# How I Work: $10M/Year Serial Entrepreneur

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjUf7lrb_xQ
Duration: 11 min
Language: English
Words: 2119
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/jjUf7lrb_xQ

---

[0:00] I just cannot stand thinking about something and not acting on it. Life is so short. Time passes you by so fast. All the time spent talking about it, you could be 6 months ahead. I'm Sam Parr. I'm a serial entrepreneur and my companies make over $10 million a year. A lot of people ask me how I spend my time or how I decide what ideas I'm going to work on. So, today I'm excited

[0:23] to tell you about how I work.

[0:34] I get up between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning. I immediately go and get some black coffee for my Nespresso and I put a little bit of whole milk in there and then I try to be in the gym just 20 or 30 minutes after that. I lift weights and I lift heavy or I'm outside on a run. And my run is mostly looks like sprinting, but I always try to get a workout in or some type of exercise in on the morning. I exercise roughly 6 days a week. If I'm injured or on rest days, I am always stretching. I stretch like a madman cuz I love to stretch and

[1:09] no matter what, without fail, I have breakfast with my kids. Obviously, I'm addicted to my phone. So, I don't sleep with my phone in my bedroom. I actually don't look at my phone until right before my workout and when I look at my phone, it's because A, I have to load my workout and B, I'm about to brick my phone. Originally, I used a timed KitchenAid container and one time I needed to access my phone so badly, I smashed the container. I tested an Opal, which is like an app, but now I really love Brick. So, I've been using

[1:41] Brick now for over a year.

[1:50] The problem with like social media, particularly with Twitter, is that everyone seems like they're killing it. Well, the truth is is I've seen behind the scenes of almost all of these businesses and all of these types of people. I have talked to thousands of entrepreneurs. At conferences, I've talked to billionaires. And I can tell you everyone has a lot of complaints and everyone at times wishes they were doing something else. Being analog and not being distracted, it's literally just a matter of like not comparing yourself to other people, which is very toxic and a trait that I tend to do. So, I need to like turn that off so I just focus on my

[2:23] one thing. And nine out of 10 times, that seems to be a better solution than bailing and starting something new.

[2:33] When getting ready for work, I do journal. I have this thing called a five-year journal and I write how I feel that day and I could see how I felt that same day the year before and the year before. So, there's been multiple times where I've seen I'm going to complain about something or say that I'm frustrated about something that day in that journal and I complained about the same day the year before. And I consider myself an entrepreneur who makes actions and makes things happen, but unless I clearly set up a system, even in my own personal life, nothing will change. So, if I complain that I don't feel as fit

[3:04] as I want to be, but I didn't hire a coach, then I'm not going to change. So, I live and I work in a very purposeful way that my commute usually only takes about 13 minutes. What's funny is I own motorcycles, I love cars, I love all of this stuff, but half the time I ride a little rinky-dink scooter to work. The other half, if it's raining or I just want to like get more steps in, I take the subway. And I love to dress nice for work. Make fun of me all you want, but I love like picking out my outfits the day before or thinking about

[3:37] what I'm going to wear because I like to look cool.

[3:44] I am a lazy person. I procrastinate a ton. And so, the only times that I get things done is when they're time-bound and they're specific. In the morning, I have active planning where I write down what I need to get done. So, it's like I need to come up with like three ideas for a podcast. I write it down and then

[4:05] I go to my calendar and I time-bound it. And my goal, by the way, I've learned this over the years is I can only do probably one or two things a day.

[4:19] My love for podcasting, every once in a while it will ebb and flow. The times that I will dislike it for weeks or months at a time is when I find myself falling into the trap of chasing numbers. I'll start with like ideas that I know will get views or downloads, but don't like make me happy. But then other times when I get really happy, like I'm super happy about the podcast right now, it's when I talk to people and they break and it breaks my frame. I'll talk to someone who has raised money in this field or someone who has bootstrapped in this other field. And the number one

[4:50] takeaway of talking to the people who I talk to on the podcast and in my life is that there's so many different paths to get to where you want to go. And that has given me so much confidence. I give so much confidence in that.

[5:07] So, I podcast every Monday and Wednesday. I have a Claude skill that looks at my calendar and it will see who's the guest that day and it will automatically do research on them. And I'll read that research. And then I will go and read books on the topic or I will go and research a bunch of stuff about that person. 10 minutes before I have to record, so about 11:50, I hurry up and I go pee so I don't have to go to the bathroom when I'm talking to them. And

[5:33] then I come and I sit down and I record. After I record, I just need to like decompress. And the way that I decompress is I just like meander and wander. So, I usually will just walk around my office and I'll say, "What's up? What are you doing?" And they'll tell me and I'll say, "You seem unhappy." Or, "You seem like you have a problem. What's the problem?" And they'll tell me. And I have to like,

[5:52] "Okay, that does sound like a problem. Let's go and solve it." And we had to put frosties, like frosted glass on the windows, because everyone's like, "Dude, it's creepy how you just walk around and look in the windows." I'm not sure if it's right or wrong to do that, but I'm obsessed. I can't go to sleep at night

[6:08] knowing something is wrong.

[6:17] Typically, people who are high achievers have a huge sense of urgency. There's this amazing study, also. They took two classes of college kids. One class, they said to the kids, "The goal of the class is to make as many pots as you possibly can." The other class, they said, "Your goal is to make the most perfect pot." The group of people who made huge amounts of quantity were significantly happier with the outcome, because they were able to perfect it as they went along, and they got so much better. The class that went for that one, their pots were less good, and they were way more unhappy with the outcome. If you're just

[6:50] trying to get your first million, your first few million, ceaseless action is the way that you get it.

[7:01] From 0 to 5 million, or maybe 0 to 10 million in revenue, for every company that I've run, I am blunt force, where I just will have what I call zebra calendar, because there's a stripe, which is like a 15-minute meeting with a customer, and then 5-minute break, and then another one, and then another one. And I'm just brute forcing this thing to like make it work. I'll make the website. I'll write all the copy. I'll do all the design work. From like 0 to 10 million, to me, it's a matter of getting more customers and making the product better. And I don't really spend

[7:37] too much time thinking about what to do. I just say, "What's next? Go. What's next? Go. What's next? Go." But, the truth is is that once a company gets to like 5 or 10 million in revenue, you should delegate and you should hire. And once I do that, I'm like sitting there, I'm like, "I don't know what to do with my hands. Like, what do I do?" And I have little toy or a play box sandbox that I can like mess with stuff so I don't mess with the main thing. When you have something that's compounding and working, you let it go and you don't

[8:03] mess with it.

[8:10] What people don't realize is you have to figure out who you are. Are you a person who needs encouragement to get started? If you are, act. Just start on whatever and get a little bit of results and then pivot and maybe a little bit more. But, if you have a track record where you're like, "I'm already proven that I'm a little bit of a terminator. I achieve goals." Then, spending time plotting and picking the right project that fits their what I call it ikigai, which is what the world wants, what the world wants to pay for, what you're good at, and what you love doing. Picking

[8:37] something right in the middle of that, that is key if you have a proven track record of doing stuff.

[8:52] For the first year of the hustle, when I told successful people what I was doing, they were like, "Okay, but what are you actually going to do?" Or when I told my friends what I was doing, they were like, "So, how do you pay the bills? Or like, do you have an actual job?" Like, they thought it was stupid. Now, a newsletter or a podcast is like, "Oh, that's what you do. I understand." I've seen like things like that happen over and over and over again to where I just know that like cool stuff seems dumb at

[9:17] first.

[9:25] My evenings are almost embarrassing. I get home between 5:30 and 6:00. We either order sushi or cook at home. I have dinner with my kids. I love it. We listen to music sometimes while we have dinner and it's so much fun and I put my little girl down between 8:00 or 8:30 and that's my favorite time of day. From around 8:30 or 9:00 to about 10:00, I like to search stuff on eBay. I spend so much time on eBay. I just love finding cool stuff and cool treasures. It's also Claude time. While the eBay search is loading, I'm on Claude asking it questions about life. It's like therapy

[10:02] time. And then I lay in bed at 10:00 and from 10:00 to about 10:45 I'm reading. I love going on what I call semesters. So I'll read like five to 10 books on the same topic. Right now, I'm in a serial killer semester, baby. Before that, it was shipwrecks. Before that, it was the Kennedy family. Before that, it was like

[10:21] New York history. A lot of times at like 10:30, I'll sneak out to the kitchen and I'll have like an Oreo. I do that all the time. Calories don't count if it's after 10:00 p.m.

[10:40] I don't think people understand how enthusiasm and the right mindset can sort of crush any obstacle. It's if I think I can or if I think I can't, I'm probably right. Like if I'm enthusiastic enough, I'm going to make my energy contagious and the people around me are going to be enthused and excited and they're the one who are going to do all of the work and actually make the dream a reality. And so I don't think you should not do something because it hurts or it sucks. I love working out. It's

[11:08] really hard. I love building companies. It's really hard. It's kind of cheesy, but it's like you have to feel pain in order to like discover greatness.

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt