Be True to Yourself Always

Isaac Mashman0:04

[In] California, I lived in California for about two and a half months, crashing on couches, crashing on my friends' floors, whatever I needed to do. Then afterwards, I decided to pack my suitcase and move over to France for a month. That's just a very, very quick summary. But I first got introduced to entrepreneurship back in 2017. I was a senior in high school, going into my senior year. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was like, you know what? I could go to school for marketing or real estate, something business oriented, but everyone and their brother is trying to do something business oriented.

I'll say that just isn't for me. It's not something I'm really passionate about. In the end, I didn't see myself working for another person. Fast forward, I tried a clothing line and didn't know what I was doing. I started working on an Instagram page, trying to go the influencer route, didn't focus on that, and kind of let that go due to some personal issues. Then I [got into] network marketing for about a year. I had some really great experiences with the company I was involved with, and tried a couple of different companies. I was able to travel a lot because of it, made some really great friends, and learned a lot of great skills. Fast forward to now: I went ahead and started Mashman Media back in July of 2019.

Isaac Mashman1:54

There were a couple of big moments of faith, I would have to say, and there were also a lot of moments of doubt. Something that a lot of people don't realize about entrepreneurship, or about life in general, especially young people my age, is this: we think that life is all sunshine and roses, then we get out in the real world and we get slapped in the face. That's the beauty behind life, though, because if it were easy, we wouldn't have too many great stories to remember it by, right? But in my senior year of high school, I'm not one of those entrepreneurs who can say I was a [D and F] student.

I can't say that. School growing up was rather easy for me. My mom enforced the values of, hey, you need to go ahead and get a good education, try in school. So I was a straight A student. I had B's here and there. I had one C in my entire life. I can't say that I was a horrible student. I was on track to get a [Bright Futures] scholarship. I got accepted into Florida State University and the University of Central Florida, on top of a couple of other colleges. And whenever I [went to] my parents and told my guidance counselor, hey, I am not going to college, they were like, what do you mean you're not going to college?

You've literally been working your entire life to get up to this point. I was just like, something's telling me not to do it. I don't know if it was a sense of rebellion or a sense of confusion, because looking back now, I was in such a weird state of mind, such a weird state just in general with what I had going on. I feel like if I had gone to college, I would have gone down the wrong path. But ultimately, I just knew that I would win and I would succeed regardless. I didn't know how, and there were plenty of moments of, I don't know what I'm doing.

I've recently had a lot of those moments too, even two years on, but that's going to be the case for the rest of my life, I feel like. We're always going to have moments of certainty, and we're always going to have moments of, okay, let's take a step back, reflect, and think about what we have going on.

Isaac Mashman4:13

Could you go and repeat that question really quick? Sorry.

Isaac Mashman4:22

Man, I've learned so many lessons, but if I had to pinpoint one, I would say stay true to myself and honestly don't give up. Just keep persisting, keep moving forward. I've had plenty of moments where I feel defeated and where I'm confused, but the one thing in my mind is just keep moving forward, keep pressing forward, because if you stop, if you give up, if you look back and stop moving forward, you're going to become stagnant and fall behind. If you do that, then you're never going to accomplish your dreams, never going to accomplish what you want out of life.

Isaac Mashman5:39

I was living in the countryside, actually. I was in the countryside for about three weeks before I went down and stayed in the city for a couple of weeks. There are cultural differences. Obviously in America, you're going to have a different culture on the East Coast versus the West Coast, in regards to music or how people act or how people behave. You think about the South, you think about Southern hospitality. You go up North, and people really aren't as friendly. That is something that is culturally ingrained in our minds. But over in France, man, it was a great experience regarding the culture. It really gave me a respect for food, for different ways of life, for the more humble ways of life.

Isaac Mashman6:27

There's this one experience I'll remember for the rest of my life. It was around four or five o'clock in the afternoon and we were walking. The sun was beating down, it was like 70 degrees, beautiful, beautiful weather, a little bit overcast, the hills in the distance. We were walking through these vineyards, literally picking grapes off the vine and eating them. For me, being raised in Florida, I'm the first person in my immediate family to ever travel out of the country. I was just like, wow, I'm literally eating French grapes in a French vineyard, 6,500 miles away from home. I was also getting a taste for the way of life.

We fail to remember that there are other people who have to put food on our tables. And for being a first world country, in a lot of regards it still has that old world mentality in different places over in France. But overall, man, it was an unforgettable experience.

Isaac Mashman8:12

Okay, yeah, for sure. The one thing I was going to say is that in France, money is almost looked down upon. The one thing I noticed about business is that it is not a business friendly country, with the tax percentage. Because of that, prices have to be higher, because the supplier and the vendor have to raise their prices in order to maintain the same profit, since they're taxed so much. So it's not really a business friendly culture. The more money you make, the more you're looked upon as almost selfish, because you have all this money while others are homeless. It was very interesting.

Isaac Mashman9:30

I was about to say. Yeah, I really can't give you my honest opinion on that, because I didn't have a chance to meet a lot of people in Paris. I was only in Paris for a total of 24 hours my entire time.

Isaac Mashman9:42

I was actually living in the south of France, in a smaller city called Montpellier. It's about six miles away from the Mediterranean. I did not get the chance to see it. I should have prioritized that a little bit more, but I'll be going back sometime in [2020]. So I was living in a city in the south, and I was also living in the countryside about an hour north of Montpellier. In total, it would have been an eight or nine hour car ride south of Paris.

Isaac Mashman10:36

Okay, this opens up a segue into something I would really love to talk about. Going up until the trip, I had a lot of people in my life tell me a bunch of stereotypes about French people. It irritated me. It honestly irritated me, because the people who were telling me these things had never traveled and had never been to France. So that really gave me a respect for this: I'm not going to speak on something unless I've been able to actually experience it, do it, or I'm knowledgeable on the subject. How can I speak about a people if I've never been to that place? But honestly, Kevin, the one thing I've noticed is people are people regardless of where you go.

Honestly, they are the nicest people ever. I might not have been able to speak fluently and interact. A lot of them spoke English, and I was living with a buddy of mine. His name is Parker, an American student studying abroad. So he was able to translate a lot for me. But people are people, and that's going to be the same no matter where you go. They're great, man. The food is great. The people are great. Everything was great.

Isaac Mashman11:57

Okay, I'll give a little bit of a backstory as to how I ended up in California in the first place. Back in 2018, I got connected with a guy through social media. His name is Devon, and he got me connected with another guy named Nolan. We were all entrepreneurially minded, and I was originally planning on moving out to California with Devon and Nolan and getting a place together. Those plans fell through. I still ended up taking the flight out to California. I booked it months in advance. I wasn't even 18 at the time; I was still 17, and I was turning 18 right before my flight.

I was like, I'm going to fly out, we're going to get a house together, and we're going to start up a couple of businesses. One of the guys ended up backing out. Things fell through. But I still had other arrangements in Arizona. The guys in Arizona I was talking to at the time ended up going MIA on me. So I was stranded in California, and I sent out a tweet: hey, I'm in Cali. Who else is here? Let's connect. Let's meet up. Let's network. My now friend Gabriel saw my tweet. He reached out to me and said, hey, I'm in Bakersfield, what part of Cali are you in?

I was like, I'm in Bakersfield. It turns out the Barnes and Noble he often goes to for work was literally two blocks away from my motel. So we ended up meeting for coffee, and he introduced me to his entire friend group. Fast forward a year later, I had maintained contact with every single person I met in Bakersfield. I had a flight out to California. I was getting flown out for VidCon, a big convention for video creators. I had a round trip booked and everything.

Isaac Mashman13:48

I was talking to a friend, his name is John, and I was like, John, what am I going to do? He said, Isaac, you know exactly what to do. Fly out and don't fly home. So I hit up my buddies in Bakersfield. I was like, hey, I don't know what I'm going to do, but let me crash on the floor and I'll help you guys with your businesses. I'll do whatever it takes. I need to leave. So I ended up flying out to California, and I literally missed my flight home on purpose. I went up to Bakersfield, which is a smaller city of, I want to say, 400,000 people, about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, and I was living there for about two and a half months.

It was different. It was very, very different, man. It introduced me to a lot of things I had never been introduced to. It was good though; it was a learning experience for me. I'm glad that I got those experiences out of the way now and learned. I have a better understanding now of what I don't want to do in the future, who I don't want to be like, the different things that I don't want to do.

Isaac Mashman15:46

No, I feel like it was more about not knowing who I was. I'm still young. I'm still working on figuring out exactly what I want out of life. It's gotten a lot clearer over the past two years, don't get me wrong, but there are still things I need to fill in, different holes, to figure out who I am.

Isaac Mashman17:35

This is actually not my advice. I do go to other people for advice, but I have to be in a very low state in order to really reach out. I have to be super low, and I reached out to a buddy of mine when I was out in Cali. He's an entrepreneur in his 30s, and he's actually involved with network marketing. His name is Brendan, Brendan De Salis. He's from Australia. I've never met him in person, but the power of the internet is great. I've never met him in person, Kevin, but we're having this conversation. I feel extremely blessed to be in the 21st century.

I asked him, Brennan, how do I avoid peer pressure? What do I do? What do I do to combat that? He said, Isaac, the one thing that you have to understand is that whenever you let another person pressure you into doing something, you are no longer in control of your life. You are no longer in control of your decisions. You're letting another person direct you and control you by influencing your decisions. That's basically what he told me. From there I was like, I need to be in control of my life. Therefore I need to be able to say no. I need to be able to hold my own. But it's not easy to do that.

Isaac Mashman18:53

Looking back now, I would say, first, try to avoid those situations if that's not the route you want to take in life. Otherwise, just have the awareness in the back of your mind that if you're letting another person pressure you into doing something you genuinely don't want to do, or know you'll regret later, you're giving that person the reins over your life. They're steering where you're going. And that's probably not the path you want to go down.

Isaac Mashman19:50

It was something I've had in the back of my mind for over a year now. Whenever I first got started with entrepreneurship, figuring out that I was an entrepreneur by nature, I had the idea of Mashman Media. In my senior year of high school, I started up the Twitter account, I got the handles, and I was like, all right, I'm going to do a media company, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that. I was taking the serial entrepreneur approach, and I put it on the back burner. Fast forward, I was building up my personal brand over the past two years, building up my name on Twitter, building up my audience on various social media platforms, and I was learning a lot.

Not knowing what I was doing, I was teaching myself, and not knowing the direction I was going in has helped me out tremendously today. By building up my personal brand, I realized that I had the ability to do that for another person. Going out to California, I was like, I'm not going to do network marketing. So it was, am I going to get a job in California, or am I going to do my own business? But then, what business am I going to do? So I had the idea: media. A buddy of mine, I'm not going to give his name, gave me the Tai Lopez 67 steps course.

So I started going through that course a little bit. It was a course on email marketing that also teaches you a little bit about social media. I started to study it a little more and I was getting a grasp on everything. I just realized, okay, it's going to be difficult. It's going to be a challenge. But if I already have a skill, now it's about how I can make money. I have the skills. So now it's just about finding the clientele, and I already had the networking skills. So it's just putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and it just fell into place. I'm getting a better understanding of what direction I'm taking my company now.

Just in the past week, I've decided that I want to focus on a couple of different services rather than offer a wide range of services like every other media company. I'm going to be a little bit more niche focused. So it's been good. It's been good. It's been a process. But trial and error, definitely.

Isaac Mashman22:04

Definitely, definitely. I feel that by knowing I don't know everything, I have this attitude that there's always going to be more to learn. I know for sure that I should always be growing, no matter how old I get or how wise I get; there's always something more to learn, to grow into, to evolve into. So I feel like I almost have the advantage. I honestly feel that I have the advantage because I don't know everything, because there's so much that I can learn and experience and do at the same exact time.

Isaac Mashman22:49

100%, 100%. And I will say, if I had gone to school, I would just now be going into my junior year, maybe. If not, I would be ending my sophomore year. I would have been stuck in a dorm room. I wouldn't have had any of these experiences. I would still be taking the electives and going through the courses that will never help me in life. Instead I'm self educated and self taught. This is a good topic to bring up about France again. I talked to a lot of students over there going to business school, and they were like, how did you learn? You have your own company, you have your own business.

How did you learn everything? I was just like, self taught. I studied, I learned, I looked at mentors, I read books, I did what I needed to do, I experienced it. And they're over there doing things that aren't going to help them in the future, taking an elective or a course on something they'll never have to use again. By being in control of my life and having that flexibility, as you mentioned, I'm able to control what areas I want to focus on, what areas of marketing I want to learn, because there are so many different avenues of marketing. Why am I going to study the broad base when I could focus on a couple of different things? I don't need to learn how to use billboards for marketing. That's not my focus.

Isaac Mashman24:12

Well, yeah, but that's something you learn.

Isaac Mashman24:51

All right. Okay. That stopped me in my tracks, because my mind immediately went to a couple of different things, and they're not necessarily business oriented. Is it okay if I mention maybe two or three?

Isaac Mashman25:04

Okay. One of them, I would have to say, is going over to France. I know that because things didn't quite work out, a lot of people would be like, oh my God, I bet you regret it, you should have never gone. It's the complete opposite. [I'm a hundred percent] grateful I made the trip. Traveling internationally and seeing just a small portion of a small country, and literally Texas is bigger than France, just seeing a small portion of how other people live, and that there's an entire world to be explored, really opened up my eyes to the future. I've always loved to travel, but that took me to another level.

That's a personal experience that will help me in a business way, in general, and in so many ways in the future I can't even begin to grasp. So one, it was international travel. Just being able to say that I'm the first person in my family to travel internationally is huge. That's something I hold close to my heart, and I respect a lot.

Isaac Mashman26:05

There's another one, though, that goes back to network marketing. I was in a network marketing company, as I mentioned. Although I never saw a lot of success, I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of mentorship because of it, and there's this one trip. I ended up taking a 16 hour bus ride from Jacksonville, Florida up to New York City. It wasn't even Greyhound. It was this Chinese bus company that I'd never heard of before. So I took this bus up to New York City. I was in New York City for four hours. I got picked up by these guys I had never met in person before, but I was building a network marketing company with them.

They picked me up. We drove out to Chicago. It's a 20 hour car ride. We picked up some other people in Chicago we'd never met before, and then we rode up to Minneapolis for this event to see the vice president of the company speak. The vice president had just turned 30 years old this year. This was back in 2018. Okay, last year. Yeah. It was last May, actually.

Isaac Mashman27:02

It's crazy. For being on this journey for two years, I feel like I've been on this journey for 20. So we ended up going and seeing the speaker speak. I walked up to him and introduced myself. I was like, hey, my name is Isaac. Thank you so much for taking the time. And I'm picking his brain with questions. People are trying to take pictures of his Rolex watch. I'm over here talking to him; I want to pick his brain.

Isaac Mashman27:30

I want to know what you know. I don't care about the watch. The watch will come in the future. I'm talking to him and he wants to know a little bit about me. I was like, yeah, well, I'm from Jacksonville. I ended up traveling and taking a bus, and so on. He's like, so how much time have you traveled? I was like, at the end of this trip, it's going to be about 70 hours of total travel time. He was blown away by it. He invited me and the other teammates out to dinner. And so we went out to dinner later that night for sushi, and he literally spent over $1,000 on 20 or 30 people to eat sushi that night.

That was an eye opening experience for me. I'm not driven by money, Kevin. This is something I never want people to think I am. Money's great. It is. But it's not necessarily the money that's great; it's what you can do with the money. It's about having the ability to treat other people, to help other people, to invest in other companies, to be able to give to charities and whatnot. But just being able to sit in his presence and see this guy who's under 30 years old who has success, who has influence, who has the things in life that I look to. That was a really eye opening experience, because I was like, wow, this is within reach.

This is something I could have. It's possible. It's possible, because growing up, I didn't have anyone in my life I could look to as a mentor like that. So I was like, okay, this is someone I would be okay switching spots with.

Isaac Mashman29:37

I'm very torn on that question. Because, okay, you follow Gary, I follow Gary, right? Gary Vee has been speaking a lot on empathy. He's been speaking a lot on happiness. You have a lot of these other mentors, a lot of these other gurus, whatever you want to call them, big name social media entrepreneurs and influencers, who are now speaking on spirituality and these different things. So in that regard, I feel like people's eyes are really being opened, but I don't think people quite understand what it means to be spiritually happy, or to be content, or to be happy with their experiences. Then on the other side, you have Instagram, which, as Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, says, has almost become an echo chamber.

You go and you like one picture, you like that picture of the Rolex watch, and the next thing you know, you see two Rolex watches on your explore feed. Then you see pictures of cars, and then you see pictures of houses. The algorithm is literally built to keep you on the page. It's built to show you things that you're interested in. Because of that, you get so consumed by the thought of having these nice things that you fail to understand the beauty behind the process of getting to that point.

Isaac Mashman31:18

So it's really a double edged sword. I feel like some people are learning, some people are never going to change, and it's just something that we have to watch. There's no way to really measure it.

Isaac Mashman32:03

Oh man, I feel like I might get a little bit of backlash for this, but honestly I don't want to really speak on it too much because it's not something I know. But in my opinion, I feel like influencer marketing is about to change. Over the past six months, actually, dang, it's been eight months, man. This year has flown by. I don't know where 2019 has gone. I'm talking to you and I'm like, what the heck, man? A buddy of mine introduced me to an app called Lasso back at the beginning of 2019. It's Facebook's competitor app to TikTok. So I got on the app and I just grinded away.

I ended up becoming verified on the app. It took a lot of hard work, it took a lot of dedication, but it was possible. Because of that app, I was able to make a lot of great connections with influencers. I was able to really get a taste of their life and a taste of the way that they create content. So it's kind of close to my heart now, because it almost concerns me how this is going to affect the entire influencer marketing side of things. Because something we've always looked at is likes. You go to a page and you look at the likes. There are so many different things that it's going to affect.

I'm intrigued and excited, yet scared at the same time, to see the long term effects and how it really affects us. For example, there are a lot of people who built their accounts with fake accounts, fake likes, fake followers, and all those other things. So with us not being able to see the likes on their posts, there could be someone who has 200,000 followers, but because we can't see their likes, we don't know that they're only getting 1,000 likes per post when in reality they should be getting 10 or 20,000. So that means it would be a lot easier to fake follower accounts. Wow, I just realized what I just said, because that is something no one's mentioned.

I have not heard anyone mention that, but it's going to be a lot easier to fake those accounts. When it comes to actual mental health, though, I honestly don't know. That's not something I've read up on a lot when it comes to social media and the long term effects. It's not something that's ever really affected me. I've never had anyone in my life who was like, oh my god, look at the Instagram likes.

Isaac Mashman34:50

Okay, when I first got started with social media, I made it my goal to get verified on Instagram. I'm still looking for the check mark. I'm not working for the check mark, but I know that it's going to come with time, because I feel like it's almost an accomplishment. It's the same way that I like a Rolex. I don't feel like a Rolex is something I want to buy to say, oh, look at me, I have a Rolex, but rather as an accomplishment to me. I love watches, I've always loved Rolexes, and it's going to be, Isaac, you got to this point, you earned this.

So for that, the verification on Lasso was a star. I became a part of their star creator program. Having that star was cool, and very humbling too, because I had to take a step back and I was like, you know what, I'm in a position now that other people want to be at. I was literally in that position a couple of days ago, of wanting to have that star next to my name. Now that I have it, it's literally the same exact thing, but it was good. It was humbling mainly. It was really humbling, but it also was a testament to myself: okay, I worked for this and I made it happen.

So what values can I take from this? What experience can I take from this? Or rather, what lessons? What can I take and implement into other areas of my life? You see what I'm saying?

Isaac Mashman36:45

Okay, [Photo], I'm watching what I say about them. I'm watching what I say. The leaderboard is not based on followers, and it's not based on total likes or any of that. The [Photo] leaderboard is based on how many likes you get per day. That day I ended up getting the most likes, but [Photo] is not a big app. Whenever [Photo] first launched, I was on the app within 48 hours of its launch. So I had a huge advantage over people who just recently got on the app, because I already had more followers, more content, and more likes to begin with. But again, I told myself, I'm going to go ahead and hit number one.

I was like, I'm going to do it, and I made it happen. So again, it was showing me that I could do something that I put my mind to. But again, it's not about the likes, it's not about the followers; it's more about real people. We have to realize that these people who are following us and liking our content are real people living real lives. Think about it: whenever you're driving on the highway, you don't think about what the person in the car next to you is doing. But in reality, that person is on their way to their home, to their work, to their job.

They have a life of their own that they're living. Every single person driving on I-95 has their own life, and it's the same exact way with the people on Instagram, the people on social media. Being able to meet so many people through social media, I've made it my goal to make my social media relationships physical. My goal is to meet that person face to face, and every single person I've met is the same exact person they portray on social media. There's a stigma that people on social media put up a front, and that might be true with some people, but overall, the people I've met are real people.

Isaac Mashman38:51

I totally went on an entire rabbit trail with that one question, man.

Isaac Mashman39:27

100%. 100%. But I also feel, okay, imagine two lines, right? Two parallel lines, but now they're going in opposite directions. On one hand, social media at one time was viewed as something scary. I remember growing up, my mom was like, social media is only for creeps, there's nothing but pedophiles on the internet. Obviously there are going to be some, but that's not the internet as a whole. The internet was something that scared a lot of people. A lot of people didn't understand what the internet was and what its power was. You would be afraid of the thought of meeting another person who you've never met before face to face.

It was scary, online dating, for example. Nowadays, and this is something Gary Vee said, I'm not trying to use his analogy, but 20 years ago, the thought of your daughter getting into a car with a random stranger was absurd, out of this world. And now you order an Uber for your 14 year old daughter to get in a car with a guy you've never met. So on one side of the coin, I feel like more physical meetups and relationships are going to happen. But at the same exact time, on the mental health side, more people are going to be stuck behind their cell phone screens.

So there's going to be some physical relationships, and then the other group of people are going to be homebodies or not know how to interact face to face.

Isaac Mashman41:27

100%. And Kevin, I do want to mention this too. Think about the fact that if Instagram shut down tomorrow, can you imagine the long term effect, or just the immediate effect, of it literally disappearing? There have been multiple instances over the past year where Instagram shut down in different areas around the world due to server issues and outages. The internet went crazy. Everyone went to Twitter and everyone's like, oh my God, Instagram, Instagram, Instagram. Social media has become such a large part of our lives. It's difficult to imagine a world without it now. Businesses rely on social media for marketing, for media work, for surveys, for feedback, for all these different things.

If the internet disappeared tomorrow, I feel like this would be a crazy documentary. You know that history documentary, like Life After People? Imagine a series, Life After Social Media. What would the long term effects be?

Isaac Mashman42:48

I'm all for diversification, man. Working with clients now, I'm starting to work with a lot of artists and a lot of musicians, and I'm getting rappers on LinkedIn. Why would a rapper be on LinkedIn? Because everyone else isn't. You have to do what other people aren't doing. The way I see it, man, the more platforms you're on, the higher the chances of other people seeing your platform and getting connected with you. It's not a numbers game, but to an extent it is. So for me, if I'm able to get on one platform and connect with one group of people, and connect with another person here, it's worth it in the end, right?

Because I value real connections. I value real people. I value people for their time, because I know that when they spend time listening to my podcast, reading my blog, or looking at my website, I'm asking them for their time. So I'm all for diversification on all platforms, man. Another thing is, especially if you're a content creator, such as myself, such as you, we're trying to get a message out there. We're trying to provide value for these people. The person who's on Twitter isn't necessarily going to be on Facebook, and the person who's on Facebook might not be on Twitter or Instagram. So by being across all these platforms, it's not only helping our brand image, it's not only helping us grow our personal brands, it's helping get more value out there, get more exposure, and help more people. From there, it's just a matter of continual growth.

Isaac Mashman44:50

Well, I just got back to Jacksonville, man. It's very weird. It is honestly very strange for me. This is going to be one of those interviews where I'm not 100% on my game right now. I'm kind of curious to listen back to this and be like, okay, this is a little bit different than what I'm used to. Excuse me. I should get some water. Give me one second.

Isaac Mashman45:10

Okay. So I'm back in Jacksonville, and this is the first time being back in town in nearly four months. It just marked four months today, the 11th, or I don't even know what day it is. Regardless, man, over the next couple of months leading up to 2020, I'm looking to be the best version of myself. Flying back from France, I was like, I need to get physically fit. I need to be in the best shape of my life emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically, in every single avenue of my life. I'm working to build up a lot of momentum into 2020. Not to say New Year's resolutions or anything like that, but it's a new decade.

It's a new year, obviously, but it's just a new opportunity. It's like a fresh start. I'm trying to make the most out of today to build up that momentum going into the new year, because everyone's waiting until 2020 to get started. People are waiting until 2020 to stop drinking or to stop smoking. Why are you going to procrastinate? Do it now. Stop now. Start now. Whatever you need to do. But my goal ultimately, man, is just to continue growing my media company, to continue growing as an individual, as a man, as an entrepreneur, and to have a better understanding of who I am and what I want out of life.

By the end of 2020, and it's a very hefty goal, I want to have two real estate properties generating residual cash flow, whether an Airbnb room, Booking.com, an apartment, a condo, whatever I need to do. I want to have two properties by the end of next year. And honestly, I want to get to the point where I'm able to travel whenever I want. I want to be able to help whoever I want, to be able to give back to my mom, to my family, to the people who believe in me. It's not about me anymore. It's not about me. It's not about my family; it's about the millions of people I could potentially help and give back to in the future. That's it, brother.

Isaac Mashman47:27

Yeah, definitely, Kevin. I would also love to mention something real quick. I started up a [networking] group a couple of months ago called Team Legacy. You've probably seen a little bit about it on social media, but Team Legacy is a Facebook group for entrepreneurs, for people from all walks of life, for movers and shakers. This is not a sales pitch; the group is not meant for selling at all. It's not going to be monetized in that regard. It's genuinely just for people to network and collaborate. Earlier on we mentioned face to face interactions. My goal with the Facebook group Team Legacy is to get it to the point where it's, hey Team Legacy, I just landed in Chicago.

What other members are in Chicago? Let's get coffee. Let's collaborate. Let's talk business. Let's get to know each other. So if you're interested in Team Legacy, reach out to me on social media. You can reach me at Isaac Mashman on basically all platforms, at Isaac Mashman, M A S H M A N, and go to IsaacMashman.com. I also have my own podcast, which, Kevin, I'll have to get you on for an episode sometime in the next couple of months, called the [Hustler's Choice] Podcast, also available on all platforms. But man, it's been a pleasure being on.