Does this scare you as much as it scares me?

As you grow older, you start to protect different things in your life.

As a kid, what you protect most often are those toys from other kids in your class.

When you're a young adult, you start to realize that you need to protect your time in order to get things done and progress in life.

Then, as you get a little bit older— which is the stage I'm at right now— you realize that the most important thing to protect is your energy.

This is probably because at 32 years old, I'm actually starting to notice that I don't quite have as much energy as I used to in my early twenties.

Recently, I've become much more in tune with my energy levels, and I've started to notice what detracts from how I'm feeling in this way.

One of the biggest detractors of my energy is people that exude negativity.

One example of this was when I was in Portugal on my honeymoon.

You see, one of the best things that I learned during this time away was that you can go on very cost-effective and enriching city tours by searching up free walking tours wherever you are in Europe.

So, for the cost of about 20 to 30 Euros, you could go on a two- or three-hour tour and learn all about the city that you're visiting.

This is exactly what my wife and I did when we were in Lisbon a few weeks ago. Little did I know that upon going on one of these walking tours, I would face an energy-depleting experience due to the negativity that I just talked about.

One of the benefits of going on these free walking tours is that they're done by locals who have grown up and continue to live in the cities that you're visiting.

This means that they're not only going to tell you the good things about the city, but the bad things as well.

On this particular walking tour that my wife and I took, our tour guide started to explain the rising costs of housing in Lisbon.

He said that in a particular area of the city, housing roughly 8 years ago cost $800 per month, and since that time, it has now increased to roughly $2,000 per month.

That’s $2,000 for a tiny apartment with no air conditioning, which sometimes does not even have its own area for a washer and dryer.

While his negativity around the economic situation in Lisbon did create a bit of a buzzkill situation, what it did as well was really open my eyes to how much costs can change in such a short amount of time.

To me, it was scary to think that people like you and me can one day be living comfortably—able to cover our bills with ease—and in a short period of time, be struggling to get by.

And the scary part is not so much that costs will increase, but that our incomes will not increase at a rate that will keep up with our bills continuing to get higher as time goes on.

For example, you probably haven't seen your income experience a 2.5x increase in the last 8 years, while people living in Lisbon have seen their costs of living go up by the same amount.

Now, don’t worry; you're probably not one of the rare people whose incomes aren’t growing exponentially every 5 to 10 years.

Most people are stuck in the rut of seeing their incomes go up two or three percent per year, which, as you can imagine, is going to do little to keep up with where things are going in the economy.

This is why yesterday I told you that working harder is not always the solution. Working smarter is the key to getting ahead.

Because if you simply try to keep up with these rising costs by picking up a second job, you end up losing somewhere along the way.

Whether that's losing time with your friends and family or losing out on your ability to maintain your health if you no longer have the time to work out and prepare healthy foods for yourself and your family.

That’s why each and every day, I send you an email about building a channel on YouTube. I send you these emails because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve earned through YouTube that have shown me the power of working smarter rather than just simply trying to work harder.

For example, working smart allowed my student Eric to earn six figures last year from a small YouTube channel while doing it part-time alongside a very demanding nine-to-five job.

There’s no way that the average person could earn over $100,000 a year part-time, only working a few hours per week. But with the power of YouTube, this is entirely possible.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am opening up 3 new spots inside Tube Academy.

If you want to join Eric and many other students making money on YouTube, reply back “Tube” and I’ll send you the details.

Until tomorrow,

Adam