One of the running motifs across most interviews I hosted was people would be on a run leading to their dreams, then they got hit with life stuff, which derailed their progress.
A couple of years after the life stuff, they were back and stronger than ever. During that interview run, my life was a messy balance of trying to keep everything together while still working hard. I was operating with crazy debt and a solid job that allowed me to pay all my minimums.
My priorities were juvenile. Probably still are. Oh well.
Here’s an example, at one point I realized if I wanted to keep smoking weed I’d need to generate a higher revenue. Facing this many choose to stop smoking, I chose to make more money. Enough that no matter the minimums I faced I could handle it and one day a future version of me would deal with it or I’d get rich.
I did not end up rich, in fact last year I was all unemployed and living it up. The guy who wrote that article sounds so hopeful. Instead this year became my version of that “life stuff” run where you get all proper adult-like.
In 2024 I finally had to “deal with it”.
Well, let’s recap this year.
This was a year of death
On December 24th, 2023 my grandfather died.
This was my father’s father and I got entrenched in the logistics of managing death in Quebec. This process took a long time and led to the last moment I saw my father alive. He handed me a cheque with a look of disgust and didn’t say a word.
At the time, I was good with that. I had nothing positive to say to him. I’m still kind of numb and unsure of how to process my current emotional state.
My father died on Dec 15th, 2024. Whereas my grandfather died slowly, with ample time to make up for never knowing him and say goodbye, my father died suddenly. Game over, user wins.
There just hasn’t been a lot of death in my life. Then in the span of 1 year two older versions of me died. After giving my dad hell, I suppose God wanted me to understand how he felt. My father had as many daddy issues as I do.
He used to like to tell me about them, which I always found kind of ironic.
Death changes how you see things.
I’m sad it ended how it did, because there were patches where if he had passed, my tone would be far more loving. When you have bad blood with your loved ones, remember that death is final. You only have the time you both are alive to fix it.
I don’t have a great solution on how to do it. I only wish I had known this was coming so I could have done something differently. I have enough empathy to know my father meant well but wasn’t great at expressing himself.
Maybe it’s worth seeing a therapist if you have family beef. Dealing with the pain of knowing they will hate you forever sucks. Even if the loved you, the end result is what it is.
My best advice is to suck it up if you can because these parentals shaped us into who we are.
My parents believed I could do whatever I set my mind to do, so as you know I set out to clear my debt.
I paid off half my credit card debt
Without getting into numbers, I lowered my balances over 10000$.
Now last year I planned on paying off even more than I did. Little did last year me know I was going to buy the following:
A laptop so I don’t look stupid in meetings
2000$ in car repair fees because I chose to drive into a wall… twice.
A battery powered PA system that lets me literally rap my songs anywhere for 8 hours.
A whole bunch of new suits because Moores has a clearance section. A bunch of clothes to be honest.
A Puerto Rican vacation
Etc.
The point is had I not lived my life and ruined my paint job I’d have definitely hit the 75% number. I spent the entire year working religiously. Outside of my travel related adventures, I worked every single day. Only the Puerto Rican trip was for pleasure, the rest was music.
It turns out when you are working most of your time (every week was past 60 hours, most were 70+), you end up spending less money on things like weed and socializing. I created a proper budget and made sure I reduced unnecessary spending.
There’s no magic secret to figuring out money. You need to figure out your costs and then make sure you make enough money to get it handled. I had a set amount of hours to do for the food sales gig, then I flipped my world into Uber which let me work on demand. Add in music gigs and social politicking and a bit more money appeared.
To brag a bit, my discipline this year led to my credit score increasing by enough that I’m in the top half of Canadians instead of the bottom 20%.
I’m still lacking the liquidity I’d like but I’m definitely better than I’ve ever been financially.
Write out your costs and revenues and really get to know your money so you can make wiser choices. Then when you get a handle on your money, it’s time to learn to spend it.
I started ordering steaks from restaurants despite the price
Now in all fairness both Flacko Bayo and my homie James’ mom got me fire ass steaks on their dime.
These catalyst moments made me realize how good a fancier steak was. So I evolved and just the other night the steak was like 50$, but it was super melty delicious T-Bone goodness. Most importantly, the birthday girl loved it, making the money spent immaterial.
It’s taken me most of my life to learn that when you spend money, you get some good experiences. When you try to be cheap about it, you get mediocre versions of the same experience. From what Scott Galloway says the researchers say, we remember experiences more than we remember possessions.
This means splurging on amazing memories is actually worth it. Don’t let society pressure you into feeling bad for balling out. We work so hard and all we have are the moments of joy we can create for ourselves.
I am clearly privileged enough to have money to spend, which wasn’t always the case. But when you don’t have kids and you get older habits, it becomes easy to start spending better. Most of y’all are probably richer than you think but have your own vices and habits.
I often think about the real benefit to investing in better things like the clothing I bought last year at Century 21. The shoes have lasted an incredible amount of wear and tear in all seasons while looking great. The bright green jeans I bought have seen 0 colour fade despite repeated rounds in the washing machine..
All that to say I regretted none of the money spent on steaks and fancier stuff. I’ve quite enjoyed most of it to be honest. Next time you’re feeling cheap, if you can afford it, splurge a little.
In my case it took experiencing the high life to create the ambition to make it happen for myself.
Try and focus on experiencing a few nice things in 2025 so you can create a real hunger for more.
You can achieve great things if you put the work in.
There is significant funding opportunities for anyone with a tight enough plan
When you can tell a compelling story, you can take a bad idea and get it funded.
Now imagine if you have a good, well thought out idea ready to go. Imagine the possibilities of what can be done, then write it down and use ChatGPT to organize it. The secret to success is actually good documentation. .
I’m going to learn to fundraise like it’s my job. A lot of that means Googling things then using those you need to explain why people should care. Here are some specific areas I will focus on in 2025:
Pitching my songs for sync deals
Cold calling promoters and festivals looking for a bag
This involves putting together a show worth paying for
Building out my pickle merch company
Finding grants and corporate sponsorships that can be linked to specific goals
Creating advertisements for consulting services to help people who want to learn how to do the things I do.
Make sure to follow the blog for more details into each of those projects.
2024 felt a lot like school. I learned so much about how business works. I learned about the economy and investing. I’ve most importantly learned how to correlate my time with income so that if I work harder I make more.
Now it’s worth stating it’s nearly impossible to chase big goals and have work-life balance. Greatness comes with sacrifice and it’s up to all of us to decide if it’s worth it. For me it is.
I’ve always had grit and hustle but for a long time I was lazy. I am ready and willing to put the work in. Only instead of wasting time working in circles, I’m going to work on things that will pay me more.
This will require taking more time and doing some soul searching. When you can figure out what things you’re naturally good at, that other people would pay you for, you’re on your way to financial freedom. It sucks that it may not be the funnest things, but if you are already good at it, it will be easier.
I need to take my own advice so I can build up my momentum.
Once I do that, I know that I’ll be able to secure the team that will help pursue my financial goals.
I flirted with music throughout the year but never committed
I knew starting this year that I’d have to make sacrifices to achieve my financial goals.
I did not realize thow little I’d focus on music. I only released 2 songs. One was “Witness The Beauty Of Stopping To Smell The Flowers” which is one of the songs I made with MCO. The other was “Bonjour-Hi”, which is the culmination of a long story.
I don’t want to paint myself as lazy. To release a song and get a buzz you need to market it. This will require a lot of content, a budget and a plan. Then you need to religiously release that content and spam the world in order to get your stuff heard.
This can range from the following:
Sketches that incorporate your music
Performance videos in cool locales
Videos of people in the streets reacting to your content.
Day X of posting this content until the algorithm finds my audience.
Whatever repetitive and hookey ideas you can think about.
Then you need to analyze performance and compare your content to more successful versions of your content. Think formats rather than trends. A format is something structured that while each video is unique, the flow is content blocked. Each section of the video was deliberately planned.
So I came up with all that and have a bunch of songs in the vault.
The songs I’m writing now are the best I’ve ever written. I get to play them in the Uber to strangers and many of them want my contact info after. I’ve made about 50$ in tips related to my music so far.
I’m also taking things more seriously. “Bonjour-Hi” cost 750$ so far paying people fairly. I have not even really got into promoting it. When I can post regularly I will do so, the beauty of a good song is it’s never too late to promote it properly.
I got paid to rap more than 5 times this year, which is a blessing. If you are an artist, make sure to let people know how many tickets you can sell to a show. I confidently can sell 8-10 tickets on the low end to a well run local event.
When you can clearly state your value, you can ask for money.
Anyway, let’s move on to one of my 2024 goals and give you a progress report.
I published 313 articles this year
I set out to write and publish 365 blogs.
I missed my first day in April, which means I went over 100 days in a row of publishing. By October I had missed 11 days. Here and there things would happen, like consuming psilocybin in San Juan.
In the future I’d like to come up with a backup plan solution for days I cannot write, but in the meantime I still did really well on my goal.
I published something on 85% of the days this year. Somewhere around my birthday (November 3) I got distracted by turning up the Uber hours and then my willingness to prioritize writing fell. I missed a week around my birthday then by the end of November I realized that trying to hit an arbitrary goal was costing me money.
I had to accept that the only person who’s really impressed by all this is me. While I do have some fans, and I appreciate the 15-20 of you who read my words, I am really not making enough to justify the effort. Nor am I doing any of the business stuff. I’ve been on Substack since March and still have put no time into making my newsletter look nicer.
While I will still keep publishing on a regular basis, I love writing, I need to make sure I start doing things properly. This will require me to sit down and just focus on the logistics. Hours of trial and error in front of a computer. Hours of Googling what other people do.
I will need to take the time to create a strategy for the blog. Look at my past results and focus my content more based on what people care about. With the volume I’ve written, there are going to be some trends in the data I can build on.
I wanted to take the time to thank everyone reading this. It means a lot how much you care. I encourage you to be brave and write your thoughts out too.
You never know who’s reading them.
Or who’s following your general adventures at large. If you are following make sure to leave a comment saying hi. Tell me what you care to read more about.
Meanwhile let’s get onto another main theme in my life, food videos.
Being in the Montreal food promo game has been a blessing
In 2024 I had a lot of exposure to more VIP experiences in life.
I literally got to go to some influencer events, cocaine dresses and everything.
My role selling food promo videos evolved into a role where I film videos. I’ve now filmed something like 50 Reels that were published. While I’m not an editor, I do get paid to film content, so I guess I’m a filmographer now.
Literally if I can do it so can you. I just stumbled my way through shoot after shoot, looked at my footage after and got better. Me becoming a filmographer is proof you can stumble your way into things you are not qualified for. Then get qualified on the fly.
Now I show up at restaurants and then they give me a bunch of food. We film the food, we eat the food. It’s gotten me to try a whole lot of stuff my childish palleted self never would have paid for or chosen. The thing is, now that I’ve had all this bougier food, it’s actually harder to go back to the mid stuff I used to love.
I’m blessed to live in a place where you can find food from nearly every culture you can think of. Based on unique restaurant brands, there are a solid 3000 choices. Most of them use fresh ingredients and do their due diligence in cooking well.
None of that is really special despite a lot of restaurant owners bragging about their fresh food. Most people come correct. Sometimes it’s simply average, but it’s rare to come across some BS.
Then again I work in the world of people who are willing to brag on IG about their food. There’s probably a ton of hole in the wall spots ready to give you food poisoning. We recently had a burrito that I loved, but it gave Bonnie food poisoning.
I took a risk stepping into a position that paid less than I wanted and brought me into places with 0 experience in my late 30’s. Turned out I got good really fast and now I get to do blessed things. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and try some influencer stuff.
Start a blog and capture your voice, someone may just pay you for it.
It’s been a pretty antisocial year for me
While there are people I speak to regularly, as the year went on my desire to socialize vanished.
It’s been an intense year, but also one that comes off the tail end of last year. I was out all the time up until I ran out of money and had to get back into working. Even then I still felt a desire to be around people and be part of something.
This year has been so focused on my goals that it’s been hard to meet people half way. My grind has consumed me so much that when I asked ChatGPT for feedback it told me to stop going on about it in every section. It wanted me to provide more insight on how I’m dealing with things, which I liked.
Only I don’t have any answers here, I still feel pretty antisocial. Moreso as time goes on. I don’t think it’s very good to be honest.
It’s not that I don’t like people, but paying down my credit cards has become a bit of an obsession.
Sometimes I try to plan with other people but my communication is always verbose weak sauce. I’ve had a couple of cool opportunities come my way but then the whirlwind of my grind sucked me back into hustling. Basically my follow up game has been bad all year.
I want the relationships in my life to be long term and meaningful. For that to happen I need to clearly communicate what I want and how I will achieve things. Or at least make some effort to keep in touch with people.
I will invest in a CRM tool that creates regular reminders for me to check in with people just to say hi. I find if there’s no effort made to keep a relationship alive, it will die. When you need things to move forward in life, the more people you are in touch with, the greater likelihood you will find the help you need.
I will turn my social life into a project that makes my network fat even if I use tools to keep up.
When I know what tools I will use, I’ll write some articles about how I use them.
This was the most mature year of my life
I used to care about making each year better than the last for the sake of vanity and ego.
This year I just wanted peace. I wanted to lower the stress in my life and alleviate drama. I wanted to focus on being responsible and living better. I still managed to have a whole year long beef with a dork from NDG in a Facebook group, so it’s debatable how mature I really am.
I did however manage to go a year without pissing off my peers in any significant ways. Ironically, the rest of this paragraph is a rewrite because I went off on some petty ranting. I’ve started to learn the value of deleting ideas that go against what I’m trying to say. I’m even learning to stay off Facebook comments because it’s just toxic sludge. There are better things to focus on.
I’ve started to care a lot less about what other people think of me. I’ve had a lot of time to think this year about who I am and what I care about. The more I take time to decide things for myself, with real reasoning behind it, the easier it is to ignore other people’s motivations.
This doesn’t mean I’m advocating for ignoring good wisdom. I value the feedback people give me and recommend always considering what people share with you. But you need to still decide for yourself what parts of the feedback you want to adopt.
It takes time to develop confidence. There are a million resources out there that will speak to any demographic of people on how to build confidence. All I can say is it’s hard to argue with the results of your work.
I prove to myself I can be better so it’s gotten really easy to believe it.
One more thing to touch on.
There are a lot of people who love me and that is the biggest blessing of them all
Despite being antisocial lately, I do have more friends that I love than ever before.
We often treat love in a reductionist manner. Keeping it for romantic partners. Especially as men, it’s complicated to express your feelings if you are of a certain age. But I love a lot of people in my life, and it took me a long time to learn that’s important.
With love you learn to enjoy things beyond the transactional nature of the relationship. Whether it’s work, time wasting or whatever else it manifests into.
It can also be a mutual love of passion, desire and everything sexy in the world. Romantic love is a wonderful thing to have in your life. Sleeping next to someone you feel comfortable sleeping next to is a blessing.
But I think it’s important to recognize love as the greater force it is and detach it from exclusively being something so Hollywood in nature. Having people who you choose to love as your chosen family is a big blessing.
When my father passed, I had so many people offer to be there for me sincerely. It made me realize that even if I’m not always aware of it, people do care. People see my life and it has meaning. Reach out to people and create those connections so that when you are in a moment of crisis they are there.
You beautiful people make it very hard to hate myself. And I don’t anymore. I’m not sure exactly when that happened but the amount of love I get makes it really easy to love myself the way the internet says you are supposed to.
To feel the way I feel now, makes everything in 2024 worth it, even if I doubt I’ll be calling it the greatest year of my life.
It was the year I buckled down and got serious for realsies (autocorrect hates when I say realsies).
My Year in a Nutshell
ChatGPT told me to add a section that was basically the TL:DR version, so here it is at the end.
I paid off half my debt
I wrote over 300 articles
I did a bunch of backend planning while banking music
I found a lot of love in my life
I got to do some travelling
I got to eat better food than a lot of you
Happy New Year everyone. May 2025 bring you love. The rest of it is whatever, I just hope you find more love in your life.
Stay tuned for more blogs and feel free to support financially if you like what I do. Comment below and tell me what you want to see more of. Let’s build a community of hustlers who want to live better, together.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone.
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