1 Year of Live Your Aim

Welcome back, Amers, to a special anniversary edition of the Live Your Aim podcast. I'm your co-host, Dylan, and man, have we got some things to talk about today. I know it's hard to believe, but this episode is coming out on the actual anniversary of the first Live Your Aim episode. January 23 of 2025 was when we went live with this podcast, And we actually dropped 10 episodes to start to make sure that no one got bored. And then we were able to release episodes throughout all of 2025. And this should be our first one of 2026. And man, it has been something that we did not expect it to turn into. First things first, and that's the cold, hard numbers. So Montel and I, if you've been listening, we've been celebrating different milestones that we've hit along the way. And I am just overjoyed, surprised, shocked, flabbergasted. I'm running out of ways to describe it. But as we're sitting here on the anniversary, we have reached over 306,000 all-time downloads. 306,000 downloads, which is just, it's a mind-boggling number. To put it into perspective, I googled a list of cities in the United States that have about 306,000 people. And we've got Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Paul, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Durham, North Carolina. It's just, it's like one of those cities. Every single person downloaded an episode of this show. Unbelievable. To that, all we can truly say is thank you. Thank you for deciding that we are worth listening to. Thank you for saying that you're going to share part of your daily commute with us. And thank you for saying you want to learn more about how to live your aim. we've had a collection of truly interesting incredible fascinating just unbelievable human beings that we have been able to talk to and hear about their stories of how they have been living their aim we heard from people like john bradley who started a mortgage business and continues to be the most popular episode of this show we heard from people like duane lefty phelps jr a barber who had to learn how to cut hair with his left hand after a motorcycle accident We heard from Ben Leatherberry who was a missionary in the Middle East and is now back in the States planning churches We heard from Jeff Fagan who was the right-hand man to T. Harv Eckert and told us how to take control of our mind and take control of our lives. We heard from John Evanson, the millionaire mailman. We heard from Matthew Jarvis and Libby Grywe, two of the biggest voices in the financial advisor industry. We heard from Austin Zabak, someone who has been an entrepreneur since he was nine years old. We heard from Preston Walla, a Chick-fil-A owner-operator who took seven years to qualify for his restaurant. And we heard from Chris Ball, an international entrepreneur whose company is in several continents. This show has really started to become a who's who of guests, of people who have done really interesting things, but have all had the common thread of aiming high and going after something that matters to them. And that's part of what living your aim is all about. It's not just about achieving things that other people think are important. It's about achieving the things that you think are important. I'm reminded of a verse from the book of Matthew in the Bible. It's Matthew 16, 26, where it says, what profit is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? Which is a concept that a number of our guests have talked about that they recognized there were some things that maybe they could achieve, but what they would have to give up was just not worth it, which is a conversation that I think a lot of people need to be having right now. We are in this time where value, where things of significance are really just overlooked. And for a lot of people, it makes sense why these things are overlooked because they've never actually sat down to think about what is important to them. This idea of core values, of mission statements, of things that are really popular and in vogue in the corporate world are substantially more important in our own personal lives. If you don't know what you're going to stand for, what are you going to do when the going gets tough, when you have to make a hard decision? If you don't know the things that are most critical to you, how are you supposed to be intentional about your life. As a lot of you listeners know, Montel and I co-own a financial planning firm. And this is one of the things that I think is most important in the way that we work with clients is we make every client sit down and articulate their core values And we help them craft a statement of financial purpose Because here's the thing, it doesn't matter how good their investment strategy is, doesn't matter how good their debt elimination plan is, or how good their tax strategy is. None of those things matter if we can't answer the simple question, what is this money for? If we can't get that part right, everything else doesn't matter. So like I said, 23 days into the new year, or at least when this episode drops, and statistically by now, just about everyone has given up on their New Year's resolutions. and you know why that is it's because we have these big lofty goals but we have nothing behind them they have no foundation there's no roots taking hold it's just for a lot of people something that they say they're going to do because they think it's expected of them or they just want to have an easier version of their life without necessarily putting in the hard work. And I'm not dogging on people who want to improve on their lives or change things that they don't like about their lives. Far from it, actually. That would go against the entire point of the show. But this idea of New Year's resolutions and giving up, I mean, think of it this way. 23 days into January, there's still 11 months left the vast majority of the year. That would be like in football, you're five minutes into the first quarter and you decide, you know what, this game, this isn't going to go our way. We might as well just pack it in. How ridiculous is that? I want to give you permission, whatever it is that you have set aside for yourself to do this year, or maybe to stop doing this year, it's okay if you've had setbacks. In fact, anytime you're trying to change your life, setbacks are bound to happen. And not just happen once or twice, but 15, 17, 30 times. And it's just a question of how serious are you about any of the changes that you're going to make. So for the person listening to this, who maybe had some lofty New Year's resolutions, who maybe had an idea of what their perfect 2026 was going to look like, and then January rolled around and punched you in the face, it's okay. But you got to know why you want these things. You have to know what your aim is. But now let turn our attention into the future and in where this show is going We are going to continue to bring you stories of people who are living their aim and giving you tools and tricks and other things. I don't know exactly what those things are, but other things centered around aimful living, intentional living, going after something that is worthwhile and valuable. Now, at the same time, we are going to take a small pivot and introduce what we are calling the Modern Founder Series. So what is this? This is going to be specific conversations related to the person that we are identifying as, you guessed it, the Modern Founder. This is a term that we actually thought of ourselves, but who is the Modern Founder? I'm going to break it down for you. The modern founder is a values-focused, remote-driven entrepreneur who grosses between $250,000 and $1 million per year. How did we come up with this? Well, we are modern founders, and we decided we really resonate, and we like to share stories of people who we can relate to. I mean, that's just the truth of everyone, right? But think about this. How many people out there truly can say that they are values-focused. That's a pretty small number, at least in my estimation from doing this show. As we have seen from past guests, you don't need to be an entrepreneur to have a meaningful life, to have big targets that you can go after, but there is an extremely high correlation between being an entrepreneur and being someone who is living an aimful life. And then from the revenue perspective, I said between $250,000 and $1 million. We decided on that because these are people that we have a good chance of being able to approach directly. We decided that part of this show is going to be focused on those modern founders' experiences and conversations. If you're listening to this and you said, you know what? That's me. I'm a modern founder. We want to hear from you. We want to have you on the show, and we want to share the story of how exactly you're being that values-focused person, how exactly you are going after something and orienting the rest of your life to support your aim. So whether you've been listening since launch one year ago, or you just heard about us last week, stay tuned because I think the best is truly yet to come. And until next time.