My video on quitting short-form content has 1.9 million views.

Last night, Instagram still got me for 10 minutes.

I'd just finished a 12-hour day of deep work. No notifications. No checking my phone. Then a 2.5-hour movie.

At midnight, I downloaded Instagram just to see how a post had performed.

The first thing that popped up was a reel. Then another.

"Just three more minutes."

Then I caught myself. I've built my entire life around avoiding this, and here I was justifying it.

Try this: name 10 reels you watched last week.

You probably can't.

But you can name a movie you watched years ago. The characters, the ending, how it made you feel.

Short-form content is too short for your brain to store. You're spending hours of your life and keeping none of it.

In the full video, I break down why scrolling feeds every other addiction you have, and why it quietly kills your motivation to build anything.

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/2WFrd66rXQE

It took me 64 sales calls to sign my first client.

And an average of 300 cold calls to get just one of those calls.

I was 18. No money, no audience, no team, no connections. Just a laptop, a Wi-Fi connection and a lot of rejection.

Most of the people I called told me no. I hated my life for six months straight.

Then one gym owner wired me £1,000, and I went from 0 to $10K a month.

Here’s what I learned: you don’t need to master your emotions or “compartmentalise” the pain. You just need to learn how to keep going, no matter how you feel.

Pick the one thing you know you need to do every day. Define the plan. Make adherence to that plan the only condition of your success.

I broke down the full story in this video, including the exact daily routine I ran for those six months: https://youtu.be/2_tbqd47oR0

Most people are ambitious, but their work ethic doesn't match their goals.

In this video, I break down how I've built the ability to work long hours consistently, stay focused, and push through the resistance that stops most people from making progress.

I'll explain why you need to build your work ethic like a muscle, why rest is just as important as hard work, and why focusing on becoming a hard worker is more powerful than chasing money, status, or material things.

The biggest lesson is simple. If you want to make progress as quickly as possible, find the thing you're resisting the most and do it. That's usually where the biggest opportunity for growth is hiding.

If you're ready to start your own business but don't know where to begin, I've also put together a completely free, step by step course showing you how to start an AI marketing agency.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/3MqgKcE8tLU

Charlie

How To Stop Sabotaging Your Own Success

Most people want to be rich, but their daily habits are working against them.

Video games, doomscrolling, instant gratification and staying comfortable are all stealing time and energy from the things that actually matter.

The problem isn't a lack of ambition. It's where you're putting your attention.

In this video, I break down the habits you need to avoid, why delayed gratification matters, and how to stop falling behind while everyone else moves forward.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/aAACe6PIpa0

Why your life feels stuck (and it's not what you think it is)

If you're unhappy, broke, or stuck in a loop, there's usually one root cause. You've replaced real risk with proxies.

A proxy is a substitute that gives you the feeling of something without any of the risk it takes to actually earn it.

Video games are a proxy for a career. They give you rank, progress, competition, status. Everything a real career gives you, minus the risk.

Streamers and YouTubers are a proxy for friendship. You feel connected to someone for five minutes with none of the risk that real friendship takes.

Porn is a proxy for a relationship. Same dopamine hit, zero courage required.

Here's the problem. None of it actually satisfies you, because your brain knows you took no risk to get it. And the things that make us feel fulfilled, a real career, a real relationship, real friends, only mean something because they're hard to get.

I lived this. I was there at 17, 18, 19. I fixed it by removing the proxies and forcing myself to take the risks I'd been avoiding. That's the entire story of how I went from a fucked life to an unfair one.

I break the whole thing down, including the practical steps to actually remove these proxies without your life falling apart in the process, in this video.

Watch here - https://youtu.be/Lu0AbbMb668

I've made $40 million. Driven the supercars. Lived in the mansions. Worn the watches.

None of that was the hard part.

The how of making money is simple. Find a group of people, find the problem they have, solve it, sell the solution, do it 100 times. That's genuinely it.

The hard part is getting yourself to actually do it.

I spent my first 3-4 years as an entrepreneur convinced I was one piece of information away from success. One book, one niche, one offer. Shiny object syndrome. I know it intimately.

What actually changed things wasn't a strategy. It was going back to being 11 and 12 years old, badly bullied at school, no friends, completely powerless to stop it. Carrying that into my late teens with no confidence and no girlfriend.

That's where the need to get rich actually came from. Not ambition. A terror of ever feeling powerless again.

Cold calling Australia at 5am from a freezing shed in December, getting told no over and over, was never hard for me. It was my escape.

Motivation runs out. Discipline gets tested. Obsession fades.
Pain doesn't.

If the pain of staying where you are isn't worse than the pain of doing the work, you won't do the work. Freud called us pain-avoidant animals for a reason.

I go deep on this, and how to actually dig up your own reason, in the full video.

Watch the full breakdown here - https://youtu.be/rka18qrv2Mg

At 17, I had no idea who I wanted to become.

No textbook exists for turning into a man. School teaches you rules for a subject. Nobody teaches you the rules for a life.

100 years ago this wasn't a problem. You did what your father did. You worked the family farm, learned the family trade. Barely any choice, so barely any anxiety.

Now you've got infinite options. And there's a name for what infinite options does to you: the paradox of choice. The more you could become, the harder it is to become anything at all.

That's not depression. That's not anxiety. That's a man with no target for the spear.

I spent years working out how to find that target, how to turn "I could do literally anything" into "I know exactly what I'm building and why." It came down to a handful of questions most people never sit down and actually answer.

I made a full video walking through the entire process: the exercise I still use every year, the framework for wealth, health, and relationships, the exact thing I told myself at 17 that changed my trajectory.

Watch it here - https://youtu.be/U0JG8sYjZzY

He moved to Bali with $500 to his name and a business doing $17k/month.

11 months after joining our programs, he's doing $140k/month.

No rich family. No safety net. Just a depression so bad he couldn't get out of bed for a month, and a decision to fix it.

What changed once he came into Imperium: one niche instead of five, real metrics instead of vibes, relentless follow-up instead of one-and-done, and reinvesting like an owner instead of playing it safe.

He liked the results so much he got a concept from our program tattooed on his skin.

Full breakdown of how we took Gallo from $20k/mo to $130k/mo in under a year.

If you're an agency owner, coach, or consultant stuck where he started, watch this - https://lnkd.in/d4Y4U6Yd

- Charlie