The Pokemon Personal Development Model (made me millions)

Throughout my childhood, I played thousands of hours of Pokémon. And while I didn't realize it at the time, the game was teaching me a lot more about life and success and how I would ultimately approach personal development than just what was super effective against ground types or what level Charmander evolved. And so in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the very helpful mental model for personal development that I've gained from my experience as a Pokémon player and how over the past 6 and a half years, it's allowed me to very deliberately transform and evolve myself from a broken, unskilled 18-year-old to someone now running a series of successful businesses with a big YouTube channel like this and having such a solid set of skills that it's almost impossible for me to not make money now given what I've learned over the past 6 and a half years. So, if you're serious about personal development, about transforming yourself into the ultimate version of yourself and along the way making money and building businesses, basically building your dream life, then this is going to be extremely helpful for you. So, it starts off with the Pokémon stat screen. So, if you're not familiar with Pokémon, uh I must have spent hours and hours staring at these things. Uh but long story short, Pokémon are little creatures and they have various different forms and they have levels. So, here you can see this one is level 61, uh 16. And based on the level of the Pokémon, it determines the stats they have. So, a Pokemon has HP or their hit points. Uh, it has their attack, their defense, special attack, special defense, and speed. And all of these stats determine how they act in battle and how they perform in battle. So, if you have very high defense, and this one attacks this with a physical attack, and depending on the type of move, I won't go into that. It gets a little bit uh a little bit more complex. Basically, this attack stat of this will be thrown against the defense stat of this, and based on the move that it uses and the type effectiveness and various other factors, it will do a certain amount of damage. So any Pokemon at a given time has stats for each of these. And by grinding XP and fighting in battles, you can increase the level. And each time it levels up, it's going to increase these stats in various different ways. So how does this apply to personal development? Well, as an entrepreneur, as as I am in this case, uh I see myself as having my own set of stats uh and types of stats. So it's HP, attack, defense, special attack, special defense, and speed. Whereas for in my line of work and you can apply this to whatever line of work you want to do, uh there will be different stats that you have that determine your proficiency in key areas that will allow you to achieve what you want or relevant to what you're trying to do. So in my case, as an entrepreneur, the key stats or areas of proficiency is firstly your mindset

and discipline. How you're able to push through things, deal with difficulties and troubles and just overall your approach to work and to life and things like that. And that's kind of like your mental operating system. And so you can be anywhere from zero to 100 on that. Uh your health, how well you're looking after yourself, how much that determines your energy levels, uh if you're in shape, if you're eating well. Uh your health is also sort of a 0 to 100 um grade. In my case, uh marketing and understanding how like consumer psychology and how to sell things is a very important stat. And then adjacent to that is content creation or writing, how well you can write to communicate ideas to people. So it's kind of like communication. And there's development and kind of coding and the technical side of things. There's design, which is a massive one of course, and then leadership and how effective you are at leading people. So, just like Pokémon have various stats, and they have their own unique value for each of those, you as a human also have various stats, and you're proficient in different ways. And so, as you apply this to your life and see yourself not as just Liam or whoever you are, but you start seeing yourself as this kind of independent kind of third party, like a character in a game, like in this case a Pokémon, you could say like I know character in a role playing game or something. Then, when you have that level of separation, you can start to look and say, "Hey, like what am I actually trying to achieve with my life? what are the key stats that I want to focus on building and putting effort into so that it's going to take me where I want to go and most importantly how far do I need to take that to start seeing the results that I want to get to and so for example in my life when I first started out as an entrepreneur I was doing e-commerce and digital marketing and so my marketing skill here if you kind of see this as a graph um you have like skill 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc each of these are the different skills and we're all kind of starting off down here with not much going on as me as my broke 18-year-old self. Um, fresh out of high school. I mean, I had kind of knowledge as you do doing your studies at school. But in terms of these core things that are going to determine if I can become the person I want to be and a successful entrepreneur, I didn't really have any of these going. Maybe the health was okay. I was in decent shape. I think I had an okay uh mindset from my studies, but I started off doing e-commerce and digital marketing. And that was able to increase my marketing skill more and more and more until you hit basically this level at which you are good enough in that skill to start making money. And that's really the exciting part that you're really trying to work with. So what this call is three my marketing skill. It took me 14 months before I was good enough at digital marketing and e-commerce in order to start making money. So this is like the money line, right? So above that your skills become valuable. And the thing that most people do in their life is they'll go to like here and then they'll get another one and they'll go to like here and you're just never going to get far. You don't go you're not spiky enough. You're not like laser focused enough to build the skill to the point where you actually start to be able to monetize it. So say you did with design, you're going to be terrible at design all the way up here, but until you get good enough and you cross that sort of threshold, then you can start making money with it. And the awesome part is if you can just sort of laser focus in on building one of these skills and then with Pokemon there's kind of the equivalent of this um where it Pokemon have certain base stats. So in this case Slowb Bro has uh a high special attack, high defense and decent special defense and very low speed and that's just baked into it as a Pokemon. But when you train a Pokemon, there's a kind of extra layer of it where depending on the Pokemon that you're fighting with your Pokemon. Say if I'm beating like a Pidgey over and over again, the game has assigned a uh an EV value to that Pokemon where if you beat enough Pidgeys, it's going to increase your

attack stat more than it increases everything else. So, the same way applies for this where if you just continue to fight and grind against the same boss or the same Pokemon or the same uh challenge, you're going to be able to gradually increase your EV or your skill level more than it is increasing everything else. And so, once you've got that one skill above, which for me was marketing and e-commerce, and I finally was able to make money after 14 months of failing. But the most interesting part about this is that that's not the end, right? that isn't resilient enough or or deep enough to really allow you to create a lot of value for yourself and basically get to the point where I am where it's kind of hard to not make money because I have so many of these stats that are up high, right? And this takes me to a really good book that I read uh by Scott Adams, the guy that made the uh Dilbert cartoon. And he made a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And a really cool thing that I took away from that was this concept of skill stacking. And it's basically exactly what I'm talking about here. when you treat yourself as a as a Pokemon or a video game character and you identify what are the core skills that are going to be uh most relevant to me in my career and and how can I mix those together. He talks about how you don't need to be like the expert. this person up here. Like sure, this person will make a lot of money, but the combination of various skills at just a decent level of proficiency like here for example, this shows how much work you need to put into a skill in order to get there. know for the the lawyers or the marketers or whatever it is, how much effort it takes to really get to the tippity top of this. Like when I look at some content creators, there's guys like Johnny Harris who are just like phenomenal. And the amount of work and effort he's had to put in to get to this very top point is so much more than just like in order to get to the top 10%. The amount of effort is actually not really that much. So, the idea is that if you can pick a bunch of important skills that are going to help you towards your uh your dream destination or outcome that you're looking for and you just get to the top 10% in each of them, then you get into a very unique position like this person here and you're actually the best in the world at the overlap between them. So, this person despite only putting in a fraction of the work of these people is actually the best in the world in their category. And so just going back to this for example for me I started off with the marketing and that went really well. I got my got to this monetization period and I was like great now I can go and travel the world and do all the fun stuff that I wanted to do and keep working on my businesses and work with my friends and that was freaking awesome. But I knew having read this and having sort of modeled this Pokémon concept in my head for so long. I knew that if I could just get a few other skills on the board then I would be able to be much I'd have a much more unique skill set and be able to create a lot more value uh for others and therefore for myself as well. And so my next battle that I picked up was development. So I took basically 6 months off in 2022 and I'd had success in my business and I wanted to support my business partner who were both

marketers. He's brought me up. He was my mentor and taught me everything I know. I want to help diversify our skill set as a team. So I taught myself development Python uh machine learning with Python, Golang, bit of JavaScript as well. And I started building applications and I started getting this development skill up to the point where I could get monetized. And sure enough, I hit that and suddenly all these other opportunities open to me because like Naval says, this is another main reason why I did it as well. He said, learn to build and learn to sell. If you can do both, you'll be unstoppable. And he's talking about if you know how to sell and market a product, but you also know how to build it, then you have a much more unique and powerful skill set. And that's what I was trying to do. I didn't want to just be the the single pointy entrepreneur here who like most people only end up maybe here in their given field. By having the marketing and then the development, I was suddenly putting myself in a category where it's much easier to be one of the best in the world. And then I applied content creation and YouTube on top of this and that went up above the line as well. And suddenly I found myself in this very unique opportunity where I could make content like this. I could understand the technical stuff. I could make YouTube videos, get hundreds of thousands and millions of views because I can communicate. I can code. I can understand how to market things as well and monetize my content creation as well. And so this idea of skill stacking and trying to like pick a few key skills that I wanted to max out. In this case, I had the marketing, I had the development, and then I had the content creation as well. And so, as long as I'm in the top 10% of each of these three, then I'm in the top 0. 01% of that category, which has allowed me to make way more money than I ever really plan to. And for me, like this journey isn't done. Like, I'm seriously looking at design, and I think I'm a maybe the three out of 10 on design, and I'm like, well, if I could become really good at designing, what would that do for my career? And so if you start to look at it like this and being like what are the key skills that I need to pick up, how can I level them up? How can I make sure that I get at least one over that monetization threshold so that I can start to make money and make a career around it and give me the breathing room I need to be able to bring up these others? And this has just been a really helpful personal development framework for me. And I hope this is super useful for you guys. And just to wrap things up and give you guys kind of a lens to look through maybe for your own personal development journey based on my success and the

thousands of other people in my community and watching this channel who have succeeded, it's pretty clear that this if you can get anything and then add a set of AI automation skills and content creation to it, it's a pretty damn foolproof stack to be able to make money, particularly in the AI age. And that's really what I talk about a lot on this channel. Um, so for example, if you were a designer and you have like really good design skills and then you learn how to do AI automation and then you also figure out how to make content. Uh, there's a guy called AI tool tip which I love his videos on AI design stuff. I'll

put him up here. He's a designer. Now he shifted over to using AI tools and he's like sort of building automations and using them to create content and showing people how to use AI for design and whatever you want whether it's the PJs or the Lambo in your garage or digital nomad. having whatever skill you have right now and combining it with being able to create content and connect with people and get the message out. And also being able to see what the intersection between your thing and AI is and AI automation really is a skill that allow you to do that um is basically a foolproof system that I would recommend to anyone, my brother, my friends, family, anyone who is serious about building a valuable talent stack u moving forward. So that has been the Pokémon personal productivity stack. I hope that's been helpful for you. It's definitely been helpful for me. And uh if you guys want to learn AI automation, I have a full course out on that. I've got a whole bunch of other stuff. Um I'll link that over here. Um that'll teach you how to do AI automation. It's 2-hour long course. Um highly, highly recommend. I've also got a bunch of other stuff that will link to as well, like AI agents course, too. But yeah, Pokémon personal development. Um I'll see you guys in the next one.