goal has to be BIG.
It takes the same amount of effort & energy, setting a big goal and a smaller goal. It is much better to aim towards 100 and end up reaching only 50, then aiming for 20, and getting to 21 on a score sheet.
Around 3.5 years ago, I was still earning about $1K per month. For a few years prior to that, I tried reaching goals of $2K-$3K per month and failed miserably.
I decided to set a goal 10 times bigger than where I was at the time – $10K net profits per month. Magically enough, I actually reached that goal in less than a year since setting it. The things I needed to do to grow to $10K from $1K were different from $1K to $2K. Since then, I always set much bigger goals.
2. Invest in yourself
3. Disconnect from the world
A magical thing that happened to me when I started traveling the world 3 years ago: I stopped having a local number where everyone can reach me 24/7 all the time through the day. All of a sudden, nobody was calling me, even though I was reachable in other online communication forms, people were used to simply calling my number, and in return, I was simply used to answering it every time, and being reactive to every message I got on my phone. All of this stopped.
By “disconnecting” from my world, I got a lot of uninterrupted time in my days and still do. And that was a big thing for me! Everyone are too hyper-connected today to our electronic devices. It is hard to eat dinner with someone for 1 hour without the other side checking their phone every second, or without them responding to every message that is coming in. We live in a world where now everyone jumps and responds to every email, Skype message, or anything that comes to us at that second, and we live in our electronic devices.
Most of my days are constructed from uninterrupted time which I find is so rare in the world today. I am on airplane mode most of the day on my phone. I simply ignore messages from Facebook/WhatsApp/Email in most of the day (Note: I am certainly not perfect with this. You do not have to be perfect here either). This gives me time to be with myself, where I can do much better and deep work, and more importantly: I can do lots of clear thinking.
Side effects of this include also happiness and less stress.
4. Prioritize your health above anything else
For me, my health is my wealth. I prioritize it right now above anything else. This comes in the form of diet/working out and anything that can improve my mental, physical & spiritual states daily.
I look at my health as an advantage over others, in a world where people do not prioritize their health, and rather prioritize their career/work or other things.
By having better health and more energy, your mind will be clearer. With a clearer mind, you are able to create better results, be more productive & effective, learn faster, communicate better and simply do better in life!
My health is better than ever now. I am much stronger than I was when I was 20 years old, with much more energy, and clearer fresher mind. This is an area of my life I keep focusing and improving on every day and is much more important to me than anything else.
Business is an intellectual sport, so it’s good to bring your best mental state into it.
5. Set time aside each week to journal/reflect
Looking backward on my last few years, most of the things I have created did not come from me being on “Action mode” every day. But from the times where I simply took a paper, a pen, and started journaling and asking myself good questions, and simply reflecting on where I am today, and where I want to go.
Every week I set time aside now to go through the most important things to me, I reflect on the last week. This helps to keep me sane and bring me back up when I am feeling down. It is dangerous being in your brain, as it is too easy running in circles around every problem you have in your life, and putting things on paper are crucial.
This allows me to take lessons from each week and know what to focus on next to improve my skills.
Here are some questions I go through every single week in my process:
- What did I learn the last week?
- How are my important relationships going?
- Which goals aren’t I making progress on? Why?
- What’s coming up that I need to prepare for?
- What should I do differently?
- What new skill do I need to start learning? Why?
- Am I happy? If not, why not?
- How did I love this week?
- How can I get more done this week?
- Should I take some time off?
- Am I working hard enough?
6. Read MORE
This is something I wish I would have done more from the moment I was a small child. Leaders are readers.
Books are cheap. Everyone can buy a book, and in a few hours, you can download to your brain the best of the best of someone’s else work which might have taken him years or decades to write and summarize in a book – Just for you, the reader.
The most successful people in the world, are also those that read the most. If you want to find the person who is a leader in a specific field, simply search for the person that read the most books on that topic in the last 12 months.
I always read books throughout my life and listened to audiobooks, however, not as much as I should have, I could have easily had long periods without even reading a single book.
Nowadays, I try and read every day about 1-2 hours, and I listen to podcasts/audiobooks every free second of the day when I can now (Can get to a few hours in a day easily on some days).
7. Meditate every day
It allows me to tackle the most important things in the beginning of the day and fully focusing on them rather than letting someone else dictate my day.
8. Have a day plan
Great article! Very inspiring and motivating! Thank you Yuli!
Glad you liked it Rafael!
Hi Yuli – it’s great to know what you have achieved. A goal and a mentor in the very near future.
Did you read 10x rules from Grant Cardone? It is very similar to the way you are setting goals
No Serge, never read it. I’ll need to get my hands on it and read it.
If you are interested I have the audio-book I could send it to you – it’s very interesting
Sure, I’ll be glad to receive it and listen to it. Feel free to send it to [email protected]com
Thank you!
Hi Yuli, thank you for sharing your journey. It gives me so much pride and pleasure knowing that when we met at UPW, 3 years ago you were just beginning this journey and now I can see how far you’ve come ?
Will you be sharing what your businesses are and how hon started them? I’m very much interested in that and would love to learn from you.
Hey Sveta, glad you enjoyed reading, and happy to have met you as well 🙂
You can find my businesses actually on my LinkedIn profile. I may certainly write on how I started with them in some near future posts.