Ep. 09 - The Basement Below Rock Bottom: Kevin Palmieri on Reinvention & Resilience

What do you do when the life you thought would make you happy… doesn’t?

Kevin Palmieri had it all, a six-figure job, the dream body, a great car, and yet, he was sitting on the edge of his bed debating suicide.

That moment changed everything.

In this episode of The Underdog Protagonist, Kevin shares how he rebuilt his life from the inside out, and how that journey led to Next Level University, a Top 100 podcast with 2,600+ episodes and 1M+ listens.

We talk consistency, mindset, creator burnout, the BS in the self-help space, and how Kevin now defines success after hitting bottom and climbing back with purpose.

This is a powerful conversation about the quiet work no one sees, and why it always comes before the growth they do.

Connect with Kevin:
Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube


Connect with Pk: LinkedIn | X | YouTube

Transcript

I'm curious to know what was this attributes that played around during that time that helped you kind of push forward? I think clarity was one just to speak to it because I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be a full-time professional podcaster, I just didn't know how to do it yet. I had the goal, I had the vision, it didn't seem like it was insane, it didn't seem like it was impossible.

You speak a lot about and I quote, learning what I did not know and unlearning what I thought I did. What were those early lessons really like for you at that time? The biggest one for me was for most of my life, I felt like the way you were was the way you were going to be forever. So if you don't feel smart, you're never going to be smart.

If you don't feel confident, that's just the way it is and you're never going to be confident. Then I read a book called Mindsets by Carol Dweck and in that book she talked about how you can go from having a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. That changed everything for me because it made things that seemed impossible, possibilities.

Let's say, let's pick a scenario, assume that the person has perfected their craft. Now what? How to market that? Number one, I don't think you can perfect it, I don't think that exists. I think you can get really good at it.

There's a lot of different ways to market it. Right now, I'm marketing our podcast. Even if we never talk about it and we never talk about the name, if somebody enjoys what I say, they might look it up.

So this is a way to market it. You break all of your long-form content up into short-form content and you share it all over social media, that's a way to market it. There are some musicians that I follow on social media that they have these like funny skits that they do.

It's almost like they're acting in these little funny skits and it has nothing to do with their music, but at the very end of it, they play one of their songs. There's a lot of really creative ways to market that aren't necessarily directly with what you're doing. I think content, content is the way.

If you can create a profile that solves a specific problem for a specific person in a specific way and put a video up every day of that, that's you marketing a podcast. Hello everyone and welcome back to a fresh episode of The Underdog Protagonist. I'm Pratyush and today's guest is Kevin Palmieri, founder and host of Global 100 podcast, Next Level University.

With over 2000 plus episodes, a million listens across 170 countries. But before all that, Kevin had a breaking point. It wasn't just rock bottom, as he says, rock bottom had a basement.

Kevin is now on a mission to help others grow holistically with a heart-driven but no BS approach to personal development. Whether you're a creator, coach, or just someone who is trying to hold on to the momentum, this episode is for you. So without any further ado, let's welcome Kevin Palmieri to the podcast.

Hi Kevin, welcome to The Underdog Protagonist podcast. How are you? I'm doing very well Pratyush, I appreciate you having me. I'm excited to chat and see where we go with our conversation.

Likewise. But before we begin this session, this episode, could you briefly say who you are, what you do, and what are you best known for, for the listeners to have some clarity and context? Yeah, so I'm Kevin Palmieri. I am the founder and the host of Next Level University, we're a global top 100 self-improvement podcast with 2,103 episodes as of today.

And we are all about holistic self-improvement. And I would say that is probably what I'm most known for since I love podcasting. I've been podcasting for eight years and now we have a global top 100 podcast where we do an episode every single day.

Awesome. So I have read your bio, I was kind of amazed to see that someone who has seen the adversities, you know, who was broke, who had a breaking point, you know, bounce back and achieve so many things at this point. So let's dial back to the history, let's flip a few pages back and think about that type.

The pivotal moment, you know, when you had the collapse, let's talk about that. And take me back to the day, you know, sitting on the edge of the bed, debating everything. How was that scenario like? Yeah, so it's very interesting because for most of my life, I didn't think I was going to be any level of quote unquote successful.

In my mid-20s, I ended up getting a really good job that I kind of just fell into and I got lucky. My girlfriend at the time was a model. I was getting ready to compete in a bodybuilding show, so I was quite literally in the best shape I'll ever be.

I had a nice car, I had a new apartment, I had great friends. From the outside looking in, I was living the dream. But internally, I was depressed, I was anxious, I was insecure, I was miserable.

So my girlfriend ended up leaving me and I convinced myself that I just had to go make even more money and if I made more money, that would fix the rest of my problems. That didn't help. I ended up finding podcasting and I fell in love with podcasting.

So at the point that you're speaking of, I had been podcasting for like a year. I hated my job, I was depressed, I was anxious, I felt hopeless because I thought I was going to be stuck at this job forever. And one morning I woke up and thought to myself, well if I was just to take my life, I would take all of my problems with me.

And I think unfortunately a lot of us, maybe we don't get to that point, but I think a lot of us go through life doing things that we just don't really enjoy but we feel like we have to. And that's exactly how I felt and I just thought to myself, well if I was just to take my life, I would take all my problems with me and I wouldn't have to worry about it. And I didn't realize that I had a pretty serious history of depression and anxiety and my family had a pretty serious history of depression.

So that was a very pivotal moment for me because I think it helped me realize what was important and it helped me realize that if you were ever going to take a chance on your dreams, if you were ever going to take a chance on your goals, if you were ever going to take a chance on this podcast, now would be the time to do it because you have so much necessity. And yeah, that was a really challenging, difficult, dark turning point for me. I mean, your voice kind of pierces through the noise, you know.

But for that, I feel like you need to have a sense of clarity, but you have to proceed towards that goal with vulnerability. So I'm curious to know, what was this attributes that played around during that time that helped you kind of push forward? I think clarity was one, just to speak to it, because I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be a full-time professional podcaster.

I just didn't know how to do it yet. I had the goal, I had the vision. It didn't seem like it was insane.

It didn't seem like it was impossible. It was a little bit insane at the time because it was, I mean, it was asking a lot. But so clarity was huge.

You have already talked to my business partner, Alan. So I had a mentor. I had mentorship built in.

He became a mentor and a coach for me. So that was really important. And I think if I was to add two more, one would be humility.

I'd ask for help. I just wanted to be guided. I wanted people to tell me what to do.

I knew I didn't know the answers to most things. So I was humble in, let me learn, let me serve, let me add value. And then I think one that carried over from my, quote unquote, past lives was grit.

I was willing to work really, really, really hard, even if almost nothing got accomplished immediately. I was willing to put my head down and grind. And I think that comes from a bodybuilding background.

And I've worked hard jobs for most of my life. And even to this day, I mean, if you want to know why we got to where we got to and how you do 2100 and however many episodes without missing it, a lot of it is just grit and you show up and you do your best even when you don't want to. And I think that is it's something that goes under the radar for a lot of people.

But that's one of the biggest attributes that has helped me for. Yeah, you speak a lot about, and I quote, learning what I did not know and unlearning what I thought I did. What are those are these early lessons that are pretty life for you at that time? The biggest one for me was for most of my life, I felt like the way you were was the way you were going to be forever.

So if you don't feel smart, you're never going to be smart. If you don't feel confident, that's just the way it is. And you're never going to be confident.

And then I read a book called Mindsets by Carol Dweck, and this whole book is about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And every time she would talk about somebody who had a fixed mindset, maybe the example of a student who was afraid to raise their hand and ask a question in class. I was like, oh, my goodness, that's me.

That's exactly me. That's exactly the way I think. And in that book, she talked about how you can go from having a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

That changed everything for me because it made things that seemed impossible. Possibilities. And going back to what we just talked about, it created a new potential level of clarity.

So for me in the very beginning, I was really focused on mindset. And I was focused on why am I not confident? Why do I feel like an imposter? Why am I insecure? And most of the books that I was reading at that time were really focused on helping me really shift my mindset. And then the other thing that helped me a ton that I was thinking about was the habits that I'm practicing are dictating the results that I'm getting.

So I started tracking habits based on the advice of Alan, my business partner. And in the beginning, it was just like three or four or five habits. It would be exercise for 30 minutes, track your bank account and post on social media.

Okay, cool. That's so that's where I started that. And then it eventually becomes a part of your identity of, oh, I am somebody who is consistent.

Cool. I have this goal that's a year out. I can break it down into daily habits.

And the odds of me getting there are way higher. So, yeah, it was mostly about mindset and then it was about the clarity around what are the habits that will actually get me the results that I'm hoping to get. Let's dig into how the podcast began.

I'm curious because so many things happened during the last years and you have evolved so much because the learnings are like continuous. But during this, you know, evolvement, I'm curious to know if whether the original goal has stayed intact, if yes, what was that? And if it has evolved, how did it evolve? The original goal was just to have cool conversations with cool people. I mean, that was it.

I didn't very honestly, I didn't think we were going to be where we are today. I so much of this is just a pleasant surprise. I am more, quote unquote, successful than I thought I was going to be.

We've reached more people than I thought we were going to reach. So a lot of this is a very pleasant surprise. What I will say is the intention in the very beginning was to add value to people's lives.

The reason I wanted to have cool conversations with cool people is because I wanted to highlight perspectives that were uncommon. I wanted to help people build self-awareness and I wanted to practice and have the guests practice vulnerability where let's talk about what's real. So while the direction of the podcast and maybe the energy of the podcast has changed and the way we do it and the fact that we don't have guests anymore, a lot of the.

Logic strategy side has changed. But for us, it is the same, I want to help everybody get a little bit better every single day, and I want to be the person who leads the charge on that. So it's changed in so many ways, but the seed of why we started based in helping people create success through personal development is the same exact as it's always been.

And I can't imagine that'll ever change because that's like that's the acorn that has built the tree that we have today. Absolutely. I mean, to consistently upload 2000 plus episodes, it takes a lot of discipline.

I mean, we, a lot of creators always talk about consistency, but they get a lot of things wrong. Sometimes when they are trying to build something from the ground up, not always that it's the success point fast. Sometimes it takes long.

Sometimes people try to crack it faster. Yeah. Successful at it as well.

But to stay on track, it's difficult, you know? So I'm curious to know for anyone who is starting to or willing to start a podcast, what things that they should do so that, first of all, they're on track. Secondly, they're consistent. And thirdly, they're able to market that thing successfully so that it reaches the required amount of audience.

One, don't quit your job and go all in on it. I would not recommend that to almost anybody because you're not going to make money. This statistically speaking, most of us will not make money in the first year.

We won't make money in the first two years. So if you have a parallel income, it allows you to play the long game and it allows you to actually make good long term decisions that you'll be able to capitalize on eventually. So that's one thing is if you have a job, stay at your job, take that money and then invest into the podcast because it's really hard to treat it like a startup if you're not making any money somewhere.

So that's that's one piece. The second piece is going in. Understand what you're already really good at, because that is what I suggest you would make the podcast about.

And here's why. Most people, when they start, they want to just have cool conversations with cool people, just like I did. It's really hard to monetize having cool conversations with cool people.

But let's say you're somebody who's into fitness and you're a personal trainer. Logically, it would make sense to have a podcast about fitness where you give away fitness advice and then your call to action is I can help you through one on one coaching virtually. That's going to eventually potentially become a business.

So I'm not saying to go into it with money on the mind, but what I am saying is if you do ever have the goal of monetizing the podcast, no going in how you plan on doing it because it's not going to happen by accident. I can essentially promise you that. So that's a big piece.

And I think just going in with the understanding that. The number one priority always gets done. The reason we don't miss is because it is the number one priority outside of my wife and my family.

It comes ahead of me. It's this is the number one priority is to make sure we get an episode out every day. If you are a content creator and you want to be consistent, it has to be a priority and it's probably going to be an inconvenient priority and you're going to miss things and you're going to have to say no to things.

And that just is what it is. That's a really big piece. And then I would say try.

So there's two ways to do it. One, go in with the thought process of this is the ideal listener that I want to serve. Or this is who I am and I'm just going to attract whoever is attracted to me and my energy.

Go in with that and you'll most likely be able to build a pretty aligned community. And then the last, last, last thing, and you said it, consistency is a requirement. Consistency is no longer a strategy.

It being consistent just isn't enough anymore because it's easier to be consistent. You have to focus on improving along with doing consistent stuff. So consistency starts and then improving consistency as you go.

This the studio I'm in right now is way better than it was two years ago. The studio that I was in two years ago is way better than the one a year prior. So it's not just about showing up and doing it.

It's about prepping for it. So before this, I looked you up. I looked at your matchmaker.

I looked at your website. I listened to a couple episodes. All right, cool.

Looked you up on social media. I prepped for it. Now we're doing the actual rep.

I'm here doing it. I'm going to give it everything I got. Cool.

After this, I should reflect on what happened and how it went and listen to this episode. Then with that reflection, I can perfect the next one a little bit better. So that's our little four step equation to improve.

Prep, rep, reflect, perfect. If you do that with every episode, you will get better faster than if you didn't for sure. Perfect.

Let's say let's pick a scenario. Assume that the person has perfected their craft. Most misunderstood thing about personal development.

Number one, I don't think you can perfect it. I don't think that exists. I think you can get really good at it.

But, you know, I've done three thousand five hundred podcasts or something like that. There's always going to be something. Perfection is 100 percent, 100 percent.

How do you market it? There's a lot of different ways to market it. Right now, I'm marketing our podcast. Even if we never talk about it and we never talk about the name, if somebody enjoys what I say, they might look it up.

So this is a way to market it. You break all of your long form content up into short form content and you share it all over social media. That's that's a way to market it.

And then I think there's a lot of creative ways where. You can kind of go off the beaten path, so there are some musicians that I follow on social media that they have these like funny skits that they do, it's almost like they're acting in these little funny skits and it has nothing to do with their music. But at the very end of it, they play one of their songs.

So there it's almost like. It's almost like if you were to give someone. A slice of pizza.

And at the after they eat the slice of pizza, they give you give them a piece of your dessert. They didn't come for the dessert, they came for the pizza, but you gave them a piece of dessert and they enjoyed that. There's a lot of really creative ways to market that aren't necessarily directly with what you're doing, but I think content content is the way you're.

If you can create a profile that solves a specific problem for a specific person in a specific way and put a video up every day of that, that's you marketing the podcast. Will it convert the way you think? Probably not. I think marketing now, at least my perspective on it now, is marketing is a way to start a conversation, not necessarily to guarantee conversion.

That's how I look at it now. I don't. Social media is different than it's been.

All right. It's it's it's fairly saturated and there's a lot going on. So you have to put more time into it.

But I think those are a couple low barrier entries for marketing. This is not a skepticism that goes around, you know, when it comes to marketing a podcast, because there's obviously organic content that you spoke about, but there's inorganic as well. Some some people try to run ads, some people try to promote their podcasts and other, you know, streaming platforms by paying them a reporting fee.

Some people do maybe ad swaps or collaborations. Even that is somewhat not that looked up. But the other things, other things I've mentioned is somewhat frowned upon because when you're when you're listening, like in my perspective, when you're listening to a podcast ad, when you're trying to stream a music, it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know, and probably you'll never look at it in the future.

If you are coming across to the podcast, maybe you listen to it. But I don't think from the ad is what the path goes to the podcast. So what are your thoughts on this organic versus inorganic? Yeah, I was actually on a call with a client yesterday who there's a platform called Overcast.

And Overcast is it's a podcast player, so it's like Apple podcast, but it's different. It's its own unique directory. But you can run ads on there and you pay like five hundred bucks or whatever it is.

It depends on the market and the category and all that. But it gives you the opportunity to be seen by potentially thousands of people. And he spent I think he spent four hundred dollars.

And he got. I don't remember what it was, it was like 50 or 60 new subscribers. That's good for that, for that, it's actually that's actually pretty good.

I don't remember the I think it was like he was paying like four dollars per subscriber. So you must I think maybe he got like one hundred. And it's actually converting really well to the point where he could see it in his stats that all of these new subscribers are actually boosting the numbers.

So. I like that way. Because it's real, it's measurable and it's worth it.

The ways that I don't like are when people bought. So there's a lot of I get messages all the time where people say, hey, I can help you. That's not real.

That's going to tank the algorithm. That's going to screw everything up. Don't do that.

But one of the benefits of essentially being able to monetize your podcast. So let's say for us, we're able to turn our podcast into a business. And let's say we're driving thirty five thousand dollars of revenue a month.

Every month we could effectively run a thousand dollars worth of ads. If that thousand dollars leads to a hundred new subscribers. We could just do that forever.

And it's just going to keep growing and keep growing and keep growing. And then as a byproduct of that, you have to imagine somebody that's a new listener is going to work with you in some way. At some point, you're able to recoup that money and that it just becomes a part of the marketing machine.

So. I'm actually a big fan of that just because it requires you to make money to do it. So it's a strategy.

That you have to be a certain level of successful to even run. Now, the outside stuff, the bot stuff, that's not going to work. That's fake.

That's it's perception. Those are vanity metrics. That's not going to be real.

But if you have money to throw at it and then you have a product or service at the bottom of the podcast or the business, I'm all for it. Give it a shot. See what happens.

Okay, I mean we spoken about consistency a few minutes back. What creators mostly struggle when it comes to consistency is trying to show up daily. Scheduling content consistently or posting content consistently is maybe easy but showing up every day to work on that content is difficult.

So I think there's two sides of being consistent. One is you post consistently or second one might be where you're showing up consistently. So in your books as you have made so many work on episodes take me through this scenario where we have to post or schedule multiple episodes throughout the week or throughout the month.

So how should one plan for the same? Should they record daily, edit it and post it or should they build a scheduling system that helps them have that mental more stable and maintain the shit? It depends on the type of content creator you are because to your point I am not the type of guy who creates a content calendar and then sticks to it. I'm recording three episodes in like four hours for our show. I don't even know what we're talking about.

I like that. I want it to be emotional and I want it to be applicable. I want it to be real.

I don't want to say like oh yeah we said we were going to talk about this three weeks ago let me. No I want it to be real. That works for me.

For other people you might need to block a time off so every Monday at 6pm you're going to record an episode whether you feel like it or not. You can do that or you can say every Monday I'm going to record two episodes. That way when I travel I never miss.

That way if I can't come up with an episode on Monday I still have a buffer. I think it's really important as a content creator to figure out what is your natural flow. Again I don't have a job.

This is my job. So if we can't do an episode I'll stay up until nine o'clock to record. It's not the end of the world.

We also have a team so it's different. I drop our files into a folder and everything gets done so it makes life a little bit easier. I would say in an ideal world you would have a recording day, you would have an editing day and then you would have a posting day.

So every Monday at 6pm I record. Every Tuesday at 6pm I edit and then the episode drops Friday at noon hypothetically. If you do that and it just is on your calendar, it's blocked off, you can't do anything else on those times, you're most likely going to be consistent.

The other thing that we have to think about is trying to make your setup as sustainable as possible. So at least for me my mic is always on my desk, it's always plugged in, my lights are on my ceiling, I just hit one switch and everything goes. If I had to set up the mic and I set up the lights and I set up the camera and do all this stuff there's just creating more and more and more resistance.

So when it comes to consistency there's two D's. There's discipline and design. My office is designed so I don't have to have as much discipline.

In the beginning though it was all discipline because we had to set up everything every single time. So it really depends on where you are in the journey. If you have a dedicated room or a dedicated office, set it up, leave it set up, you're off to the races, it makes things easier.

If not, you're going to have to tap into discipline maybe more than somebody else. But scheduling is huge. If it's scheduled at least it's there and then it's up to you to show up and do it.

The other thing you can do is, it's in our intro where we say self-improvement in your pocket every single day from anywhere on the planet completely free. Put that in your intro. This podcast, I'm going to bring you a new episode every single week on boom boom boom boom boom you're creating public accountability which is also super health.

Yeah absolutely and you can't help but remember the conversation we had with Alan a few weeks or maybe a few months back and we spoke a little bit about atomic habits. I'm sure that you have also read the book by James Spear and this thought came into my mind because I think we're moving into a similar direction over based on the facts that we are speaking out about consistency. You spoke about you know how you can make things easier for you to get back at it and stick at it and for a long term right.

So similarly what I feel like works I think it's on the same lines as well is that you try to reduce friction. Whatever you're trying to do is you're reducing friction around the particular task if you're making it seem easy then you're highly likely that you'll commit to that for a long time no period of time but if the task is difficult maybe you will try for seven to ten times but after that you'll soon quit because no one wants to do the difficult stuff over and over right kind of takes a lot of energy trains you out and doesn't leave a good taste afterwards. People like like prefer fast results and easy roads.

So no one wants to walk through a difficult road for a long period of time. So yeah if you want that I think there's nothing wrong with it but you have to work on your systems to build something that may help you have that easy road ahead of you. So this industry you know where the creator economy does not speak about self-improvement it kind of shows you something that this is how you should improve but I believe it has a messaging problem it does not speak the things that is meant to be said out loud.

So based on you on your experience being a being a creator what's that something you feel that self-improvement space needs to say louder to people? Well self-improvement and personal development is the key to becoming the type of person that you want to and maybe need to to achieve the level of success you desire. It is also incredibly painful it is incredibly painful it is incredibly lonely there are certain awarenesses that once you see you can never put back in the box and it's depressing at times and I don't think anybody talks about everybody makes it out to be this amazing thing and it is but it also sucks at times and it's also challenging at times and I think that's what I really enjoyed about researching your show is and you have it up right now I have it up right now it's for the ones who are currently in the hustle period of their life that's what I think there's not enough of in the messaging is you don't just get to a place where you don't have to do self-improvement anymore it doesn't work that way and most of the quote-unquote gurus their lives they make them look incredibly easy and they don't talk about what they're struggling with anymore they talk they talk about what they used to struggle with that I think that is that is the messaging and here's the other thing too and I think this is a problem with the messaging most of the people in the self-improvement or personal development space did not become successful because of self-improvement or personal development that's not why they had businesses they had multi-level marketing they had people in their corner they had ghostwriters they had people that were getting paid to help them just like an actor or an actress doesn't necessarily make it on their own there's people behind them that are supporting them that's a whole other thing is most of them didn't become successful through personal development they were successful previously and then they started talking about personal development and it's different for us I think one of the reasons we're not as successful as we could be is because we only talk about personal development that's that's what the brand is and that's what also makes it hard so yeah I very clearly I think there are definitely some issues with the messaging in general yeah I mean the word growth is sometimes misled by a lot of people because you don't see the road as lonely or you don't feel invisible when you're on the other side you know of the boundary because for us the grass has always been at the other side and when you're reflecting on someone who is going through the journey you will always say okay that's easy apparently I can do that but it's not that easy unless you are there with them on the other side right so let's again dial back to the history when you are building and you're trying to grow with self-improvement and trying to scale your podcast to reach a wider audience how is that growth phase like did you feel invisible did you feel like you're getting lonely how's that phase really looking like for you I definitely felt invisible I felt lonely I felt like a loser because I was single and I had no prospects of love first couple years we made little to no money so I was in debt I couldn't afford to pay my bills I mean it was it was terrible I felt all of those things but I also felt fulfillment which is something that I had never really felt before and I think again the landscape in 2017 2018 2019 was a little bit different I felt lonely until we started connecting with our audience and then I started to understand that okay if I want to feel like there's a community of people that I can resonate with we're gonna have to create that and that became the mission is to create that community and we have a Facebook group with 900 people or 800 people in it that became a big piece of it if anything I feel like the more we got to know our audience the less lonely I felt but I did feel like a complete failure for the first two to three years at least I felt terrible I was broke I couldn't buy my she was my girlfriend at the time he's my wife now I car broke down probably you should I literally it would literally stall at red lights like I would just pull up to a red light my car would shut off the brakes wouldn't work it was terrible it was absolutely terrible and I just felt like a loser who everybody was judging so yeah it was really bad but that's the hard thing is internally I also felt like I was growing a ton so it was two sides of the same coin one piece was like I'm so proud of me for the work I'm doing on me and the work I'm doing in the world and the other thing was I don't think anybody can see any of this yet and everybody thinks I'm a freaking loser that sucks so it's both of those at the same time yeah we spoke about the past we spoke about the SC middle let's talk about the present do you feel like uh you have uh been successful do you have you feel like you've achieved success or do you feel like there's a higher purpose for you where you're trying to build a legacy and uh a lasting identity for yourself I would say both I definitely feel successful based on the fact that again it's this is a dangerous game in podcast land I am very successful I come on podcasts and people talk nicely about me oh two thousand episodes right so I get a lot of significance from this in the business world we are not successful at all there's so many more companies that are making so much more money and having so much more impact than we are so in podcast land we're top one percent of one percent in business world we are it's not even we're not even on the map yet so that's important to hold the duality of that because I think that that keeps humility and I feel like I have a weird relationship with legacy because with for me my legacy with you is the however much time we have together I've never talked to you I may never talk to you again after this I hope that's not the case but it may be your your audience most likely has never heard of me the vast majority of them will never hear from me again my legacy is the time that I have with you that's it I don't I'm not worried about what people are going to say after I die really because that's going to be based on this conversation so I always approach legacy from a very micro scenario and and then in the grand grand scheme of things we are not even close to achieving our potential we want to have the most successful personal development company on the planet and we have another many decades several decades to go before that is even reasonably achievable so all of them I feel successful but also there's so much to go I feel like oh my gosh in the podcast space we're crushing it in the business space we're just a baby all of those things at the same time let's talk about that particular thing that particular party of course thousands of people when the seven-figure brand so now how do you measure success oh man one way is and it's gonna sound kind of pie in the sky how aligned are we with what we said we were gonna do so we have said no to a lot of things that would have made us way more successful because it's not in alignment with the brand that makes me feel successful because I'm doing it in the way that I said I was going to do it and I'm not selling out so while we might not be as externally successful from a character perspective I feel more successful and there's something to that for sure so that's a piece of it and then we have a lot of so if we're trying to create the most successful brand possible 50 years from today luckily I work with an engineer who can reverse engineer the future so we have specific goals that we're focused on hitting right now that's how we measure success did this quarter go better than last quarter yes are we on target to hit the yearly goal yes awesome then when we get to the next year we'll set bigger ones and we'll focus on the growth so yeah everything is kind of broken down from the massive goal that will never accomplish to goals that we can stretch ourselves into accomplishing while maintaining the quality of our character throughout the process that is the ultimate goal and that's what makes it really hard is I could just become a terrible person and just sell stuff that doesn't exist and rip people off and we would make way more money but that's we're just not willing to do it that way and so far so good on that it's just it's definitely a harder journey for sure yeah I mean that's that's a part of legacy you're trying to build I believe because the way you're parting the you know the goodness and the things that you're doing for the people I think that will stick no matter if you are exchanging money no matter what you're doing there but eventually if you're helping someone build a happier healthier life I think that is something to be grateful for no matter what so we have talked about the past we have talked about the money we have talked about the present let's talk about the future now what's next for Kevin and the next ever university just this but better is always my answer I'm gonna keep doing the same exact things I'm doing but I'm gonna try to get a little bit better at them every single day I believe this conversation you and I have had has to be a percentile better than it would have been if we did it last month and if we talk again in six months my goal is to be different than I was today so that is it it is about going back to the drawing board sitting in the dark where this isn't a thing and nobody is seeing me and I'm working on honing the skills that have allowed me to get to where I am today and just making them a little bit better that's for me and then for NLU it's just doubling and tripling down on what's working and eliminating the stuff that is not working no longer serving us or misaligned and just rinse and repeat that forever and ever and ever unsexy I know no tactics at all in that answer but that is the best truth I can give you it's I do not expect the business will grow beyond me I got to go grow me and when I grow me opportunities will present themselves and we'll hopefully be able to capitalize on them rinse and repeat that cycle forever culture thank you so much Kevin you know for spending your time where's my friend we do the segment this last final segment with all of our guests is the rapid fire segment oh I love these yeah and the catch is that I'll ask you five questions back to back you can't take much time to think you have to be fast and you have to be short with your answers okay ready for it I'm ready my friend okay the first one one daily habit that's non-negotiable for you exercise number two a book you recommend more than any other mindsets by carol dweck most misunderstood thing about personal development it sucks number four what's scarier failure or success for me failure but for a lot of people surprisingly success the final one an unusually tool or hack that changed your productivity for the betterment oh unusual tool or hack setting a timer setting a timer to see how much you're actually working helps okay thank you so much sharing I'll give you a fourth right away for the last one I did love them but I appreciate it thank you so much for sharing your insights I think it will help a lot of the people who are starting to you know build a podcast I appreciate you having me thank you so much I appreciate it and yes I will be back in the future whenever you want me thank you so much for tuning in I hope you found this episode insightful and it showed you ways on how you should approach self-improvement differently I'll give links to Kevin's socials and his website down in the description or show notes for you to go and check it out I'll catch you in the next one but until then take care.