Every Graveyard Is Full of Great Ideas

Iredafe opened our Creativity Boost conversation by naming the obvious objection: "digital millionaire" sounds like exactly the sort of claim the internet is drowning in.

Fair. And still true — there are more ways to make serious money online than at any point in history, and plenty of them don't require you to be a personality. People make six figures a year selling beaded jewellery on Etsy.

So the interesting question isn't whether it's possible. It's why most people never get there.

The uncomfortable answer

He pointed out that something like eighty percent of YouTubers have never made a thousand dollars on the platform.

The honest explanation is that most people aren't that talented, and the ones who are usually don't have the work ethic to follow through.

I've worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and with Grammy-winning artists, and here's what I've noticed: the people who do best are rarely the most gifted. They're the ones who work harder than everyone around them.

The typical pattern is someone records a video on their phone, publishes it, goes back to Netflix, and wonders why the money hasn't arrived. And what they published is usually a thinner copy of something they'd already seen work for someone else.

I'd bet that ninety percent of the people at the top have failed at more things than most of us have ever attempted. That's precisely why they're there.

Two kinds of creation

Everything you interact with online was created by someone. The platform we recorded on. Every product, every book, every chair in the room.

Which means creativity isn't the property of people who make things that look creative. An accountant can be creative. So can someone who collects rubbish, if they find a better way to do it.

There are two halves to it. The creation that happens in your head — the idea, the thing you can see — and the physical creation, where you drag it into the world.

Most people are only good at the first. And a good idea is worthless without the stubbornness to finish it and push it out.

Progress over perfection

Every graveyard is full of people with enormous talent and brilliant ideas. All useless, because they kept them inside.

I don't have the camera. I don't have the money. I don't have the contacts, the studio, the time. I'm not good-looking enough, fast enough, experienced enough.

Then you don't have it. If you let those things stop you, you didn't want it much in the first place, because everyone started with nothing. Some people start with more, and it still takes the same work, time and discipline.

Zig Ziglar had the line: you don't have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.

Publish today and have it land flat? There's tomorrow. You can make the next one better. And you've taken the first step, which is more than the person still planning has done.

Stop being soft

Iredafe asked why so many creators start and never finish, and I gave him a blunter answer than he expected.

Life will kick you. Before I was eighteen my mother and I had lived in twelve different places across two states. My father struggled with addiction for fifteen years and was killed by police when I was thirteen. I lost my support in my freshman year of college. I've been homeless. I've started businesses and lost them, had money and lost all of it, and built it back.

I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because if publishing videos consistently already feels too hard, the rest of this is going to be considerably worse.

So go and look at yourself honestly. It might take five years of work with very little visible progress. If you aren't willing to spend that, don't. That's allowed.

Not everyone is built for this, and in America we're strangely rude about that. I love my employees. If nobody wanted to be an employee, nobody could lead anything. There's no shame in deciding the entrepreneurial thing makes your stomach hurt, going to work for someone who does want it, and becoming excellent at that instead.

But if you do want it — stop complaining and get back to work.

Three things that actually move it

Plan your work, work your plan. Waking up and doing whatever presents itself is an excellent way to burn years. It doesn't need to be a two-hundred-page business plan. It needs a beginning, a middle and an end, so you can tell whether you're moving.

Find a mentor. Someone further down the road. Approach them humbly, and the cleanest way is usually to pay them, because their time is worth something and the information is worth more to you than the fee.

10x your output. Not a bit more. An obscene amount more. One video a day becomes ten. Talking to five prospects becomes fifty. Two networking events becomes twenty. I have almost never seen someone genuinely multiply their activity by ten and fail to see a significant gain.

What it looks like when it works

Coach Dr. J had the idea somewhere between ten and fourteen years ago. She's had a death in the family, moved across the country, changed industries and roles. She never said when.

This past year was the first time she turned a profit. She's had press, including iHeartRadio, with more interviews scheduled. She's speaking to students across the country, talking to universities about licensing her course, and in conversation with state organisations about using her materials.

Years of sowing, and the harvest arrives all at once and looks like luck to anyone who wasn't watching.

The part nobody tells you

You hear from people who made a million, ten million, a hundred million. You rarely hear about the false starts, the hard nights, the months when the money wasn't there and they wanted to stop.

Go in knowing those are coming and they become part of the course rather than evidence against you.

You can't beat someone who never quits. If you haven't stopped, you aren't finished — you're in process.

Find your why, make it deeper than money, and put it somewhere you'll see it. Mine is written on the windows in front of my desk.

Listen to the full episode

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How to Become a Digital Millionaire in 2025. Creativity Boost with Iredafe Owolabi, December 2024. My first of two appearances on the show.

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Once you've decided to 10x the activity, the systems have to hold. That's what Ignite Funnels is for.