At the time of this recording, I'm 24 years old, and I went from a depressed teenager to being a hyper successful person in his young twenties, building Dan Martell's personal brand from a 100 k followers over 10,000,000 across all platforms. And here are the seven brutal truths I learned along the way. Brutal truth number one is have courage in spite of competence. When I was 14 years old, my dad called me into his office and he said, check this guy out on YouTube. Turns out that guy was Dan Martell. And at 14 years old, I started watching his YouTube videos. Fast forward two years, I'm 16 and I meet Dan's videographer at the time. I started doing work for him as a subcontractor. I was a depressed teenager. I had no direction in life. I was gifted in school, but I literally didn't know what to do with myself. And I luckily stumbled upon this person and started to learn the high income skill of video editing at the time, which luckily
became a huge thing with social media. I literally for the next two years did the hardest work that I could, and I had courage in spite of incompetence. I wasn't the best video editor. I wasn't the best videographer. I wasn't the most gifted, the most talented, or any of that. But what I was was someone that showed up every day and was extremely hardworking. Maybe because of a little bit of the trauma that I went through when I was younger, that's fair. But for the next few years, I showed up. And when I turned 18 years old, Dan's old videographer went off and did his own thing. And now there was an opening. There was a moment that I could step into Dan's world and start providing more value. And so I applied for the position of videographer slash video editor full time. At this time, I'm 18 years old and I did the test project. I sent in my one minute video and I remember doing the final interview with Dan. And he looked at me and he said,
you're young. And I said and I remember I took every single ounce of courage that I had in my body because I didn't have a lot. Every single ounce of confidence in my body. My bones were fucking shaking.
And I said, is that gonna be a problem?
And on the other side of me leaning into the pain, leaning into the the uncertainty,
the not knowing, I got the job on the backside and I started working for Dan Martell full time at 18 years old. The truth is most business owners have tons of options. Right? They have tons of people that they could go hire, especially Dan back then. And what I think made him lean into hiring me over someone that had ten years more experience than me was the fact that I was hungry, was the fact that I wanted more, was the fact that I still had that fire in me, and he knew that. You could see how I over delivered on my test project, and how I showed up on the call, and how I had carried myself as a young 18 year old. And so if you're watching this and you think I'm too young for this position, or I'm too unexperienced to apply for this thing,
Ask yourself, what is the person on the other side of this interview value? And a lot of times, employers value courage over competence.
Being able to be in hard situations
and still push in spite of it. And that was the foundation for everything else that's gonna come. And trust me, I've hired over 50 people in my career. And a lot of the times, I rarely hire the most skilled person in the talent pool. 97%
of the time, take the person that is either second or third most skilled and has the highest drive, has the highest hunger, has the biggest fire
inside of him or her. And I see that on the first couple interviews, and I want that person in that seat because I think personally, those people have a higher ceiling
than the most skilled people. If you've been told all your life that you're God's gift to this world, that you're, you know, the the best person in your class, that you're the smartest person around the block, you're never gonna lean into pain, and you're never gonna actually get better. And so if you are young and you want to go on this journey of working for people that are more successful than you, Find out what they want, which is a lot of times that hunger that drive that fire
and present yourself as that. You don't have to be the smartest. You don't have to be the best. You don't have to be the most talented. You just have to be the hardest worker in the room. But courage gets you in the door. What actually makes you stay in the room? Which brings us to brutal truth number two, prioritize your reputation. So all your reputation is is what people say about you. It's not what you say about yourself.
It's not what you write in your Instagram bio. It's literally when you're not around and people talk about you, what do they say? And guaranteed,
if you do something shady, if you show up lazy,
if you don't do great work, that will close doors behind your back that you didn't even know were open. And in today's world, reputation is everything. Especially in this world where we're hyper connected, You could move cities, you could move countries, but your reputation will follow you, and that is the reason why you wanna prioritize it especially early on in your career. Recently, was hiring somebody from my media team, and there was a prospect in the pool that I wanted to do a reference check on. And so I texted his old employer and I said, hey, what do you think about this person? If you wanna call me, feel free to. And he said, prefer not to talk about it over text. Are you free later? And I literally texted him back. I said, that's all I need to know. Because at the end of the day, if he would have had something nice to say about that person, he would have probably texted it back to me. And so that person,
which I was gonna hire, I was like 97% there, had a bad reputation with their old employer. A lot of the times when you're young, especially in your twenties, you're being a little bit reckless. And you burn bridges that you didn't know you needed. That is why a big priority for me in my late teens, early twenties was to protect my reputation, was to be the person that is solid, was to have only good things spoken about me behind my back. So what does this actually look like? Well, it's show up early for meetings. It's do the things that you say you're gonna do. It's be reliable. It's answer the call. It's answer the text. It's be proactive. Right? Don't wait for people to ask you to do something. Do it proactively and send them over to them. And guess what? That will compound over time. How you do anything is how you do everything. And if you show up every day and you are a reliable person to your employer,
you will be rewarded for that. This was my whole journey from 18 to 20. I put my fucking head down and I grinded, and I built my reputation within Dan's company. Put my head down and do the best quality work that I could because that was the only thing that I had control over. I didn't have a big network. I didn't have a huge following. I didn't have a ton of skill, but what I had was a bunch of fucking hours in the day. And I cut out everything else out of my life and just focused on one good thing which was editing videos,
filming
videos, making good videos, and everything else went out the door. And if I could recommend
something, if you're watching this, if if you're anywhere between 18 to 22 and you wanna win, just focus on one thing and get really fucking good at that one thing. All your hopes and dreams
will be on the backside of that one skill. But doing great work isn't the only way that you can protect your reputation, which brings us to brutal truth number three, diversity is distraction in disguise. From the time I was 20 to 22, I had built a really good media company within Dan's
ecosystem at SaaS Academy. And every month, I was getting offers from other companies that wanted to poach me. And I had to
ignore the lady in the red dress just like in the matrix when Neil goes through that crowd of people and he sees the lady in the red dress and he gets distracted. What I wanna do as much as possible is ignore the lady in the red dress. Because guess what? There will be tons of opportunities that come up in your life, especially if you put your head down and get really good at a high income skill. But what doesn't compound is diversity. What doesn't compound is you switching jobs every fucking year. And if you wanna win in today's age and you wanna build a very strong reputation with the person that you're working for, one, pick yes, pick the best shit, pick the best employer, try to find the person that you admire and go work for them. But once you get that job, don't bounce around.
Stick with that one person. And even to this day, I get people that ask me, what's next for you? Because they assume that I'm done here. They assume that we won. They assume that this mission is over. When I hear that, I hear someone that bounced around a lot. Someone that is always looking for the greener grass. And guess what? Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side because it's fucking fake. You know what grass gets greener? The one that you water. The one that you actually take care of. The one that compounds over time. Because guess what? Compounding doesn't happen in the first year. It doesn't happen in the first five years. It happens over a decade, twenty years, thirty years. And if you go on a big mission like myself, I wanna make Dan the biggest personal brand in the business space, it's not gonna happen in five years. It's not gonna happen in ten years. It's gonna happen in fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty years. And guess what? I know on the other side of me achieving that,
there's gonna be way bigger opportunities than whatever gets thrown my way today. So even though I get very sexy offers every day, and I get tons of opportunities every day, the bigger my mission, the more times I need to say no in a day. If you're in the same position that I was at 28 to 22
and even today, where you get tons of offers every day and you get tons of opportunities every day,
sit down and ask yourself, what opportunity would make all of these other opportunities irrelevant?
What one thing could I do in the next ten years that would make everything else that's possible in the next year irrelevant?
And that is the single most important thing that you should focus not fifty, sixty or 70% of your time on, a 120%
of your time on. All of your time on. And any time not spent on that one thing is wasted. And that makes it really easy for me to say no to those lady in the red dress moments. But sometimes making the right decision will scare the shit out of you, which brings us to brutal truth number four, take the leap of faith. When I was 22 years old, Dan's book Buy Back Your Time had just come out. And he calls me and he says, Sam, I wanna go all in on media. I've seen the impact that people have had from this book and I wanna make sure that it gets in as many hands of people as possible. And he invited me to essentially move 4,000 kilometers away from my hometown to build and scale the media company. And I remember saying, I'm gonna think about it and hanging up and asking one of my mentors at the time.
And looking back, this person would not be a mentor of mine today.
And I asked him, what do you think I should do?
And
he looks at me and he said, if you move to this new city, do you think you're gonna work harder
or less hard than you're currently working right now? And I looked at him, I said harder. And he looks at me back and he said, would you make that decision?
And I just remember having that moment of clarity where I am never gonna ask this person for advice ever again. So you know what I did? I threw all my shit in my car, grabbed my best friend, convinced him to come with me and I drove fifty six hours straight to Kelowna, British Columbia from my hometown
and I moved to the city that Dan was in. I didn't even have an apartment. We slept in Dan's basement for the first month that we were in that city. And there's literally a photo, I'll put it up here, where me and Matisse, my best friend, were in Dan's mechanical room
editing videos. That is where Martell Media started. I want you to understand, none of that was easy for me. I obviously had some doubts in the back of my mind. I knew that it was a big risk that I was taking. I essentially put all my eggs in one basket and I literally told myself, I'm gonna grow Dan's personal brand no matter what. And
on the other side of me making that decision,
the amount of opportunities that have come up in my life have been insane. And that is the year that we went from taking Dan's audience to a 100 k followers, which most of those were on Twitter at the time, to over a million followers across all platforms.
And that was the year that kick started everything. So if you're watching this and you have two paths, one that seems easy and seems to have a guaranteed outcome and the other one that seems a little bit harder,
but the outcome is 10 times, 20 times, 30 times bigger,
I would strongly encourage you to consider going on that hard path, going on the harder path, taking on the harder journey. Because guess what? That journey will teach you more about life, about performance, about success than the easy path will ever teach you. Stop optimizing your life for the easy path. Instead, optimize your life for the hard path and on the other side of that, your life will then become easy. But taking the risk isn't enough, which brings us to brutal truth number five, learn
don't earn. Denzel Washington has this great quote where he says, the first part of your life is to learn, the second part of your life is to earn, and the third part of your life is to return. And I just love that quote because that is a 100% the arc that I'm trying to go on is even in this season, all I'm trying to do is learn. I'm trying to learn as much as possible. And I remember there was tons of opportunities
throughout building, you know, Dan's personal brand where we already won on paper. We had a million followers across all platforms. That's more than the top 1%. But I knew on the other side of us building this to 10,000,000, 20,000,000, 30,000,000, 50,000,000, a 100,000,000, that would make the pie even bigger. And a lot of people try to take a piece of the smaller pie
and take a piece for themselves. What I wanna do is ask myself, how can I make that pie 10 times bigger
and then take a piece? Or not even take a piece, but keep making it bigger after that. And there was a series of moments
in that year where Dan told me, you should earn more. I want to pay you more money. And instead of taking a 5 k, 10 k, 15 k raise,
I went and hired another person for my team. Why? Because I knew on the other side of me unlocking those resources to go hire that person, we're gonna get more results and we're gonna scale the company faster. I have repeatedly said no to money,
to allocate that money to something that's gonna make the pie even bigger, that's gonna make the company even bigger, so that the opportunity becomes bigger for everyone, not just me. There's another great analogy that I like, which essentially means the bigger the surface area of the snowball is, the more snow it picks up, which then makes it bigger. But people forget that if you take a chunk out of that fucking snowball, there's not gonna be as much snow that collects on that snowball. And that effect is canceled out. And a lot of people don't treat their lives like that. They try to cash out too early and the compounding doesn't happen. And they keep going from zero to one, zero to one, zero to one, and never from zero to one, to two, to four, to eight, to 16, to 32. And that doesn't happen if you cash out today. And Dan tells a story, if you go on his Instagram, this post is pinned. In 2024
is when he bought me a Porsche GT four. And I had no idea at the time that he was doing this for me, and I remember flying in from LA with him on his jet and landing and he says,
let's go look at some cars.
And I hadn't seen my girlfriend in over two and a half weeks, and I looked at him and I said,
I think I'm gonna go home. And he said, bro, I think you're gonna I really think you should come. And I knew something was up. And so I said, alright. Fine. Let's let's see it through. And we pull up to the dealership, and in the corner of my eye, I see a Porsche GT four in white just like the one on my vision board right here. And I think to myself, this motherfucker is gonna make me buy this car. And if you watch the video, you'll see that he looks at me and he says, every time I've tried to give this guy more money, he turns around and gives it to the team. He turns around and hires more people. He turns around and unlocks more resources
and
hands me over the keys to a Porsche GT four. And a lot of people ask me how that happens, but they didn't see the 16 year old Sam that showed up every day and grinded his fucking ass off to become the best video editor on his team. They didn't see the 20 year old Sam that said no to every sexy opportunity to get to stay focused on the mission. All they saw was a 23 year old Sam that had built one of the fastest growing personal brand in the business space. And that is what people forget, is your relationships will compound. And if you pick a good person like Dan to work for and you create an immense amount of value in their lives, they will turn around and reward you for that. And it's in that season of learning not earning that we were able to go from 1,000,000 followers
platforms to over 3,000,000 followers across all platforms in one single year. But if you wanna be in the 1%, learning isn't enough, which brings us to brutal truth number six,
break false ceilings. One of my really good friends came to me about a year ago and told me he had hit his capacity. Capacity. I remember asking him how many hours are you working? You know, what are you working on? And what I soon found out is that he wasn't excited
about the work that he was doing. Not that he had too much work. And a lot of times when you think you've hit your ceiling, when you think you've
expanded your capacities to the extremities, the problem isn't too much work. It's working on the wrong things.
And in 2025,
I hit a lot of those ceilings. And in spite of that, I pushed through. And in spite of that, I realigned my priorities. And in spite of that, I found new ways to work that made it easier for me to get results. What that looked like was hiring people around me to take on things that I had been holding onto so tightly for the longest time. And if you wanna achieve things that the 99%
haven't achieved, what you have to do is act like the 1%. What you have to do is prioritize
your efficiency,
your work and work on the right things that light you up, not the busy work, not the stuff that just fills your calendar. Going from 3,000,000 followers across all platforms on Dan's personal brand to over 9,000,000
in one year was a fucking stretch. Was very hard.
But the only reason we were able to do that as a team is because I
stopped holding on to all the things that I was doing. I was able to delegate and give away control over the stuff that I've been holding on so tightly to to my team so they were able to scale it. They were able to be empowered. They were able to be held accountable. They were able to move it forward, and then I wasn't the bottleneck, and I wasn't the person holding people back. So when you're starting off, you're in a season of saying yes to everything. You wanna learn as many things as possible. You wanna learn not earn.
But then you enter a season of scale where you have to say no to everything except the one thing that makes everything irrelevant. And that's what I've been able to do last year is essentially focus my time on the leading indicators, the stuff that moves the needle the most, the stuff that only I can do. Right? Even though I'm a decent video editor and I love editing short form videos, I had to literally delete Premiere Pro from my computer because I kept getting in the weeds. You can't see the fucking trees if you're still in the weeds. And a lot of times when you need to make these big strategy moves, you need to be over the trees at a 40,000 foot view and look at the whole forest which you won't see just editing another video. Because if you hold on to everything like I did for the longest time, you will be the bottleneck in the business. You will be the person holding the business back. You will be the reason why the business can't move forward. And as soon as you let go, as soon as you empower people, as soon as you go hire those people and hold them accountable, you will see your calendar free up and you'll see an insane amount of progress in your career. But false ceilings aren't the only thing that show up when you win, which brings us to brutal truth number seven. The bigger the building, the bigger the target. I'm about to turn 25 years old and we've built the fastest growing personal brand in the business space. One of the biggest personal brands
in the whole space.
And we have a big fucking target on our backs. And in the last year and a half, I've seen an insane amount of people that I thought were friends come after us for negligible reasons. Right? That were looking for reasons to come after us. And that is what you will realize is when you win and you will, if you're watching this, if you made it to the end of this video, I believe you're the type of person that will fucking win. When you win, there will be a target on your back and people will attack you. People will come after you. People will say shit behind your back that you wish you had never heard. And what you have to do is show up in spite of that. What you have to do is focus on value creation. Because guess what? Those people are on their own journey. Something might have happened in their lives where they have to react that way. And that doesn't have to affect the way that you show up. And a lot of times it feels good for other people to shit on you because you win. To shit on you because you look cringe in the new video that you just posted. But on the other side of you embracing the cringe, on the other side of you ignoring what other people say and focusing on your mission and focusing on winning,
you will unlock a level of not caring and not giving a fuck that you didn't even realize was even possible. If you put crabs inside of a bucket, one will try to leave the bucket. It will try to climb out and all the other crabs in that bucket will pull it down. Why?
Because they don't want that crab to achieve freedom. They don't want him to get out of the bucket. They want him to suffer with them inside the bucket so that everyone is equal. And when you win, you will hold up an invisible mirror up to people's faces and show them where they've stopped, where they lack, where they maybe gave up, and that doesn't feel good. And when you win, you will have multiple conversations with people that you thought were friends
that then turn around and subtly criticize you and even behind your back talk shit about you. But this is tricky because criticism might be this guy's feedback. Right? It might be something that you actually want to internalize.
And this is a simple rule that I tell myself. Only ask advice from people who've done the thing that you wanna go do. Pick the five people who've done things that are bigger than you and ask them for advice. Don't ask your cousin, your brother, your mom, your dad for advice on something that they've never done. Instead, find the people who've done the thing that you wanna do and ask them for advice. Ask them for feedback, and that will set you up for success. And trust me, it's gonna be hard. Right? When somebody comes at you and tries to tear down your building, you're gonna wanna tear down theirs, and you're gonna wanna criticize them back. And guess what?
What's better than tearing somebody else's building down is making your building so big that you can't even see theirs. Look, if you made it to the end of this video, I want you guys to know that you're the type of person that will win. You're the type of person that any challenge that comes up in your life, you will fight through it. I want you to know that, you know, I'm in your corner. I wanna see you win. I am your biggest cheerleader.
And if you have any questions about anything that I've done and if you're wondering, you know, whether you should take path a or b, just find me on Instagram, Sam Gaudet, and shoot me a message, and I'll be happy to respond. Watch this video next to learn some of the tactics that I use to build Dan Martell's personal brand.