I always thought New York was a dirty city with bad weather that smelled like piss and was full of rude people. Some of those things are true, but what nobody told me about NYC was that people out here hustle harder than anywhere else in the world.
Instead of saying that (because they're idiots who don't know how to properly use language), what they say is something like: "The city has a certain energy about it. You can feel it in the air."
Not like that's not true, but it doesn't really explain the frenzied obsession for upward mobility that consumes anyone here who doesn't work in a boutique clothing store or Starbucks.
Maybe I'm a little biased. The only people I know in NYC are Jews, and New York Jews are a different breed than what I'm used to. Not like I didn't meet thousands of them in Israel, but something happens when you put them all in NYC. It's like.. I don't know. Hard to explain the vibe really.
I mean, Jewish people are generally polite, likely a result of having a guilt-ridden consciousness about perceived slights and over-analyzed social interactions.
That's one thing that I always liked about Jewish events - despite the wealth, there's very little pretentiousness. People are open to talking to each other. You see someone, introduce yourself, shake hands like adults and then proceed to have polite conversation that usually morphs into a philosophical discussion about insignificant details of everyday events. Like an episode of Seinfeld.
Honestly, I haven't quite figured out the Jewish scene yet. I'm tempted to say that it's very superficial, even by New York standards. In this city it's all about the clothes you're wearing, your job, and your apartment. Compared to LA where it's all about your physical appearance (body) and what kind of car you drive.
Writing that, I just realized that the Jewish scene in NYC has one more quality that people judge each other by: how Jewish you are.
It seems obvious now that I think about it. Maybe that's why I still feel kind of uncomfortable at these things. Yeah ok, I'm Jewish. But only because my mom is and that's just how Jewish law works. Your mom's Jewish? Boom. So are you.
But I don't practice anything, don't pray, don't date only Jewish girls, don't restrict myself to kosher food... nothing really.
Sure, I lived in Israel for a few years and was even in the army. But that doesn't make me a New York Jew. That makes me an Israeli. And despite how it may seem from the outside, those are two very different animals. Israelis just have a kind of "embedded" Judaism in them. Hebrew (EDIT: and Arabic) is the national language and their cultural values are structured from Jewish values.
There's a lot of variety within the Israeli world as well, but I don't want to get into that right now. The point is that I feel more Israeli than Jewish.
I was in the army, I did my time. I paid my dues to the Jewish people. So if I want to show up to Shabbat dinner in basketball shorts and a Punisher t-shirt I bought from Walmart? Isn't that my right?
If you've ever been to an Israeli wedding, you'd understand.
But we're not in Israel anymore, Toto. This is Manhattan baby, and if you're not wearing $300 dark jeans with shoes that make you look like a try-hard lawyer then wyd?
I fucking hate it, honestly. I hate that shit. I'm from LA man, I don't want to dress to impress. I want to work out to impress and let my body do the talking. But people don't seem to care about that here. They're more interested in the packaging than what's actually inside the box.
Ironic that I'm complaining about sizzle vs steak.
But that's all it is - complaining. Honestly I feel like I won the fucking birth lottery by being born Jewish. Shit, they paid ME to become an Israeli citizen. Even bought me a plane ticket.
Being Jewish here is great if for no other reason than all of the free meals and parties that go on in New York. There's literally something to do every single night if you want. And my good friend is basically famous in the community, so not only does he know about virtually every event, but without exaggeration he knows at least 10 people every where we go. You'd expect nothing less from a guy who actually used to throw parties in NYC and Tel Aviv for years.
Another interesting benefit of coming to New York is the infusion of borderline desperation that you feel towards making money. With so much to do and such a high price ceiling, you feel like if you're not making at least $100k a year then you're a bum. Contrast that with Thailand where you can live like a king on $3k a month.
It's definitely an adjustment, but since my work is remote anyway, I see this place a crucible where I'm more motivated to hustle than SE Asia. I'd still like to go back there for other reasons, but for now NYC is where it's at.
The crypto scene here is the real deal, too. One of my biggest partners lives here, and when he heard that I was in NYC he invited me for lunch.
It was strange meeting him after only working together online, but I got over that quickly. This guy is easily one of the most famous people in the ICO space and has his fingers in all kinds of deals. To gain physical proximity to someone like this was a lottery ticket I was happy to cash in.
Our brief lunch turned into a 4 hour brainstorming session. I'd watch the gears turn in his head as I pitched him some crypto-related idea. Then he'd interrupt me and say, "I'll introduce you to [nsert big baller here]. He owns a magazine/crypto exchange/investment fund/whatever in [some foreign country]."
In fact, one of the biggest deals I'm working on right now is with none other than 
A friend of mine who used to work on Wall Street told me once about an associate of his who would send out a daily newsletter to fellow traders early in the morning. It would have all kinds of news, market analysis, and price predictions for the day. $10 a day to get the newsletter. $300/month.
I figured since these guys were essentially doing the same thing, albeit with crypto, there's room for them to create a crypto day trading newsletter too.
And I really didn't do much except come up with the idea and explain it to a few people. EZ.
The funny thing is that if I had never started posting on this godforsaken website, I never would have had this opportunity. Any of them, really.
Who knows if I would have gained the type of traction that I did if I hadn't written those crypto articles on here. Without those, I never would have met this guy in NYC. And I wouldn't have met the people on the other side of the deal either.
As much shit as I talk about this place, it's opened a ton of doors to me that I never would have had access to otherwise. And I'm not even talking about money. Shit, I've probably lost money on everything I've spent on bidbots.
But it was never about the money, you know? Not because I'm rich. But because I had such low requirements for living that I was able to "grind hard" in Thailand for six months while to everyone else it looked like I was on vacation.
That's partially the reason why I'm publishing something today. I don't really have anything important to say. Not that I ever did, but I used to enjoy yelling at people on here and calling them idiots. I still do, but sadly my ego has been sated. I'm just not hungry anymore.
And while it feels good to let out a humblebrag and say, "Oh, I don't need Steemit anymore. I'm big time now," I know that kind of thinking is a mistake.
This shit platform is what got me where I am today. Sure, I still had to do the work and write those masterpieces, but without the option to exchange some fake money for an instant audience, I never would have been inspired to keep going.
Say what you want about me or the way I write, but the fact is that my articles have attracted people to me who find that my writing resonates with them. They find me on Discord, we chat about shit, and sometimes big deals come out of it.
Look at 
But for some reason, he came to my Discord channel and started talking about god knows what. The guy was straight up John Nash-levels of genius to the point where I'm not sure he even realized that I had no idea what he was talking about.
That said, I knew that working with someone who was that smart would be a good idea. So now we have a Discord group full of developers who are interested in building a blockchain-based platform that aggregates content from Steem, EOS, and another social media platform one of my clients is building.
Never would have happened if I hadn't sat down and written some long ass rant every week for however long I did it for.
I don't want to get lazy, you know? But I feel like that's what's happening. I'm going to wake up one day in the future and all the shit I built will have decomposed, and I'll be like, "Fuck, remember when I used to write on Steemit? I gotta get back into that."
It's like being out of shape for so long and then finally getting your fat ass back to the gym. You know you need to do it, you don't want to do it, and you're capable of putting it off for years despite the fact that you think about doing it every single day.
Shit, this article isn't even any good. But I still need to write it. I still need to flush out all the gunk from my brain pipes so I can get to the real shit, that good old fashioned 
It's not like I don't write anymore at all. I've been pretty consistent with the Instagram. But I almost feel like that's a waste of time. Writing anything intelligent on Instagram is like putting on a Shakespearean play for a bunch of stray dogs. They just won't get it.
Actually, it's kind of like writing on here, now that I think about it. Most of the sub-continent dwellers begging for pennies probably won't even read this, at least judging by 75% of comments that my posts normally get.
Many of you know that I started out planning on doing social media management. Once I got into crypto, things kind of just took off from there. And while I'm still fairly active in the crypto space, since coming to New York I've been focusing more and more on social media management for traditional businesses.
Crypto is great - don't get me wrong. But the deals are precluded by long conversations and take a while to happen. Plus I can't pay my expensive ass rent in tokens. I need real US dollars.
Besides, NYC is FULL of businesses, most of which probably don't have any sort of social media management happening. And with the pressure of making money so tangible here in New York, I knew I needed to make a change if I wanted to stay here without feeling guilty about spending all my money.
For the past year or so, I've been managing around 70 Instagram accounts. Most of them are mine - mostly niche pages - while a few are for clients. I use special invite-only software that some random ass person hooked me up with after buying an IG page from him.
Even if I focused on nothing else, I don't think I'd be able to do everything needed to manage all of these accounts without automation software. You have to follow hundreds of people, like hundreds of pieces of content, comment on shit... it's impossible. Not to mention boring.
But this software man... truly a lifesaver. Pretty much everything is automated. You just have to configure the settings and let it run. Check it every few days to make sure it still works and you're good to go.
The point is that I knew I could handle more accounts. But how to get the clients? Cold emailing worked fine with ICOs because I could just copy and paste from sites like ICOAlert. Tedious? Yes. Effective? Also yes.
Maybe I'd gotten lazy since coming back to America. You know, the type of laziness you feel when you get some experience under your belt and start to sneer at the hard work you put in to get your scars.
Copy and paste for an hour to send 80 emails? Fuck that.
By pure luck, I managed to find a piece of software that scrapes search engines for contact pages of websites based on certain keywords and locations. It also has a posting tool that allows you to post to all of the contact pages way faster than a human would be able to. I can hit 10-20k pages a day, easy.
Most of the people are going to tell me to fuck off and I'm cool with that. If sales was easy, everyone would do it.
But statistically speaking, when you contact such a massive amount of people, you're going to get some who are interested. Why do you think spam is still a thing?
And it's no different when you're selling an actual service, like I am. Basically what I do is introduce myself, show them a few pages I manage with a lot of followers, explain how I'll be growing their page and then give them a ridiculous offer. In the past week I've already signed up five people.
Sure, I'm only charging a few hundred for the privilege of working with me, but what do I care? The whole process is basically automated at this point anyway from the first contact to the running of the account. All I have to do is close the deals and configure the scraper + IG management tool.
That's what we call being efficient.
And no, I won't tell you what tools I use. But you can find some cool ones on this site.
Even though I have a habit of counting my little chickies before they hatch, I can't help but get excited about how easy this shit is. It's strange that we spend so much time agonizing about "starting a business" or "writing a book" or some equally impossible-sounding goal, but then once we actually start on it, we realize that it's actually 100x easier than we ever could have expected.
My personal sticking point has been making videos. I've been wanting to do this forever, and despite a brief 30 day vlogging experiment and a few "exercise" videos, I haven't been doing shit about it. But not a day has gone by in the past few months where I haven't thought, "should today be the day that I start the channel?"
The funny thing is that I know once I start it, everything will be fine. I just can't get my bitch ass to start it. I need proper incentive, you know?
Actually that's not true. I have incentive. "Building your brand," remember? That's the hustle these days. I used to think that was all just an excuse for attention-starved people to listen to themselves speak.
Perfect for me, in other words.
But now I'm beginning to think that there's more to it than that. You need to build your brand so you don't have to go back to having a real job. You need to build it so that companies will pay you thousands of dollars to speak at their university. You need to build it so Gucci will pay you $10,000 to take a selfie decked out in their gear.
Something like that.
And NYC is the easiest place to do it too. I thought Thailand was a feature-rich environment, but it doesn't hold a candle to the amount of shit you can do in New York. I can literally just walk down the street with a camera and film myself eating pizza and it'll be interesting. Not healthy, but interesting.
The biggest problem isn't even making the videos - it's getting anyone to watch them once you've made them. But I even have a solution for that.
Remember that scraper I was telling you about? I can add a link to one of my videos in that introductory email. I already link my personal IG, LinkedIn, and FB pages. Shit, I even link to an old ass Steemit article that I wrote about managing IG accounts.
Not only does it help to reassure people that I'm some Ukranian teenager trying to steal their identity from his babushka's basement, but it also gets me lots of clicks on my social media accounts. I've been averaging 50+ adds on LinkedIn since I started sending posts every day.
I used to think that LinkedIn was THE original circlejerk, way worse than Steemit. Be that as it may, people respect LinkedIn. You're less likely to run a scam on someone when your entire professional history is in the same place.
Just imagine if I had a link to a YouTube video with my beautiful face and sexy voice doing something in New York. "Hey I want to manage your IG page. Oh and by the way here's a link to my YouTube channel so you can see I'm a real person."
Who knows if people would actually click that shit. The curious ones would, and that's all that matters. Once YouTube sees that you're actively trying to promote your own shit, they help you out too. And the more watch time your videos have, the faster you can get to Partner status and start earning some shekels.
Perhaps even more important, however, is that video is the one medium that I still haven't worked up the balls to approach. I've been pussyfooting around it for years, too scared to take the plunge.
You think it's easy being so expressive through text? Words are perfect - they look the same every day no matter what page they appear on. It's just up to you to put them in a certain order.
But human beings? Fuck man, I don't want ANYONE to see me when I get in one of my moods. Let alone the few people out there who actually like what I write.
Deep down I know that I have nothing to worry about. Those people already know me and likely don't give a shit. They won't judge me. Did you know I still keep all my social media separate from one another? I just can't bring myself to let people know about the weird shit that I write. And once those floodgates open, there's no turning back.
Once my mom finds my blog, it'll get a lot less interesting.
goodness?