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Welcome to the Million Dollar Sellers Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Shucet. Today we have million-dollar seller Mussa on the call. He's done $15 million in revenue last year. He's got a pretty large team, about 45 to 50 people in total. He's meeting up with us from Canada today. Mussa, thanks for coming on the show. How's it going today?
Everything is going amazing. Thank you for having me.
Excited to get you on Prime Day 2023. Just wrapping it up. I know we were chatting a little bit about how Prime Day is going for you and me. We can definitely dig into that here in a little bit, but for those of us who don't know much about you yet, why don't you go ahead and just give a bit of your background, talk a little bit about how you got introduced to Amazon and what life is like for you where you're living there in Canada.
I'm basically from Pakistan. I did a bachelor's in engineering. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I moved to Canada in 2010 for a master's in mechanical engineering degree. At that time, I came to Canada. I was doing my master's. I didn't have enough money to support my expenses for the remaining terms. I was working my ass off in restaurants, doing dishes, bartending and cleaning toilets, and working as a sous chef and manager at the restaurant, just trying to make money.
It took me almost one and a half years, two years to finish my master's degree. I started looking for jobs, engineering jobs because at that time I always thought success in life was about having a nice job. This was what was taught to me from my family, from my parents, and from my whole community so I went on and started looking for a mechanical engineering job. I landed a job not too far from the city that I graduated from. I got a job in Windsor, Ontario. It's actually the automotive hub of Canada right next to Detroit.
I actually still live here and I got a job in the engineering consulting industry. Early on my boss, was very strict and he was actually a very nice guy as well but he threw me to the dogs. He threw me to the clients. It was a consulting job so I had different clients. I had to go to Chrysler. I had to go to GM. I had to go to Ford. I had to go to the pharmaceutical industry and try to learn different things.
Early on, he threw me to the dogs and I had to learn what are the principles of project management. How do you manage different teams? How to get the job done and everything. I worked there for three, or four years, but I started realizing it's good, I like it, but I want something more from life. I want to have the freedom. I'm not a nine-to-five person.
Also, there was another side to making money. I wanted to make more money but the bigger goal was success. I want to be successful, how can I do that? I cannot be successful, I cannot retire at 65 because I was seeing people who were retiring at Chrysler GM at 50 or 60s and they were miserable and you know they were all yapping about different things.
I said I'm going to look into what can I do and I started looking into the stock market. I took a lot of different courses about technical analysis and fundamental analysis, but I really wanted to make money and have some freedom. I was doing technical analysis courses all the time and I started investing. I found out that was too much stressful for me.
I was all of the time reading candles and emojis and moving averages and you know all that. I did make some money but it was not much and it was too much stressful. I need to do something else. I can't do a job and do this at the same time. That was 2000 still 14-15 and I started looking into real estate. I thought maybe real estate was another way of getting passive income and with real estate, I didn't have that much money.
I needed to have some equity to go into the real estate. Sooner I gave up that idea and then I started looking for online businesses, you know started reading 4-Hour Workweek and other successful books before even embarking on the entrepreneur journey. Okay, first I need to figure out what are successful people doing. I read the 4-Hour Workweek and The School of Greatness by Lewis Howes.
That really changed my mind and it told me that you need to have a bigger mindset in order to do things. Then I started looking into drop shipping. Okay, maybe I can do some drop shipping and start with doing some drop shipping on even Amazon and retail arbitrage. That was 2016 and I was selling Sony PlayStation game consoles and a couple of other things, getting them from Walmart, trying to sell them on Amazon but I figured out that I cannot make money this way.
This is too much work. I have to find prices. I had those apps where you find the prices and then you go on Amazon, you check the price and you're at Walmart and Target. That's too much work.
What year was that, Mussa? Sorry, what year was that?
That was still 2016.
Okay, 2016 you were doing the arbitrage. All right. Yeah. Keep going, man.
At the end of 2016, I need to do private labels. I took another course from a company called Startup Bros. I'm not sure if they're in business anymore, but they had a course, and it was a very extensive course on how to start on Amazon. I took some courses on Udemy, on how to start on Amazon, started looking into different products from China, and made an account on Alibaba.
I launched a product and at that time there were different software. I don't remember which software was I using but that software was telling me that this product that you will sell, is selling for $76,000 a month. There was only one other guy and he's doing like $76,000. That's a perfect product. The volume is there and I brought that product into the market and it was all crickets.
I ran PPC on it. I did the listing optimization and I was getting not even one or two orders a day. It doesn't make sense. I am seeing this huge number. At that time I did not know that the software could be wrong. They can give you bad estimations and bad data. I was just starting out but that product was a blessing in disguise for me, that failure of that product was a blessing in disguise.
I started figuring out why is this not selling, and what am I doing wrong. I started going hard into more PPC. I need to learn PPC by myself. I need to do more product optimization by myself I need to take the pictures by myself. I was consistently optimizing and trying to make things work but then I realized maybe I need to go more. I started getting more products.
Maybe that product is not going to work. I needed to find so I started working on seven, eight products simultaneously. I'm gonna max out my credit cards. I'm gonna max out everything. I'm gonna go in and see what that does for me. I launched two brands, one was a baby brand, one was a fitness brand and I launched two, or three products.
That was the end of August 2016 but then I launched those products, and still every single day I was losing money. I was really stressed at those times. I actually got IBS at that time too, with some digestive issues. I healed myself, but that's a different story. The first time I saw some net profit was on November 27th. That was Black Friday and I saw some sales coming in and I saw some profit and yes, there are at least some products.
Then December was really good too because in December people were buying more products. I started getting more profitable and I got like crazy. You know what? I'm gonna keep on adding products and keep on going aggressively. I found a supplier for both of these products and they really wanted to work with me and they were sending me more and more samples.
The first year we closed, I went really crazy and we closed at 1.4 million. My goal was in one year I was going to crush 1 million. Since then it's been a continuous journey. I hired my first employee back in 2017. I think it was July 2017. I was still working a full-time job and I was handling this as well and then I actually quit my job in July 2019. Right after that I was working toward my goal was I'm going to expand the business and I went to China.
I went to Canton Fair to find more suppliers and more products. When I went to China, Amazon suspended my account because of a listing error or listing violation. I was really stressed at that time. I'm here to expand the business and Amazon closed my account. I hired a lawyer and everything. It took me two to three weeks to get the account reinstated, but that really pissed me off.
I cannot rely on Amazon. I have already quit my job. It was four or five months ago. I need to do something else. I need to make sure I can be off of Amazon. I started looking into Shopify. I started taking Shopify courses and my goal was I'm going to make processes and systems for Amazon, hire more people, teach them everything, and make KPIs for them they will be working on Amazon and I want to go more into branding, but what can we do?
I was more interested in the fitness brand and I started working on that fitness brand and made the website. It's been two, or three years that we've been trying to do Shopify. It's not there where I want it to be but we're slowly getting there and on Amazon, we're doing well on Amazon. We sell in all marketplaces, Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Australia, Japan, and UAE. Properly sell them, not like Mexico.
We have a warehouse and we send FBA and we do all that thing. That's it. So far, it's been a long journey and it's been almost six years and I've learned a lot of things along the way. Recently I've been doing more business mastery type courses, trying to understand the fundamentals of the business rather than an Amazon business. Because Shopify actually taught me that Amazon is not a business, quite honestly.
Amazon is just like, if you are an Amazon business owner, you still don't know the ins and outs of what a business does. What's marketing, what's product differentiation, what's branding, what's understanding the metrics of bringing in new customers, increasing their average order value, and continuously selling to them? Those are the things that I learned along the way that can be applied to almost any business that Amazon business did not teach me.
Those things were learned through mistakes and hardships with Shopify.
Man, that's a really good story. I love how you got started where you've ended up now and the things that inspired you back in the day, like Tim Ferriss. I just listened to his podcast with Andrew Huberman, by the way, and it was so good to hear him again and just remember how inspirational he can be and just see what he's up to now and hear his origin story and all the things that he's been through.
It reminded me of those feelings I had when I read The 4-Hour Workweek or The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef and all that stuff.
He's really into longevity these days. He, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia. They're all really into longevity and stuff.
I really like his approach, which I think you'd be able to appreciate is he's got a framework for figuring out anything. Asking the right questions, making things easy. He said something that stuck with me. He would talk to people about their business the things that they had been through and what was difficult. He had a question he would ask if it was easy, what would it look like?
I find myself asking that question of myself and my business partner. We had something that came up the other day. He handles a lot of the finances. He was talking about how difficult it was going to be. Well, what would it look like if it was easy? You just say it. Then it's all right, can we make that happen? It's just such a great way that he processes information to get to the next stage.
That I really appreciated and just found very helpful. It was cool to hear you mentioned that because you seem like a guy who just figures things out.
There is actually another book to that. I'm going to add to that. There's another book I read, it's called One Thing. I read that early on as well. There's a quote from that book that I keep using again and again, and it reminds me of doing the most important things. The quote is: “What's the one thing I can do right now such that by doing it, everything will be easier or unnecessary?”
I forgot the name of the author, but he keeps on repeating this again and again. The whole book is about doing that one thing. As business owners, we want to take on more things. I slowly learned that too. Before I was okay, I could do listing optimization too. I can do PPC too. I can do branding too. I'm a marketer, I'm a product content writer, I'm everything.
Slowly I realized, we started this business as a way to have more freedom, not just bogged down with the nitty-gritty every single day. What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything will be easy or unnecessary? If it's hiring a new person if it's finding a new place or a new contact or whatever. I'm finding a new supplier sometimes.
Maybe the supplier is problematic. If you ask these questions, then you find that easier path. Otherwise, you're always on a difficult road and you're not able to find out the answers that can help you grow.
I think that's a great one to mention, especially for a lot of people in the group. I know I've struggled with this and maybe you have as well as entrepreneurs that used to execute a lot in the business. At one point, like you said, I used to do customer messages. I used to list products. I was talking to suppliers, I'm doing sales. We're filling all these roles and it can be hard to put that on pause and zoom out and be you know what, we need a new supplier or we need someone to manage our supply chain.
Back then I was just too dialed in on all the tasks. I'm going through some executive coaching and I laughed at myself as I heard you mention Amazon not being a real business and how there are all these other things going on in a business. We hired this executive coach and it's funny because we're going through simple things but it's bringing me a lot of clarity in the business.
What are the five major functions of your business and the five important processes and just mapping all that out? I think my assumption when we started that coaching was it was gonna be all this high-level advanced stuff, but It's not. That's what was missing for me. You said you're going through that right now. What's that process been like for you as someone who used to do so much in the business?
Honestly, we all learn from successful people and successful entrepreneurs. I have always been following successful people. To me, the definition of success early on was money. When I started doing a job, I was trying to find a job but actually got a six-figure salary just trying to make money. I started making money and I started asking myself this question.
I started the business early on too at that time. I'm going to tell you a little bit of an inside story about myself. I started the business, I was really stressed, I was doing everything on my own. I was doing a job at the same time, but I got IBS. I was having stomach issues and stomach problems. I could not eat anything properly. It was just getting worse and worse.
I went to the doctors and they obviously diagnosed me with IBS and they were giving me a shitload of antibiotics and stomach liners and all that but my situation was not improving. I started at that time, I started asking myself this question. What's the point of this? I have a six-figure salary. My business at that time was doing two million. It was still early on, but I was working a lot.
It was doing too many and I always thought I would be making this much money or whatever. It will be a relaxing experience for me but it's not. I'm sitting in my bed. I cannot go out. I cannot travel anywhere without giving me a run to the toilet. I started looking into it. I need to get my health back. If I really want to make this work, I need to get my health back.
I started looking into these natural ways of fixing myself. I started hating my doctors because the more and more I read, I figured out you know they are actually the cause of 90% of my problems. I had maybe a 10% issue. They gave me so many antibiotics they've messed up my stomach and everything. I understood I read, and I started on this fitness journey.
I started working out. I was not a fitness guy. I started learning more about what's good, and what's right. Tried different diets, keto diet, in the Mediterranean. Anyway, I started getting my health back on track. I got my health back on track and I was still doing good in business. I started asking myself again, I was still unfulfilled in a way. I was always trying to find the answer, the recipe.
Since I got the IBS, I will never make that happen to me again. I will always try to make sure that I will take care of my health. I started on this longevity journey too, like how to optimize your health and not have disease, how to eat every day right, how you need to move every single day, do the steps, and everything. I did that, but I was still feeling unfulfilled.
I was asking myself this question every day, what's missing? I'm really into documentaries and all that. I watched documentaries and we all as entrepreneurs love information. I was watching this documentary on Netflix, Down to Earth by Zac Efron. I'm not sure if you guys have watched that documentary. In this documentary, Zac goes to a town in Italy called Sardinia and he meets this old guy.
He goes to these blue zones where people are living the longest, like those centenarians. He goes to this town called Sardinia and he meets this old guy, he's 94 years old and he's very happy and he's living on top of his world. He walks up and down the hill every single day. He takes them to a bar and he's drinking wine with them. How cool is this guy?
94 years old and he has that much energy and he walks up and down the hill every single day. What does this guy have that I don't have? Then they showed more about his life and I figured out that he was spending so much time with his family. He was still living with his grandchildren. They were still making pasta together, organic food together, and they were enjoying the stuff as a family and blah blah blah.
Okay, that's the missing piece, man. I have the freedom and the money. I have health now, but I need those social connections. I did have those social connections, but it really hit me that if you want to live a balanced life, you need to have all these three. You cannot ignore any one of them. Every single day should be about family, fitness, and freedom.
Those are the things that I made up. It's actually the three core desires of every human being. I later found out from a book in Russell Brunson's book, Marketing Secrets, and he wrote that there are three core desires needed by every human being: health, wealth, and relationships. Those are the same things that I found out: family fitness and freedom, I call them.
You need to have in your life every single day in a balance. Yes, there are days that could be up and down maybe you spend too much time on your career one day but you circle back and you still spend time on your fitness, go for a walk, eat healthy. You cannot ignore your health for a week and you work on your career. Then you say next week, I'm going to focus on fitness.
No, every single day needs to be about these three things. This changed my perspective. I'm not going to work too much in my business. I'm going to work on my business trying to optimize the processes and systems that can help me find that extra time for my health and fitness and for my family and friends. I'm gonna live every single day where I'm done work at 5 p.m.
Before when I was doing a job, I realized I was more happy when actually I was doing a job because I was done work at 5 p.m. I did not have the stress of, is my PPC working properly, or if my product was suspended from Amazon. I need to assign this to this one. 5 p.m. I realized I needed to stop everything, I still needed to go for a walk, I needed to do my steps, I needed to cook, whatever I was doing before, those small things that some people might find struggling.
They might call them, hey, why would you do dishes, you are an entrepreneur. Hey, why would you cook? I purposely try to find time to do those things because it helps me along the way. When I'm doing dishes, I get the idea of optimizing the business. When I'm going for a walk, I get the ideas of optimizing the business. When I step away from the business, I get the idea of fixing the problems in the business.
This is what I learned. If you're working in the business, you will never be able to optimize it and grow.
I think what you're saying, reminds me of something I think about myself and how I think about other people. What would happen if you just went and you forgot all the problems, all the stress, all the things you have to do and you just went and did the one thing you love to do? For me, it's surfing. I go to Nicaragua for 10 days and I'm not even really connected to the world, so I can't really do much.
That's when all the good ideas come. That's when the best ideas come. I think everyone can have that. No matter who you are, where you're at in life right now. I believe in you. At some basic human level, I really believe in everyone's ability to find happiness if they get out of the way. I think that's what I was doing a lot in life just getting in my own way because of all these things I think I had to do.
You mentioned school and getting a good job and a degree and that's just the way it is and I remember that feeling of wanting more probably at maybe eight or nine years old. A feeling I don't really know what this is, but I'm sitting in this classroom and I don't want this for myself. What was that like for you? When did you start feeling that way and how did you navigate that as you got older?
I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. I always had a hunger to do more. I always came number one in class from grade one to grade 12. Then I went to university and I finished my degree with honors. The problem is, since I came to a Western country, I realized the kids here are born with the freedom to think about what they want to become in life.
If you want to become an artist, yes you can. You want to become like whatever, whoever you want. In Pakistan, India, and all these Asian countries, you need to be either a doctor or an engineer. That's it. They order that. I thought I was going to be an engineer and that's the path I chose. I did a bachelor's in engineering and after I did a master's.
When I got the job, I realized that I was meant for much more than that. I cannot retire at 65. I cannot be saving money. I want to take risks. I want to travel. I want to live life on my own terms. I need to, as you said, it's you. I started figuring out that if I wanted to do all of these things, I needed to change, not my circumstances or the people around me need to change.
I need to change. What are the habits? What are the traits of successful people that I can copy and bring into my life? Again, number one is having a big vision and a big mindset. If you don't have that, if you don't have a strong vision and a strong mindset, you cannot do this. You cannot wake up every single day and go to work where your shit is broken and you're losing money.
You will lose yourself. You need to have a big purpose, a big mission. My purpose was that I needed to be much more than what I am, leaving a legacy behind. I know we all have, as entrepreneurs, we all have this hidden feeling inside us to leave something behind. Not all the time we work for money. We wanna do something for the greater good.
That still drives everyone, but when I realized that I needed to do this after getting a job, I didn't want to retire like this.
I don't know what life is like for you now, but I remember back in the day when I was young, at times I didn't have very much and I wanted these things really just to go on trips and do fun things. It was never really about a big house or a fancy car for me, but I find that where I'm at now, man, I just wish I had less stuff, less responsibilities, a smaller house.
It's just funny. The path. I think there's an old saying, I'm going to butcher it, but it's like, a businessman in Mexico, the locals take them out fishing and they're killing it. They're catching a bunch of fish. He's like, oh man, you could turn this into a business. You could sell these fish, and make all this money. The locals were just like, oh no, we're just doing it because we enjoy being out here and we're catching food for our family.
At the end of the day, we go home and we're done. We're not worrying about, you know, how much fish we sell today or did it make it where it's supposed to go and all these things. That's where I messed it up because the businessman was saying, one day you could retire. You would be able to go fishing every day and spend time with your family, and they're like, well, we're already doing that.
This is where I actually have another concept that I use it on my own self. Whoever asks me a question about how to live life to the fullest or whatever, apart from family fitness and freedom, I have another concept that I call that you need to have two very important things in life. Number one, you need to have a purpose, a goal, something bigger than yourself.
That actually applies to that fishing example as well. You need to have a bigger purpose and a bigger goal but at the same time, you need to be grateful for what you have. If you are not grateful for what you have you will always be chasing that thing like a crazy dog. You will always be like going running after it but you will never catch it.
Once you sit down and you start to appreciate the small things the little things that you already have, maybe you do not need more. Once you do that, you understand that the desire to achieve that bigger goal or bigger passion doesn't come from following the money-type concept. It comes from something big. You actually want to pursue that thing. You actually want to pursue that passion. If you don't have those two things in life, you cannot be satisfied with my books. You cannot be grateful all the time.
Oh my God, I'm happy with what I have, blah blah blah. You will lose yourself. You cannot be chasing something, a passion, or a goal all the time, you will lose yourself. You need to have a balance of these things too, where you wake up every single day, you say, okay, you know what, I am grateful for what I have. Even if it's an apartment.
Still, you need to have that goal, that passion, that drive, and that dream you need to pursue until 80, or 100 years old. I have a friend. actually, he works at a hydro company in Canada. He told me once that there's a woman there, she's 93 years old and she still works at London Hydro. I asked him, Man, 93 years old she's still working?
He's like yes, she retired at 65 from another company and then she joined that company and she completely changed her career. She was a real estate agent or whatever and then she retired at 65 and then she started working. She's 93 and she still works there. I was like, man, see, that's the purpose. That's the drive that keeps you going.
If she were to retire at 65 and say, OK, you know what, I'm done. I'm going to chill now. I'm grateful for whatever I have, but that desire. that purpose works in every single thing. It makes you keep moving, it makes you keep living, it makes you keep going after the things that some people at 93 would not even think about doing. They're probably sitting in a bed, loaded with diseases, but that woman, she's like, I'm gonna still keep on doing something bigger than me.
That's the example of where you were using the fish and you know those people were happy with what they have and the businessman was telling them to go do this. It's actually a blend of both of those things.
That's where I try to be. I think of it as like a pendulum. I've got this over here. Let's say it's motivation. It's like I'm lying on the couch doing nothing. I'm never really there. If I'm there, then I'm going through something, but then if you swing it all the other way, it's like popping out of bed, ready to go, attack the day. You have these big ideas. I always find myself swinging from one end to the other and I find the most success when I strategically modulate that behavior.
Like you said, scheduling things each day that help me with my health, my business, and my relationships to make sure I'm not missing those little things and focusing on the right things that have a big impact. I know 100% I think better when I work out. If I'm getting my heart rate up consistently, then my mindset is just better and my energy levels are better.
There were quite a few things like that at one point in life, it was like, oh man, how do I have time to go to the gym? Now it's like, I don't have time to not go workout, because that's how I leverage time. The best is when I'm in that state of mind.
You slowly become that person. Just 100 years ago, I used this example as well. Just 100 years ago, our grandfathers did not have access to all the luxuries that we have. No fast food, no computers, internet, phones, TikTok, social media, none of these things were available. They were working their ass off. They were living that hard life.
It's actually funny because our brand's tagline does the difficult thing. I tell this to other people too. People were living hard lives before they were doing the hard things. In this generation, we lost it. We don't know the meaning of hard work. We're hungry, we just call, SkipTheDishes or whatever, Uber Eats and we get food right now. Those things can still be found in underdeveloped countries.
You still go and see. I was just in China and Pakistan, actually almost a month ago for a business trip. It gave me a great sense of inspiration. I still saw people struggling. I still saw people working for food every single day. Man, once you start having money, once you have success, most people start becoming comfortable and they forget their roots, but it's actually the opposite.
You still need to struggle. Even if you have money, the point is not that you have to buy a luxury car. The point is that you can buy a luxury car, but you still choose to go on a bike. You still choose to ride. Doing those hard things and difficult things, they neutralize you and they remind you of who you are. You are not an immortal human being.
Once you start making money too, I started thinking, I can eat anything I want. I can do whatever I want. It's just like nothing is gonna happen to me. Then I had shit health and I realized, oh my God, I'm not invincible. I need to take a step back, lower gear, and figure myself out.
I think if look back at the legacy perspective of it all, and we talk about the family, friends, and what was the third one?
Freedom.
Freedom. It's like my kids. I've got four kids. If I can make enough money to really set them up to where they don't have to worry about it in the same way, I'm knocking one of those out for them and they can focus on their freedom and their family or their relationships as they're growing up. Then I just have to teach them to be responsible and to know that hey, money doesn't grow on trees.
You have this opportunity because of what I did going through my life growing up and this is a gift I want to give to you. I hope you guys pass this down to your children and keep it going because man, it's so nice when you can really just focus on the freedom and in the relationships. To me, that’s what life is really about. Those are the best moments.
I mean life is actually about that. Working 24/7 is not life. Working on your business 24/7 where your family and kids are sitting out there waiting for you, that's not life working where you are working on the business but you have diabetes and heart conditions because you sit on your ass too much. That's not life. As I said this is life. People attach themselves to money.
When we start the business, we are also taught this way hey, we need to make more money, but we need to teach people a balanced life, how to live life to the fullest, a fulfilling life. That should be the goal. How can you live a fulfilling life? A fulfilling life does not also, you know, money is not, you can make a lot of money in doing something that you don't even like.
You can be a doctor but actually, you do not want to be a doctor but you're making a shit ton of money. Maybe you go be a farmer and you will be happier, maybe you will make less money but your happiness level will be at a higher level. The definition of freedom for me is chasing your goals, chasing your dreams, chasing your passions, those goals, dreams, passions, and hobbies you lost as a kid.
As a kid, you thought about doing all of those things but then you grew up, and then society told you, hey you know what? You need to make money, you need to do all these things, you need to be a doctor and you're like, okay, what? I'm going to be a doctor, but you need to bring that kid out of you and say okay, what did he want to do?
He wanted to climb Mount Everest when he was a kid. I'm going to go do that. I want to go kayaking. I want to go whatever. I'm going to be a biker. Yes, make money. I'm not saying anything against money, but you need to find those goals. I call this the spiritual and mental well-being. The fitness part is also not physical. It's mental, it's spiritual.
You need to do those things for your mental and spiritual well-being. I was actually reading from Peter Attia. He recently launched a new book Outlive and I was listening to the audio description as well. In one of the first few chapters, he says, I can teach you how to have a longer life. I can give you all those secrets. I can tell you how to increase your lifespan and increase your health span.
He said, but what I figured out is what I cannot help you with is your emotional stress. You can do all of these things and I can tell you to eat this and work out this many times a day and I can tell you all the supplements and you can do all of those things, but you need to get your mind in check because this is also another problem that people struggle with.
As they get older, I think the baggage becomes bigger and bigger and they lose themselves. Again, this is a balance of everything. We need to consistently remind ourselves that life is about doing all of these things, not just one thing.
Do you have kids, Mussa?
No, not yet.
As I hear you talk about the kid inside and that's how I've reflected on life. I think about success and I'm like, all right, what would little Nick think of what I'm doing, where I'm at now, and stuff like that? Man, I look at my kids. I've got an 11-year-old, so he's in school, just finished fifth grade, but then I've got three kids that aren't in school, four, three, and like 10 months old.
I see these kids navigate the world in all the ways we want to as adults. They come out fearless, they come out confident, they fall down, they get up, they don't bitch about it. Their attitudes can shift at any given moment and sure, they can be a little difficult at times, but I think the difficulties honestly come from the parenting. I don't mean to say that in like a judgy way, but I think it's also just natural the grandparents get ahold of them for a weekend.
All the foodstuff goes out of the window, bedtime goes out of the window, and iPad at night. They start to desire these things because that's how the human brain works. We desire things that make us feel satisfied. I see them just enter into that stage of life and you start to see some things change and then my oldest is in school and he's asking me questions about work and college and education and I just think we come into this world with so many great traits.
I think as we get older and just a couple of years in, we start to lose some of that stuff. I think it's just so important to stay in touch with those things and trust yourself and the things that you want.
I have something to add to that as well. I was actually watching a video or something or reading a book, I actually don't remember. They say when people cross 30 years of age, their quality of life actually starts to go down rather than going up. Most of the time, 99% of the time, it starts to go down. The reason is curiosity and knowledge. Since we are kids, we are born, and we are given knowledge.
We are told by our parents how to navigate the rest of our lives. They teach us walking, they teach us reading, and then we go to the school and then we read, we gain knowledge, applicable to the level of grade one, then we go to grade two, and so on, we go to grade 12. We keep on getting knowledge. Then we go to bachelor's, we get more knowledge.
Once we get the bachelor's, we get a job. That's where the knowledge stops most of the time. You were like, this is what I needed. I needed a job. Now I have a job. I have the money. I'm going to get a pension. We stopped getting the knowledge, of how to navigate your 30s, how to navigate your 40s, how to navigate your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond.
We stopped getting knowledge and we stopped being curious of look, how to navigate the rest of our lives but if you circle back and just like you and I are talking about, we are talking about getting knowledge and navigating the 30s and being with the kids and being a successful entrepreneur and having a balance of life, that's knowledge.
Most people don't do that. If they do that, I'm pretty sure their quality of life will improve. I keep telling this to people as well, knowledge is equal to power. Once you stop gaining knowledge, your quality of life will go down. Read more, watch documentaries, and be more curious. Have curiosity about anything, how life works, how space works, how relationships work, and how can I have an improved relationship with my mom, my dad, my wife, with myself. We don't get that knowledge.
We're only given the knowledge to just have a bachelor's, get a job and just be on our own. Go figure out everything yourself.
It's a great point to make man. I think it's a really important subject and we've definitely tossed a lot of good stuff out here for the listeners but before we wrap up let's give them some stuff they can take home man. Let's give them some of the recipes. I know there are a few things I do that I put on my calendar that I really try to not miss.
What does that look like for you? How are you making sure that you're doing these things and what are one to five of these things, maybe you put them on your calendar, maybe not, but I'm sure you make sure they get done. What are those things you do to keep everything in balance?
I like to use a quote, if you're failing to plan, you're planning to fail. Plan everything, try to have an idea of what your next day is going to be. You should have an idea. Try to put things on the calendar, but if you're not if you miss a couple of the things, you should have a mental note that I'm going to go to work out at three o'clock tomorrow.
I try to plan out my next day entirely before going to sleep, I think 8 a.m. What's the meeting that I have? I have this much time in between. I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna go for a walk, I'm gonna finish work at five, then I'm gonna still watch a movie, whatever, visit family, friends.
Then you wake up, have a gratitude journal where you plan, write what's your biggest goal, what you want to accomplish, your affirmations, five top things to do in a day, things not to do in a day, and also reflect on that day as well. Don't just write a morning journal. Do an evening journal as well just for one minute and reflect on what you've accomplished.
Putting these things down, I think they really help a lot. Yes, you can miss sometimes, but it's okay as long as you're doing like 90% of the time, I think it will really help you in your future. Have a vision and have a long-term goal because if you don't have a vision, you cannot get there. You cannot arrive there. If you wake up and you say I'm gonna be a successful person the next day, it's not gonna happen.
You need to have a north star that you're gonna hit that. Keep that north star in your mind and try to visualize it all the time and once you do that slowly you will start traveling towards it.
Nice man. I love it. I really like the planning aspect of it. I definitely get stuff on my calendar and plan that stuff out. I think one thing I hear some people say on the other side of that is like, oh if you're always planning, you know, you're not doing spontaneous things. You're not enjoying life. That's how you know they haven't tried it. When you go through it and you plan things out, and something pops up, it's actually easier to just like, oh, I'll reschedule that.
This popped up today and you don't freak out about it. That's one thing I've learned over time from planning.
Plus when you plan, you will realize that you get to do everything within 7-8 hours and you're done. You're like, oh my god, I have so much time now, what should I do? But if you're not planning, you're always scrambling what to do next and you never get anything done.
It's something you don't know until you go through it. That planning actually leads to freedom. On the surface, it might look like the opposite but yeah, because that's one thing I went through that I changed big time a few years ago. It's been good, man. It's been really good. Mussa, we had a lot of good stuff on here, man. Great conversation.
We'll have to bring you back on to talk more about your business. I'm sure you've got some great stuff you could share that's going on over there. Congratulations on everything you've been able to accomplish. $15 million in revenue last year, that's huge. I'm definitely interested to learn a little more about you. I don't think I've had the opportunity to meet you in person yet so hopefully I'll see you at an MDS event here sometime soon.
Yeah for sure, I plan on attending some of those events. I actually moved a little bit away from Amazon and more into Shopify so I haven't been too much active in the group but I'm slowly coming back.
All right, man. Well, thanks again for coming on and we'll talk to you again soon.
Thank you for having me. Thank you.
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