Digital Social Hour - Self-Publishing Secrets That Changed My Life! I Sean Dollwet DSH #490

Starting point is 00:00:00 America, we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By honoring your sacred vocation of education, you impact your family, your friends, and your community. At Grand Canyon University, our online bachelor's, master's, and doctoral education degree programs allow you to balance online coursework with observational and hands-on experience in the field. Find your purpose at gcu private christian affordable visit gcu.edu did you like japan better or hawaii i would say like my personality wise it's america's most suited because like you know in japan growing up as a kid like i would step outside uh and then all the other kids like neighborhood kids would just stop

Starting point is 00:00:45 like look at me like that and like they would point at me saying oh my god look there's a foreigner you know so like wow yeah so that was pretty much my entire childhood you know damn wherever you guys are watching this show i would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe it helps a lot with the algorithm it helps us get bigger and better guests and it it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys. Digital Soul Shower. We are back. Sean Dalwet in the building. Digital nomad, making a living selling audiobooks and books online, right? Yeah, just books in general. So like e-books, paperbacks, audiobooks. Nice. And how'd you get into that? the story is uh i got recruited into a multi-level

Starting point is 00:01:25 marketing company at age 18 and that's when i learned like the concept of passive income and all that but i i sucked at mlm you know english is my second language so i failed for like four years straight and one day after work i came back uh looked up on youtube like how to make money online found a video by this guy saying uh kindle publishing or like self-publishing as the easiest business uh beginner beginner friendly business model so i'm like okay i'll try it out and published one book did really well so i'm like that's crazy you wrote it i wrote a super short book on mindfulness and after that i kind of used ghostwriters to outsource the process but so i published a second

Starting point is 00:02:06 book third book and i just kind of stacked uh like started doing that and kept doing it consistently for like years wow so how many have you published now overall i published like hundreds of books damn yeah that's insane and it's all under your name no so i have a few books under my name i kind of regret it because like the books aren't that good. So like I don't have good reviews and like people look me up saying like, oh, your books aren't even selling. But I used to, I try to build my brand using like ghost written books and try to funnel into like, you know, back and offers like affiliate marketing. And that didn't work out. But most books that I have is under a pen name. Got it. So walk me through how long it takes to make. I know you're using AI to write some of them, you're using ghostwriters. What's the process like?

Starting point is 00:02:47 Yeah. So it really depends on what kind of books you make. You know, like if you're trying to make journals and planners, those books are super easy. There are templates out there. You just customize the templates and you can get it out in like hours, a couple of days. Right. For me, I kind of focused on nonfiction books. So nonfiction books, like obviously if you write yourself, it depends on how fast you write. But if you work with ghostwriters then you know typically like a full-length non-fiction book of 150 to 200 pages it takes about a month for you to write and or i'm sorry the ghostwriter to write and then for you to review it then you get a book cover done that's like max one week or so and they just format it you upload it to kdp and then they review it it takes like 72 hours and got it it'll be live on amazon so what is kdp kdp is just

Starting point is 00:03:31 amazon's uh platform where you can sign up and upload your book and then publish it got it yeah so you're taking like the mass approach rather than hormos you're just taking years to write one book at a time you're kind of going. Like if you want to succeed in this business, you need a balance of, you know, quantity, but also a high quality book. You don't want to just spam low quality books. So, you know, yes, I have hundreds of books. It's probably a mistake

Starting point is 00:03:55 because like the first couple of years of doing this, I was kind of spinning my wheels, right? Like I was publishing a bunch of books and then, you know, my older books eventually gets bad reviews, dies dies off and then i'm publishing new one to keep maintaining my income and when i shifted my focus to like you know producing high quality books that actually got four or five star reviews uh it never died off and that's when my income kind of stack it uh stacked more and more and more so that's definitely the focus you

Starting point is 00:04:22 want to take but i would say you don't have to take like years writing one book right it's a balance yeah and you're selling all of these on amazon yeah all on amazon amazon dominates the book market so like 70 of all book sales are coming from amazon damn yeah but there are other like obviously the 30 outside of amazon so you can upload your book to other places like you know apple barnes and nobles play those kind of things too r.i.p barnes and nobles man i got some good childhood memories there yeah i like barnes and nobles but whenever i walk in there these days it's a ghost town yeah it's completely different i mean i love bookstores i read a lot of books i think that helped me to build this business too because like even though english is my second language so you know i'm i'm not a great writer but at least i read a lot of books growing up so like when i

Starting point is 00:05:05 got the book back from the ghost writer i was able to tell what is a good book what's not a good book right i mean like i kind of had a good idea of how to structure a book and what people are looking for which books stand out to you in terms of just changing your perspective on life uh for me i mean when i was 18, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And that really, really, really helped. Like, I understood, you know, oh, like, you don't have to trade your time with money, right? Like, you can build passive income systems and make money while you sleep. And so I'm like, that's cool. I want that.

Starting point is 00:05:36 And since then, I've been trying to build that as much as I can. Yes, I would say Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I mean, recently, like, $100 million offers. Classic. Dude, I read that, like, three, four times yeah yes alex almost so i would say those yeah i will say leads was decent but i feel like offers was way better yeah that really really changed my paradigm like how i approach this yeah and that book was so great because you could just implement that information immediately yeah i feel like some books are so like i don't know more of like a i don't know how to describe it you know what i mean

Starting point is 00:06:09 yeah it's really niche you know but like that book you can kind of apply into any business like even in kdp like how we position it's basically just positioning right so like how we position the book uh makes a huge difference in like perceived value and and how much you can sell. Absolutely. What percentage of your sales are audiobooks versus physical? For us with nonfiction, generally, on average, ebooks are, I would say, 20%, 10%, 20%. And audiobooks, maybe 30% or so, and then the rest. So that's like what? 60% or so would be paperbacks but it really

Starting point is 00:06:46 depends like if you start publishing you know cookbooks like no one's gonna listen to an audiobook of a recipe or those kind of things yeah so most of your sales are gonna be from paperbacks so it really really depends wow i thought it'd be the opposite so i'm an audiobook guy yeah audiobook is picking up like it's trending it's crazy so like you know there's studies out there where they're projecting audiobooks uh the market for audiobooks to triple in size by like 2030 right so i can see audiobooks taken over completely but for now it's it's so new uh and it's just like people are still buying paperbacks yeah i would say in the future it's going to be like e-books and audio books.

Starting point is 00:07:25 I agree because I feel like with audio books, you can learn quicker. Yeah. I do 2x speed. I know our friend Zach Fisher knows someone that does 4x speed. That's crazy. So I feel like you could just learn pretty fast because when you're reading, it's kind of capped. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:38 You can't read at 2x. I mean, some people read fast, but. Yeah. 4x is crazy, man. I don't know how to do it. I think for me, it's like 2.5x that's the most i've done certain podcasts i could do like 2.6 if it's a slower talker but then if it's someone fast 2.5 is very fast on a podcast yeah you're right it depends on the reader's speed or the narrator's speed too right if he's naturally fast talker like 2x is even too

Starting point is 00:08:02 much sometimes yeah but with rogan mean, those are four hours. So it's kind of hard to listen to that on one X and not get bored. Yeah. Attention spans these days. And that, that's what surprised me about the book. The book industry is still being pretty solid. People's attention spans are three seconds now.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Yeah. But books are still doing pretty well. I thought they'd die off. Yeah. It's, it's definitely, there's definitely a market for it. You know,

Starting point is 00:08:23 it's definitely an older demographic, I would say. But yeah, like audiobooks, it's picking up. So maybe like paperbacks in the future, it's going to slow down. But I would say e-books and audiobooks, it's going to keep growing. And I think there's a little shift in the market, like even younger generations.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Like people are getting into more self-development. And like reading books, like everybody says it's one of the best things, right? so like people are kind of coming back to like reading more books yeah that's cool to see because i feel like it got lost during our generation a bit yeah i mean when i was in school i hated reading yeah but i didn't know it was because they were giving us books we didn't care about if they gave us business books or like self-development books maybe we would have liked reading in school yeah yeah absolutely man i mean i read a lot of like sci-fi books on like evolution and stuff growing up and then when i started like entrepreneurship i read a lot of business books and self-help in general so yeah it's like really like if you enjoy

Starting point is 00:09:14 reading uh those kind of topics books are great absolutely so you're kind of going against the traditional publishing route where you sign with a company they give you an advance or they give you a percentage of sales you're doing it all on your own yeah self-publishing is so much faster like you have way more control and obviously you don't have to sign away the rights to the book and you don't have to give away like 90 90 of the rotis to the publishing company i mean you know the thing is we got a lot of students that uh sign with publishing companies right and have their books published and like it's crazy because they just help with, and obviously I can't speak for all the companies,

Starting point is 00:09:48 it really depends, but for the most part, they just help with the most basic stuff, like formatting and editing and book covers. And those are something you can do yourself super easily. You can hire someone very cheaply, although still high quality, and get it done yourself. You can keep 100% of the royalties right like you know in publishing companies they often don't even help with marketing so you still got to market it but

Starting point is 00:10:11 you're making like five ten percent i didn't know they take 90 yeah it's a lot man wow it's not always 90 but it's a lot for a first timer it's probably 80 90 that makes sense yeah so wow that is insane yeah so unless you're like super famous, you know, and like they can give you a huge advance and like they can actually market the book for you. Like it often doesn't make sense. It's better to just go through the self-publishing.

Starting point is 00:10:34 They help with the distribution though, right? That's like the main sell. Yeah. But the distribution is also easy too. Like if you want to get yourself on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, it's as simple as just uploading there. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:10:45 Yeah. And then you just market it yourself. Wow. Like social media marketing or whatever. They're not doing anything different than what you can do yourself if you understand marketing. Yeah. They might go out of business

Starting point is 00:10:56 with a self-publishing model picking up them. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not a hater or anything. I think there's like, you know, for some people it might be good for them. Right. But I'm a huge believer in self-publishing. You just have more control and just do things the way you want.

Starting point is 00:11:11 Are you interested in coming on the digital social hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life. Click the application link below. And here's the episode guys. Yeah. What think about tiktok shop i bought a gratitude journal i bought a meditating thing off there seems like pretty good deals on there yeah tiktok is just crazy now i mean there's a whole movement of book talk right even on instagram too there's like a

Starting point is 00:11:39 bookstagram you know popping so yeah like before the way we marketed the book was mainly like advertising so like facebook as amazon as is what i use heavily too but i think it's kind of shifting you know like people are starting to tune out of paid ads and more organic content and like you know being recommended by other people on social media like from their peers uh they trust that opinion more so like that's why tiktok is really good because you can hire or you're not really hiring but they can get a bunch of affiliates right like talking about your product or your books and then you can give them a little cut like if people buy it from the tiktok shop so there's this uh and this might be the like did you buy the shadow

Starting point is 00:12:18 work journal or i believe it was that one yeah yeah so like we kind of talked about this before about yeah like that book made i believe like four million in a month like millions of money right it's nuts so yeah like just utilizing the viral nature of social media i think just so powerful nowadays yeah absolutely um in terms of ranking on amazon is that based off of reviews mainly it's mainly reviews um as well as sales velocity so it's just it's just sales and reviews right if um yeah sales reviews and also keywords based ranking is good too like you know if you have like this seo so like if you have a book on how to stop overthinking you title the book how to stop overthinking then it's so much easier to rank for that keyword so when people type in how to stop overthinking show up um if your title doesn't have that eventually like you know

Starting point is 00:13:12 if you run ads to that keyword and then people who typed in how to stop overthinking find your ad click on it buy it then amazon will make the connection like oh this book is about how to stop overthinking even though it's not titled that way eventually it'll show up but it's just so much easier if you have the seo and the title and yeah that stuff yeah how do you get book ideas i know there's extensions that tell you amazon sells of certain products is that kind of what you do to see if there's a market yeah so it's as simple as just searching amazon and seeing what kind of books are selling because amazon actually tells you right on the page uh how well the products are selling it's not just books like all products they have this thing called the best

Starting point is 00:13:49 sellers rank yeah so you know like there's certain numbers that you kind of want to go off like with books generally if the best sellers rank is below 80 000 it's making an average of like 500 bucks if you include like the other formats is you know with e and audiobooks, it could go up to $1,000 a month. So those are a good baseline number to follow. If the best sellers rank a lot lower, then it's making $1,000. So yeah, you just find other books that are selling pretty well. And if you find multiple books on the topic selling well, that's a pattern. And then from there, you're like, okay, it's profitable.

Starting point is 00:14:23 But now is it competitive? And you start analyzing the competition. If it looks good, you're like, okay, it's profitable, but now is it like competitive? And you kind of like start analyzing the competition. If it looks good, the next question is like, can I make a book on this? Right? Like a lot,

Starting point is 00:14:31 some books are harder to make. Some are easy. Like, you know, if it's like a trivia book, it's as simple as like writing up random trivia. You get ideas from online or just like even use chat

Starting point is 00:14:40 if you could come up with ideas. Obviously, you have to like, you know, rephrase this. So it's your content and it's not just copy paste but it's as simple as that um for non-fiction books like you know you got to find writers who can write that topic once again with like you still got to create high quality books right but you don't have to know about the topic because you can find someone who can write about the topic who's knowledgeable on it you know so that's kind of how it works yeah what's the most you've seen generated off of one book from one book i would say like probably the shadow work journal

Starting point is 00:15:08 one i mean i've never heard of a book like a single one making millions of money right but in terms of on amazon the store directly uh it's it's interesting because there's uh one book called curious uh interesting facts for curious minds and it's a trivia book right so it's like the easiest content to make it's just literally just random facts uh one after another barely no images it's just text right so like anybody can write this but it just have an amazing cover you know so it stood out they got a good marketing team behind it so that was actually the number one best-selling book in the entire store wow like it was number one in the BSR, in the bookstore. And it was doing like 20, 30K a day.

Starting point is 00:15:50 Damn. For months. Yeah. That's insane. Just facts? Just facts. So it's all the marketing. I want to see the cover now.

Starting point is 00:15:56 Now what goes into a good cover in your opinion? Good cover is something that pops. It clearly like illustrates what the book is about. But like the main thing is it captures attention right like you know because it's a on amazon when you're scrolling through small thumbnail size covers so like you really need the colors to be popping and the text to you know like bam like the book title is very clear and just got to catch people's attention yeah that makes sense i want to dive into the coaching side and how you got into that so how many years were

Starting point is 00:16:24 you doing this before you got into the coaching so i was doing like five years of publishing myself and you know i sold my first account and that put me over like seven figures net worth and then like i felt like i was finally qualified to like start teaching so i was doing youtube videos uh but then i created a course and i kind of got into it so since then i've been doing youtube for like five years just teaching nice yeah and youtube's i feel like that's one of the biggest social media assets you could have these days yeah absolutely i mean i love youtube um definitely opened a lot of doors for me like this podcast i mean if i didn't have a youtube channel i wouldn't be here uh for instagram my instagram game is kind of weak

Starting point is 00:17:05 my tiktok game is non-existent so you're not on there i am on there but it's just my team like repurposing my long form video and like cutting it up and putting it up there yeah but amazon kdp is so niche that it's it's not very viral worthy so right i probably got to film a short like original shorts just for that purpose of like going viral rather than just cutting up long form but as of now i'm kind of just focusing on youtube yeah it is super niche i've never seen someone teach this or talk about it actually other than you yeah yeah i mean there are some side hustle channels like oh you know make 10k publishing blank line journals and then they talk about like you know uploading journals and stuff but barely anyone

Starting point is 00:17:45 talks about non-fiction fiction books a little more higher content books that you know takes a little more work to make but often like so much more profitable yeah what are you up to this year i know you're you're a digital nomad we'll get into that are you traveling a lot yeah so i actually just flew in a couple days ago from thailand so the past two years I've been traveling Southeast Asia basically since I make money online you know and I can live anywhere I'm trying to find a home base because like I'm born and raised in Japan moved to the U.S. and it's cool like I'm happy because I like we moved to Hawaii so Hawaii is nice right but i wanted to see if there are other places out there and that i like so i started traveling and uh saw pretty much all of southeast asia a lot of good

Starting point is 00:18:31 places but now this year i kind of want to check out latin america nice some parts of europe nice we'll get into some of those countries first i want to know was it a culture shock coming from japan to america was there any specific moments you remember where you were like wow that's different yeah um first off i mean i barely spoke english you know obviously i'm half white my dad's from america so like he would talk to us in english uh growing up so like i was able to understand english but i was not able to speak it right so at least the understanding was there uh so that it was a lot easier for me to pick up English compared to my Japanese friends who didn't have that. But the culture shock, I mean, we moved to the Big Island,

Starting point is 00:19:15 the Hilo side of Hawaii, which is like, it's not like even the other side of the Big Island, Kona, it's more touristy, it's more developed. And if you go to the Wa waikiki side which is a whole new island then there's a lot of like you know japanese people and all that got it like in my school uh there were only like maybe like four other japanese so like dang uh and i had to kind of like force myself i played basketball so i made a lot of basketball friends learn english that way like i was able to talk about basketball in english pretty well it was like other topic like i couldn't say anything um the biggest culture shock is just like hawaiians

Starting point is 00:19:50 they got their like dialect called pigeon pigeon english and it's like it sounds different than normal english like for me i had to learn that and like oh i didn't know that yeah wow i thought they talked english over there they did talk english but it's just like they got an accent or a dialect got it got it did you like japan better or hawaii i would say like my personality wise it's america's more suited because like you know in japan growing up uh as a kid like i would step outside uh and then all the other kids like neighborhood kids would just stop and like like look at me like that and like they would point at me saying, oh, my God, look, there's a foreigner, you know. Wow. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:28 So that was pretty much my entire childhood, you know. Damn. So I would like I never fit in like how I look anyways. And Japan has a whole thing of like doing what everybody else is doing, fitting in. And nowadays it's kind of changing. Like there's a lot of Western influences. But before, I mean, it was different, you you know especially because i grew up in the rural area it wasn't like tokyo or osaka or anything like that so i was like don't like it got it um so yeah like you know

Starting point is 00:20:55 japan's amazing people are nice um the food is really good oh yeah but i would like personality wise i don't see myself living and working in japan like especially as a corporate setting but yeah us is just i like that kind of more of like you know the freedom kind of mindset that people have yeah not even just japanese people asians in general are super weird with other races yeah there's videos on social media where like a black person or something will be walking through china like a rural town and they'll literally touch him they'll like point at him they'll film him yeah i don't know what it is with asians man they gotta chill yeah it definitely i think they're just not used i mean but nowadays they're it's getting normal

Starting point is 00:21:40 because like tokyo there's a lot of tourists you know even osaka so if you turn on and they love foreigners right so like that's the good thing is it's not in a bad way like you know you do get a lot of attention but not in a bad way um they like mixed kids or mixed people in general like so a lot of like if you're going there for dating like a lot of girls they want mixed kids you know so like you're a lot more attractive yeah in their eyes if you turn on the tvs in japan like half of the the people that you see on any show is like mixed person you know like mixed black mixed white whatever right so like i mean it's a good attention it's definitely you're gonna get a lot of attention growing up mixed i don't see people talking about this often but it was an interesting experience because you get to experience both cultures.

Starting point is 00:22:30 And for me, it was so different, like because my mom's from China and my dad's from like a farm. So I got to experience both. But it's also tough. Like you were saying earlier, you got to figure out where you fit in almost. Yeah. So I played that game for a while. Big part of my life. Was this the same with you? Like, you know, you go to China, like you don't necessarily look Asian. Right. So like people think you're a foreigner, but then you're in the U.S. you know when you go to china like you don't necessarily look asian right

Starting point is 00:22:45 so like people think you're a foreigner but then you're in the u.s and people think you're asian all the time yeah i before the facial hair yeah everyone thought i was just 100 asian oh because most asians don't have facial hair yeah but yeah all the time man but then in school it was tough because like did you chill with the asians or did you chill with the white people i was chilling with the basketball players okay so i would say a mix yeah yeah i didn't want to chill just with the asians because like well with other japanese uh just because like we didn't have much in common besides just being you know both and and also like if you i have so many friends like japanese friend who only hung out with other japanese friends that they never learned english wow right because like even though they live in the u.s they're just constantly speaking japanese so like i picked up english so much faster just

Starting point is 00:23:33 hanging out with americans or like other people who speak english yeah it's one of the most probably the most useful language in the world in my opinion for sure i think english spanish and chinese yeah those are probably the top three i'd say absolutely when you did that yeah same when you did that two-year asia tour which countries stood out to you in terms of oh i might be able to live here yeah so i started with bali uh just because it was like you know the digital nomad hot spot i had some friends over there so bali was nice especially like during time you know it's so quiet so peaceful it's absolutely amazing and then the border opened around april and then like

Starting point is 00:24:11 people started flooding in and obviously i'm part of you know the population there right so like i can't say like oh you know i don't want anybody coming in the fact is just it just got super crowded uh and then it was really hard to work too because like although bali has a really good work setting or southeast asia in general like it's amazing the fact that you can outsource pretty much anything like people do the laundry for you you know and then you can they got their own version of uh uber and uber eats right so you can just order food it's often cheaper or it's like the same price even if you cook it at home so like you might as well just order it right it's like a couple bucks per meal that's it yeah it's like it's crazy i mean bali if you go to the touristy area maybe it's a little more like five to ten bucks but it's still like way way

Starting point is 00:24:52 cheaper right and so and it's good food too it's healthy you know so you just order meals every day and then like even cleaning is included in the villas that you stay in uh wi-fi is good you know so literally you can just sit down and work and do nothing else because everything else is out which is amazing um but yeah so bali just got too crowded after a while like you know they kicked me out of the first place because i was on a month-to-month uh lease yeah right so then i moved to the new rental and then i couldn't work because literally right next door they had construction happening and every single day from eight to five they're just drilling you know and i'm trying to film a youtube video and just like constantly drilling right suddenly sitting there and then when the drilling pauses

Starting point is 00:25:43 i'm like all right guys like let's go i talked for like five seconds and then the drilling continues it was super frustrating wow uh and that's just because uh like you know bali's so popular that it's constantly building everywhere so i moved out of bali went to thailand checked out chiang mai i went to bangkok phuket kosamui and koh pang phangan you know a bunch of different places and then i also went to malaysia i did kuala lumpur penang and then did uh vietnam so i did the name nice and i would say my favorite is chiang mai thailand okay just super super peaceful uh the thing is you know like bali phuket thailand those kind of areas like by the beach it attracts kind of the party crowd a lot of people go there for tourism, but also to live too.

Starting point is 00:26:27 And, you know, I don't really party. I really just am looking for a peaceful place that I can just, you know, set up as a base and just work. And I love the convenience of Southeast Asia because everything is so close. And once again, like you can order everything. So that's what I'm looking for. And Chiang Mai was kind of like that. It's like a city, but it's not like was kind of like that you know it's like a city but it's not like bangkok where it's hectic it's crazy it's super peaceful super uh chill and then you

Starting point is 00:26:51 got a lot of nature which which i like and uh yeah once again it's like you know there's so many cafes restaurants you can even walk and everything is like legit 10 minutes away from from like everything you need is 10 minutes away i I love that. Yeah. So it just was amazing. Yeah. Being able to walk, that's a life goal of mine. Just being able to step outside, don't need a car.

Starting point is 00:27:10 Yeah. I want to live locally. You know what I mean? Eat locally. Who knows where the food's coming from these days? I mean, that's a whole nother topic, but you are qualified to answer this next question.

Starting point is 00:27:20 So as a big foodie, which country in Asia had the best food? That's a good question. I mean, I would say Thailand has amazing food. You know, it's like a lot of food is, the flavor is crazy in Thailand, but some people may not like it. Like I was talking to Zach the other day, but you know, he said like, it's not really the flavor of the ingredient, but they cover it up so much, right?

Starting point is 00:27:42 A lot of sauces and spices and this and that. So if you're cool with that maybe that's fine but if you kind of want more uh we if you want to experience the the flavor of the ingredient then it'll be more like japan and how they cook right it's more simple that's what i heard yeah with their sushi with their sushi it's more simple there's no spicy mayo very simple yeah yeah the whole like california roll dragon roll like we don't have i love dragon rolls man yeah i love it too i love it too but it's it's not a japanese i feel that so you mentioned you don't party was that a lifelong thing not drinking not partying or did that come across later in life yeah no never happened i mean i'm naturally an introvert i don't know if the introversion started uh because of my upward upbringing of you know just like being super shy

Starting point is 00:28:27 growing up because of like you know just standing out uh when i was small or if it's just my personality but i never was interested in partying uh in general and then i i don't drink i don't do drugs i don't smoke it's just like i live a healthy life and i don't need much to be happy you know i like you you know I just enjoy working and being productive. I think that gives me the highest dopamine hit. It's just like knowing that I've got a lot done at the end of the day. Right. And then I just want to keep doing that.

Starting point is 00:28:57 Yeah. Well, you've achieved location freedom, which is, you know, hard to do for a lot of people. You can work for wherever you want, wherever in the world. And I think what I've noticed, at least with my friends that have achieved that, they're super happy. Yeah, for sure. I think the key is not to make as much money as possible,

Starting point is 00:29:14 but to make enough so that you can do whatever you want. And then also having a business that allows you time freedom and location freedom, right? So truly, if you're working, that's because you want to work, not because you have to you know yeah that option agree that's the best feeling and you know i i hope to see more people get there because right now it's definitely the opposite yeah right now i mean a lot of people go back into business and they say it's the game you know i love the game and if that's truly the case i understand but i feel like a lot of people

Starting point is 00:29:43 have they're doing it for the ego too like you know oh i want to make more than this guy this guy like yeah yeah so like i think that's the wrong reason i'm doing it uh for most people i feel like because there's studies out there right like uh you know there's a book called your money or your life and it shows that apparently in the studies that they've done it's like after you make more than 100k a year you're not necessarily happier right so i think the key is to have like for most people i think the goal should be to make like 100k euro whatever you know that covers your living expenses in a semi-passive way so you're just working a couple hours a day or however much you want to work uh and you just enjoy life that's a way more peaceful way of living.

Starting point is 00:30:26 Yeah, there's a certain point, whether it's 100K, 250, it's different for everyone where the money starts to lose that value almost because what else are you going to buy? You know what I mean? Right, right. Like you got the car, you got the house,

Starting point is 00:30:38 kids are taken care of. Yep. You know, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, and if you stop chasing those things that you see on social media, like, you know, luxury cars, houses, watches, those kind of things, you realize you don't need much to live a good life, you know, like especially in Southeast Asia, it's so cheap, right? So obviously like I can live, I can pay more now and I can afford more living in the US.

Starting point is 00:31:01 But for me, I just, i just love southeast asia especially chiang mai like i've met so many seven eight figures uh entrepreneurs in chiang mai even though like they can live anywhere they want uh they're not there because of the cost of living the cost of living is really low but it's really because of the quality of life that you get there that they choose to stay there wow so yeah So I kind of agree with that. Like, I love China. I didn't know that. So the housing's affordable.

Starting point is 00:31:28 Yeah. It's super cheap, super affordable. You know, it has all the benefits of living in Southeast Asia and living in Thailand. But just, you know, it's not just that, right? You're not sacrificing the quality of life because you never want to do that, right? Right. You never want to live somewhere just because it's cheap, but you't like living there puerto rico yeah everyone does that i don't know why people don't like puerto rico i've never been there yeah i assume it's kind of similar to hawaii

Starting point is 00:31:53 or that's what i thought so but yeah you just hear that constantly like people go to puerto rico and they don't necessarily like it but it's more so for tax benefits but uh yeah in chiang mai i don't see that like people are actually successful living there but they just they just enjoy it yeah yeah the puerto rico thing i mean there's ways to save on taxes living in the u.s where you don't even need to move there honestly if you knew about it so that to me never made sense to sacrifice happiness for that for sure yeah how does that work uh we'll talk off camera okay but uh dude it's been fun anything you want to close off with or promote before we wrap up uh no i mean you know if people want to learn about amazon kdp or learn about my journey of like just traveling around and sometimes i do like reports on youtube like

Starting point is 00:32:35 you know what i learned from living in this country like which country i like the most in southeast asia or like wherever i go so if you want to follow me on that just look me up on youtube sean dolewit is my name or Instagram would be SeanDolwit13. But besides that, I mean, it's been nice talking to you. It's been fun. And yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:53 Yeah, it's been fun, man. Diving into your world. Thanks for coming on. And thanks for watching, guys. As always, we will see you tomorrow.

Digital Social Hour - Self-Publishing Secrets That Changed My Life! I Sean Dollwet DSH #490

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