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They laid her off 8 weeks before having the baby. She cried.

Nobody expected it. Least of all me, her husband. Having a kid is supposed to be joyous — not when you've just lost your job for no reason.

I’m not supposed to say the quiet part out loud… but I will. They fired her for being pregnant. This isn’t a sob story though.

When my wife got fired, she reflected on her career. She got a master’s in engineering at the start of her career. She needed a lot of approvals. Then she became a graduate at a big company. She then spent 8 years climbing the corporate ladder.

They promised her a senior product manager role. They kept her on the sidelines for years, waiting for her turn to step up. She had to do everything the bosses said. She had to go above and beyond. She had to kiss old man white guy ass.

She hated it.

After she got fired, she saw that the corporate emperor she once worshipped had no clothes and was wearing a g-string that didn’t cover their private parts.

She saw her deep need for approval lit up by a floodlight. Now she has become a rebel. She doesn’t give two f*cks about the corporate ladder anymore.

She’s decided to stop needing approval and just do things.

The sublime madness of quitting while you’re ahead

Agnes Martin wowed the New York art world in 1967.

Old dudes in top hats got intellectually aroused by her grid paintings. Elitist critics and gatekeepers crowned her Queen Bee of fine art. Every major museum wanted to display her work.

They begged her.

She was at the absolute peak. Everything she’d ever dreamt of and more. But she did something wild that still seems crazy today.

She quietly walked away from it all without telling anyone.

When no one was watching she gave away all her art supplies. She destroyed every painting she’d ever made. And she embraced her inner redneck and bought a pickup truck. What made her do these crazy things?

She didn’t want her future defined by what people already liked.

She then drove out into the New Mexico desert, built an isolated home, and didn’t paint again for years. Rebellions are often defined as noisy and public. We rarely talk about the quiet rebellions though, like the type Agnes pioneered.

What Agnes did is the most radical act of defiance you may ever come across. Hers was completely silent on purpose, which sent the loudest possible message. Her message was clear, even if she never said it out loud: “F*ck off, I don't need your approval.”

This happens when the people who admire or praise you no longer feel like your people. So rather than try to explain yourself, you just disappear in silence as a form of quiet rebellion.

The seductive addiction of
people-pleasing

You seek approval to please people. It feels good.

It starts in school. You want to please the teachers so they’ll give you good grades, give you lollipops, or let you go to lunch early. Makes sense.

But this childlike behavior follows most people into adulthood which makes sense because the average person commutes to an office daycare every day to be micromanaged by some dumbass boss.

There’s no real thinking required to be a people-pleaser.

You just do as you’re told. You do what you’ve always done. The default software in your head just runs as it’s supposed to.

But the longer you seek out approval the less you feel like yourself. It’s hard to put the feeling into words. To me, it felt like going to work as an improv actor in a costume and coming home to get changed into boxer shorts and be myself again until the next morning.

What makes it so seductive is everyone else is doing it and pretending to like it.

When you hear success stories in your career, you assume they came from following the rules and pleasing others. You become fixated on those stories because they reinforce the narrative that you’re doing the right thing.

All is well… until something blows up your worldview.

My worldview exploded when I got paired with a bunch of whacky clients in my banking job – each one more bizarre than the next. First guy I met was a bankrupt who started a fintech. He tried to hire me. Next guy ran a gym software business and secretly donated most of the money back to the homeless in Egypt.

The last guy was Brian Johnson, the “don’t die” guy. I worked with his team early on and saw randomness all around. These dudes had a psychopathic sense of urgency and an unreasonable expectation about, well, everything.

I could never really please Brian’s team. Soon as I did something good, it became the new norm. They pushed me to level up every day to the point where I didn’t recognize my former self.

The whole “don’t die” movement makes sense to me now after that experience.

What each of these people had in common was they succeeded because they ignored the rules and pretended they didn’t exist. Their defiance was a core part of why people followed them and they became wealthy.

They worshipped competence, independent thinking, and merit.

The dark side of needing approval

In my career, I’ve seen some dark stuff.

Drug dealers getting away with murder, rich people profiting off insider trading, charities doing evil disguised as good, and hospitality venues used for illegal s*x and the sale of drugs.

The people who give out the approvals don’t do so in a fair manner. The criteria is flaky and it can easily be used for personal gain. The people who get approved and who don’t can entirely be based on bias, s*xual favors, or flat out bribery. It’s a slippery slope. That’s why I’ve never vibed with it.

If certain people have the power to grant approval, it means they can abuse it too.

I witnessed this firsthand when a bunch of fake do gooders took over my neighborhood and told me “we can do whatever we want” when they were questioned. One of them had a medal issued by the government.

The more big egos are given the right to hand approval to others, the more they will get high off their own self-worth and abuse it.

Dr. Nicole LePera says “People pleasing is safety seeking.” Yet people-pleasing is the most dangerous thing you can do because the gatekeepers which grant approval to you can take it away too.

You don’t want to be part of that world. Join the rebellion.

Learn to say this without feeling bad

The way out of needing approval starts with one word: no.

It’s a word we all know. It’s a word we hear a lot but don’t speak often enough. No. No, thank you. No is the start of the rebellion. It’s a small act of defiance. You don’t stop seeking approval in a single moment.

Instead, it’s a small migration from one worldview to another. The bridge that gets you there is no. Each no gets you further away from needing approval.

When you don't clearly communicate your decision, it looks like cowardice. You’re choosing silence which doesn’t clearly communicate your desire for refusing to seek approval.

Saying no out loud makes you stronger. It voices who you are and who you’re not.

It’s an opportunity to grow.

The post-2000 revolution destroyed the need for approval

When the internet took off around 2000, it removed the need to ask for approval.

Suddenly, you could make your own website and express yourself. Then you could message anyone you want from anywhere in the world. Then, government secrets escaped to the dark web. Then, social media allowed everyone to voice their opinion. Now we have AI that can help you build a billion-dollar business without banks, lawyers, or accountants.

Every layer of the approval hierarchy has been dismantled.

Now you can live anywhere. You can give up your passport and move offshore when your local government tries to screw you with new laws or taxes. You can buy magic internet money that stays entirely in your custody.

I call this brave new world the permissionless economy.

The trouble is a lot of people haven’t woken up to it. They’re still living as if they need to seek approval at every crossroad. They're blind to opportunities that exist without credentials or daddy’s special friends in high places.

What used to take 4 years to learn at college and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can be learned in months, weeks, or even days. Or not learned at all because it’s irrelevant.

This opportunity grows stronger each day. It’s created a level of freedom I can’t even comprehend or explain.

The true source of self-worth

By default, you seek approval through praise to increase your self-worth.

But I’ve learned you can increase your self-worth by giving yourself approval to be crazy, out there, unhinged, and unapologetic.

The self-worth you create internally through your own actions is way more powerful than the kind others rent to you through their approval.

When you’re in full control it feels so much better.

When your effort and hard work determine the outcome and not a flogger in a suit with a Harvard MBA, life starts to feel different. The greatest self-worth I have comes from publishing 7000+ long-form essays over 12 years without any writing credentials, editors, or publication owners.

True self-worth is permissionless.

It’s not all sunshine, champagne, roses, and orga$ms though

With every positive comes a negative.

Not needing approval is great, but it will make you the villain in someone else’s narrative. That someone will be living in the old world. They’ll see you living all permissionlessly with your quiet rebellion and decide to take aim at you.

Why? Because how you live sh*ts in the face of everything they’ve ever known. And that’ll make them mad. Real mad. Just look over at yours truly. I dared to say in an essay that having two daughters changed my life.

It resulted in 100s of proclaimed feminists coming after me and saying, “It’s because he’s a man. He knows nothing about raising kids.”

That’s right, a picture of me with my two daughters pisses them off for some unknown reason. So, while I’m here, let me share a picture once more for those haters in case they’re reading.

The irony is that I’m actually pro-women and anti-manosphere. I’ve loved seeing female leaders flood the corporate world. Having two daughters has only made me appreciate the gender rebalancing even more.

Being a villain in someone else’s narrative is a good thing. It reminds you that you stand for something. If you’re not at least pissing off a few people, you’re likely still living a people-pleasing life.

Being the villain to someone else is how you know you’ve transcended.

The quiet rebellion has started

You don’t need approval from anyone.

Give yourself permission to be whoever you want. Realize that over your lifetime you’ll be multiple different people. The person you were a year ago will be laughable to the person you are in two years. That’s the way it should be.

You defeat the need to gain approval from others when you make life a competition between you versus you. The only person you need to impress is yourself. If you do that then outside opinions will have little relevance to you anymore.

Even if you do everything right, 1/3 of the people you meet will think you’re an a**hole, another third won’t even take notice of you, and the final third will think you’re the greatest thing to be invented since electricity and won’t even be able to articulate why.

That’s life. Bloody amazing if you ask me.

You don’t need approval. You need to show yourself what you’re capable of through your own actions.

P.S. 2026 is the year I’m opening up my entire LinkedIn playbook for you.

The LinkedIn algorithm is NO LONGER what it was.

Which means:

You can’t just roll up and write the phrase “mental health” or “hiring practices suck” and go viral.

But in many ways, it’s been a change for the better.

Want leads?
Want clients?
Want subscribers?
Want business revenue?

You can get it on LinkedIn.

Click here to reserve your seat for How to Win on LinkedIn in 2026.

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Information overload is the new pandemic.

We’ve become information junkies. The internet has overloaded us with information. Then social media 10X’d it. And now AI slop has 100X’d it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m drowning.

If I get one more email from someone who wants me to read their god damn 20-hour book, my head is going to explode. Books from unknown authors are dead. Why?

No one can afford to risk 20 hours of their time on a book written by an unknown person. So they will read books, but only if they already trust the author.

This is what information overload has done to humanity. It’s sad.

The false god is that gathering more information will solve our biggest problems. That’s clearly a lie. We have more information than ever and simultaneously more problems than ever. The simple life has been replaced with the complex life for most people. Every channel to someone’s brain is noisy.

Brain rot is everywhere too.

So the goal for you must NOT be to endlessly collect information.

The hidden problem of information gathering

You’re addicted to collecting information and probably don’t know why.

Writer Sahil Bloom simplified the problem for me:

Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It’s the dopamine from reading, planning, or learning, but never doing.

I wasn’t lying when I said we’re information junkies.

Just like junkies are addicted to heroin, we’re all addicted to gathering information because it gives us the drug of dopamine. Dopamine runs our brain's entire reward system. That’s why you’re addicted. It’s biological.

You can only defeat the addiction with an understanding of what’s going on, and a ruthless level of discipline to stop consuming so much info.

When you collect information, you feel like you’re making progress.

The information you collect gets added to a plan, strategy or set of actions you intend to take in the future. The problem is plans always get f*cked up by life.

Everything sounds like a good plan until you get punched in the face, sued by a stranger, or fired from a job you spent 10 years working at.

The entropy of the universe guarantees your fantasies of plans and future actions will never come true. Yet most people can’t see the information-gathering mirage. They genuinely trust themselves and the world that chaos won’t find them.

But chaos finds everyone. Even me.

That’s when people say, “Sorry, I didn’t take action because I got sick or my mother died.” The response is innocent. But quietly underneath their reply is the belief that “Now you’re surprised what just happened to me and will let me off the hook for not doing what I told you I was going to do.”

That translates to “I’m special.”

But whatever unique form of chaos you experience isn’t special at all. There’s a list of about ten problems that will find their way into your life – and they happen to all of us.

Collecting information and expecting to implement it later on is a fantasy that’ll destroy your life the same way cheating on your partner with a hooker will.

The danger of gurus

Gurus are everywhere.

Open any content platform and you’ll drown in opinions. All of them seem like they’re only trying to help. The challenge is everyone’s strategy to solve a problem is different.

If you listen to too many gurus, you end up confused.

I shouldn’t admit this but it was a big problem for me. Between 2014 and 2019 I made little progress on my goals. And my business went nowhere.

I just kept listening to too many people. One guru told me to build a Wordpress blog. Another one told me to write on Medium dot com. And another one told me to focus on writing a book.

None of this helped me. I only felt more and more confused. So I did nothing. Perhaps you can relate.

The best type of information most people are unaware of (caution)

My entire life changed when I stopped consuming more information.

In my corporate job, I learned “agile methodology.” I won’t bore you with that sh*t, but the main takeaway was to run experiments using minimum viable information.

I started publishing essays on different platforms. I wrote short-form content on LinkedIn. I launched a few test products. Instead of consuming information, I became a creator of information. I used the information I created from my experiments to learn what did and didn’t work for me.

In the case of Medium, I rose to the top 1% of the platform. I figured out things about writing essays that no one else knew. I had essays get tens of millions of views. And I made $70K a month.

Turns out I had enough information to start. And I could learn more from iteration than conflicting gurus.

There is one difference though. Instead of paying for more information like before, I started paying for personalised help contextual to my situation. This combination has become deadly. It’s enabled me to get 1B+ views on my content.

This part is controversial as hell

Up until this point it’s all cookie-cutter and kumbaya. You’re probably thinking, “That Tim guy is a standout guy.”

Hold your horses, cowboy.

I must let you down. I’m not here to blow your whistle or tell you what you want to hear. I’m hear to see you change. That means I gotta share the hard part.

Learning from experience and experiments is good. It’s level one stuff. But there’s level two. It’s where the learning goes from a 5/100 to 999/1000. Ready?

Real learning comes from taking risks, embarrassment, facing uncertainty, and dealing with failure.

The problem with information gatherers is they’re stuck in a comfort bubble. They think they’re learning. They’re taking a few small actions, but their progress is nonexistent. So they consume more information.

That’s not the answer.

As an anti-guru, I’ve learned real learning only comes from circumstances involving negative emotions. I learned nothing in business until I lost everything. I learned nothing about investing until my digital wallet got hacked for $1.2M – in the years preceding, I made more than $6M from that loss.

I didn’t learn about love until I went through multiple painful breakups and my wife-to-be exited the car in the middle of the highway and never returned.

I didn’t learn about the music industry until I worked as a DJ in a strip club and got played by nightclub owners.

I didn’t learn about banking risk until my client was caught at the ATM with $100K in cash attempting to launder drug money. And none of us learned about the power of governments until we were locked in our homes in 2020 because of a bat virus.

Here’s what you don’t want to hear:

True learning happens when something bad happens. Avoiding bad outcomes or not taking risks is the real barrier to wisdom.

I love to see people fail or get rejected because that’s how I know they’re learning.

Most information you consume presents the ideal circumstances. But when you act on information, you experience the opposite. Nothing is ideal. Everything is f*cked. Your balls are on fire every day.

One negative emotion is all it takes

I spoke to a lady from Japan the other day.

She told me how she didn’t want to get help with her business because she bought a blogging course in 2018 for $500 and it didn’t work out great. So she's been stuck for 8 years — paralyzed by a single bad experience.

This is how most people live.

They expect everything to work out. And when one tiny failure happens or they experience a teaspoon of negative emotions, they stop everything and usually never get back on the horse and ride again.

Real learning is a series of negative emotions that you must be willing to experience.

This is what it all boils down to for you

The solution Sahil Bloom suggests is this:

Stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have. Get your dopamine from action.

When your dopamine comes from the right place, your brain’s reward system is working for you, not against you.

You probably have enough information to take action already. Use a minimum viable level of information to take some actions. Learn from those and add personalized help along the way so you’re not trapped in a bubble of your own awesomeness.

Taking action decreases confusion because you see what works for yourself. And without evidence something works, you won’t invest the time to repeatedly do it. Because you can see me do it, but you’ll still think, “Yeah, but will it work for me?”

You gotta act to find out. And your own experience is always going to be the most trustworthy in a world of shonky gurus and bad AI answers.

Oh, and go out there and sh*t in your pants so you can experience the thrill of embarrassment and your whole day not going as planned.

Be honest — what's the one thing you already know you should be doing, but have been "researching" for way too long? Drop it in the comments. No judgment. Just accountability.

PS

Get this.

My YouTube channel has driven $1M in revenue.

The channel is tiny

But the profit is huge.

Will reveal more of the “how” soon.

For now, take a peek at my latest YouTube video.

(See if you can guess how I’m doing it)

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I’ve never shared this. I was offered a job working directly for Tony Robbins.

I spent weeks thinking it over. Then I said no. Yes, I’d be on the road hanging out with my biggest hero alongside people like Jay Shetty and Gary Vaynerchuk – but the hard truth I knew deep down is I’d be living in his shadow.

Instead of using my skills to become a leader in my own right and make money on the internet, I’d become one of Tony’s many minions and never have a family. That’s right, I’d be on the road all year, flying from country to country.

It would have been glamorous as hell, but good luck finding a wife or having kids with a career like that.

I now see that life as a nightmare.

Making money on the internet gives you a better life. This is nothing new. You’ve heard it thousands of times already. So the question is, if everyone is so smart and already knows this, why can’t they make money on the internet?

The ego trap that screws people

Making money on the internet has different rules from the real world.

And it’s not even close to being like the traditional path of get a degree, get a good job, get into huge debt for a house, climb the corporate ladder, brag about “years of experience,” and retire at 65.

Years of experience mean jack sh*t on the internet.

I paid to get consulting from a 17 year old girl who made $50K a month with a business coaching offer. She'd never had a job. She wasn't certified in anything. Her entire business was built on a Google Doc, a simple email sequence, and showing up consistently on one platform.

Her clients — doctors, consultants, people with 20 years of experience — paid her $5,000 to learn what she figured out in a bedroom after doing homework while listening to BTS K-pop songs.

Her clients were in their 30s and 40s. That’s how much the internet doesn’t give a f*ck about age or experience.

I’ve observed big egos a lot with people I’ve met who want to make money on the internet. They’ll often flaunt their many degrees or say things like “I’m good friends with Richard Branson,” when if you dig deeper, you realize it was a dinner with him 4 years ago and Sir Richard has completely forgotten it by now.

If you challenge their “Branson friendship,” they’ll say, “Well, he said my idea was brilliant and I had potential.” Okay.

He says that to everyone because he’s a gentleman. Nice words aren’t proof of work or results. They’re just words. If Sir Richard really believed in you, he would have stayed in touch or invested his money in you.

But he didn’t. He’s kite surfing in his underwear not giving two sh*ts about you.

Your ego tells you that you’re brilliant. But the internet tells you the truth. And the internet is now the real world.

If you attempt to build anything online, you’ll be humbled real fast. It’s hard to get attention. People are skeptical and don’t trust anyone easily. Experience doesn’t mean you can solve a person’s problem. And how many degrees you have doesn’t fix the “I don’t trust you” and “I’m not sure you can help me.”

Smart, experienced people don’t make money online because their ego blocks them.

The hardest idea you’ll ever ponder

This is one of the best ideas I’ve ever come across and it’s from Naval Ravikant: “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

To succeed, you must change your definition of success.

Most intelligent people don’t get what they want out of life. They’re NOT living the good life. They’re stuck in their head, angry at the world, chasing goals so they can desperately tell the world they’re a somebody while quietly being a nobody.

For me, I don’t care about wealth or any of that nonsense. I consider myself successful because I’m getting exactly what I want from life.

No boring job. I wear Nike clothes 24/7. I don’t follow anyone else’s rules. I have fun online. I write whatever I want. I get to decide who I work with. And I’m surrounded by the top 1% in my field who I look up to.

Life could not get better if I tried. I don’t say that to brag. I say it to smash your view of the world into a thousand pieces.

I’m not that smart. Average IQ. Zero degrees. High school dropout (went back later and barely passed). No rich family. No special privileges.

Success is less about how much money you make online, and more about what you do with the money you make to live your ideal lifestyle.

Smart people on paper are dumb people in lifestyle terms.

The hidden downsides of being smart

People with high IQ are great at seeing downsides.

They’re often skeptical about everything because they think they know better. So when you present a simple idea to them like “Oh, you just take your skills, package them into a high ticket offer, and sell it via an email list” they look at you like you went to a billionaire’s naughty island to make out with seals.

Pessimism sounds smart and optimism looks like a sales pitch.. so they ignore the obvious opportunities. “That make-money-online stuff is all a pyramid scheme.” Tell that to the doctors, lawyers and accountants I’ve worked with who have built 6 and 7-figure online businesses. Are their businesses scams too?

Smart people spend all their time doing calculations and assessing risks because their intelligence forces their ego to believe they can tell the future, like some sort of drunken fortune-teller living in a gypsy van with her grandma.

Being intelligent means you likely overthink, overplan, and overanalyze, which leads to painful procrastination that guarantees you never make a dollar on the internet.

On the surface, they’re in motion, “doing stuff,” but in the eyes of the internet, they’re nobodies who’re helping no one.

An idiot in motion will always go further than a genius at rest – Kpaxs

If you break down what smart people are doing, you'll find a silent plea for permission hidden inside all that planning.

They needed permission to get a degree, and permission to climb the ladder in their job. And, deep down, they’re waiting for that kind of permission online as well.

Except it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, I failed here too.

I stayed stuck in a banking career for 10 years because I waited for the world to give me permission to quit. I wanted my boss to say, “Timbo, you’re making $70,000 a month outside of your job already. You’re too good. Quit, man.”

He never gave me permission. He needed me to sell stuff for him so he could take the credit for it. That’s because incentives drive behavior. So I never got the permission I was looking for. Thank god, I ended up signing my own permission slip.

Writer Sahil Bloom once said, “Permission isn’t granted. It’s taken.” Spot on.

The missing trait smart people don’t understand

What’s missing is courage.

You can think you know everything, but if you don’t have the courage to act on what you know and build something online, then you never will.

It’s not one-time courage that is needed either. It’s daily courage.

Like when a huge Twitter influencer took a swipe at me for using an AI-generated photo of a guy working on his laptop on the beach. Dude lost his mind. He put my face on a coffee cup and sold it in his merch store. He called me a course boi even though I don’t sell courses. He made fun of my nose and my ears.

I thought I was the bigger man, but honestly, it brought back high school trauma of people calling me dumbo ears or making fun of my witch nose. You think you’re past that until your face appears on a coffee mug for $19.95 plus shipping.

Turns out I wasn’t past it.

It took courage when an essay I wrote on Substack went viral and a group of angry women accused me of being a terrible man because I said having a family was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.

“What would you know about having a family?! You’re a man. Women raise kids, not you!”

Yep, I saw some version of that comment 100s of times. It took courage to ignore it and not react. Or not feel stupid. Because without courage, you stop the moment things get tough or your perfect little plan goes up in flames.

The leaders you follow and admire had the courage to act.

Unconsciously, you probably don’t realize that’s why you follow them. It’s why people say they follow me. I had the courage to quit a successful banking career, knowing I could never go back because of the potty mouth stuff I said online.

That type of courage does more to help you make money than an over-bloated business plan ever will (that’ll get blown up by AI anyway).

“Complexity makes you seem smart. Simplicity makes you money.”

(Codie Sanchez)

Some of you are going to hate me for saying this. Making money on the internet is stupidly simple. It’s not easy though, but it is simple.

Smart people love to make it complicated because they think the barrier to entry must be high, just like it was when they applied to get into debt to buy a PhD. It’s not.

I’ve spent 100s of hours in masterminds surrounded by people doing more than $1M online with their business. Here's the pattern I can never unsee — and it's the same every time.

One social media platform. One funnel. One offer. Daily action.

The tech stack they use is almost non-existent. They use a few basic tools like Gmail and Zoom and that’s about it. Yet smart people want to use Claude bots, hire big teams, build their own customer app, etc.

They’re literally trying to boil the ocean when all they need to do is take a few simple steps that a 17 year old girl I met did after doing her high school assignments.

Internet businesses are actually dumb. But you have to be willing to be dumb enough to make a million dollars or more from one. Intelligence and complexity will only take you further away from your goal.

A reader of mine said, “The smarter you are… the easier it is to talk yourself out of doing the simple things that actually pay.” I think about that a lot.

The mindset that robbed me of millions of dollars

I’ve made millions of dollars on the internet. But I could have made millions more if I realized my one big flaw: I was afraid to be salesy.

I thought selling stuff was beneath me. I wanted to have companies sponsor my work and to speak on stages for $50K a pop.

It never happened. My mindset was off.

Everything changed when I figured out the people who make the most money online aren’t the best at sales or marketing. Nope. They’re the most useful.

Selling stuff is just helping people.

The more people you help, the more money you make. The help starts as free, then as they enter your world some percentage of people will pay to get your help.

So the question I ask myself daily is “How many people have I helped today?” If the answer is “none,” then I know it’s been a bad day financially without even logging into Stripe.

Smart people think the internet will pay them for their ideas, IP, or brilliance.

But they won’t.

That’s selfishness. People pay you when you help them. And if they actually know you give a sh*t about them, they’ll pay you a lot more and more frequently too.

The simple path that actually helps you make money on the internet

Some of you probably hate me now. Good.

I’m not here to please you. I’m here to tell you the truth, or else you won’t change and you’ll become one of those nasty haters on Youtube that nitpicks at everyone else’s videos except their own (because they have no videos).

All that’s left is to tell you what does work from what I’ve observed helping more than 6000 people start online businesses. I’m warning you… it’s uns*xy. It’s so simplistic it almost sounds like a cliche or a 10 ways to be badass blog post from 2011.

Here we go…

• The start is hard. Only brute force will allow you to cut through the noise. It won’t be easy. Momentum will take longer than you think.

• Relentlessness gets you through. Ruthless levels of posting. Follow up that is better than the FBI investigating a murder. Stupid, tedious, hard work and painfully boring execution. Work like a horse instead of a magnificent lion that struts around looking for its next meal while everything in the jungle trembles at the sight of it.

• Sell things tied to your existing skills. People don’t spend good money with unskilled amateurs. True professionals make the most money.

• Build systems above all else. Simple ones too. Use them to run your business. Document everything.

• Insist on daily KPIs for yourself. Otherwise, you won’t know what inputs created the outputs. And you’ll lie to yourself about what you actually did on the hard days when your ego is bruised from NOT making as much money as you thought.

• Be yourself at all costs. Don’t become some caricature of yourself, where you act like somebody you’re not. The internet is smart. They sniff that sh*t out and come at you with pitchforks.

• Don’t sell to people. Offer them help.

If you’re not making money on the internet, it’s entirely your fault.

That’s not an insult. It’s empowerment. Because if you created the problem that means you have the power to fix it. And that’s cool as hell, man.

Being smart won’t make you money online. Intelligence just leads to overthinking.

What you must do is to focus on daily execution, that 99% of people are unprepared to do because they don’t understand the enormous rewards they could access if they did.

What's stopping you?

P.S. (Almost) everyone who makes a lot of money online has an audience.

Haven’t built one yet?

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The 6-pack Lambo bros make fun of employees.

They say having a job is for losers and you should be an entrepreneur. Most of them have never had jobs – and it shows. They just live off daddy’s money in secret while wearing Calvin Klein boxer shorts and shooting TikToks by their rented pool.

Quitting your job as an ambitious person with no money coming in is su!cide.

It’s literally the worst advice I’ve ever seen. While you build your business, you still need money to live. And your business probably needs a little startup capital.

Just quitting your job and YOLOing your savings into a business that may not even work is low IQ.

Harsh truth: you can’t help anyone if you’re broke.

It’ll make you desperate, needy, and do dumb things.

You might even break the law or avoid paying taxes because some Instagram bro said to put your money in the Cayman Islands.

Quitting cold turkey and going all-in isn't what I did — and it isn't what most of the successful people I know did either.

We did the responsible thing and earned a salary while building a business on the side. It’s not as s*xy but it’s the best path for 99% of people.

A better goal for financial freedom

Instead of quitting your job, change jobs.

Get a job that is 100% work from home and pays well. Get a job where you can do the work and clock off at 4:59PM every day. Choose a boss that isn’t a pain in the ass and won’t micromanage you into an early grave. Choose low stress.

Choosing the easy path in your 9-5 career gives you the freedom, energy, and bandwidth to choose the harder path of entrepreneurship in your after-hours career.

What I did was set strong boundaries in my 9-5 career. I told the truth. I made my intentions clear. I didn’t work weekends. I didn’t show up for the 10PM calls with the offshore team. As I got validation of my business, I went from 5 days down to 4 days.

Then eventually I quit with a smile and zero drama.

I quit right because I wanted to keep the door open in case I wanted to go back.

This is a much better approach than taking some giant risk because some bro said having a job is for losers.

A job is level one. For most of us, it isn’t the end game. But a job does serve a purpose. Milk the job and suck on the corporate teat for as long as you need to. Use the milk money to fund your side business until it can fund itself. Then quietly slaughter the corporate cow and put the meat into a steak sandwich.

Don’t get stuck for decades though

Building a side business is alluring.

But some people move too slowly. A sense of urgency is crucial. You don’t want to stay in a 9-5 life you hate for too long, or it’ll rot your soul and suck the joy out of your life.

So, get around other people building similar things. Pay to get help to move faster. Focus on action, not consuming endless information. And back yourself, knowing millions of people have gone down this same path.

Ambitious people love to be self-sufficient and succeed in their own right. But you’ve gotta earn it. You’ve gotta validate your ambition because you might be entirely full of sh*t and be a total rookie. And the sooner you work that out, the better.

I made $70K a month and thought I was a hero. But I earned it from a platform and didn’t build a real business. So when the platform went woke and then broke, I had the $70K a month taken away from me and learned a hard lesson.

The first time you try, you may fail. That’s okay.

You can always get another job. What you can’t get back are all the times you wish you had taken a chance and didn’t. That leaves you with huge regrets about what you could have been.

Treat 9-5 jobs like an investor for your side business. Build after hours during 6AM to 9AM and 5PM to 10PM. See what you’re capable of. Validate your business idea. Then quietly vanish from corporate life without a trace.

That’s the strategy gurus never talk about because it’s uns*xy.

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I’m embarrassed to admit I waited in line at a nightclub for 9 hours.

And I never got in. When I was 18, there was a club everyone wanted to go to. I got there nice and early when they opened. It was a chilly night. I wore a massive puffer jacket. Honestly, it was cruel to make people wait outside in the Antarctic conditions.

But people like me were suckers.

We had to be seen at this nightclub to inflate our fragile egos. I went with two of my friends. At the start of the night, we thought it was a given we’d get in. The wait was long. After 2 hours, we got to the front of the line. We were pumped.

Then the doorman Jason said “Sorry, guys, without a guest list, there’s going to be a bit of a wait.” We didn’t mind. We would wait. Every hour after that, I’d check with Jason about the wait. He kept telling me “Not long now buddy.”

At 6AM the nightclub closed. We were still outside waiting to get in.

Jason said “Sorry, guys, maybe next time.” I crossed the road and just stood there. I saw Jason and the security guards laughing. I assumed they were laughing at us.

I was pissed. I felt betrayed.

The two friends I was with thought I overreacted. A few weeks later, we weren’t friends anymore. I never quite got over what Jason did to us. It was cruel. He had no intention of ever letting us into the club. It was a game.

The 9 hours we waited in line to get in taught me a lot. I saw one guy give a $50 note to the security guard and go from the back of the line straight in. I saw hot girls walk to the front of the line and be let straight in.

We were in the general admission line. On the other side was the guest list. Those people didn’t wait. And right at the front was a VIP entrance. They didn’t line up or talk to anyone at all. They went straight in.

The next day I realized this is how life works. There are three entrances to every opportunity and most people choose the general admission line.

The story doesn’t end there.

About a year later, I found out that my dad had met the nightclub’s owner. My dad introduced us. The owner said, “Timbo, if you ever want to come to my club for free, let me know.”

So I did. The next weekend I went with the owner to his nightclub. I saw Jason. His whole vibe changed. He looked surprised. It didn’t end there. I ended up working for the owner. That meant I could use the staff entrance.

I could walk into the club whenever I wanted and do whatever I wanted. Jason saw. He watched. Then it went even further. I became a DJ at that nightclub.

Jason now saw me walking in with bags of vinyl records and a small crew. He saw me get handed stacks of drink cards for free alcohol.

On my birthday the owner threw a party for me. All my friends and I drank for free. Jason saw that too. Then one night, someone handed Jason one of my demo CDs of a mix I’d done. He walked up to me later that night and said “Man, that mix you did is one of the best DJ sets I’ve ever heard.”

He was blown away.

I never forgot what happened at that nightclub. It taught me you can settle for the general admission line in life, or you can find a way to skip the line altogether.

Stay the hell away from the front door

The front door for any opportunity is where you ask for permission.

“Please, sir, can I come in tonight?” The crazy thing is most people choose the front door. They choose the traditional path. They get told what to do.

Right now what makes me emotional is seeing so many people being laid off, then applying for jobs on websites or LinkedIn. It’s sad because they use AI to write their resume, and then the employer uses AI to read their resume and screen them out.

Humans are removed from the process.

And so many job ads are fake. They’re posted for compliance reasons, to test the market, or to build a pipeline of people for a possible future opportunity.

If you apply for a job and ask for permission, you either get ghosted, put through endless interviews, or low-balled on the job offer because everyone is getting laid off.

The front door sucks.

Same with dating. If you go through the front door and end up on some dating app, you’ll be put in touch with predators, people looking for free or paid s*x, and blatantly rude people who treat you like a doormat they wipe their dog sh*t filled feet on.

Starting a business is another area where the front door sucks. You go it alone through trial and error. You ask the bank for a loan to buy a business. Or you buy a McDonald’s franchise where they dictate the rules and take a huge chunk of revenue.

Either way, you’re asking for permission and being treated badly.

If someone stands in between you and your freedom, it’s a trap. And that’s every front door in existence.

You’ve got to be bold as hell to skip the line

Skipping the line sounds simple. Like anyone can do it.

I disagree. To skip the line you have to reject everything you’ve ever been taught. You have to reject what 99% of society does. But most of all, skipping the line is deeply psychological.

When you decide to skip the line you’re becoming a rebel. You’re being bold, courageous, and dangerous. When Freddy McBasic finds out what you’re doing, you’ve got to be strong enough to ignore him when he tries to talk you out of it.

But most people don’t act boldly. In fact, they don’t act at all. They just sit there in fear for most of their life and fantasize about what they could do without doing anything.

That’s your opportunity.

The high-profile job that didn’t exist

Early in my finance career, I was stuck in a call center. I couldn’t break out.

One afternoon a manager asked our team if one of us could process the paperwork for a small startup. No one wanted extra unpaid work. I said yes.

I’d never heard of the company. They were called Braintree, founded by the “don’t die” guy Bryan Johnson.

I did their paperwork as fast as I could. And I emailed them every day to keep them up to date. I didn’t think much of it. But they thought I was a hero. They told everyone at the bank I worked at how much of an asset I was to the company.

Eventually, I got a secondment to work with this manager directly. He taught me everything he knew. At the end of the secondment, he promised me a job. But there wasn’t one. I waited a year. Then the manager came back to me with an open position. It was at least 3x more senior than my current role.

He told me I already had the gig but to pretend I didn’t. I did fake interviews and acted humble. Then I got the job.

It was a dream job. Everyone wanted it because it dealt with Silicon Valley tech companies. Guys with decades of experience applied. Guys with better tech backgrounds and who drove $400K cars applied. None of them got it.

Somehow, underqualified, overlooked, stupid old me got the job.

And the people who missed out were pissed.

They complained. But no one cared. Every day after that I had a target on my back. They did everything they could to make my career a living hell. It didn’t work.

I got a dream job I was stupidly underqualified for because I went through the back door. I did admin work with no reward to prove competence. I showed I was high agency. Around this time, Braintree sold to PayPal for ~$800M. I now had a giant client backing me. Speaking up for me. Telling my employer they must promote me. And big companies always listen to big customers.

The challenge with skipping the line is you must be delusional.

There’s no roadmap or guarantee. You must do what isn’t rational or scalable. You must do things with no clear reward. And you do those things because you understand the rules of the skipping-the-line game:

• Do hard work

• Act high agency

• Be humble as f*ck

• Build relationships instead of create transactions

People always told me I was talented or lucky, and that’s why I got the job. What they didn’t know was I learned how to skip lines because I waited 9 hours to get into a nightclub when I was 18.

The worst startup in history skipped the line and became a unicorn

In 2008, everyone laughed at Brian.

He’d pitched his startup to 20+ investors. They’d all said no. He was selling novelty Obama O’s cereal to pay his bills. If there was a line, Brian wasn’t at the back. No. He was banned from the line for being an incompetent fool.

Brian had the crazy idea of pitching his startup to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. John was seen as a mythical god of the tech world. People kissed his butt and licked his feet because of his early investments in Google and Amazon.

To get on his calendar, you had to be referred by a tier-one investor or founder and wait months. Even then, there was no guarantee. Brian had no chance. He was Kramer from Seinfeld dressed in a clown suit asking Buckingham Palace if he could stay with them for a year and share a toilet with the King.

Brian had a screw loose.

He didn’t bother with front doors. Wasn’t his style. He preferred a more backdoor approach. Giggity giggity.

Brian found out John Doerr was heading to a conference. He used the last of his savings to fly there. While everyone was networking and slamming business cards in each other’s faces, like desperate sheep looking for a root, Brian went on a stakeout.

He watched John’s every move.

After John spoke all the sheep descended on him. He was swamped with beggars, freebie-seekers, and “Can you sign my google t-shirt?” Poor guy. I’m sure he could cry tears into $100 bills from his multi-billion-dollar fortune, though.

After everyone tried the front door and failed, Brian descended into the dark and gloomy car park. He found the speaker’s VIP exit. He stood there like a creep. He watched. He waited. He smoked a cigarette.

Then John exited the building. He was all alone and headed for his ride home. Brian knew it was go time. He appeared out of the darkness. Instead of asking for permission by saying “Excuse me kind sir, can I pitch you my startup if you have a minute,” he just went straight to value.

He explained his startup’s core value in 30 seconds.

Brian said they were going to unlock the surplus capacity of millions of spare bedrooms around the world. He chose that instead of talking about challenging hotels or running a marketplace which sounded generic and obvious.

John was surprised by Brian. He didn’t expect the pitch in the car park. Brian’s appearance, financial position, KPIs, or pitch deck didn’t matter. What John saw was a high agency individual and he instantly got him a meeting for the following day.

Brian’s startup is now known as Airbnb.

Now, that was a nice story. Beautiful hero’s journey ending. Heck, you could turn that into an animated Disney movie and call it Cinderella. Glad you liked the show. Please leave your tips at the door. Now let’s go for drinks.

Wait… hang on a f*cking second. The story doesn’t end there.

Brian did have the meeting with John. But John was a prick and didn’t invest in Brian’s startup. He thought the idea was too weird and creepy.

The idea strangers were going to sleep in your spare bedroom tucked nicely into your bed with freshly washed sheets was wild. Creepy even. And god forbid those strangers did the dirty in your bed and left white stains on your Eight Sleep mattress. Yuck.

Too weird for John. So he passed.

But something odd happened. When all the other VCs and investors found out about Brian’s meeting with John, he went from being the homeless guy no one wanted to go near to an Instagram super model in a Victoria-Not-So-Secret g-string, baby. Jackpot.

The takeaway here is when you attempt to skip the line, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want the first time. But it does mean you’re now in the main game. People take you seriously. You can make things happen.

Brian eventually applied to well-known accelerator Y-Combinator. Silicon Valley royalty Paul Graham didn’t let them in right away. He, too, hated the idea of strangers sleeping in people’s beds. But when Brian told him how he sold $40 boxes of Obama O’s cereal to keep the company afloat, Paul nearly pissed his pants.

Brian stunk of high agency. And it’s so rare, Paul let him into Y-Combinator even though the idea was stupid. Because you never want to underestimate a high agency person who skips the line for a living.

High-agency moves don’t eliminate failure—they just eliminate the wasted time spent waiting in line to find out.

Alright, here’s how the heck to do this in reality without all the hype and Lambos

There are some general principles I’ve learned being a serial skipper of the line (mostly because I hate kissing ass and sucking off gatekeepers).

First, assume if you’re resourceful enough, you can always find a way to skip the line. If you don’t believe this and you’re not completely delusional, skipping the line won’t work, and you may end up in the homeless shelter line by accident.

You and I are not the first to skip the line. We won’t be the last. History is full of the greats who secretly skipped the line. If only we knew. You know the tech bro Tim Ferriss? He has that best-selling book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” The hero story is that it was a great book and he went from nobody to somebody.

Not quite.

Tim’s advisor the whole way through the book process was Jack Canfield. If you don’t know Jack, well, he wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul – one of the best-selling books in history. So with Jack by his side, it was unlikely Tim wasn’t going to smash it.

But that part of the story is left out. It ruins the mythical nature of it.

The point here is Tim found a way to skip the line. He somehow got one of the greatest authors in history to back his book project when he was a nobody.

We don’t know how, but we at least know it wasn’t privilege or a rich family because Tim had neither. So somehow Tim Ferriss was resourceful enough and got to skip the line. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

In other areas of his life, Tim is famous for being resourceful. In his first job, he famously figured out a way to reach CEOs after hours while everyone was calling them during business hours.

The second way to skip the line is to share your ideas online.

People don’t buy products or services. They buy ideas and the people behind those ideas. Social media is one of the best ways to make that happen. I recommend you write every day on one big social media platform. Share stories. Share ideas. Don’t freaking paywall anything. Focus on being helpful.

The third way to skip the line is with non-needy networking. This is where you make it a habit to proactively connect with people without asking them for anything or saying “Can I pick your brain?” like an absolute moron.

You do it by leaving thoughtful comments on people’s social media posts for a while. Then after a few months you reach out via the DMs and start a conversation. Because they’ve likely seen your comments by now, they’ll reply.

Now you have a new connection. Someone you can build a relationship with. Do this enough times and you end up with a powerful network. That network can help you meet hard-to-meet people, and see opportunities others don’t.

When someone is looking for a co-founder, they don’t put up a job ad. No. They go to their network. That’s how I found my co-founder. He was referred to me.

The best opportunities with the highest leverage, most status, and biggest paydays aren’t public. Read that again. So if you’re waiting around for opportunities or hoping one will find you, you’re wasting your time. Skip the line and start doing non-needy networking tonight.

The last way to skip the line is the hardest of them all – it can’t be faked. It’s to have proof of work. It’s to rack up hundreds of hours actually taking action, reaching goals, and gaining experience in a field. Along the way there will be stories that happen.

This is powerful for skipping the line because when you can show you’ve done things, and you can share interesting stories about it, people pay attention. They see you’re real. You’re secretly given the label of a practitioner. This is how you stay away from the front door and avoid asking for permission.

It’s what I did. I wrote every day online for 12 years so that my proof-of-work was undeniable. So that the outcome of my success would be inevitable. It’s simple to understand but hard to pull off.

Theorists say, “I think I can do it… give me a go.” Practitioners say, “I’ve done it before, and here’s what I did.” Nobody gives a f*ck about your potential. They only care what you’ve already done. That’s the fastest way to skip the line.

Go skip the line

You now know the principles.

Go try them for yourself. Watch opportunities flow in your direction. Be humble when they do. Show others how to skip the line too. The journey won’t be easy, but the failures and rejection will become the best kind of nostalgia later on.

The market right now is tough, no matter if you’re an entrepreneur or an employee. This is the cheat code. This isn’t hope, it’s a strategy you can implement.

Stop going through the front door. Use the back door, VIP entrance, or go really crazy and use the staff door. You’ll be amazed at what happens when you do.

P.S.

I went from 5k to 300k followers on Instagram in 6 months.

No cheating.

No pods.

No ads.

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To celebrate, I’ve launched a new workshop showing exactly how I did it: How to Win on Instagram.

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A limitless mindset that I can do anything changed my life.

This idea can bizarrely change your life too. To get to the essence of the idea, I need to take you beyond the cookie-cutter mindset info that is all over social media. A happy-go-lucky view of the world won’t make you successful and wealthy.

That’s clickbait.

I never used to have a limitless mindset. I was overweight, depressed, hated my 9-5 job, and didn’t want to live anymore.

One evening I discovered these “Power Talks” from Tony Robbins. They were recorded in the 90s, long before podcasts existed. Tony sat down with individuals most people hadn’t heard of. The whole point of each talk was to reinforce the idea you can literally do anything you want in life.

He interviewed regular people who became astronauts. And spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra. After the first talk I called bullsh*t on the idea, as you do. But I was bored and had to pass the time on the way to work because I parked an hour away from the office to save $5 in parking fees.

After about the 30th Power Talk, a switch flicked in my head.

It became obvious to me what Tony was trying to drill into my stubborn brain. I could literally do anything I put my mind to.

I didn’t get the inspiration then do nothing.

Nope.

I went to the staff directory of the 40,000-person bank where I worked. I looked up all the General Managers and Chief-level staff members.

I called them on their cell phones out of the blue. And I just assumed I would be working for them in the future. I even told them so. Then I asked for advice on how to skip the line and reach their position.

Some of them told me to f*ck off. No joke. But most helped because they admired the total bat sh*t craziness of my approach. I wasn’t just delusional. I risked my job to call them and talk the way I did.

One complaint would have ended my career.

I eventually got a gig working for one of these Chiefs much sooner than I thought. We’re still friends. And he still thinks I’m crazy.

The world wants to place limits on your imagination. It wants you to get on your knees and ask for permission, get more experience, wait your turn, be patient, get underpaid in the name of “that’s what you deserve,” and choose one path and stick to it until retirement.

The internet burned this worldview to the ground.

AI and social media finished the job.

You can now literally do anything you want in life with zero barriers. No one is watching. No one gives a f*ck if you fail. And there are infinite opportunities to replace the current ones you have access to.

Let me explain the power of the mindset that you can do anything you want in life.

The war hero with a naughty secret

Joseph Cyr is a son of a gun. You’re about to see why.

In 1951, he got on a ship and headed to the Korean War. He was the ship's sole medical officer, responsible for the health and lives of every man on board.

As the war raged, he completed dozens of complex surgeries and saved many people’s lives. Everything from reattaching limbs to cutting open chests to remove bullets. Not a single patient died.

Dude was a freaking hero.

There was only one problem: “Joseph Cyr” was actually Ferdinand Demara, a high school dropout with absolutely zero medical training. Ferdinand had stolen a real doctor’s credentials, forged some paperwork, and walked onto the ship with a smile.

When patients started piling up, he didn’t panic because he had zero medical training. No. At night he read books on how to perform surgeries. The next day he’d perform them. He felt successful because he saved lives.

When he returned home, he got busted for not being a real doctor. The public was outraged. “Why’d you do it, man?”

His answer was chillingly simple: he just didn’t see why he couldn’t.

Ferdinand couldn’t be stuffed waiting 4 years to get a medical degree. He just decided he was a surgeon, so he became one. Before you go and do the same, I must tell you that I don’t suggest you become a fake doctor. That’s not the point.

The point is people tell themselves stories about why they can’t do things when they can. The story you tell yourself becomes reality. You can change the story. You can rewrite it. Or, like Ferdinand, you can pretend the rules don’t exist.

The delusional 16 year old that defied a room full of PhDs

Boyan Slat decides at age 16 to clean up the ocean.

He gets in front of a room full of billionaires and PhDs and tells them he is going to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world. World governments had already declared the problem impossible.

The world’s brightest scientific minds unanimously agreed that cleaning the oceans was impossible. The area was too big, the currents too unpredictable, the cost too astronomical. It would take thousands of years and tens of billions of dollars.

So the fat cat scientists went back to work and kept reading National Geographic.

Boyan was a punk high school kid. He had a total disrespect for authority and experts. He decided to fix the problem himself. He dropped out of his aerospace engineering degree and founded The Ocean Cleanup.

The biggest problem to solve was the extreme current of the ocean. Instead of moving his cleanup machines through the ocean, he got the ocean’s current to move the rubbish into his cleanup machines.

10 years later, this punk kid is now an adult and his company has removed hundreds of thousands of pounds of rubbish from the ocean.

There is a solution. There is hope. Seals don’t need to swim in your beer packaging anymore and get drunk with frustration.

Boyan didn’t make enormous progress because he had a high IQ or a degree.

He did it because his brain wasn’t mature enough to understand what was impossible. He assumed the problem could be solved so he just got to work.

Most of society sees a problem and goes, “The government needs to solve this and change my adult diaper.” A small part of society sees a giant problem and says, “No one is going to solve this, so I must do it, instead of complaining like a toddler.”

The moment you stop seeing problems and start seeing opportunities, your entire life changes. You realize what Star Wars creator George Lucas said: “We are all living in cages with the door wide open.”

There’s a dumb fish called a Northern Pike.

If you put it in an aquarium and divide the space in two with a piece of glass, the Pike will try to get to the other side.

Each time it will bruise its nose when it hits the glass. After three days, the lazy Pike gives up on life and stops trying. It’s conditioned to stop trying after three days of failure. Conditioned by failure, it accepts the invisible wall as permanent reality.

If you remove the glass in the middle of the tank and chuck in lots of food on the previously blocked half of the aquarium, the Pike dies.

Inches from food it just ignores taking a bite. It won’t cross the now invisible barrier to save itself. The Pike’s mindset is fixed and nothing will change it. It’ll die because of its stubbornness and worshipping of the rules.

This story isn’t just about the Pike. It’s the story of mainstream society.

Most humans starve to death in an environment full of opportunities only inches from their grasp. Then they complain there’s no food when there’s a Costco warehouse full of food right in their backyard with the door wide open.

A limitless mindset is the solution to your biggest struggles

I know you’re not Ferdinand, and you’re not going to pretend to be a doctor. And you don’t need to.

But everyone suffers from limits we place on ourselves and don’t even realize. Unless you remind yourself every day that you can literally do anything in your life, you’ll forget. Hang this picture from Tim Urban on your wall as a reminder:

You may have followed one path to date, but that’s literally one of millions of paths you can take. And you get to choose your path in life. The most dangerous thing you can do is let other people choose your path.

Religion, parents, or the corporate ladder can make us put on blinders and limit our paths in life for no good reason.

A limitless mindset is different. It allows you to turn the impossible into possible. It gives you mental fluidity. It helps you see opportunities, not problems. It expands your mind to believe anything is possible and you get to decide.

It’s one of the greatest forms of modern freedom in existence. And most people do not take advantage of it.

Right now you either believe anything is possible for your life or you don’t.

There’s no in-between. Now don’t bullsh*t yourself. Be honest. Do you really believe anything is possible for your life? If not, that’s the opportunity of this essay. That’s the change you now get to make if you want to get what you want.

The challenge is not so much yourself, but everyone around you who wants to mold your mind for their benefit.

Slavery is the default in society and it starts with brainwashing people to close off huge parts of their mind and delete all of the limitless paths they could take.

Modern mindset theory lied to you

The woo-woo spiritual vibe guys go too far and tell you to believe you can do everything. So you end up doing too much and being overloaded and burned out.

One of my readers said this:

It’s about taking responsibility for building the conditions that make something possible. Mindset without a system is an illusion. Mindset with a system is power.

Theory sounds smart. It’s inspirational. But it doesn’t produce change or turn you into a millionaire. It’s just free dopamine that gives your brain an orga$m.

If you want to do anything you want, you must first work out what you want. Dan Koe calls this a quest. I call it a mission. Call it whatever the hell you want. But what do you want? If you don’t know, you must experiment or you’ll never know and die a bum.

Once you know what you want there has to be a system to get you from where you are to where you want to go. That’s a combination of cliche as hell daily habits and some sort of accountability like a KPI tracker.

No one wants to hear that because we’ve had James Clear’s Atomic Habits shoved up our asses for almost a decade. But it’s true.

Adopting the idea that deep-rooted belief manifests into reality has completely changed the way I move

(One of my readers)

What you believe shapes your reality.

If you have terrible beliefs, no amount of reading or advice will help you. What you believe determines whether you will act on what you learn.

Beliefs must shift before you can learn new things.

I used to believe I was a loser and would end up on welfare. I came within a month of that becoming a reality. Getting a $55K a year call center job saved me.

After learning Tony Robbins’ teachings, I began to change my beliefs. I believed I would find a way out of the corporate world and build a life I love. I didn’t know how, but I believed this idea with every bone in my body.

This belief opened up my mind and helped me see opportunities I couldn’t see before. For example, I used to go on Youtube and leave hate comments on people’s videos. I believed anyone with a Youtube channel was a grifter and trying to sell something.

When my beliefs changed, I suddenly became open to the idea of doing Youtube, using social media, putting up a website, and doing some blogging.

That opportunity eventually changed my life.

The simple path to get what you want in life

Whatever you’ve done to date is irrelevant.

You can go from being a lawyer to a Youtuber tomorrow if you want. You can quit a career in banking and go be a chef if you decide to.

You can light your current degree on fire and get another one. You can use self-education to get out of poverty if you’ve had enough of your current life.

The limitation is you.

If you can remove YOU from the equation, you can see a different reality. Your current thinking got you to the current place. New thinking is what is needed. And the idea you’ve been searching for your entire life is this:

Adopt the mindset that you can literally do anything you want in life and you will.

This idea made me a millionaire. Everyone I’ve shared it with, who has dared to embody it, has gone on to change the world in some tiny way.

Why not you?

“But this situation prevents me from…”

The limitless mindset tells us that humans are all the same.

People we love get sick. Some of us have kids which affects free time. All of us will struggle financially at some point. People will lose their jobs. We will get lied to at some point. You’re not special. Your situation isn’t unique.

I had a guy last week tell me life is hard because he’s a single father of two kids. Therefore, he can’t do anything until the kids are grown up. He acts as if he’s the only single father on Earth.

Meanwhile, a connection of mine lost his wife to cancer and raised two kids on his own with no help, while building a massive brand online that helps people overcome the grief of losing a partner.

Some people are victims. Some choose to be heroes.

I had another guy tell me he’s been stuck trying to start a business for 16 freaking years. Yet he still won’t change.

The harsh truth is nobody is coming to save you. You must save yourself. But the upshot of this reality, as Alexei on X said is, “No one is coming to stop you” either.

Every limitation you think you have is just a fake sob story and a bunch of excuses. If you’re living like that you need to wake up and stop being immature. You will either get what you want, or you will suffer and watch other people get what they want.

You get to decide. And your bullsh*t excuses determine which reality.

You will hate this part and may block me

When some people discover the secret they can literally do anything they want, they set up an Instagram account to brag about it. They take photos of the Ferrari and 6-pack to rub it in your face.

There’s not much you can do about it. It’s human nature that once you learn to defy the laws of nature and live in abundance, you may want to brag about it. A limitless mindset is incredible. But it can make you think you’re better than everyone.

I’m guilty of this.

I discovered in my 20s I could build a $50M a year eCommerce business without much skill and using other people’s money. I turned into a narcissistic a**hole and even asked employees to kiss my shoes. I asked a couple of them to suck my you know what, too. And I was serious. I wish I didn’t. But that version of me did it.

Every cheat code in life comes with downsides.

The solution here is to adopt this limitless mindset, but use it for good. Don’t let it blow up your ego. Instead, use the mindset to help others. That’s how you use it to create more abundance, and it oddly creates more for you too.

Here’s how to make a limitless mindset work for you

This part is simple. It’s uns*xy. But I’m not here to please you. Sorry.

1. Reverse-Engineer the “Experts”

The biggest illusion holding you back is the myth of the “Expert.” You look at CEOs, authors, and innovators and assume they possess a secret blueprint of the universe.

They don’t. Most of them are just making it up as they go, running on high confidence and iteration.

• The Action: Stop looking at people at the top as superior beings with superpowers. Look at them as prototypes. If a human being built a company, wrote a book, or sailed the world, it means the physics of reality allow for it.

• The Rule: If someone else has done it, it is mechanically possible for you to do it. Strip the romance away from success and look at it as a logical puzzle to be solved.

2. Operate with “Strategic Delusion”

If you only aim for goals that feel realistic based on your current resume, you will only ever achieve linear growth.

To do anything you want, you have to practice strategic delusion: setting a goal so absurdly high that your current brain doesn’t even know how to process it.

• The Action: Choose a goal that genuinely scares you, then actively ignore the voice that asks how you’re going to pull it off.

• The Rule: The how is none of your business at the start. Your only job in phase one is to lock onto the what. When Ferdinand Demara walked onto that ship, he didn’t know how to do surgery. He figured it out because the situation demanded it. Audacity forces capability.

3. Lower the Cost of Failure to Zero

The reason people don’t try to do “anything they want” is the fear of looking stupid.

They treat failure like a permanent tattoo when it’s actually just kids’ washable paint my daughter uses to draw monsters for my 5 month old baby.

• The Action: Build a lifestyle where a “no” doesn’t break you. Send the cold email. Pitch the crazy idea. Apply for the job you’re entirely unqualified for. Build the business that feels beyond your reach using your existing skills.

• The Rule: Treat life like a video game with infinite respawns. If you lose a level, you don’t die. You just hit restart with more data than you had before. The faster you collect rejections, the faster you stumble into the room where everything changes.

The brutal truth

I’m not that smart. I didn’t invent this limitless mindset.

Everyone who has succeeded throughout history has stumbled across this mindset. Unfortunately, the bastards didn’t share it and kept it for themselves to reduce competition and have an aura of superiority.

F*ck those sons of b*tches. It’s time to level the playing field with a bazooka.

Adopt the mindset starting today that you can literally do anything you want in life. Embody the idea. Tattoo it on your cheeks. Then when it brings you abundance, like it has for me, make sure to share it and not be greedy.

Those who believe they can do anything end up doing anything they want. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

What's one limit you've accepted as permanent that, reading this, you're now not so sure about?

P.S.

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The world is full of AI slop.

Most writing has become unreadable. It’s full of oversmart how-to fluff, contrasting, EM dashes, and information placed into threes.

Most writing just feels lifeless.

It’s become nothing more than a performance done by a machine. Sure, it looks like words on a page, but it has no soul. It’s saying something without saying anything much at all. On some days, it makes me depressed. I miss the days before ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022.

Now everyone is looking for the shortcut with writing, which makes sense because writing is hard. It’s not putting words on a page. No. Writing is thinking.

And most people don’t think. They’ve forgotten how to think.

TikTok and their phone have turned their brain into mashed potatoes. Not the good type of mash either. The watery type that your 3-year-old throws in the bin while having a tantrum.

Good writing is deeply human at its core. So the idea that a machine could replicate that is kind of stupid if you think about it long enough while smoking a joint.

The last thing you should want your writing to sound like is a machine.

I’m determined to bring back great writing. Here’s how to write well.

Rule 1: Show up butt-naked in all of your glory

The best writing is risky.

The writer shows up and takes a risk by sharing a story or point of view that could harm them. There’s a touch of vulnerability. They’re sharing an idea that is contrarian or goes against what society deems prim and proper.

When you publish writing like this you feel naked.

Hitting the publish button feels dangerous. You imagine you might get canceled. I did this last week. I live in Australia, and recently we all got butt-f*cked with a massive tax increase. I quote-posted the government’s polite spin on the massive tax increase and shared my unfiltered opinion about why they must be voted out.

This is risky because in Australia we have draconian social media laws. You can go to jail for criticizing the government. But I did it anyway. I'm willing to take the risk because the cause is greater than the individual.

This is what naked writing looks like. It’s powerful. That’s why people pay attention and it cuts through all the AI slop.

Rule 2: Don’t perform like a circus monkey doing tricks for bananas

Modern writing has become a performance.

People write to look smart or build an audience that inflates their ego. It’s deeply f*cking selfish. And boring.

The best writing feels like a friend wrote you some advice on the back of a napkin because they actually care about you. It’s selfless. It’s a conversation instead of a performance. It’s egoless.

The best example in history of this is The 4-Hour Workweek book written by Tim Ferriss. He struggled to write the book, so instead, he opened a blank draft in Gmail and wrote it as an email to his friend.

It removed all the overthinking and pretentiousness from the book. This one technique helped the book become a bestseller for more than a decade.

You can apply this to your writing. Write like the reader’s friend. Have a conversation with them. Remove all the formal words and jargon and just say “Gday, mate, here’s what I wanna tell you about.”

Rule 3: Be totally unhinged to the point where your grandmother turns in her grave

Modern writing is too safe.

The best writing is unhinged. It goes where most people won’t go. It says the thing we all think but are too scared to voice. Like, who said we all need to use pronouns in our bios and email signatures? Or, does International Women’s Day really empower women? Or is it just a “thoughts and prayers” kind of vibe?

I don’t have an opinion on either of these topics, but if I did, I would share it without giving two hoots what anyone thinks. Good writing feels a little naughty. It makes us dream a little. It encourages us to be leaders or to dare to inspire others.

The world needs less how-to content and more writing that pushes conversations deeper and further than before. You can’t do that if you’re wearing safety pants and bringing a box of condoms to every conversation. Sometimes you’ve gotta let your ideas impregnate people’s minds.

Rule 4: Bleed on the page until you pass out

Great writing has emotion.

Emotion moves us. It helps us abandon all logic and keep reading for reasons we can’t explain. Not everything you write has to have emotion, but some of it should.

AI can’t do emotions. It only understands how-to content. So if you want to avoid writing AI slop, then adding emotion is an easy workaround.

That doesn’t mean YOU must bleed on the page. You can share conversations or stories from other people and convey their emotion instead. But without any emotion, writing lacks the human element we all secretly crave.

Rule 5: Read a boatload of good f*cking human writing

This one isn’t obvious.

After 12 years of writing every day, whenever someone asks me how to get better, they assume my answer will be about writing. Wrong.

Writing better starts with reading better writing. Because reading great writing helps inspire you to do the same. It gives you ideas. It helps you see how to package your ideas so people will actually want to read them.

Reading a combination of old writing and modern writing is usually best.

Rule 6: Write where good writing exists

Writing well comes down to the environment.

It’s hard to write well when you’re in poor company. Writing is deeply social. You publish and people read. Other writers publish and you read. If you publish your writing in the wrong place, it messes up your mind.

It’s why I stopped writing on Medium dot com. Everyone on there was trying to write to the point of insanity to maybe earn $20 for an essay while the platform overlords mocked them like King Joffrey did to the peasants in Game of Thrones.

Being in a toxic environment like that kills your inspiration.

Your perception of the writing world comes from which corner of it you inhabit. It’s why I write on Substack. It’s where the best writers in the world are.

As my grandma used to say, roll around in the mud with pigs, and eventually you become nothing but a filthy pig waiting to become ham in someone’s sandwich.

Rule 7: The best writing breaks every Harvard University writing rule

To avoid sounding like AI slop you now must break all the rules.

AI wants to make your writing logical. It’ll tell you to flesh out the conclusion more. Or if you dare tell a story in two sentences, it’ll slap you in the face and tell you to make it longer and go into more detail.

But AI doesn’t understand writing.

Great writing isn’t logical. It doesn’t read like a neat little essay you wrote for Mrs Winterbottom in Grade 3 to try to get an A+. Great writing is messy. It has incomplete thoughts. The flow is often illogical. It’s not chronological. The contention isn’t always revealed right at the start.

Great writing is kind of like that TV show Lost. It’s all over the place. You never know where it’s going to take you. One minute you’re on a plane, then it crashes, and now you’re stuck on an island. And before you realize it, weird sh*t is happening and you’re seeing ghosts from 100 years ago.

If it’s logical and flows nicely, it’s probably bullsh*t.

Non-AI slop is also imperfect. Grammarly didn't jam in a whole bunch of extra punctuation. There are spelling mistakes. Some of the facts might be slightly off. You might start a thought and forget to finish it.

This is the writing era we’re moving into.

We’re so damn tired of perfect writing performances that inspire no one and read like a listicle from a Wordpress blog 10 years ago. The world is going mad. We’re going back in time to an era when technology didn’t filter the words and shape our thinking.

Raw, unfiltered writing is the future. And the good news is we’re all overqualified to do it. Even you.

Closing Thought

I’m going to end in an unexpected way with a cookie-cutter conclusion that’ll make AI wet its pants in excitement.

The secret to writing well in an era of AI slop is to violently refuse to go down this dark path and reject every hack and copywriting technique there is.

Lean into your human side as much as possible in your writing, or expect your words to be lost in a never-ending pile of AI dog sh*t. Ask yourself, “Does this essay show proof I’m human?” If it doesn’t, light a match and let your essay burn. Then write it again like a human freaking being.

It’s now either unhinged human writing or AI slop. The messy middle has been removed – and I love it. You should too.

What's the one opinion you have that you're still too scared to publish?

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This one makes me cry every time.

All my daughter wanted was $2 to buy a toy. My wife said she had to do chores to earn it. Each chore she did earned her $1.

Within a day she’d done two chores and earned her $2. She really wanted these toy eggs. The look on her face melted my heart. Her sweet little voice begging for the toy was impossible for me to ignore.

But what made me emotional was the thought of being cruel.

I cannot stand to be cruel to my two daughters in any way. It’s because my childhood was extremely cruel to me. I spent my younger years surrounded by criminals.

I saw people get punched, stabbed, and robbed every day. I hated every minute of it.

The thought of me being cruel to my daughters with things they want to buy is too much. It gets me every time. It goes deeper. I grew up with no money. I now never want to NOT be able to provide for my daughters.

I want them to have all the things I couldn’t afford (without spoiling them). I want them to experience Disney World that I didn’t get to go to until I was 32.

The other night my daughter was misbehaving. My wife told her if she didn’t eat her dinner it would be taken away and she would starve (normal parental discipline). But I couldn’t handle it. It felt cruel. I once again felt emotional.

Nobody tells you that having kids turns you into a giant p*ssy with a heart full of love.

That is lesson one. Here are 39 other life lessons from my 40 years.

2. “Trust me, bro” doesn’t work.
   
   You must have proof of work. Proof of competence. Proof of skill. Social proof. If there’s nothing to evaluate, the risk of betting on you is too high.
   

3. Burnout isn’t real.
   
   You only experience burnout when you live a life you shouldn’t be living and do nothing about it. Stress is good for you.
   
   If you run from it and call it burnout, you’re missing the point. Eliminate the bullsh*t work, not the stress. Time off doesn’t fix it. Changing your life does.
   

4. The only way to be a loser is to be afraid of losing.
   
   Pessimism is low IQ. You won’t know anything unless you try. And the way you learn is by losing. So not losing equals zero learning. You gotta love losing if you want to win.
   

5. Your life isn’t unique.
   
   Everyone else is facing death, sickness, money problems, job loss, and uncertainty too. Once you understand your life is the same as millions of other people’s you can stop letting excuses hold you back. Yes, life is hard. But what are you going to do about it? Delay? Complain? Wait? Just f*cking get going.
   

6. Understand everyone’s secret incentive.
   
   It’ll help you make better decisions. And it’ll stop you from getting scammed. A person’s bias is your opportunity. See it. Verbalize it. Then make an informed decision.
   

7. Most problems make sense when you apply basic logic.
   
   Instead of looking for complex solutions, break down the problem and analyze it. What seems logical? That becomes your starting point.
   

8. Understand human psychology to become wealthy.
   
   And to get people to take the actions you want to take. People do things out of selfishness, not compassion or virtue.
   

9. Everyone needs someone to mind f*ck them.
   
   Tony Robbins did it for me. For others, it’s Dan Koe. Find your person and let them challenge your view of the world. Let them stress test it.
   

10. If your focus is to always save money or cap downside, you’ll never be wealthy.
    Good news is it’s easy to change.
    

11. No one who said “in 3 months will be the right time” achieves their dreams.
    
    Avoid these people like the plague. A dream is a daily habit that starts today. If you can’t even work on it for 10 mins a day today, you’re not serious.
    

12. Many opportunities are lottery tickets in disguise.
    
    Sell SaaS. Write a best-selling book. Sell $50 digital products. Run a $5/month Substack. People are tricked easily into these paths because they look easy. But they’re actually dumb. People win lottery tickets. Doesn’t mean you should try to too.
    

13. All the psychological labels give people permission to be mediocre.
    
    “It’s not me. It’s because I’m introverted.” Don’t outsource your potential and identity to a made-up human label. Your brain can literally rewire itself to believe anything and to heal from anything.
    

14. The most life-changing rabbit hole I went down is neuroplasticity.
    
    Nerd out on it. Understand it. Experiment with it. Your entire life can change because of neuroplasticity. It’s the antidote to boredom, procrastination, laziness, and feeling stuck.
    

15. Selling is just helping. Learn how to help people and you’ll make a lot of sales without having to try and sell.
    

16. When people call you cringy, they really just mean “I wish I could do that.”
    
    I love being cringe. It means I’m acting weird and refusing to fit in and that’s my zone of genius. What you want to avoid is being unremarkable.
    

17. Not taking risks is disrespecting yourself.
    
    You won’t know unless you take a risk. And 99% of decisions are reversible anyway. In the future you'll appreciate the chances you took — regardless of the outcome.
    

18. Relying on fantasies hurts you.
    
    Many people fall for this delusion. They think the result they crave is inevitable. Most results are insanely hard to achieve and require more effort that is hard to imagine. Focus on actions. The memories of doing — not dreaming — are what compound over time.
    

19. Most luck is hard work and networking compounding over so much time that you forget you were even building it.
    
    Luck is earned. It’s proof of work. It’s when what you do is undeniable and you appear serious due to the library of experiences and moments you’ve shared.
    

20. Aim to be a practitioner – not a leader, influencer, or guru.
    
    People trust practitioners more. The barrier to entry is work and effort. Anyone with a low IQ can do it. While it’s simple it’s hard. And most people won’t do it, so there’s little competition.
    

21. Your nightmares reveal your fears.
    
    Mine are about failing high school and something happening to my daughters. High school isn’t important to me, but being self-made is. You can’t stop nightmares. But you can use them to tell you what’s important.
    

22. “Get good grades. Get a good job. Stay for 40 years. Retire at 65.” Tech killed this dream. Most haven’t realized.
    

23. The country you live in and its government are actively working against you.
    
    Not in an evil way. It’s just incentives. Their incentive is to take more of your money. Unless you understand how and why they do that, they will get more of your money. And you’ll work harder without realizing it.
    

24. When you have kids you miss simple things.
    
    Much of your social life disappears for a while as you nurture small children. When they’re able to fend for themselves more, society has already written you off. You’ve been missing from the social scene for years.
    
    All you can do is jump back in. Let people know you’re back. And make going out a priority.
    

25. Family picnics with friends are way more fun than nightclubs/pubs.
    
    A picnic is where you go to enjoy the moment and look at what you’ve built. A nightclub is where you go to drink and escape the life you have. They’re not the same.
    

26. Avoiding alcohol and drugs solves a lot of problems. Addiction rots the brain.
    

27. Having a copy of “Ego is the enemy” next to you at all times keeps you humble. Your ego will ruin more opportunities than rejection ever will.
    

28. Life is more fun if you learn to enjoy the struggle and see hard mode as a way to get everything you ever wanted in life.
    

29. The courage to look stupid matters more than skill acquisition or competency ever will. If you can look dumb and not care, you’ll figure out what you don’t know.
    

30. Rock bottom is just a breakthrough that’s about to happen.
    
    Craving them is important. Knowing we all have them makes it easier to push through. Without extreme pain you don’t have the motivation to change.
    

31. There’s no need to explain yourself.
    
    As long as your world makes sense to you that’s all that matters. If people ask for explanations you can ignore them. Not every question asked of you demands an answer.
    

32. Fall in love with criticism.
    
    I get about 5-10 people every day criticizing me. It used to make me depressed. Now I crave it. Criticism means you’re making moves. You’re repelling people. And that means you’re actually trying to produce change. The haters just want what you have anyway.
    

33. The best skill to acquire is to constantly reinvent yourself
    
    My dad started as a minister. Then he became a soldier. Then late in life he bought a business. You’re not one thing. Your life is made up of many different paths. Don’t get stuck on one.
    

34. “Am I willing to change or am I happy to stay the same” reveals your true bottleneck. It’s rarely money, time, resources, or information. It’s you. You’re the roadblock.
    

35. Redundancies prove job security is bullsh*t. Stop protecting your job and start protecting your family.
    

36. When you truly witness insane levels of obsession it’s hard to forget. David Senra is my daily reminder of this.
    

37. A war always ruins your investments at the start.
    
    But after people get used to the war it becomes old news and the markets recover. Same with the pandem!c. Same with tech layoffs. Same with the AI debate. Same with the president being shot in the head or the Queen dying.
    

38. Labor leverage is still one of the greatest advantages.
    
    Hire smart people to replace you. Let them do the work. You measure the outcomes. Doing everything is dumb. And people can be more talented at a skill than you.
    

39. If you play the social media game, embrace authenticity above all.
    
    It’s what people now crave. It means mistakes, typos, and being vulnerable. It also means you don’t let AI do the writing for you.
    

40. Anyone (including me) can die tomorrow. Stop waiting for someday like a f*cking clown. Do it today.

P.S. I’ve just opened enrollment for next week’s workshop:

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It’s weird that a video of a guy DJing made me teary-eyed.

Grown men aren’t supposed to cry over DJs. I might be the first. It happened because I accidentally stumbled across a DJ set filmed at the Boiler Room nightclub. People online were going bat sh*t crazy over it. At first, it seemed like nothing.

Then about halfway through there’s an odd moment.

Everyone is partying hard and loving the club tunes. Then one strange-looking guy bumps the DJ console and the music stops. I used to be a DJ. If you did this in a club, you’d be thrown out on your ass and likely beaten to a pulp by the security guards.

But that didn’t happen.

The normal-looking DJ restarted the music, smiled at the guy, then gave him a massive hug. As I analyzed the video, I realized there was an extreme version of love in that room. The DJ had somehow created this environment.

His random act of kindness to the guy who stopped his music was one of many moments that proved it. There was something real about this DJ. It transcended his music, personal brand, and Spotify music.

He cared. He was real. He gave a f*ck about people. He wanted to spread joy.

The video stayed with me longer than I expected, even after I stopped thinking about it consciously. Then, a few weeks later, Justin Bieber got on stage at the Coachella music festival and played random Youtube clips. Nothing fancy. No big lights or LED boards. Just Justin and his laptop, hanging out like friends.

Same happened again at the Grammys. Justin got up on stage in nothing but his boxer shorts with one light shining on him. He played some guitar, used a basic loop pedal, and made music live in front of the audience.

It felt like you were in his bedroom.

If that weren’t enough, I noticed my favorite Substack writers doing something similar. Not trying to be content creators. Not building some over-the-top personal brand. Just sharing real stories and educating.

It’s catching on. More well-known people are joining Substack (not an ad for Substack) – Mark Manson, John Cleese, Pamela Anderson, Tony Hawk, and even Gary f*cking Vee. (Unfortunately Andrew Hate joined and still acts like a d*ck. )

The Substack version of these famous people is different.

It’s downplayed. There’s no fancy website, slogans, amazing graphics, or ghostwriters. It’s just them. Real. Sharing basic writing that’s mostly unedited.

What the hell is going on?

The world is reversing.

We’re sick and tired of polished, loud, and overdone. We’re having a moment. And that moment is called the Authenticity Era.

The Authenticity Era is the cultural shift where audiences are actively rejecting polished, produced, and performative content — and gravitating toward creators who show up raw, imperfect, and genuinely themselves. It's not a trend. It's a correction.

In a world of AI, the way to win is to be authentic.

What’s cool is it’s easier to be authentic, real, and yourself than it is to be a puppet acting for other people. Hollywood is full of actors pretending to be other people because they hate themselves.

The corporate world is full of people doing soulless work they know is bad for humanity and feeling like they can’t escape because that’s all they’ve ever known.

When you spend your life pretending to be someone else, it feels exhausting.

It rots your soul. You feel like a zombie.

It’s not just exhausting for the characters. It’s exhausting for the audience too. As part of an audience, we want to feel intimacy. We want to feel like we really know the writers, musicians, athletes, and entrepreneurs we follow.

When everything is stripped back to its core and PR and marketing are removed, what you’re left with is the true artist. That’s what people connect with. And that’s what is creating all these viral moments of authenticity all over the internet.

Being raw and authentic is one level of the game.

There’s an even deeper level.

That level is being willing to make mistakes, publicly fail, and intentionally insert errors. In music, that looks like performing a song and stopping then starting if needed. In writing, it means publishing without an AI edit or spell check. In comedy, it’s going to a comedy club and trying out new jokes even if no one laughs.

We want to see people put themselves on the line. We want to see people take artistic risks that have consequences. This is when the people we follow and admire shine.

Not when we see the finished product. But when we see them struggling to actually make the product.

To go to this deeper place and be willing to be imperfect, you must go to a dark place. Something other than cookie-cutter fame, likes, or money must motivate you.

I am a good example of this. I’ve been to the dark place many times. Both with mental illness and not wanting to live anymore, and during my banking career that felt like a prison sentence. If I want to truly connect with people, I need to go to these dark places and talk about things I swore I’d never talk about.

I need to be willing to share stories I come across (names changed), knowing the main character of that story may realize I’m writing about them.

Without the artistic risk there’s no f*cking point in creating anything.

“Safe” doesn’t inspire people. Safe doesn’t help people change. Safe doesn’t blow up someone’s view of the world. Only taking artistic risks can do that.

The other cost is embarrassment.

Let me share an embarrassing moment to demonstrate. A while ago, my team was testing a new AI writing tool. They loaded up a piece of content they found from someone else and asked the AI to write it like me with my insights. The AI f*cked up. It posted the story as mostly a copy-and-paste job.

A few hours later, a reader saw it and emailed me in a rage.

I had posted a pure piece of plagiarism. No doubt about it. Total freaking accident… but still, no excuse. Within minutes of finding out, I deleted it. Still, the damage was done. A few people now hate me forever because of that.

When I want to inspire people, I go back to this dark place.

Because from here there is energy, emotion, and a sense of rock bottom that can help act as a reframe and connect with people on a deeper level. You can’t fake stuff like this. People know when you’re full of the brown stuff.

The secret to winning the internet is to lean hard into authenticity.

The DJ at the start of this essay is Fred Again. He’s built a cult following by leading the Authenticity Era.

There’s a problem though.

When you research Fred’s journey from the outside, you’ll quickly realize his dad advised the King of England. He comes from pure privilege. He’s a rich kid. His neighbor growing up was famous music producer Brian Eno.

Brian became his free mentor. It opened many doors for Fred. At a young age, his privilege helped him to produce albums for people like Ed Sheeran.

But then Fred walked away from producing famous people’s music. He stopped dropping his famous mentor’s name.

And he produced his own music which he put out on Spotify. The first album “Actual Life” blew people’s minds. It wasn’t just music. It was an experience. It defined the 2020 era of isolation, staying at home, and loneliness.

People craved Fred’s work. It was inescapable.

The critics would argue Fred’s privilege made him famous. But I did deep research on him and found something different.

Fred’s privilege bought him a life of making music for famous people – but that turned out to be a huge burden. Fred's pivot into authenticity won him the internet

It’s why famous artists from all around the world get on stage with Fred. A recent example is Thomas Bangalter. Thomas Bangalter spent decades as one half of Daft Punk — one of the most successful electronic acts in history — deliberately hiding his face behind a robot helmet. He almost never performs live anymore.

But Thomas decided to perform with Fred because it was different. So when he got on stage with Fred, people paid attention.

Fred dances on top of the DJ console. He talks to the crowd like a friend. He hugs the people he performs with constantly. And he invites the audience to dance on stage next to him with no security guards or barrier between him and the audience.

People like Thomas want to be part of that. It helps them be reintroduced to the world through a new lens of authenticity. It even relaunches their careers.

If you want to rise to the top of your field and win the internet, you need to start embracing the Authenticity Era.

The reason most people don't do this isn't laziness. It's fear of being judged, misunderstood, or ignored.

But here's what Fred, and every creator living in the Authenticity Era, has figured out: the people who judge you for being real were never your audience anyway.

The good news is to harness this new era you basically just have to be yourself. Make mistakes. Have fun. Connect with people. Talk with them, not down to them. Fail. Get rejected. Make more mistakes. Show people behind the scenes. None of it is hard.

There’s no need to perform anymore, thank god. Just be yourself.

Are you craving more authenticity just like I am?

P.S.

Quick question - If you took 30 days off tomorrow — no calls, no emails, no checking in — would your business still make money?

If the answer is “no,” you’ll like this.

Just dropped a new video: How to Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You

You can jump straight to that by clicking here - How to Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You.

(I’ve even left some homework hidden in the video for you as a treat)

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The last 2 weeks have been tragic.

I found out a coach I wanted to work with was found dead. He took his own life. The more tragic part is in his content, he talked about how taking one’s life was selfish and hurt others the most. He had an ex-wife and a young son.

His son will grow up without a dad.

Yet his son will see his dad’s social media videos and be blown away by the persona he had. From one perspective, his dad was a titan of the online world, inspiring millions of people. From another perspective, he obviously didn’t practice what he preached.

Seeing someone die so young for no good reason really hit me hard.

Only a few moments later after I made this discovery, I learned that a young woman I used to drive around as a chauffeur, who later became a famous DJ, fell off a balcony in Bali and died.

She was blind drunk.

I wish I could say it surprised me. Hardly. Her relationship with alcohol had always been terrible. She would drink until the ambulance rolled up. Right before she died, she told her sister that nobody taught her how to be happy.

She tried to use alcohol to fill the void. It didn’t work.

Both these individuals fell out of love with life. They let a series of seemingly normal events rob them of their love of life. A few dark days turned into weeks, months, and eventually a tragic end.

This is why if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, it’s critical you do something about it. Now.

Here are a few uncommon ideas you can use to fall in love with life again.

1. Quit accidentally acting like a coward

The gurus will call people cowards.

I rebel against that idea. No one knowingly acts like a coward. It almost always happens by accident.

When you act like a coward you rob yourself of potential. You become less than you can be. Each day you lose a tiny bit of your personal power. After long enough you become a hobbit hiding in your bedroom full of wall-to-wall pillows to protect you from harm while telling yourself you’ve earned your self-care.

Cowardliness starts with ghosting. Not replying to people. Ignoring simple follow-ups. Not RSVPing to invitations. Hiding. Watching. Waiting. Being flaky. And most of all…

Avoiding hard conversations.

Cowards go nowhere in life. They fall out of love with life because they see everyone else winning and they blame their situation on personality traits or being neurodivergent when it’s really just cowardliness.

If you know you’ve been acting like a coward… that’s okay. But it’s time to stop.

Admit where you’re at. Start doing the uncomfortable things you’ve been avoiding. And for the love of god stop ghosting people because it’s ruining your reputation and making you look like a giant p*ssy.

2. Start making real decisions

Life starts to feel terrible when you can’t decide.

When every decision turns into a 6-month research project and still nothing happens. If you spend enough days not making decisions, you shrink. Your confidence contracts. Your options quietly disappear. You feel terrible inside.

Every big opportunity that comes to you requires a decision. And the right decision will never feel comfortable. You either make decisions with a yes or a no (not a maybe), or life gets worse real fast. And you fall out of love with it and don’t know why.

Decide. Today. 99% of decisions are reversible anyway.

3. Add more total randomness and chaos

The assumption is that if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, you’ve transcended into total darkness and are about to walk off a bridge. That’s not true.

Falling out of love with life looks more like boredom.

Every day feels the same. There are no surprises. You just want to make it through the day. Life becomes a game of survival.

The cure is actually simpler than you think.

Try adding in more randomness. Walk to the shops a different way. Drive to different places. Start random conversations with people. Buy the person behind you in line a coffee.

Life starts to feel less predictable when you do. And that helps you fall in love with life again too. The cool thing is when life becomes less predictable, your experience of time slows down as well. Instead of months feeling like days, they now feel like months again. Randomness forces the mind to take more snapshots and to operate less on auto-pilot.

Here’s where I’ll push you to go further…

Add in more chaos to your life too. I did this by having two daughters under the age of three. Every day is a tantrum followed by dinner being thrown at my face. Running a business adds even more chaos into my life.

I never know what is going to happen. I constantly have to grow and evolve to deal with the latest crisis and this helps me fall in love with life. Why? Because when I look back each year I realize I’m far more capable than I was the year before.

I’m about to do that right now. I’m 39 today. In a week I will be 40. The difference between the two characters is ridiculous. A year ago, I had a tiny team and half the following. And I was making half the money.

Seeing your evolution like that is deeply addictive. It makes you think anything is possible for your life.

But it all starts with a little more chaos. That’s what creates the growth and builds the resilience – so you don’t experience a little bit of stress and get fooled into thinking, “I now need to take a year off work.” No, you don’t. You need to learn to deal with a little stress and chaos.

4. Lower your stupidly high expectations

High expectations rob you of joy.

They make you think every situation needs to be perfect when the reality is the world is messed up, imperfect, and chaotic.

Plans don’t go to plan. Your cookie doesn’t crumble the way it does in the TV commercial. And your kids don’t grow up to be perfect little angels who never smoke weed or get blind drunk.

If you lower your expectations, it makes you happier.

You feel better with failure and rejection as a result. You expect things to go wrong and even begin to crave it. And on the rare occasion things go right, you can do a victory dance to Katy Perry’s “ Baby, You’re a Firework” song.

5. Stop doing work you don’t give a f*ck about

People’s careers are the #1 form of misery.

The worst part is we don’t admit it. I didn’t. I told myself I loved my stupid banking career for years, even though it made my ears bleed. Not doing work you love is a fast way to fall out of love with life.

You spend so many hours at work, you better enjoy what you do, or you’re literally wasting precious hours of your life. This doesn’t mean quit your job tomorrow. That’d be financial su!cide. But start building something on the side.

Let the side project grow into the main project. Then turn your job into a side hustle and eventually into a resignation letter. Now you’ve transitioned without YOLOing your life away and giving into the quit-your-job bros.

This doesn’t just apply to employees. There are many business owners who hate what they do too. They might make a million dollars a month like they say on their Instagram, but behind the scenes their life is a train-wreck and they hate all the cr*p they’re selling.

Bizarrely, sometimes these people need to go back to jobs for a while. Or start a totally new business they don’t hate.

Either way, life is too short to do bullsh*t work and pretend you like it so you can get a paycheck and pay off debt. There’s a higher level of calling, purpose, and fulfillment. And it starts with you getting real with yourself and running some experiments.

6. Rebuild your energy levels

The last few days I’ve had intense food poisoning.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt like vomiting non-stop. I had no energy. I couldn’t eat. And my piss was yellower than the yellow submarine from that Beatles song. So, I missed writing an edition of this Substack.

When we have no energy life looks and feels terrible.

The last few days felt like the end of a 6-month chemo battle. When your energy comes back again you suddenly love life again. The bizarre part is many people live with low energy and the consequences and don’t even know it.

Until the brain fog lifts, most people don’t know that the reason they fell out of love with life was entirely due to a lack of energy.

It’s a bit like waking up every day looking through a dirty windshield full of bird poo, and expecting life to look good. It won’t.

When your energy levels are high, it feels more like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope each day and seeing the wonder in our planet and your potential.

The ways to fix your energy levels are cliché at this point. Drink more water. Sleep longer and better. Eat food that is grown not processed. Be careful of your content diet and don’t consume ragebait, politics, and clickbait. Remove losers from your inner circle who suck your energy away. Ignore critics and nitpickers.

7. Focus on one goal and go all in at an extreme level

Making progress in life is crucial to whether you love being alive.

The masses have goals, though, and never achieve them because they quit too soon. They give up at the sign of one roadblock. Or, they don’t give their all. They put in minimal effort. They dabble. They have a hobbyist approach. They’re a tourist in the environment that could take them to the next level instead of being a citizen.

To make progress you must go all in. You must be stupidly consistent and worship James Clear’s Atomic Habits like he’s your daddy. To sustain that level of effort, you must focus on one thing — not a hundred. And you must take action at an extreme level for more than a year.

If you follow this simple formula, you’ll end up more in love with life than you may realize. You’ll see a side of life most of society can only dream of by watching Instagram life p*rn.

Most won’t do this. They’ll dismiss it as hustle p*rn. And that’s the greatest opportunity that exists for you right now.

8. Treat every day like it’s the last day of your life

Life feels nowhere as good when you think you have time.

To fall in love with life, adopt the cancer survivor’s mindset. Assume every day is the last day of your life.

Assume, like my now deceased friend, that everything is going well in life, you’re about to start trying for a baby, then you get a strange lump on your chest and 4 weeks later your funeral is being filmed on Youtube because you die during the middle of a global pandem!c (true story).

Being truly connected with the fragility of life helps you appreciate every day so much more, without having to do a gratitude journal and shake hands with a hippie wearing rainbow-colored flower pants.

Life is short. You could die tomorrow. May as well fall in love with today because that’s all you’ve got.

You can use life to your advantage, or life can use and abuse you for society’s advantage. Choice is yours. Don’t be a victim. Be the main character. You know how to fall in love with life again, so go do it. Stop reading this. Hug a bear. Make out with a flower. Scream “I pissed my pants” in the middle of Times Square. Just do something interesting. Do it for the story. Do it for the love of it.

P.S.

Part of loving your life is succeeding financially.

So if you have an internet connection, fingers, and ambition, read this:

I’ve just posted a new video called:

10 Ways to Get Clients for Free (That Work for Any Kind of Digital Business)

I’ve used all 10 of these. A couple are not-so-sexy, but I have to share them anyway because they work.

No ad spend required. Just effort.

Click here to watch the new video now

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Financial freedom is now s*xier than dating a supermodel.

People would rather watch financial education p*rn than real p*rn featuring people bonking on the couch with the curtains open.

It’s just so damn s*xy. Yet it’s totally misunderstood.

I’ve achieved financial freedom. So have most of the people in my network who I call friends and colleagues. I’d have to be an idiot after all these years not to see a few obvious patterns.

The problem with financial freedom is that it’s misrepresented. The bros, gurus, and hustlers have completely distorted the concept beyond recognition. People like this flogger below are teaching financial freedom.

He’s supposed to be financially free working on his laptop, but one hand is on a cigar and the other hand is on his martini, so he’s not actually working.

The photo is a fake pose doing fake things because that’s the fake version of financial freedom he sells. To escape the mainstream and misrepresented version of financial freedom….

This isn’t going to be a pleasant read. I'm going to challenge and rip apart your entire worldview. I’m not going to be cute about it either.

Here’s my brutal advice for achieving financial freedom.

You’re going to hate what I’m about to say

Ready?

It’s not going to be f*cking easy. Easy is a lie. Passive income is a lie.

The Claude bot isn’t going to automate your entire business and make you money on autopilot. The Airbnb properties will likely never make any profit. The $20 book full of your cliché, repeatable life advice isn’t going to sell a million copies and beat Mark Manson. Your digital product isn’t going to blow the lights out and make you richer than Elon Musk because it’s new information or super cool and helpful.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Anything that looks easy is a scam. None of it will get you to financial freedom. And the sooner you stop chasing Jenna Jameson hardcore p*rn fantasies and get back to planet earth, the sooner you can get on with actually working toward financial freedom.

Most people aren’t financially free. That should tell you everything you need to freaking know. It’s clearly not easy. That’s why few people do it. Not because it’s impossible or complicated. But because it’s hard work and simple.

The average person hates those two things.

They vomit a bit in their mouths when you tell them they have to do a bit of work. Why? Because they want to reach financial freedom for the money, which is the worst and dumbest reason there is, and will guarantee you’re never free.

Figure out the breathtakingly simple reason you want it

I figured out years ago that if people try to do something hard without a strong enough reason to do it, then on an off day or when they get sick or frustrated, they will give it up.

We all know we need the right daily habits and to take action repeatedly. That’s grade one sh*t. But you can’t take action and push through the obstacles if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

Now, if you have kids or a husband/wife, I’ll give you the cheat code. Make them your why. It’s the simplest solution to the problem and it works.

If you want to get a little fancier because you like to drink martinis in Hollywood while wearing Ray Bans and tilting your hat to Tom Hanks while he walks down the street… then make your why related to a deeply human cause.

Examples:

• Curing cancer

• Helping the world escape obesity

• Creating breakthroughs in psychology

• Getting 100,000 people out of poverty.

But if you’re not the kumbaya-my-lord type of guy/gal and don’t have some grand plan to save the world (like me), then make the why your family.

This is what I do. I show up to write this filthy newsletter and look at a photo on my desk of my two daughters. Then I imagine I’m writing this for them, so one day when I’m dead, they can train an AI bot to coach them through life using everything I’ve ever said on the internet.

That one idea helps me write certified bangers that make people cream their pants.

And on the hard days, it helps me run a business and make more money than most people in human history.

Nail your why, or you won’t be motivated to become free.

We gotta talk numbers so let’s get it over and done with, chief

I hate numbers. I failed math class.

But… financial freedom does have a numbers component. You must work it out, then decide on what your financial freedom number is. As the idea goes, once you hit your financial freedom number, you’re free. Nice and simple. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

Here’s where I get to bust your boiler and ruin your quiet evening reading this essay while sipping a glass of red wine.

Your financial freedom number will change.

Today it might be $1M. Tomorrow it could be $10M. We live in a world of imperfect decisions. Just decide. Choose a number. You need something to aim for.

No number will ever be enough because of lifestyle inflation. Once you own the Tesla you’ll want a BMW. Then you’ll get the BMW and want the Mercedes. Then you’ll get the Mercedes and want a Lambo. Then you’ll get the Lambo and want a Ferrari. Then you’ll get the best Ferrari money can buy and say “screw you idiots” and tomorrow Ferrari will release a new model and the guy down the street will buy it.

And you’ll once again be inferior and not enough.

Makes sense. You’ll never be rich enough. My brutal advice: stop trying to get rich and impress people in the first place. Make enough money to live in a normal house and own the base model Tesla Model Y and you’ll be happy as Larry.

Chasing moonshots will ruin your life. But you should chase moon shots. Here’s how.

I talk to people online about financial freedom every day. It’s a blast.

There’s a pattern that screws people over though. It’s what I call the moonshot mindset. It sounds like this:

• I’m going to quit my job and launch a SaaS (in the middle of a SaaSpocalypse).

• I’m going to sell a $5 a month Substack newsletter and make a million a year.

• I’m going to invent the next version of nuclear fusion, then everyone will worship my genius and I’ll be rich, mofo.

These ideas are moon shots. That means they are statistically unlikely to come true. The odds of achieving a moon shot are worse than winning the lottery. “But Tim, what about blah blah blah who sold his app to Facebook for one gazillion dollars?”

Yes, people do achieve moon shots. People win the lottery every year too. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win the moonshot lottery.

Now this is where the gurus and highly credentialed knobs will step in and say “Screw your dreams, pal. Choose a safer option. Pay us $400k for a degree and get a nice safe cubicle job. Gotta be realistic after all.”

First, slap that professor or “expert” in the face. But seriously, not pursuing moonshots is bad for humanity. We should try to make a moonshot come true and sell it to Mark F*ckerberg for $3B dollars so he can be a little poorer.

The solution isn’t to kill the dreamer inside of you or rob the world of innovation and new ideas. Dreaming is good. Moonshots give us high energy. The solution then?

Have part-time moonshots.

Moonshots you work on part-time that don’t take up your entire life and aren’t the sole path you intend to take to financial freedom. With this mindset you get the best of both worlds. If your lottery bet doesn’t work, you don’t end up in poverty begging people to buy your $20 book on the streets of San Francisco. If your lottery bet does work, then you get your financial freedom win.

And while you work part-time on your moonshot, it gives you extra energy, which you can channel into your business to help you reach financial freedom.

Quit accidentally gambling

The path to financial freedom often looks like investing.

Investing is smart. Warren Buffett is a good, wise chap and is right. Invest in the S&P 500. Own a bit of Coca-Cola. Where this goes wrong is modern investing is basically just gambling. People download the Rawbin-Hood app (ironic name, given it’s how the rich steal from the poor), and buy stocks or crypto.

Seems smart except no one can predict which AI Company or dog coin is going to go to the moon and create generational wealth, bro.

No one can predict when the next recession will happen either. So most investing is just taking a huge amount of risk using leverage (debt), and hoping it’ll make you loads of money that leads to financial freedom. It’s a bad idea.

You and I are not Warren Buffett or the Wolf of Wall Street (thank god).

Unless you’re insider trading then your information isn’t special. And if you are insider trading, then I’ll see you in jail and I promise to send you postcards from the Sydney Harbor Bridge while eating my $3 vegan, gelato, no dairy, no life sorbet in a gluten-free cone. Okay?

Stop following influencers

They won’t change your life. You don’t need more lifestyle p*rn. And their goal is for you to become their passive income by buying their $199 course that’s actually just an affiliate link to Andrew Tat3’s business course.

Pick a path to financial freedom that you’ll actually piss your pants with excitement to do

Time for me to slap you around like a rag doll. Ready?

The path to financial freedom is owning a business. You likely won’t reach financial freedom as an employee. Because even if you become CEO of freaking Microsoft and replace Satya Nadella, and make $20M a year, you’ll have no free time.

You’ll be on terrible Microsoft Teams calls (not Zoom) all day with a fully booked calendar. This is not financial freedom. This is corporate s*x slave-style sh*t that’ll ruin your life and fry your genitals.

So now you know you must own a business. The next issue is people pick a business based on what is s*xy, cool, or most likely to lead to a Lambo. Bad idea. I don’t care if every dude is selling Claude bots or is a ghostwriter.

S*xy businesses fail when they hit a bump because when the trend changes or things get hard, you’ll realize you don’t like doing what you’re doing and no amount of money will make you feel like doing it.

The business you pick needs to align with your skills, obsessions, desired lifestyle, and whatever it is that doesn’t feel like work to you.

Free up your god damn calendar

Most people can’t become financially free because they have no time.

A 30-minute Zoom call with their doctor is enough to blow up their week and put them months behind in their work.

They’re so busy they keep telling themselves and everyone else how busy they are. They’re so busy they’ve transcended the dictionary meaning of busy – and they’re super proud of it.

They still think it’s 1994, and that being busy while holding a cell phone the size of three bricks is cool and hip. It’s not.

Being busy is now the equivalent of saying I’m broke, I didn’t shower, I sniff butt holes for fun, and “Would you like to bang on the first date and livestream it?” That’s how it sounds. Busy is the worst. I’d rather be bankrupt than busy.

Yet this is modern life.

People are busy. Everyone. Even your grandma. Even my parents. The hard part is they can’t tell you where the time is going.

But I have a dirty secret. I know where all the time is going.

I spy on busy people. I follow them into the bathroom and watch through the crack under the door while they take a poop. Everyone is so busy because they’re glued to their phones.

Endless text messages about nothing. Non-stop notifications pinging their brains to death. Taking phone calls while doing ab crunches at the gym. Talking on the phone while driving. Being in useless Zoom meetings about nothing. Embracing a morning routine that takes 3 hours when it should take 30 minutes. Prioritizing housework for no good reason. Just basically doing everything but prioritizing what actually matters.

Justin Welsh once said this to me & I never forgot it (I have a tattoo of this on my butt):

The time exists to become financially free. It just needs to be a priority. It needs to be a habit. It needs to be a daily event on your calendar that writes over all that other useless sh*t that shouldn’t be there.

Because if your calendar is blank for the next hour, I can guarantee you’ll use it to scroll through your phone, then lie about it.

You either make time, or you stay non-financially free.

Take an insane amount of action

I see people who want to become financially free every day.

But they take tiny actions and think it will lead somewhere. It won’t. Financially free people take massive action.

They don’t send one DM and have a tea break. They send 200. They don’t write one tweet and expect to go viral. They write 1000s of 5000-word essays and build an audience.

Thinking about financial freedom doesn’t count.

If we break down what being financially free means, it’s having more money than you need, so you can spend your time however you want without stressing about money. This is huge because most people have undiagnosed mental health issues, and almost all of them are caused by financial stress.

So if money is value, then having more than enough money means you have to add more than a normal amount of value to other people’s lives to earn it.

The goal is now simpler. You must find a way every day to add value to people’s lives. If you do that enough days in a row, they will share that value with you. That's the whole model. No secret. No shortcut. Just value, delivered consistently, until the money follows.

That now leads to the next phase. You need a way to help other people solve problems so you can provide the solution that creates the value. That translates to choosing a problem, then getting good at solving it for others.

Life is now simpler. Solve a problem for people. Win. Make bank. Become free.

Hurry the hell up already

We’ve come a long way.

Hope the slap in the face and the brutal honesty helped wake you up and get realigned. You now know what to avoid and that you need to own a business. You also know how to find the time.

The final bit of advice is to hurry the hell up. People take way longer than is needed to become financially free because they move at the pace of a turtle. But you can now move fast. I met a guy today who went from $0 to $500K in 3 months. AI, the internet, and social media have now sped up the path to financial freedom.

You no longer need to ask for permission or wait for years for a degree to make serious money and retire early. Do it now. Do it today. Stop making excuses. Stop listening to gurus. Go do the thing. Now.

P.S.

You’re gonna like this.

I just opened up access for a brand new workshop.

It’s called Effortless Sales.

A new method of online selling that has one of my clients saying:

“I almost can’t believe people are buying this thing.”

No sales calls.

No 1,000 DMs per day pressure.

No website landing pages.

No dropping your pricing to “low-ticket” pricing.

No advertising money... (or ANY advertising money).

Almost sounds too good to be true, right?

Head here and find out for yourself.

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Your career is probably boring as f*ck.

That’s okay. What’s not okay is pretending your career is good when you know deep down it isn’t. People lie to themselves because they don’t want to admit the truth.

If your career is one big lie then so is your life. That admission of guilt is too much. So we pretend. We tell ourselves that we chose a good, respectful career. That becomes the justification that the sacrifice, pain, and boredom are worth it.

But it’s not.

A boring career is never worth it.

To have a boring career is the equivalent of wasting your life. And you only get one life, so wasting it on a career you don’t give a flying f*ck about is a tragedy. Don’t do it. Be better. Be more honest.

If your career sucks no one is going to save you from it.

Not a boss. Not a magical piece of software you invented. Not a LinkedIn DM from a recruiter at your favorite company. Not the government. Not your family.

Only you can save yourself from a terribly boring career you know you should have quit years ago and haven’t. On the one hand, that’s sad. On the other hand, it’s empowering. If only you can change it, then you control the outcome.

That’s rare.

But your career won’t change unless you change. That change starts with an admission. Do you really like this current career?

I asked myself this every day for 10 years. My answer was always a lie. I told myself I liked banking because it was cool and s*xy to mention at dinner parties. I got to work with famous Silicon Valley tech companies so I convinced myself the boring career was worth it.

But Sunday night was the truth I couldn’t ignore.

I hated Sunday. I used to get anxious. The thought of going to work the next day haunted me. I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like prison. I had to be someone I wasn’t. I wore a suit and tie to impress strangers when the truth is I prefer to wear all Nike 24/7. Even on a dinner date with my wife.

The suit made me an actor. I put on a mask and became this mythical banker.

But I hated who that banker was. He was selfish. He was privileged. He spoke in a funny way. He kept talking about his “connections” and friends in government.

The whole act was despicable. But it was how I made a living.

I didn’t know any other life. And the idea of finding a new life was too scary to pursue. So I stayed with what was familiar, even though I was slowly dying inside.

By the end of my banking career, I became a twisted psycho. I lost all my filters. The shoe shine wore off. And I just stopped wearing the suit. I was asked to show up to all these pointless meetings and I just stopped going.

I didn’t care. I told the truth.

“This meeting is a waste of time so I’m not attending.”

It was self-sabotage. I thought it would get me fired. It did the opposite. People started to admire me even more. My boring career, which I was desperately trying to escape, ended up reaching new heights.

It made the eventual exit even harder.

The more honest and authentic I became the more it resonated with people at work. This happened online too. The more unfiltered writing I shared about the truth of my existence the more readers I attracted.

Those readers weren’t just strangers. They were my bosses, colleagues, clients, and even prospects. All of this began to mash together to form this odd crossroads.

I so didn’t give a f*ck about my boring career anymore and everyone knew it.

It was obvious I would leave it behind. The question wasn’t if but when. I thought I would quit my boring career sooner. But I didn’t.

Even at the height of it all while I was making $70,000 USD in a month from writing royalties, I couldn’t leave this bullsh*t career behind. It became like cancer. Nothing could defeat it. And my career was terminal.

The shift began when hatred set in.

I began to hate myself. I hated what I did for a living. I was unbelievably bored. Nothing at work challenged me. My boss gave me an impossible lead for a client we’d lost $10M+ on due to a failed project. He thought there was no way they’d ever buy again from us.

But I found a way to get them to buy.

They spent $12M with my employer. 12x my sales target for that year. Not because I was brilliant but because I didn’t give a f*ck anymore. In the prospecting stage, they kept highlighting how much they hated my employer.

I kept telling them that if they avoided my calls and didn’t share their business problems with me, I’d tell their boss’s boss in an upcoming meeting. I’d call it discrimination.

So they shut up. They feared me.

They told me to my face that I had a screw loose.

All I could say in reply was, “Yep, you’re right so you better play ball because I’m a psycho and I’m unpredictable. I got nothing to lose, pal.”

This is what a boring career gives you once you admit to it. You now have free motivation to say and do whatever you want. It makes you act a certain way. It makes you crazy. And god almighty, the average person’s career needs more crazy.

A boring career makes you optimize for the story more.

You have the opportunity to do weird stuff because it makes your life story a little more interesting.

Optimizing for a better life story is actually a good way out of a boring career. If you had to make every day of your life into a Hollywood movie and make it as interesting as possible, what new decisions would you make?

The trick? Go do that. Today. Make decisions that turn into weird stories.

That’s how you slowly get out of a boring career and into one that makes you want to wake up on Monday morning and get fired up.

A boring career compounds in the opposite direction.

The longer you let the bad career keep wasting your life, the harder it is to escape. This isn’t theory. It’s neuroscience.

Repetition wires your brain. Your brain takes action based on what you repeat. So if all your brain knows is to keep working a boring career, it’ll help you keep doing that unless you take a sledgehammer to that idea and brainwash yourself to change.

So the antidote to a boring career is to first accept it, then ask yourself, “Am I willing to change right now?” If you can get a yes to this question, your career will never be the same again.

Getting to yes is the hard part.

Your brain will fight you. It will want you to keep the prestige, titles, comfort, and certainty of your current career to feel safe. Your ego will fight back too. It wants you to do what keeps family, friends, and colleagues happy.

Your ego wants you to fit in so it can collect fake compliments.

The only way to fight the slow-moving disease that is a boring career is to chop it off at the head. It requires bold and swift action (and an ax).

You must become fed up. You must feel what it’s like to waste your life. You must believe you have more potential.

Until that happens, you won’t change. And your boring career won’t either.

Beyond a boring career lies something special.

It’s the career you should have been having. One full of meaning and fulfillment. One that doesn’t breach your morals and make you sit in boring-ass meetings. One where you make the decisions instead of a pea brain boss with a small d*ck.

Thinking of that future helps you want to change.

A career shouldn’t be boring. It should be an adventure. You should reinvent yourself every couple of years. You should work multiple careers in a lifetime. You should work across many industries. You should have many and varied experiences.

Most of all, your career should be full of creativity and imagination – not meetings, lifeless cubicles, spreadsheets, and “let’s circle back” office culture talk.

I wasted more than 10 years living a boring career. Don’t make the same mistake as me. Be willing to change right now. Nobody is going to save your boring career so you must save yourself. Today. Now. Not tomorrow.

P.S.

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(Or from a random YouTube video published in 2018 that sounded good?)

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Take a peek at my new YouTube video for 4 types of content that work now (and 1 that definitely does not)

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I’m about to turn 40. My friends and family are freaking the f*ck out.

“You’re gonna be an old man.”

“It’s all downhill from here.”

I don’t agree with the panic. Age isn’t something I can control. Freaking out is dumb. Every year on this planet gets better.

This past year I became a dad for the second time. A client this morning asked me why I don’t take topless pictures, given how much time I spend in the gym.

The truth is, I’m fit but not muscly. I don’t eat the high-protein diet required for muscle. And I don’t want to look ripped. I’m an almost-40 dad. I’d rather be a great dad than a ripped Hulk.

At 40 you often stop giving a sh*t about what everyone else thinks you should be doing.

You’ve decided who you’re gonna be by 40 and now it’s time to embrace it. That’s what I’m doing right now.

In your 40s there will be a moment you realize…

The life you’re living was designed by the 22-year-old version of you

When you’re 22, you’ve likely graduated college already. You’ve made your mind up about what career you will start. You probably know if you want to start a family at some point. And you know if you want to go into debt to buy a home.

This 22-year-old designs the rest of your life.

Problem is your goals, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs change. But the life you designed at 22 doesn’t. You’re still subconsciously living it.

Being aware of this is crucial. Doing something about it is even more crucial. Your 22-year-old fantasies of who you’d become are wrong. They were pre-AI. They were before all the life experiences you’ve now had. Your friends and family heavily influenced them too.

It’s time to update your dreams.

In your 40s there will be a morning where you do the math on how many years you have left to truly go for it.

Make sure to do that math.

Let the number terrify you. The biggest issue people face is they think they have time – especially 40-year-olds.

You don’t have time. Time is running out. Everything takes longer than you think.

So you’re either making your goal a habit today, or you’re pissing your life away with p*rn fantasies. “I will start in 3 months” is really saying “I’m taking this goal to the grave with me and will have huge regrets.”

A near-miss with cancer taught me this the hard way. I thought I was young and healthy. Turned out I was months away from death. I’m lucky to be alive. I got reminded again not long after.

Outside the skyscraper where I worked, a car intentionally sped up the footpath to run strangers over and killed a whole bunch of people.

The afternoon it happened, I was scheduled to be in the exact path of the out-of-control car. Through sheer chance, a colleague pulled me aside in the lobby for 15 minutes, which prevented me from being a victim.

I survived.

But a baby girl in a pram parked right where I should have been standing got hit by the car instead and died instantly.

Through a weird coincidence, 6 months later, I went on a date with a woman. As we were saying goodbye, I told her this story above. She told me it was her sister’s baby that got run over by the car. I felt a wave of emotion. Life had come full circle.

I believe everyone needs a near-death experience to wake them the hell up. Especially 40-year-olds.

Age 40 means more than half your life is over. Get moving already.

In your 40s life will throw huge piles of sh*t at you.

The hardest challenge is aging parents.

By 40, your parents are either dead or not far from dying. You have to look after them. You have to make every moment count. It’s why recently I’ve spent much more time with my parents. And I record every moment.

They won’t live forever. Understanding them better is how I will know where I came from and, therefore, where I need to go. In my 30s, my parents took care of me. At almost 40, I now take care of them.

The roles are reversed, and this isn’t easy to come to grips with.

More sh*t gets thrown in your direction. Your body starts having issues. Last year my Achilles tendon went doing calf raises at the gym with, no joke, baby weights. I couldn’t walk properly for 6 months. Cost me thousands in physio bills.

I look after my body, yet I’m seeing the signs. The hardest to face is both sides of my head are now full of grey hair. To hide it, I get the hairdresser to shave the sides of my head every four weeks.. Soon, the grey hair will spread.

I’ll either need to dye my hair brown or embrace it.

I still wear hoodie jumpers to look and feel young. Guy gave me cr*p yesterday because he said I wear Nike in every video. He’s right. I’m a wannabe high-performance athlete writing on the internet. I treat business and writing like an elite sport. So Nike makes sense. But I’m not wearing Nike for its intended purpose.

Being 40 will be hard. There’s more cr*p to come my way no doubt. I expect a possible midlife crisis. Maybe I’ll buy an electric Harley Davidson or a boat to numb the pain. Hard to say. What’s guaranteed is none of us is immune to a midlife crisis.

It’s part of aging. Some people fear it. I love it.

Every rock bottom for me has been followed by a huge comeback. The same is true for most people. It takes a crisis to figure out who you currently are and to get the motivation to change.

Because most 40-year-olds won’t change. They stopped doing that years ago. They’ll only change if the world forces them to. So I wish you a happy mid-life crisis!

In your 40s it becomes obvious which mistakes you made as a 20-something year old.

God, this is a hard one.

I drank too much. I had a big ego. I asked employees at my startup to kiss my feet. I treated women like s*x objects. I spent too much time in nightclubs.

I wish I’d avoided all this nonsense and started a business while writing online and being completely s*xless. That’s not how life works.

I needed those wasted years to know how NOT to be happy.

If I didn’t do those things, I would have done them later in life when they’re more harmful. Sort of like the choir boy who does everything right, goes to church, and donates half his salary to a charity… then at 40 he becomes an atheist, listens to rock music, and dresses in all black. At 25, it might be acceptable. At 40+, people think you’ve lost your mind.

True wisdom is a paradox though.

People thinking you lost your mind at 40 is a good thing. It means you have a screw loose. It’s a sign of authenticity. And it likely means you’ve figured out living the default path is hell on earth.

You have to be careful with what happened in your 20s. If you don’t see it all as a positive in your 40s, you end up becoming a victim. Victims are powerless. Everything happened to them. But you’re actually the one making life happen.

Mistakes lead to beautiful wisdom.

In your 40s your circle gets brutally small.

Before I quit my finance career, I had over 1000 contacts in my phone.

Now I have less than 30.

Some contacts were deleted by me. But most of them disappeared because they didn’t understand me anymore and the choices I’d made. The people who stayed earned their spot. The people who left told me everything I needed to know.

Those who left initially made me mad.

I felt used and abused like a victim of domestic violence or an orphaned child. How dare they ignore my calls or not worship my online success? This way of thinking was nothing but ego. People have their reasons for leaving you behind.

And they won’t share those reasons with you.

Instead of mourning friends and contacts I lost, I’ve found it’s better to invest the time and energy into the bold folks that stuck around. The ones who didn’t get scared off by the millions of followers, successful online business, and viral posts.

The ones who saw nuance. The ones who saw me going for it and took it as inspiration to do the same.

Your 40s tell you which relationships to invest in, and those ones compound into family-like connections. Family is everything. It makes you feel whole.

Nurture your inner circle in your 40s. Let the rotten eggs leave. Let the true heroes shine bright and help you get to the next level.

In your 40s you’ll realize you spent most of your life building other people’s dreams.

This part isn’t going to be easy to write without getting emotional.

I wasted over a decade building other people’s dreams. I wish I could say I was learning or upskilling, but I wasn’t. I was afraid. Terribly afraid.

The comfort of a job and a steady paycheck forced me to trade my potential in for the biggest bullsh*t life imaginable. It was such a dumb idea. I regret it.

Now I’m almost 40, I can see it clearly. Perhaps you can too?

Building someone else’s dream is a tragedy. It’s totally unnecessary. But to graduate out of servitude into building your own dream requires a certain mindset. You have to be willing to give up your need for certainty and comfort. And you have to be willing to increase your level of intensity.

The 9-5 passive effort most people are used to will eat you alive outside of a job.

You cannot compete by thinking and acting like an employee. The market will tear you limb from limb until all you’re left with is a 1-year career gap and unemployment.

If you do build your own dream, you’ll quickly see the freedom that comes with it. You’re in control and your level of personal growth will exceed any other point in your life. At 40, the silly thing is I know that even if you fail building your own dream, it doesn’t matter.

No one is watching.
You can always start again.

And in your 40s you’ll be glad you took a chance on yourself instead of being a piece of sh*t cog in someone else’s barely functioning machine. The upside is in your 40s there’s still time to build your own dream. It’s not too late. Will you?

In your 40s there will be a Tuesday afternoon where you sit in silence and hear your real life trying to get through.

There are brief signals from the other side.

Where the life you should be living sends undercover signals to try and break your thought patterns. I got fired and made redundant many times. This was a message from the other side. I’d been a successful entrepreneur up until 26.

Then I walked away from it.

But I shouldn’t have. Being fired and made redundant reminded me of what I should have been doing. I was too scared to listen though. It’s important to do the opposite.

When you see the signs in your life, don’t ignore them. Take the whole day off and listen to them. Ask yourself, “What is this situation trying to tell me?”

In your 40s you’re right for cursing “the best time was 20 f*cking years ago.”

It probably was.

The Rolling Stones were cool. The 80s had it all. The beaches were cleaner in the 90s. Life was quieter before social media. Politics never used to be the focus. Culture wars didn’t really exist.

But longing for the past is a waste of your 40s. The world isn’t going back to Walkmans, portable TVs & websites. The AI genie isn’t going back in the bottle, baby.

All you can do is deal with it. There’s a paradox though.

The past may have been the best, but the second-best time is right now. The best way is to make decisions that allow you to experience nostalgia later.

Writer Nicolas Cole once said to me, “The chapters of life with the most pain have the most nostalgia later on.” This translates to doing hard things, going through pain, working hard, and taking risks.

If it feels hard now, it’ll probably feel like nostalgia later. Hell yes. Do more of that.

Closing Thought

The thing about your 40s is, you look at those 20-something-year-olds and see what they have and what you don’t. But the same is true in reverse. Look at all the connections, experience, and skills you have that they don’t.

You can still turn your life around or decide to start living it by design in your f*cking 40s. Either way, it’s a gift to be alive and your 40s can be your prime, or a time when you slowly die inside and fade to black.

I’d recommend you make your 40s mean something. Go beyond yourself.

P.S.

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Influencers are destroying humanity.

They’re influencing their way to warping minds and promoting radical views of the world that are simply untrue.

I’m so glad I never became an insufferable influencer. There was a crossroads where I could have. I could have artificially boosted my social media growth, taken paid sponsorships from crypto and gambling companies, and taken endless selfies.

Something about influencers has always felt off to me. Yet all of us are affected by them whether we’re aware of it or not.

Just look at your LinkedIn feed.

I did this morning, and this is what I got (I block and mute everything on AI and LinkedIn growth, but still get this influencer garbage).

First post: “How to master LinkedIn in 6 weeks.”

Second post: “I was going to hire a $70K/year chief of staff. Then I spent a weekend building 7 knowledge pipelines with Claude Cowork.”

Third post: “I built an AI 2nd brain with Obsidian and Claude Code.”

Fourth post: “11% of AI answers use LinkedIn content.”

Fifth post: “I told my team that AI should do 92% of their work. Aggressive? Maybe.”

Every platform has its own version of influencer p*rn. Substack isn’t immune either. How to grow on Substack is the most popular form of content here. You can’t block it even if you try.

The problem isn’t that using social media is bad. The problem is influencers have infected every channel to spread garbage, so they can get attention.

It’s not clickbait. It’s flat-out lying.

You can read a lot about this topic, but my viewpoint is unique. I’ve worked with or know many of the biggest influencers on the internet. I have millions of followers myself and could have easily become an influencer (and didn’t).

The underground world of influencers is crucial for you to understand.

Influencer content plays into people’s desires and makes them unrealistic.

It makes well-intentioned, normal people think they don’t need to work hard. A Claude bot is going to do everything for you for $20/month, and an eBook is going to make you a millionaire.

Consuming this garbage is like pouring arsenic in your coffee and expecting to get healthier and have glowing skin.

People now mistakenly think it’s inevitable they will get rich online. They believe they have the knowledge too.

But where is this knowledge coming from?

Most influencers have no real credentials.

They’re just content creators. They don’t know a f*cking thing about the real world. They live in a fantasy world and try to recruit people to join it like an MLM pyramid scheme worse than a timeshare business.

Creating content doesn’t make you knowledgeable. It’s not a skill to be worshipped. And it doesn’t make you understand how business, tech, the economy, or society works. Content is just content. Content is mostly just an opinion.

And opinions are like a**holes. Everyone has one.

Yet it’s easy to take these opinions as the truth and assume they’re right. Most are horribly wrong.

It gets darker…

In the recent “Inside the Manosphere” documentary, I got a good look into the influencer world.

Young men start out on platforms like TikTok as content creators. Then they realize one thing every human secretly forgets:

S*x and violence run the world.

Add these two things into your content and you’ll go extremely viral. Same as A/B testing on websites. If you A/B test your website enough times, you end up with a p*rn site. Because nudity will always increase conversions.

Does that mean we should all put a naked photo of ourselves on our side business website? Hell no.

Conventional wisdom from influencers has a lot of this kind of stupid logic.

If you follow the influencer playbook long enough (like I have for the last 12 years every day), you’ll notice another trend. Influencers eventually start sharing conspiracy theories.

They themselves consume so much influencer content creator content that they become infected with the virus. They’ll share radical opinions, such as rapper Ye (Kanye West) is a good guy again.

We should simply forget he wrote a song with the name “Hail H**ler.” Sure, no worries. That makes sense. Good guy. Local soccer dad sort of person. Nothing harmful at all. Death camps based on race are fine, right?

No. Anyone who has read history or has even an average IQ can see through this.

But when you live inside the influencer mind f*ck it eventually infects your mind. You start to think terrible things are okay. Your desires become completely warped. Lambo at 22 is normal. Nothing unusual here.

The influencer movement is so harmful it should be outlawed.

The core driver of influencers is selfishness.

They’re in love with themselves. They think because they figured out how to use the camera on their iPhone and take selfies or post conspiracy theories that they somehow unlocked the secrets of the world.

They didn’t. Truly influential people are humble. They don’t think they have all the answers. They aim to inspire. They have ethics. They won’t promote gambling companies or Onlyf*ns models. They treat selling as helping, not a kill-or-be-killed type of equation.

A great example is Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton, who launched the world’s largest photography project, “Humans of New York.”

He started his career as a bond trader. Making money was nothing more than a game and it inflated his selfish desires. On the weekends he’d take photos in downtown Chicago of strangers.

Then the 2008 recession hit.

It changed his priorities. He wanted to do something else. So he quit his job and took photos every day. It became an obsession.

He worked on Thanksgiving.
He worked on Christmas Eve.
He tried not to go home.

He worked every single day and photographed all day long. It was a lonely existence. He didn’t know many people. And it meant making almost no money. He later went from photographing strangers to also asking them a few questions about their lives.

The hard part wasn’t taking the photos. It was dealing with daily rejection from people who didn’t want to answer his questions.

In a famous interview between Brandon and podcaster Tim Ferriss, the true motivation was revealed.

Brandon: I’d go out some days and ten people in a row would make me feel like I’m some sort of freak. “No, you can’t take my photo — get out of here!”

Brandon: There were days when I couldn’t do it anymore and would go home and lie in bed.

Ahh…..[long silence]”

Tim Ferriss: “You there?”

This was the moment Brandon started crying during an interview with one of the most famous podcasters of our time. It was hard not to feel Brandon’s pain.

The hardest part of Brandon’s passion for photography — that evolved into a passion for talking with strangers — was the rejection. All the doubt, not having any money, and his battle with loneliness were tough.

Retelling what it felt like made him cry.

He felt the rejection all over again.

One Christmas, there were two weeks when he didn’t see a single person he knew. All he had were conversations with strangers.

He spent Christmas Eve alone in a diner, and his only coping mechanism was to go out and take photos to take his mind off everything. Taking photos was what kept his thoughts off how unlikely his dream was and how stupid an idea people thought it was.

Brandon is a great example of a truly influential person. He’s technically a content creator, but he does the opposite of every insufferable influencer.

This is the sort of influence I aspire to build online. Maybe you might too.

Getting rich is a big part of influencer content.

On the surface it seems smart. And I believed it for many years too. But then I got what these influencers said was the dream and it looked different. Enormous wealth leads to this one question:

When is it enough?

One Lambo? Twenty Lambos? One family home? Five mansions?

There comes a point where the idea of getting rich goes from being a decent goal to becoming borderline insanity. Once you have your time back and report to no one, why would you stay on the hamster wheel of getting rich? It’s pointless.

Thank god, I ignored the influencers and slowed down. Most of us don’t need extreme wealth. It’ll only blow up your ego for the worse. I’ve quite enjoyed the quiet life with two daughters and more than enough money to live.

What more could you want?

I’m not the only one who figured out being an influencer is a scam.

Some smart influencers eventually figure it out on their own. One good example is former influencer and Youtuber KevJumba. He was one of the biggest Youtubers in history back in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Then he quit everything to become a monk.

A more recent example is influencer PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg). For 10 years he dominated Youtube. 111 million subscribers. Billions of views. And then, at the peak of his influence, he did something radical: He decided he had enough.

He packed up, moved to Japan, and radically downsized his production. His content changed too. No more high-octane edits. No more chasing drama. He started posting 20-minute vlogs about walking his dogs, buying groceries, and being a dad.

He explicitly stated, “I am retired.”

Other influencers said he was soft. That he left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. But he actually won the game.

He realized the influencer life is total bullsh*t. He made $56M USD which is more than enough to live on. And he quit at the top of his game.

I promised a solution to the influencer movement.

And it’s not to quit social media or fire a bullet at your wifi router. No. It’s this: follow practitioners. A practitioner is someone with real results who has real-life experiences and has actually done sh*t. It’s not hypothetical.

I consider myself a practitioner.

It’s the category I want to see explode and help nurture.

For example, I built a $50M a year eCommerce company in my 20s. I overcame deep mental illness to rewire my brain using neuroplasticity. I got a job offer to work with Tony Robbins. I did fake interviews in investment banks and got a job (that I then turned down) to prove you don’t need a finance degree. I became a writer by publishing 7000+ essays online instead of asking Penguin if I could s*ck their d*ck and get a book deal (which led to a book deal with them). I spent 10 years working in banking, helping overseas tech companies set up in Australia. And I’ve built several multi-million dollar businesses online.

None of this is theory. It’s not content. It’s not great copywriting. It’s experience.

There’s no cheat code. You’ve gotta live it. You’ve gotta be the actual person. The main character. You don’t manipulate or story-tell. You just tell. You share. You help instead of selling.

Another example is Julie Fratantoni who I worked with.

Her social media has exploded. She’s not an influencer. She has a PhD and real-world experience. She has genuine, unique insight about how the brain works that is healing millions of minds in real-time. Not fake. Real.

If you’re tired of the influencer movement that rots society from the core and spreads conspiracy theories, just unsubscribe.

Find this new category of practitioners. Be inspired by real people. Not Lambos, the fake-rich life, and selfish selfie mofos.

Are you tired of influencers, or is it just me?

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Neuroplasticity is a life-changing idea.

But to unlock it you must understand it in simple terms, and 99% of the writing about it comes from PhDs who make it unnecessarily complex. Bastards.

I first heard about neuroplasticity from a Tony Robbins event. I cheered, laughed, and rah-rah’d my way to the end of the event. In the last hour on that day, Tony introduced the idea of neuroplasticity. I was ready to switch off and sleep.

But Tony quickly pivoted to how people used it to change their lives.

This got my attention because I was a drunken, burned out, fat slob at the time. I’d been trying to change my life for years and nothing worked. Then I realized what Tony was trying to say.

Wanting to change isn’t enough. Having a dream isn’t enough. Good intentions aren’t enough. The only way to experience real change is to first change your brain.

Neuroplasticity is the secret high performers have known about for years.

It’s still not mainstream. But if you understand it you can literally achieve any goal & rise to the top of your field while the high school bullies scream “How’d they do that?”

Let me explain the power of neuroplasticity and how to use it in under a few minutes, without all the psychological jargon and brain science.

The woman who didn’t like her brain and built a new one

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young (not a character in Game of Thrones) grew up in a confusing, messed-up world.

On the surface she was a bright spark. Einstein-level genius in some respects. But there were freaking holes in her brain.

She couldn’t do simple things like tell the time because her brain couldn’t grasp the relationship between the hour and minute hands. She couldn’t for the life of her understand cause and effect. If she heard the sentence, “Tim was punched by a big girl driving a Tesla,” she couldn’t tell you who was bruised and who was doing the punching.

Nothing made sense in Barbara’s mad world. It was nearly time for her to adopt a label and take pills to solve it while telling people “Oh well, I’m broken and therefore can’t get a job or be part of society.”

The geniuses of the 50s and 60s while smoking ciggies with grins on their faces told her she was retarded in some areas… and there was nothing she could do.

She’d have to learn to live with it.

99% of people accept their diagnosis. It holds them back in life.

But not Barbara. She quietly said to herself “F U.” The issue wasn’t the doctors in white coats or the beautiful array of pills she could have gotten high off for the rest of her life while on a comfy pension. No.

The issue was that the adult brain was considered fixed and immutable.

You get the brain you’ve got and if you don’t like it, pal, tough t!tties.

But Barbara stumbled upon a different idea. One that was radical, and extremely unconventional at the time. She began to wonder:

If the brain can change itself, why can’t I build the parts I’m missing?

Barbara didn’t waste any time, bless her soul. She turned on psychopath mode and began doing extreme mental calisthenics. She’d sit in front of clocks for 100s of hours and force her “retarded” brain to figure out the relationship between the hands.

It was torture. It was pure exhaustion.

And Barbara loved thinking she was a crazy b*tch for doing it.

Out of nowhere, one afternoon, the brain fog lifted. She could tell the time. Shortly after she could finally understand grammar. Lastly, she finally understood logic.

This wasn’t an accident. Or a Tim Ferriss life hack from the 4-hour workweek. She had permanently and physically altered the neural pathways of her own mind.

On the surface she solved a learning disability. But at a much deeper level she proved the brain can change at any age. It’s a living system you can give instructions to, and program to do and believe whatever you want.

Barbara discovered what we now call neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the solution to every problem in life

You’re likely not like Barbara. You probably don’t have a learning disability and doctors don’t call you retarded (although Andrew Tat3 bros might).

But everyone including me experiences anxiety, limiting beliefs, disempowering thought patterns, and failure. It’s easy to treat these traits or experiences as permanent. And… until you realize they’re not, nothing will change.

Got divorced? Lost your job? Loved one died? Dog got cancer? Someone stole your life savings? The traditional route is to replay these scenarios over and over in your mind until they steal your personal power.

They become roadblocks, limitations, and dare I say it, excuses.

Neuroplasticity is different. You don’t seek to reminisce or focus on the past. You seek to change your brain. To rewire it. To reprogram it.

The meaning of a situation is whatever meaning you give it.

Once you understand your brain can radically change whenever you want, you start to become the architect of it instead of its slave.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire itself based on repeated experience. But what people misunderstand is it’s not something you turn on. It’s already happening. What matters is, are you rewiring your brain every day in your favor or to accidentally work against you?

Right now as you read this, your brain is wiring itself around:

• What you focus on

• What you practice

• What you emotionally react to

Your brain is made of billions of neurons connected by pathways. When you repeat something, those pathways get stronger and faster. When you stop using something, those pathways weaken or disappear.

It’s like a trail in the Amazon rainforest:

• Walk it once → barely visible

• Walk it daily → becomes a clear path

• Ignore it → it gets overgrown

The challenge is to walk the right paths every day in your mind that are good for you, not walk the bad paths that are full of addiction and weakness.

Self-improvement lied to you. Goals are bullsh*t.

I’ve long believed self-improvement is bullsh*t. Now I know for sure it is. Neuroscience proves it.

Your brain controls everything. And it doesn’t give a flying f*ck about your goals, intentions, or Lambo vision boards. Nope.

Your brain asks itself one question repeatedly like a psycho: “What should I get better at?” And it answers based on your behavior, not your goals.

Dr Dominic NG explains:

The secret to becoming who you want to be is just pretending you already are. As a neuroscientist, it’s action that rewires the brain. Not the other way around.

You can wank off all day to how you want to start a business, have more freedom, and get wealthy. Your mind doesn’t care. Your actions shape your mind.

Writer Eduardo Briceno explains:

The bottom line is wanting an outcome is ridiculously stupid. Stop it. Instead, repeat the behavior attached to the outcome you want. If you want to be fit, then show your brain the actions of what a fit person does every day. It’ll then rewire your brain toward the new behavior using neuroplasticity.

I did this with writing. I always wanted to be a writer. But I had no clue. So I wrote online every day and published 7000+ essays. Along the way, I got offered a book deal from Penguin with a 6-figure advance.

Feels like a Houdini magic trick once you understand this.

The simple path to achieve stupidly big goals

When you have a new goal, like becoming an entrepreneur, you’re effectively trying to leave behind your old employee identity.

People make the mistake of waiting for their identity to change. Or mapping out the change of identity as if it’s a 4 year university degree from Harvard.

Worse, some aren’t even aware they need a new identity to achieve their goal. They think an employee mindset will help them invest $500K in their self-education and build a $1M per month online business. It’s laughable.

The brain is smarter than we give it credit for. It doesn’t wait for your identity to change. The daily actions you take create new neural pathways, and slowly the brain starts treating whatever new behavior you’ve embraced as the new normal.

Act first. Identity catches up later.

But I can’t change… wah wah wah

Neuroplasticity is the discovery that the “map” of who you are is written in pencil, not ink.

You can 100% change. That’s not the question. The question is “Are you willing to change?” Most people will answer yes, but then they’ll sit on the couch and not take actions that demonstrate real change.

So their brains will just wire themselves to do more of nothing and they’ll keep blaming the president, society, enemies, gurus, or whatever other target they can find.

Wanting to change isn’t a feeling or a goal you assign to 2028. It’s a decision. Your brain cannot work in your favor until you decide change is a must today.

This part of neuroplasticity pisses people off

Andrew Huberman says “Errors are the basis for neuroplasticity and learning.” Read that again. If you want to rewire your brain you must make more errors.

But people-pleasing humans hate making errors. We do everything we can to avoid them. We hate the feeling of making an error. And so our brains can’t experience the magnificent power of neuroplasticity.

High performers love making errors and that’s why they get what they want in life. Average people hate making errors and don’t learn much which is why they feel like cr*p and can’t explain why.

Make more errors with the Joker’s smile on your pretty little face.

There’s a huge downside of neuroplasticity that cannot be avoided

Earlier, I said the brain is rewiring itself no matter what. This isn’t a new idea. If you’re not aware of neuroplasticity, it’s likely been working against you since birth.

The problem with neuroplasticity is it works in reverse too. Stress can rewire your brain in the wrong direction. Chronic stress strengthens neural pathways for anxiety, fear, and overreaction.

This means your brain harnesses the power of neuroplasticity to make you better at being stressed.

Boy, the world now makes a lot more sense, right?

Now you know why the average person is in outrage mode 24/7 and throwing bananas at their TV when a politician says something they don’t like. They trained their brains to overreact and produce this state of mind.

The brain isn’t smart enough to know what new neural pathways will work in your favor and which ones will destroy your life. It just automates whatever you repeat.

The whole dumb-dumb movement the Atomic Habits book created about choosing better habits may actually be life-changing after all. All we need now is Mark Manson to write a new version and put the F-Word in the title to make it cool and hip.

Here’s how to make neuroplasticity work for you instead of wage war against you

I will keep this part simple.

1. Figure out what you want your brain to get good at

You now know your brain doesn’t give a f*ck about your goals or intentions. Decide what actions you are going to take and repeat.

If you:

• Check your phone 80 times a day → you train distraction

• Write every morning → you train clarity

• Avoid hard things → you train avoidance

The first step is the hardest one. You must pick the behavior, not the outcome.

Instead of “I will build a 6-figure business” like every other dreamer, make the daily action to pitch your offer to an email list. Instead of “Write a book” like a starving romantic artist in a wife-beater singlet, make the goal “Write daily on social media before 9am.”

2. Use repetition like a freaking bazooka

Neuroplasticity runs on frequency.

• Once = nothing

• Occasionally = weak wiring

• Daily = identity shift

You need boring consistency to get neuroplasticity working in your favor. The brain rewires itself when something becomes normal – not when it’s exciting, nice to have, or makes you rich on Instagram.

High performers go a step further. They add intensity + obsession.

3. Bleed out the patterns you don’t want

Many people mistakenly see neuroplasticity as adding positive actions and behaviors. That’s only half the story. It’s also about subtraction. Mental pruning as they call it.

Unused neural pathways weaken. So remove negative triggers, make your bad habits harder to practice, and interrupt bad new behaviors as early as possible.

You can’t fight bad habits like a gladiator and win. You can only starve those pieces of sh*t by removing their oxygen supply and letting them bleed out on the curb until they can’t survive in your head anymore.

4. Give the brain enough time to rewire itself

Neuroplasticity doesn’t make dreams of Lambos a reality in a day. It needs time to work its magic. Here are the rough timelines:

• Week 1: friction

• Week 2–3: familiarity

• Week 4+: automaticity begins

Unsuccessful people quit right before the new neural pathways are built and the brain has completely changed. They’re impatient suckers in diapers. Instead, give your brain time to adapt to the new behavior.

If the new behavior still feels hard, it means neuroplasticity is working. Sing hallelujah.

The uncomfortable truth

Neuroplasticity isn’t new. Tim Denning didn’t invent it (son of a gun).

Neuroplasticity has existed since humans took over from the dinosaurs and got together after a giant big bang (giggity giggity). Neuroplasticity is on. It’s working right now. It’s been running your life.

So the real question isn’t, “Timbo, can I really change my brain and be a special snowflake like you?” Nope. The hard, uncomfortable question is this:

“What am I currently training my brain to become?”

Because whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, you’ve been training your mind every day for your entire life.

The software is already running in your brain. Now the decision is, do you want to take back control from the drunk driver that’s been programming your brain to date?

If so, change your behavior. Reinforce it with repetition. Let neuroplasticity do the rest.

P.S. Put that neuroplasticity to good use by picking up a new skill in the workshop I’m opening next week

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Not knowing what you want in life sucks.

It’s the default option in society. People like Andrew Tat3 would argue it’s because “people are retards.” I don’t believe that to be true.

What I believe is true is you must decide what you want. It may not be the perfect option. You may not do it forever. But you’ve gotta pick one thing. Because if you don’t, you end up being distracted by a thousand random things.

Soon I will be 40. Some might think that’s scary. I don’t. I have two amazing daughters going into my 40s, and I think that’s all a man like me needs.

But right now, I’m still 39. I wanna exit my 30s with a bang. So, if I could only tell you to do one thing, it would be this:

Decide what the f*ck you want. Say no to everything that isn’t that.

Last week a well-known TV station reached out to me.

They want me in a documentary. I instantly said no without hesitation. I know what I want and it isn’t fame or being on TV. I had another request soon after to host a popular conference. Without hesitation I said, “No, thank you.”

They thought they were giving me a kiss on the d*ck with this offer.

It felt like eating a turd from where I’m standing. Another email then came in. An offer for $10,000 to promote an AI company. Another instant no.

Finally, an ask via Twitter/X DMs to mentor a college student. Yet again a polite no.

I know what I want, and at age 39, it’s to look after my 4 month old baby. Everything else is a distraction. I don’t want to miss her first steps for some flogger’s conference, or get rich with some AI scam that won’t make people rich. Yesterday my baby did her first push up. Magic. A $10K sponsorship feels empty in comparison.

Unless you decide exactly what you want, you will be thrown in a million different directions by the chaos of the world and get left feeling confused.

Knowing what you want isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision.

You can just decide today if you want. And if you do, your full-time job will be to say no to everything that isn’t that one damn thing, amigo.

Say no to friends who drain your energy and give you sh*t in return.

You don’t have to put up with energy vampires who suck your energy away.

They want you to drink alcohol and watch sports with them so they can escape their life. You’re under no obligation to do so. I once had a boss who did this to me. He wanted me to go out every night and drink alcohol with clients.

When I told him no, he gave me sh*t. Called me a teetotaller. Bastard.

I didn’t want to drink on weeknights because then I’d wake up with no energy. He was unsuccessful in turning me into an alcoholic. Looked him up on LinkedIn the other day. He’s 45 and looks like he’s 85 because of all the partying. Newly divorced too.

Just say no.

There’s no obligation to do anything just to fit in or look cool.

In fact, if you’re trying to fit in, it’s a sign of people-pleasing. You gotta stop. People who get what they want are rare, and that’s precisely why they get called weird and don’t fit in.

Say no to meetings that could have been a f*cking email.

What blew my mind working in corporate was how many people were stuck in meetings all day and started doing their real work at 5PM. Makes sense why they never saw their families.

Most meetings are a waste. No agenda. Layers of hierarchy. And most importantly, most people in the meeting are looking at their phone and not fully present.

In my companies, we do everything we can NOT to have meetings. 99% of communication can happen async without wasting everyone’s time.

If you find yourself stuck in back-to-back meetings all day, it’s time to make a change. Modern companies are smarter and rebel against endless meetings. Either start a company like that, or work for one that believes in the same philosophy.

When people ask you to be in meetings just politely say no. Tell them you’ll send them your thoughts via email beforehand. Or that you’re busy with customers. In my last job, I said no to every meeting so I could finish work early and write online.

The majority of people didn’t care. Except one flogger in HR.

He wanted me to use my LinkedIn to talk about my employer. I told him no. He then set up a meeting with me to discuss.

I declined. So he told my boss like the little snitch b*tch he was. My boss backed me up. He got rejected once more and never contacted me again. God rest his soul.

Meeting lovers give up on getting you to attend if you challenge them as to what value you will bring to the meeting. Push back. Make no your default answer to meetings.

Say no to family members who guilt-trip you for chasing your dreams.

Boomer parents are amazing.

But not always. Many parents want their children to achieve goals they couldn’t achieve in their youth. So they force them to get some boring-ass law degree or take over the family business. I copped the latter. My family wanted me to take over the toilet cleaning business. I told them flat out, “NO!”

They tried to guilt-trip me and sell me the dunny cleaning life of cleaning up other people’s poo off the side of the toilet bowl. No thanks. To their credit, it was insanely profitable, and I’d probably be driving a Ferrari now if I’d taken their advice.

But I didn’t.

I wanted to live life the hard way. So I got the equivalent of a music degree and became a starving artist. My bank account came close to hitting $0. Even though I never became the next Elton John, I don’t regret making this terrible career decision.

Music taught me about history. It helped me see the world through an artist’s eyes. I got to discover what “vibes” were. And I experienced some of the deepest flow states I’ve ever had in my life.

Everything music taught me is still used in my business endeavors today. I’m so glad I chased my music dream and failed instead of succeeding as a toilet cleaner.

Say no to your family’s wishes. Don’t pass down traditions or choose terrible careers just to keep them happy. Be your own person.

Say no to the news that makes you angry about things you can’t control.

My friend recently bought a Tesla.

He went out to a cafe with friends and mentioned it. All of them got mad. “How can you support Elon Musk you scum bag.” They were genuinely angry at him.

So he said this…

“What operating system do all of your computers run on?”

Answer: Windows.

He then went on a tirade about all the disgusting things Bill Gates did, including going to an island where kiddies got interfered with, giving his wife STI pills because he was worried she caught something from a Russian hooker he had relations with, and, oh, his best mate Jeffrey.

The room went silent.

This is what the news does. It makes you angry and react stupidly to situations like buying a car, while making you a complete hypocrite in other areas.

It’s mental programming for the masses, and it’s a beautiful way to weaponize perfectly healthy brains for some stupid cause.

Say no to the news and whatever war they’re endorsing. Choose peace and spend the time working on what you want in life.

Say no to advice from people who aren’t where you want to be.

There is a guy in my corner of the internet who talks a lot about online business.

I won’t name him because I don’t want to start World War 4 and go back and forth with him on Twitter trading insults with memes. But he’s a smart guy. He gives a lot of advice. He’s made a lot of money.

Yet I ignore everything he says despite his success.

Why? He’s a playboy. He cheats on his wife. He films videos of doing burnouts in luxury cars and uploads them to Youtube. He brags about working 18-hour days and sometimes not leaving his office for weeks.

I say no to his advice because I don’t ever want to be like him. He doesn’t have the life I want. He’s unsuccessful according to every one of my metrics. So even though he might be able to make me rich, I don’t care.

Stop taking advice from any old person.

If they don’t have the life you want, it’s time to switch them off. Money, owning famous companies, and having fancy job titles shouldn’t be the reason you take someone’s advice.

One of my good friends is the most unsuccessful person I know in the traditional sense. But I listen to his advice because he’s insanely kind, and when he’s not in the room, everyone has life-changing stories to tell about his impact.

Fewer gurus, more aligned mentors.

Say no to parties where you have to pretend to be someone else.

So much of modern socializing feels like an elaborate status game.

You dress in your least comfortable clothes. You go to a venue and meet other people. The first question they ask you is “What do you do for a living?”

In my case, the answer is complicated. Ummm… I write online in my underwear and write life advice full of f-words??? I don’t know. It’s, ah, complicated.

The reason we play these status games at parties is we want to fit in. We want to be accepted and perhaps even be the life of the party. So we pretend to be someone we’re not and often don’t realize it.

It’s why I don’t go to weddings.

I find them boring. People pretend to be in love. They go into $100,000 of debt to look happy for a few hours at their wedding, then spend a lifetime paying it off.

All the ceremony and glitz and glamour make no sense to me. It’s perhaps why I married my wife during the pandem!c at an Australian government office. The nice ceremony guy did play Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) on his iPhone on our way out which was nice.

You can just say no to high society.

You can leave the BMW in the garage, the Gucci jeans in the laundry, and the Rolex watch in the garden shed.

Invitations are a suggestion, not an obligation. Say no if it’s not what you want.

Say no to opportunities that are distractions dressed up as productivity.

I had a client, Paula, who gets asked to do a lot of podcast interviews.

On the surface, she believes it’s good for her business. “It builds my brand. I’ll get some leads.” Sounds good in theory. Then I asked her to give me tangible results from the last few podcasts. Took one line to cut through the bullsh*t:

“How many leads did you get from the last podcast?”

She fumbled around for a minute, then admitted to getting zero leads. Even worse, she was obsessed with doing face-to-face coffees with strangers.

She’d basically give them a free 60-minute consulting session over a coffee she paid for! The lead would then say, “Thanks for all that value” and never become a client.

A lot of opportunities are like this. Productive on the surface. Bullsh*t in reality. It’s why I don’t do podcasts. Unless it’s Tim Ferriss the answer is no, bro.

Real productivity is doing the boring stuff that moves the needle and actually helps people. If you do things for your ego, your ego becomes your worst enemy. It makes you say yes to your own vanity instead of what you really want in life.

Tattoo this to your brain…

Decide what the f*ck you want. Say no to everything that isn’t that.

Because what happens when you say no to all of these things? You automatically say yes to the things you do want.

When that opportunity comes up that’s exactly aligned with what you want, you have the time, energy, and mental bandwidth to go for it.

When there’s an event you actually do want to attend, your calendar isn’t filled with bullsh*t that’s in the way.

Learn to say “no” more.

It makes your yeses more aligned.

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You read every “make money online” post. You buy all the best investing books. You follow everything Alex Hormozi says. You know every passive income funnel.

And you are still no closer to your income goal.

Every day you consume more content that makes you feel like sh*t for not figuring out the simple act of being wealthy enough to never work a job again and pay off all your debt.

Here’s where I ask you a f*cking hard question: do you want to be wealthy or do you just like dreaming about it?

Because here’s what most people miss… thinking you know how to get wealthy and actually doing it aren’t the same thing. The internet has given us all the answers which makes people think they’re experts in topics they have zero real-world experience in.

In theory, getting wealthy sounds simple and doable. Like everyone in the free world should be able to do it, right? It’s normal, right?

Wrong.

Being wealthy is NOT normal. Most people live in quiet desperation and don’t figure it out. Not because it’s not doable but because 1) they’re unwilling to change 2) they have the wrong mindset 3) they stand in their own way.

You probably plan to get wealthy one day. You might even think it’s inevitable. I’m here to tell you that you’re full of sh*t.

Having a goal without a daily operating system is just an elaborate fantasy.

The illusion of progress ruins lives

All the consumption of free money-making content feels like progress. “If I just know a little bit more, then I can start.”

Problem is the goal posts keep changing.

Here’s where it gets weirder. The more content you consume from already wealthy people, the more your mind starts to believe their life is already your life.

Daydreams feel like reality if you indulge in them for long enough.

Other than information, planning is the other big problem. Planning out what you need to get wealthy feels like progress.

Consumption + Planning = Fake Dopamine

Think of dopamine like a drug stronger than heroin. Now combine that with the idea of becoming wealthy, and you have a lethal cocktail. Most people are drinking this cocktail multiple times a day like it’s water.

Then they’re saying “I feel like sh*t” or “something feels off and I don’t know what.”

What’s off is fake progress. It’s delusions dressed up as information gathering and corporate-style planning.

You’re accidentally learning from con artists, not practitioners

Recently, I watched the Louis Theroux documentary “Inside the Manosphere.”

In it, a hustle bro named Harrison Sullivan shares his life with Louis. He helps people get rich online. Every month 1000s of good-natured people buy from him. He has 600,000 people inside his private Telegram group getting his advice on getting rich.

The deeper Louis goes into his business models, the worse it gets. Harrison says he thinks women being Onlyf*ns models is disgusting and he is highly against it. In the next sentence he admits to owning an Onlyf*ns agency and having 15 women set up in a house filming explicit content 24/7.

Then Louis shares some of his Telegram content. Every video is sponsored by a gambling company and their watermark is in the corner each time. Harrison shares his so-called “investment tips” and they all lead to stock and crypto trading platforms. Every single platform he recommends is scammy, and it takes not even 3 seconds with a google search to find this out.

This will sound wild, but Harrison is the typical person that people are learning how to get wealthy from. 99% of the advice online about building wealth is bad and borderline illegal.

To get wealthy you must become good at screening out scammy gurus.

I’ve never had this problem because I seem to be remarkably good at spotting liars and con artists from a mile away. I’ve invested over $500,000 in my own education and training, and not once have I been scammed. I’ve paid coaches, consultants, and mentors to teach me what I don’t know and gotten an ROI every time.

But I am the exception rather than the rule.

You must get good at finding practitioners to learn from. For example, I help people with digital business and writing. I’ve written online every day for the last 12 years and have 7000+ public essays. I’ve also created multiple million-dollar businesses. You can verify all of it online in minutes. No need for trust. It’s publicly verifiable.

This is what being a practitioner looks like. The proof must be undeniable.

Why does this matter? Because everyone who got wealthy had help. None of them did it alone through trial and error – they just want you to think that to inflate their oversized, small-penis ego.

Your urgent priorities are stealing money from you

I remember talking to a lead once about building a business.

They told me they had no free time. Then I asked to see their calendar. Within 30 seconds, I smelt a flaming pile of dog poo. Their morning routine lasted from 6am to 9am. It included things like washing the dishes and watering the plants.

Those tasks were more urgent than their financial dreams. They started their day with the least important tasks. They acted like this dumb stuff was urgent and critical.

People who never get wealthy create urgency around tasks that are mostly distractions because they’re comfortable. They help them avoid doing the hard, uncomfortable tasks that lead someone to become wealthy.

The path to any sort of wealth is extremely uncomfortable.

If you’re not already feeling that every day, you’re guaranteed to be a million miles away from any form of wealth – in a world of AI and layoffs, you’re likely heading straight toward poverty. Harsh but true.

You must change your identity to match your goal

Your identity is who you believe you are.

If you want to be wealthy but have the wrong identity, you’ll never get there. For example, my grandma lived through the Great Depression. She took her wedding dress and turned it into clothes for my mother when she was a child.

There’s frugal… and then there’s my grandma. No one comes close. She’d recycle a pea on the floor if she had to because that’s how she survived the Great Depression.

My grandma passed these tightarse tendencies onto me.

I subconsciously adopted them and it held me back for a decade. The biggest mistake I made was I refused to spend a dollar to get help, and just kept consuming surface-level free content on how to get wealthy, as well as how to build a business.

That lack of investment in my own self-education kept me stuck in a banking job prison for way longer than was necessary.

The problem I faced was I wanted to be wealthy, but I didn’t change my identity. I kept being the teenage tightarse and saying no to every investment in myself.

The question isn’t, do you want to be wealthy? It’s are you willing to change?

Being wealthy is less about money and more about who you become. With the right mindset wealth becomes inevitable. Yet very few people want to change because they believe their mindset is already good enough when in reality it’s nowhere near what is required to get them to their income goal.

Identity goes even further. Many people adopt labels like “entrepreneur” or “CEO” when they’re not actually one at all. They believe that just because they have the goal and are doing research, they are now embodying the label they are unqualified for.

You can call yourself whatever the heck you want. Only the results will prove whether you are who you say you are.

The brutal truth about wealth

Becoming wealthy isn’t a game of intelligence, information gathering, privilege, luck, credentials, qualifications, or investing skill.

It’s a game of execution.

And most people suck at execution which is why they don’t have the results they know they should have. Without execution you will never create the value that will make you wealthy. You’re either a value creator or value taker. One lives a life of freedom and abundance, the other is stuck in scarcity and desperation.

How to break the cycle and get wealthy (without the Lambos)

If you actually want to become wealthy and stop daydreaming, here’s what you’ve gotta do (it’s simple but not easy).

1. Think like a business

Most people think like an employee slave.

They wait to be told what to do. They put everything off to the future. They can’t handle failure, rejection, fear, or any sort of uncertainty. Their entire life motto is “What is the world going to do for me today?”

To get wealthy you must violently rebel against this miserable existence. The world will do nothing for you. What will you do for the world?

Any form of passiveness is just laziness. Owners do. Owners bend the world to their wants. Owners think they have all the power.

I see it with leads all the time. They’ll say, “How will your program make me successful, Timbo?” My answer: “I am not going to make you successful. You’re going to make yourself successful, I’ll just get you there faster.”

The book “Unlimited Power” by Tony Robbins taught me that I am in control of everything that happens to me, and I get to determine what experiences mean. A bankruptcy can be the end, or the start of a new beginning. I decide.

That’s the owner mindset.

Here’s a powerful reframe:

2. Acquire assets

This is radically unusual in modern society.

The consumerism virus makes people buy crap they don’t need to add unnecessary convenience or signal status. Some of the poorest people you’ve ever seen, who are in a mountain of debt, own a Gucci bag.

Being in huge debt is the norm. No one blinks an eye. Everything is paid for on a credit card. We steal from the future to spend in the present. We magically assume the future will be better, and our financial situation will be right, mate.

No, it won’t.

To break the cycle you must go from acquiring debts and liabilities to owning assets (with some that provide cash flow too).

When I come into a small win fall of cash my brain now says “what asset can I acquire to generate wealth.” Not “what can I buy to feel happy or give myself a dopamine orgasm.” The whole game of wealth is to store the value you create in productive, high-quality assets.

It’s obvious yet few people do it.

3. Upgrade your skills

Your earning potential is determined by your skills. If you’re not making enough money, it’s because you need to:

• Add more skills to your skill stack

• Get paid more for your current skills

• Get better at selling and marketing your current skills

This requires extreme personal responsibility. You must own it. It’s not the market’s fault or the war or layoffs. It’s all you. That means you have the power which is freeing if you think about it.

I had a lead recently named Jane. She does bookkeeping. She said she was struggling to clear $50K a year. She asked for my help. I told her bookkeeping is now done by AI. My wife used to do my bookkeeping. Now AI does 99% of it for me.

When I broke the news to her she got mad. Screw you Denning! I’m now her worst enemy. She wants my head hung on her front door for decoration.

I insulted her by telling her the truth. Because the ego will do anything to guard our identity and protect everything we’ve done so far in life.

But that doesn’t change a f*cking thing. AI replaced bookkeeping whether me or Jane like it or not. You either adapt your skills or go broke.

Always be willing to change.

Always be willing to upgrade your skills or replace them if needed.

4. Guard your mindset

This is the most important step. It’s cringy, cheesy, self-help advice that makes me want to vomit. The best wisdom is often like this.

Our level of wealth is dictated by our mindset.

If we think like sh*t, we earn like sh*t. The game isn’t “How do I get wealthier?” The game is “How do I have to think to be able to build wealth?”

Few understand this. They walk around like a psychopath with a toxic mindset and can’t see they’re polluting their own wealth accumulation and destroying their future bloodline. All because of how they think.

Politics and the news dictate how they see the world. They’re skeptical, think everything is a scam, and have the open-mindedness of a peanut.

They get into arguments with strangers on the internet, too. Every bad belief they have is then reinforced by social media algorithms that cause us to live in an echo chamber of our own bad thinking.

To become wealthy you must radically protect your mindset like your life depends on it (because it does).

• Get around high performers in masterminds.

• Read autobiographies of the greats.

• Assume you know little about most things.

• Learn to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind.

• Don’t take opinions as gospel. Test and validate.

• Don’t consume content given to you by a social media algorithm. Use bookmarks to proactively choose which people you’ll listen to regularly.

• Pay attention to practitioners, not influencers.

What you let into your mind determines your level of wealth. Better to have Tony Robbins in your AirPods than Fox News.

It’s time to exit slavery

I spent 10 years stuck in 9-5 banking slavery while being told what to do, being underpaid, and eating scraps like a hobo.

God damn, it was a waste of my youth. If you actually want to become wealthy, you must stop dreaming about it. A life of slavery is the default. If you don’t want that you must be uncommon. A little weird. Even a bit of a psycho.

I’m not going to lecture you about what to do next. I don’t know everything, far from it. I got trapped in a job because I refused to believe I had value. I spent 5 years consuming free content instead of paying smart people for help.

My self-education budget each year was $0. I wanted free help. I wanted to “pick people’s brains.” I had all the plans in the world. I could recite every line from Alex Hormozi or any other popular guru.

But I never tried any of it.

My job kept me busy and stuck in back-to-back meetings. I had no priorities and would just go where the biggest fire was and attempt to put it out.

Then I stopped being busy.

I made becoming wealthy a priority. I became determined to increase my value and upgrade my skill stack. I got around people building real digital businesses and built my own operating system to make money.

That one decision made me more than $6M. And I’m not special.

More important than the money is the change in thinking it gave me. I saw what was possible for my life. And I fell in love with it. All I needed was a taste and I was hooked like a crack addict.

It’s time for you to start building wealth instead of dreaming about it.

P.S.

If you want new clients more often, listen up.

I’ve landed over 150 new clients in the last 90 days.

Each of them paid me (at least) $5,000.

5 big ideas helped me get there.

I share each of them with you in my new video: These 5 Big Ideas Got Me 150 Clients at $5,000 Apiece.

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Being neurodivergent is thought of as a weakness.

I talk to people all the time who say some version of “I’m neurodivergent, therefore I can’t do…”

It’s a tragedy.

Labels like ADD, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia are given to people by the medical profession. They’re then put on medication or told they’re different and need special treatment. So naturally, people use these labels as a sign they’re weak.

And that leads people with some of the greatest advantages on earth to mistakenly hold themselves back.

I’ve never bothered to get diagnosed myself, but I’m almost certain I have ADHD, ADD, and probably some autism thrown in for good measure. On some days, I’m nothing more than an anxiety disorder dressed up as a writer/entrepreneur.

I don’t shy away from any of it.

My weaknesses are my advantages. I have a screw loose for sure, and that’s why I’m able to live the unconventional life I do and access personal freedom. If I were normal and not neurodivergent, I’d be worried I’d live a life of mediocrity.

The world needs to celebrate being neurodivergent. Let me explain.

A random clip from the Joe Rogan podcast changed my mind forever.

Joe says “I have the right amount of brain damage. I think it makes me more fearless.” He’s referring to all the blows to the head he’s taken in martial arts. He’s saying those blows helped mess up his mind a bit and that’s a good thing.

His guest, Mark Normand, then says, “It’s just like autism. If you have just the right amount, you’re a genius.”

The conversation then moved to blind people. Blindness just like being neurodivergent is seen as a weakness too. Except blind people often have superhuman hearing. And their lack of eyesight enhances other senses.

The greatest example of blindness being a superpower is magician Richard Turner. In his documentary titled “Dealt,” you see him do crazy card tricks with no vision. His memory is so good that seeing the cards becomes irrelevant.

We shouldn’t be scared of being neurodivergent or even blind. We should embrace whatever cards we’re dealt and see them as hidden advantages. That mindset will take you to the top of your field.

As I did research for this essay, I came across an amazing viewpoint.

Being neurodivergent gives you these traits:

1. Hyper-focus

(Most commonly associated with ADHD and Autism.)

• The Science: It’s often a result of differences in the brain’s reward system (dopamine). While a neurotypical brain might get bored and switch tasks, a neurodivergent brain can become “locked in” when a task provides enough stimulation or interest.

• The Advantage: This isn’t just “paying attention”. It’s a state of deep flow where hours pass like minutes. This allows for the mastery of complex skills or the completion of massive projects in a fraction of the time it takes others.

2. Pattern Recognition

(Most commonly associated with Autism and Hyperlexia.)

• The Science: Research suggests that some neurodivergent individuals have a higher density of local connections in certain parts of the brain. This creates a “bottom-up” processing style—the brain sees the tiny details first before the big picture.

• The Advantage: Because the brain is processing every “data point” individually, it notices inconsistencies or repeating sequences that others miss. In fields like cybersecurity, coding, or data analysis, this is the difference between finding a single corrupted line in a million rows of code — and simply seeing a lot of code."

3. Lateral Thinking (Thinking “Outside the Box”)

(Most commonly associated with ADHD and Dyslexia.)

• The Science: In ADHD, the brain’s “executive filter” is often less restrictive. While this can make it hard to focus on a grocery list, it means the brain is constantly making “illegal” associations—connecting Idea A to Idea Z without stopping at the letters in between.

• The Advantage: This is the definition of innovation. While a neurotypical person might follow the established “best practice” (linear thinking), a neurodivergent person is more likely to find a shortcut or a radical new way to solve a problem because their brain didn’t see the “box” to begin with.

In the wrong environment, like a cubicle job, these traits above will be seen as weaknesses. Naive friends and family will tell you to get them looked at and perhaps even encourage you to swallow some pills every day.

In the right environment, these traits will be nurtured to help bring out your uniqueness and get you to achieve big things.

Sir Anthony Hopkins was known in Hollywood for being difficult.

They called him “intellectual” as a quiet insult. He didn’t like to socialize. He was a loner. He wanted insane levels of privacy. And the way he prepared for movies was borderline obsessive.

People thought something was wrong with him. They underestimated him.

In the late 70s, Anthony got an Asperger’s diagnosis. This revelation didn’t halt his career. It enhanced it. Suddenly, his whole life made sense. He realized he had to embrace his true nature and stop suppressing it.

Some actors hone their craft with memory or emotional mastery. Anthony did something different. He used extreme pattern recognition and hyper focus to elevate his craft to the world stage.

Anthony became famous for his 250 rule. When he got given a script, he’d obsessively read it like a psychopath at least 250 times.

Nobody could f*ck with him.

By the time the cameras roll, his knowledge of the script is so deep it moves from his conscious mind into his subconscious.

This allows him to achieve a state of “terrifying stillness.”

In The Silence of the Lambs, his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter was iconic, specifically because of his lack of blinking and his eerie, precise vocal patterns. These traits weren’t an accident or an act. They were traits often associated with the “flat affect” of autism. Instead of acting, Anthony utterly transcended the role.

He used his brain’s natural ability to deconstruct human behavior into a series of repeatable, haunting patterns.

Anthony proves that neurodivergence isn’t a lack of emotion—it’s a different way of processing it. He took his autistic mind and transformed it into a nuclear warhead that could blow up any cinema screen he appeared on.

This allowed him to move millions of people. To make them feel something.

Alix Generous accidentally discovered a glitch in the Matrix we all call reality.

She struggled to fit in as a kid and was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD. Her mind was secretly brilliant but she was trying to live in a world that worshipped average minds.

The more she experimented the more she found her brain worked faster in certain high stakes situations. The average person is blind to problem-solving because they fall for the trap of groupthink and tribalism. This leads them to believe things should keep being done the way they’ve always been done (the definition of insanity).

When Alix looks at a corporate structure or a scientific problem, she doesn’t see a hierarchy. She sees a web of data points.

For years nobody knew who Alix was. She quietly became a high-powered consultant making insane amounts of money. Then she did a Ted Talk that went viral.

People started to pay attention to her.

Her hidden advantage was she could see the glitch in any system or project. With certain tech firms she worked with, she found employees too polite or linear in their thinking to solve the root problem. She helped clients see what they couldn’t.

She can transcend the problem and get to the root cause faster than anyone. Alix’s story is the ultimate rebuttal to the idea us neurodivergent people need to be “fixed.”

No, we don’t. We’re perfect the way we are.

Alix’s autism is her competitive edge. It makes her badass. She has built a career by being the person who can see the invisible lines connecting complex ideas, proving that when you think differently, you see what everyone else is missing.

We need to stop seeing neurodivergent people as broken.

We don’t need repairing. We don’t need pills, labels, or judgment thank you very much. We need opportunities to use our hidden advantages to change the world in some meaningful way.

A neurodivergent label is only limiting if you let it be. It can also be the reason you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

Don’t ever let anyone put you in a box. Make your own damn way in this world and be whoever you want to be. Your neurodivergent mind might think differently. Thank f*cking god.

There are enough average minds in this world already. Average is boring. You could say the suppression of greatness is the real cause of the big problems we face as a species. I believe neurodivergent minds are the vaccine to the stupidity virus.

If you’re blessed with a neurodivergent mind, embrace it.

P.S.

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A 4-hour workday sounds like a scam.

Let’s not be cute. It almost sounds like a 4-hour workweek. Pre-2022, you could be forgiven for your hatred of the idea of a 4-hour workday. Now, not so much.

The 4-hour workday is psychological. The average person works 8 hours a day. Working half that would be a dream. In my last ever 9-5 job, I worked a 4-day workweek. I had to squeeze 5 days of work into 4. And I did.

It was the most productive phase of my life.

That’s when I figured out a 4-hour workday might be possible. I used 4-hour workdays to complete the work for my job faster, so I’d have time to take one day off a week and build my side business.

Now, in a world of AI, the 4-hour workday is no longer a clickbait p0rn fantasy.

It’s a reality (if you want it to be). By the way, I’m not the first person to discover 4-hour workdays. But my approach is wildly unique and far easier to implement than other models I’ve seen.

Here’s how to implement a 4-hour workday so you can work less, have more freedom, become wealthy, and never work a job again.

Have a strong “why” that’ll crush your petty little excuses

Let’s go straight to the biggest one.

If you have a piss-weak why, then you’ll never have what it takes to do anything great in life, including working a 4-hour workday.

The trouble with any goal is when life gets in the way you’ll delude yourself into pausing, delaying, or saying “in 3 months the chaos will pass.”

No it f*cking won’t.

A proper why pushes your lizard brain past the petty little excuses that hold you back in life and keep 99% of the population stuck in mediocrity while fantasizing about dreams they’ll never achieve.

Over the last 4 years, my personal why has become stupidly simple:

1. Feed my wife and two daughters.

2. Be an outstanding example for my two daughters of what achieving the impossible looks like while inspiring them in the process.

3. Leave behind a powerful legacy so my daughters can train an AI bot to take daddy’s words and use them as a personal coach when I’m dead.

My insane view of the world that I’ve jammed down my throat is that I either do my thing or my daughters starve. Skin and bones. World Vision Africa-type images of homelessness and despair. That’s what I imagine right before I think about eating a doughnut and taking a load off.

I have a good example to follow too. One of my good friends is homeless. He has three daughters. I love him to bits, but I don’t ever want my daughters to sleep in the car the way his have. Some call it an anti-vision.

Perhaps your why is different from mine. That’s okay. The point is you need an extreme why, or you’ll never do what it takes to achieve a 4-hour workday.

Work on a project that can actually make you enough money by only working 4 hours a day

Most successful businesses, income streams, and career changes start as a side project.

People stuff up their lives by trying to quit their current job or business and go all in on a project on day one. Big mistake. Ease your way in gently.

Before choosing the right project, you want to be clear on:

• What’s the business model?

• What’s the offer?

If you choose the wrong options here, you piss away any chance you have of ever working a 4-hour workday. When you take the right offer and business model and apply digital leverage, that’s what has the best chance of getting you to a 4-hour workday.

As boring as it sounds, the side project needs to be on social media, allow you to build an email list, let you work from anywhere, and it must actually help people with a key problem that’s associated with a big desire – health, wealth, relationships, business, career, etc.

In my case, I chose to help people with growing a digital business. I chose this because I’d already successfully done it myself. It started with a 1-1 LinkedIn coaching offer, evolved into writing challenges, and ended up as business consulting.

Your project will likely be different from mine. Cool.

Just make sure to pick a project that gives you energy, is tied to your current skills/experience, and that’s a pain killer for people & not a nice-to-have vitamin pill.

The simple formula that changed my entire life and made me a millionaire (and let me retire at 34)

Big freaking claim. But it’s true. Ready?

Experimentation + Iteration = Breakthrough

I got the inspiration for this from the lean startup philosophy. I’ve used it every day for 12 years. I even used it in my banking career. And I saw my former clients like Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon use it too. Let me explain…

Most people never achieve a 4-hour workday because they rely on:

• Free mentors with opinions (even though there’s no incentive to help you)

• Gurus who preach some gospel that doesn’t work for 99% of people

• Guesses, vibes, feelings

• Pre-AI career knowledge that is largely irrelevant

• Endless strategy that leads nowhere, assumes best-case scenarios, and is mostly idealistic p0rn

On top of all that, without realizing it, they overthink everything and are indecisive. So they live a death-by-a-1000-papercuts kind of life. That is, they mistakenly think they know everything when they know nothing.

Don’t worry, I made every one of these mistakes and more. Please criticize me in the comments and throw bananas at my head.

The truth is most people aren’t willing to change – but they think they are.

They have a goal and they come up with all these grand plans because they mistakenly think outcomes are fixed. But outcomes aren’t fixed.

You don’t have all the answers on day one. No. You assume that constant iteration is a part of every goal. That you launch, look at the data, assess feedback, try, then try again. When you think like this, step one becomes easy because you’re not looking for final answers or the perfect approach.

You’re looking for signal in the noise.

Secondly, what changed everything for me was I started treating every goal as an experiment. If I got stuck in my business or in life, I’d commit to a tiny experiment.

For example, my long-time girlfriend dumped me. She got out of the car in the middle of the road and yelled, “I hate you, Tim Denning,” and ran off. That left me single and s*xless. I had no clue if I could fix the problem.

I felt old. I had some grey hairs. I have big ears and a face only a mother could love. I felt deeply insecure. So I ran an experiment: I downloaded Tinder.

At first, I thought I was right. But then a kind lady reminded me I had all the filters turned on to limit the pool of female candidates. Turned out my limiting beliefs about who I could attract limited my options.

So I did an experiment and turned off all the filters.

I actually got supermodels and women way out of my league to agree to go on dates with me. The experiment proved I was an ugly duckling, but that I could indeed attract the woman of my dreams. It eventually led to marriage.

The mindset you must have is to:

1. Run daily experiments

2. Increase your rate of iteration

This formula will lead to breakthroughs that’ll change your life and get you to a 4-hour workday. Trust data, actions, and experiences – not thoughts and feelings.

Just get up and get to work. No more elaborate morning routines.

The perfect morning routine is the death of the 4-hour workday.

All the cold plunges, smoothies, yoga, and “forest bathing” are a distraction. The self-improvement industry loves to preach this stuff because it sounds s*xy and leads to a $99 course. But you don’t need it.

What I do is just wake up and get to work.

Then, after 1-2 hours of working on my main goal, I do some simple morning routine. This alone will save your mornings. Instead of starting to work on your goal at 9am after 3 hours of self-help morning masturbation, if you want, you can have 3 hours of your work done by 9am with only an hour left.

It’s so simple, and that’s why it works.

Feel free to riff on this. Everyone’s life is different. But focus on removing all the elaborate warm-up routines and getting down to business faster than normal.

Start the morning with creation. Do admin in the afternoon.

The morning is often when we’re the most productive. Makes sense because we’ve just had 8 hours of sleep.

Not every hour of the day has the same value. An hour before 9am is the equivalent of 3 hours after lunch. This is why I do creation tasks in the morning and boring tasks like admin and managing in the afternoon. Try it.

Have a psychopathic sense of urgency

The 4-hour workday is effective because it creates urgency.

If you mess around with bullsh*t, you’ll never work 4 hours a day. It’s why, when I had a 9-5 job, I had to ruthlessly cut all the fat to get it done in 4 hours a day. I said no to meetings. I deleted everything that didn’t tie to my sales target. I went ghost for every social function. And I didn’t hang out with my boss much.

I did this because I had a psychopathic sense of urgency. I wanted to retire at 34. My brother retired at 32 so I knew it was possible.

To achieve this goal I had to stop:

• Saying “should”

• Saying “someday.”

• Saying “in 3 months then I will…”

I don’t believe people who say “in 3 months.” They’re lying to themselves and they will take their dreams to the grave as a result.

The 4-hour workday philosophy is you either do it today or likely never. There’s no in-between. Your life and goals must be so urgent that anyone who dares get in your way will be steamrolled by you.

Implement a corporate slave KPI tracker

The gym has the best system in the world.

You go there and a trainer tells you what exercises to do, how many reps, and how many sets. You follow the routine and get to your fitness goal. It’s so stupid and boring which is why it works.

When I was a corporate slave, I had a boring-ass KPI tracker. I had to fill it in and give it to my slave-driving, micromanaging, son of a b*tch boss. He’d reply:

“Good job, Denning.”

Then I’d be on my way with a spring in my step because I had his precious approval. I later realized that big goals without an operating system rarely happen. And the foundation of an operating system is a KPI tracker that has daily, weekly, and monthly stats that you track.

The KPI tracker tells you “what do I need to do to achieve my goal?” That’s bloody important, yet most people do not have one.

You must measure your actions if you want to achieve your goals. Otherwise, you end up deluding yourself as to what you’re doing and achieving.

Once you know what to measure, the next step is making sure the hours you work actually count. That's where flow states come in.

Learn how to turn on flow states on command

A 4-hour workday sounds like clickbait because most people have never worked in a flow state before. Once you can turn on flow on command, you realize it’s way more productive than doing normal work full of distractions and phones buzzing.

Flow is where you become so immersed in a single activity that 8 hours feels like 4 — which is exactly why it powers the 4-hour workday.

What’s weird is we all secretly crave to see people in flow.

It’s why you pay $200 to go see a Taylor Swift concert. You’re not paying to see or hear her sing. You can do that for free on Youtube. You’re paying to see her in a flow state – and I bet you never even realized.

Here’s my flow state protocol:

• No distractions – most traditional work is done in an environment full of distractions. Open-plan offices, noise-canceling headphones, phones on, notifications blasting the home screen, emails popping up, etc. These things destroy any possibility of flow. You must do the opposite. Right now, I average less than 10 minutes a day on my phone. That’s how I achieve otherworldly levels of flow.

• Coffee – for many people, coffee helps spark a flow state. Try it.

• Warm shower – you have some of your best ideas while having a warm shower because your mind is fully relaxed. Have one right before work. Turn the lights off if you want even deeper relaxation.

• Background music – music helps focus the mind and block out background noise (crucial as I have a 24/7 screaming baby next to me).

Use flow states to do your work faster than humanly possible. Read the book “Stealing Fire” if you want to nerd out on the topic.

Do uncommon things that give you abundantly more energy

A flow state is a high-energy mood and work routine. But if you’re tired as hell and attempt to turn on flow, nothing will happen.

The greatest life force is simply energy. With high energy you can achieve the impossible. You can do things that make people say “How the hell does he/she do that?”

People often make the mistake of thinking I’m a genius. I’m not. I just have extremely high energy levels which draws people to me because most people are sleepwalking through life barely awake. When we see someone doing the opposite we pay attention.

Here’s my simple energy protocol:

Leave your loser friends behind

A loser is a loser is a loser.

Their only goal is to drag you down so you can be at their level and they can feel good about their bad choices. Sounds harsh but you’ve gotta get them out of your life. They drain your precious energy. Replace them with high-energy people who are going places. Join masterminds if you need more of these sort of people in your life.

Don’t argue with trolls on the internet

If you do anything noteworthy online, haters will find a way to twist your words and call you a Naz! or sexist or <insert popular term>.

The temptation is to argue. Don’t do it. Their goal is to get a reaction out of you and create a show. They have no intention of changing their mind. This steals away your energy. Ignore haters.

Stop trying to be right

This leads you to try and avoid failure, rejection, and embarrassment. This drains your precious energy because it’s an impossible goal. If you ever want to work a 4-hour workday, you’ll 100% experience all of these uncomfortable things.

Focus on being humble instead.

Eat high-energy foods

Not junk food. Not fast food. Not packaged food. Eat more plants. Drink more water. Impossible to have high energy if you eat low-energy foods.

Sleep right

8 hours a day. Dark room with blackout blinds. A proper mattress (insert 8-Sleep affiliate link here…joking).

Exercise

Do it every day.

I feel like your bloody mother with this energy protocol. This stuff is so simple it’s become cliche, yet most people don’t do any of them. They pollute their bodies with crappy food, scroll the news to stumble upon rage bait, and spike their stress levels with petty thoughts from insufferable people going nowhere in life.

Do what obviously gives you high energy. Thank me later.

You might need a 16-hour day

Wait, what the f*ck?!

Yep. 4-hour workdays are incredible. But sometimes you need to throw in a 16-hour work marathon to remind yourself of what you’re capable of.

See, when you master flow states and choose the right project every day to work on, work suddenly doesn’t feel like work anymore. So if you choose to occasionally work 16 hours in a day, it’s not a big deal. In fact, like me, you may even crave it.

The world isn’t black and white. Your needs will change based on what you’re building and the season of life you’re in.

The point of a 4-hour workday is to prove to yourself that it’s enough if you choose. You get to decide. The old myth of long hours slaving away at a job for a promotion or pay rise that’s probably never going to come is busted.

Independent work done in a flow state without a job is becoming the norm. Lifestyle design is becoming the top priority. And you, too, can embrace it and access its enormous benefits.

The 4-hour workday isn’t a fantasy. It’s a decision. The only question is whether you’re willing to make it. Are you?

PS

Now that you’re working on max efficiency mode…

Make sure you’re running on the right path.

For that, my new video training will help

Watch — The real path to $20k months — without complicated funnels

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My life changed when I retired from the corporate world at 34.

The critics will say it was privilege that let me retire. Hardly. My family is broke, and I have exactly $0 coming my way in inheritance. It happened from working my butt off and avoiding the need to buy stuff to impress others.

At the same time, I had to retire. The corporate world broke me. I needed to have my 34 year old midlife crisis. And it was impossible to do while working a job. You might think my exit was some F U to men in suits. Not really.

I cried a lot.

I was afraid.

My hands shook.

It took me weeks to send the resignation email.

Everyone’s a hero in their head. But when it comes to doing bold stuff, most of us freeze and crap our pants, whether we’re willing to admit it or not. I didn’t crap my pants, but I did get a lot of runny poos (too much ???).

In retirement, I could reflect on all the dumb stuff I did.

Fake interviews at investment banks. Sleeping with co-workers. Getting blind drunk in the office. Dancing on the table top during an awards night. And confronting my team leader about being a stripper (my hunch was right).

For the last 5 years, I’ve observed how my brain has changed since I stopped climbing the corporate ladder to nowhere.

Now, in retirement, I’ve been able to chill the heck out and finally be myself. Here are a few simple changes I’ve noticed since leaving the corporate world.

I am now self-sufficient

The corporate world made me dependent.

I sucked the corporate titty like a baby who couldn’t survive without its mommy. My job let me use only a few of my skills. There was no time or desire from my employer to add more skills.

At the end of every year, I hoped and prayed I would get my measly bonus that I worked so hard for. Round tables and bell curves would decide my fate. Once my payout was decided a multiplier was applied based on the overall business’s performance (the multiplier was often less than one).

I’m someone who likes control. The corporate world didn’t give me much. In fact, it often left me powerless. Whenever I had the spark for an idea, I’d get slapped back down by a man in a suit.

They called themselves bosses. I called them oppressors.

I feel like the big difference since leaving the corporate world to be a business owner is I’m now self-sufficient. I don’t rely on anyone or anything to make money. I decide my fate. My level of resourcefulness determines my income. And if I do something smart, I instantly get rewarded for it.

The reason you should consider exiting the corporate world yourself is to become self-sufficient. It’s to learn to hunt and kill your dinner yourself. Once you’ve experienced this level of freedom you can never go back.

I am calmer without the constant threat of layoffs

I learned quickly that job security doesn’t exist.

Every few months layoffs would strike. Didn’t matter who I worked for. It felt like a constant game of Whack-a-mole to see if I was gonna get whacked mob style.

It made it hard to relax.

When I got fired in 2019, I thought I’d be okay. “You got 200,000 LinkedIn followers, Timbo, you’re gonna crush the job interview process.”

Hardly.

I learned that when you’re unemployed there’s a stigma attached to it. One tech recruiter from a software giant said to me“the perception is you’re unemployed because you’re sh*t.” God bless that discriminating, stupid b*tch (she got laid her off 2 years later).

Applying for jobs felt like a special kind of torture to me.

I hated every minute of it. Full of ghosting, lies, and discrimination. When I finally got a new job 6 months later the anxiety didn’t go away. The new employer had constant layoffs too. All it took was one little bleep in the global economy and jobs got shed. Or if profitability was off by 0.3% then jobs had to go amigo.

Families destroyed. Mortgages unpaid.

I realized even with all my high performance, online presence, and impressive sales skills it all meant nothing. Layoffs weren’t done by bosses. They were done by external consultants. Now, layoffs are used as a way to regularly scare employees and remove low performers.

But it’s even darker than that…

One guy I worked with was a high performer in his role for 12 years. Then one morning he woke up and his perfectly healthy 7 year old was having trouble breathing. His son became a vegetable almost right away. He now needed 24/7 care and the bills were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He needed time off. He got it.

But his performance temporarily dropped in the short term.

The McKinsey consultants came in around this time. The numbers next to his name didn’t look good. The consultants didn’t know about his son.

He got brutally laid off.

The corporate world is cruel because people misunderstand it. It’s not personal. It’s just business. Which means if you expect to be treated fairly or like a human, you’ve chosen the wrong path.

Since leaving the corporate world my brain has changed and I don’t constantly have this extreme anxiety that I will be laid off.

I am much more skilled

The corporate world made me stupid.

My skills 5 years ago compared to now are miles apart. Now I can:

• Run Claude bots

• Face into difficult customer conversations

• Generate leads from cold DMs

• Write high-converting copy

• Network with famous people

• Do all my own accounting

• Procure products and service

• Bring on partners

• Solve complex IT issues

• Grow a personal brand on social media

• Build an email list

• Run conferences and large live events

• Do podcast interviews

• Host a mastermind

• Work with recruiters

• Run sales teams

• Lead people

All I could do in my old job was sell basic banking products. I knew a few paragraphs about the products, and I’d repeat them for years on end. I felt like I didn’t grow at all.

My brain is now wired to mess around and figure out any problem.

In corporate, if I encountered a major problem, I felt powerless to solve it and would just complain to whatever department might be able to fix it. Now I try to solve it myself, get AI to help, and hire a professional if needed.

I used to be a specialist with a high likelihood of being replaced by AI.

Now I feel like I’m a multi-skilled generalist who can acquire any skill. Just last week, I was teaching myself to illustrate using AI (the cover image of this essay is proof).

My brain now craves skill acquisition.

I lean into the chaos

Working in banking forced me to crave certainty.

I hated not knowing what would happen in the future. I loved the idea that I’d go from a salesperson, to team leader, to manager, to Head Of. But this meant I avoided chaos at all costs. If innovation was needed I secretly hated it.

I became a junkie addicted to calmness. I wanted the least amount of change in my day. One morning my favorite sandwich shop flooded. I nearly had a mental breakdown. The thought of finding another lunch shop felt impossible.

That’s how soft my brain had become.

Since leaving the corporate world I’ve begun to crave chaos. I feel like I can now deal with any problem. Owning a business has little to do with being an entrepreneur. I’ve found it’s simply about going from being a problem creator to a problem solver.

Now I must solve problems or my two daughters and I will starve. The stakes are high. So my mind now always goes to “how do we solve this” instead of “who’s gonna solve this.” It’s a freeing feeling to know that no problem can ruin you.

I understand the importance of distribution

The year after my retirement, I had a big realization.

If we go back to first principles and redefine the meaning of employee and business owner, there’s not much difference except one:

At a job your employer does the sales and marketing for you.

Now, some people will delusionally think it’s them and not their employer’s logo doing the selling – but they learn this lesson the hard way when they go out on their own. In corporate, make no mistake, the sales and marketing is done for you.

When I went out on my own I had to do sales and marketing myself. It looked easy when I was a corporate drone.

It’s 10x harder when you have to do it to survive.

The people I thought would always answer my calls didn’t answer anymore. No explanation. Just ghosting. I no longer had the company logo, so they no longer had any reason to talk with me.

You can’t blame them.

I’d gone rogue. I was a liability. But most of all, I was unrelatable. They didn’t know how to engage with me. We didn’t have the common ground of my employer’s logo anymore. With all that certainty removed it became uncomfortable to talk with me.

So I got ignored.

After my retirement I leaned in harder to nailing down my own distribution. I used multiple social media platforms to build an audience, so I’d always have inbound opportunities and never starve.

It looked easy but it wasn’t.

I decided to focus on multiple platforms because LinkedIn had banned me too many times (for nothing) to bet the farm on them.

If you don’t have a reliable path for new inbound opportunities, you’re effectively trapped without realizing it. It’s a skill you must develop to be free.

I don’t do pointless coffee chats or “pick your brains” anymore

Corporate is full of this garbage.

Employees seek out free mentors, then expect they’ll have the answers to get them fame and fortune. But a free mentor has no incentive to help you. Often, they are only trying to help themselves.

This mentorship mindset created all of these pointless pick-your-brain chats. And it felt like I was stuck in endless back-to-back coffee chats with leads, managers, and team members. It took up most of the time in my day but led to very little progress.

Plus, all the coffee drinking left me as high as a kite by 4PM. I couldn’t think straight. Reality bended… but in a bad way.

Now, I don’t do coffee chats, except one per year with my former bank boss. Gives me so much more time to hang with my daughters and do real work.

And I quit coffee too.

I don’t commute to an office

Commuting is the worst.

The challenge I had was I had to rent a property close to the city, so I could get to my employer’s office in a reasonable timeframe. This meant most of my salary was eaten up on rent. And the apartment I lived in sucked. It was student accommodation with paper-thin walls and a kitchen smaller than my daughter’s Barbie kitchen play set.

Every morning I sat on trains with lifeless, sweaty people in suits jammed together like sardines while some talked loudly into their noise-cancelling headphones about total bullsh*t. I tried to escape the daily nightmare by listening to podcasts.

It got boring though.

There’s only so many times you can listen to some B-grade celebrity interview random people before you feel like you’re watching others have all the fun while your life rots away in some concrete jungle full of suits and bad-tasting bagels.

The best thing that ever happened was the bat virus.

It ended my daily commute. I got a taste of working from home 24/7. And I loved it. I spent more time with my wife and got multiple hours a day back.

One of the reasons I retired was because my employer was starting to light a fire under my ass to return to the office.

I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

So this helped me get my piss-weak, pussy brain to have the balls to send the resignation email. Thank god I did. My brain now demands I work from home forever.

I spend more time with my daughters

I used to climb the corporate ladder for myself.

This made sense when I was single and dateless. The job gave me purpose because I was too dumb to get it from elsewhere. Now I have a wife and two daughters it’s rewired my brain.

I don’t think “How do I impress others so I can get heaps of cash and a big job title?” Nope. My mind thinks “How do I spend more time with my family before I’m dead?”

People think I’m some sort of tough guy on the internet.

LOL. Not in real life. I’m a big, soft ball of fudge. If my daughter brings home a painting from kindergarten, I get tears in my eyes.

I’m sentimental over every moment with both of the girls. The joy I experience is like nothing else I’ve encountered. Now my brain is optimized to experience that joy, which makes the corporate world redundant forever.

Here’s my summary of the last 5 years since retiring

• I don’t care about someone’s job title anymore.

• I never want to work from a noisy office full of distractions ever again.

• I never want to be sandwiched up against a 65 year old man with bad body odor for an hour ever again.

• I never want to be ordered around by a man in a cheap suit ever again.

• I never want anyone else to do the sales and marketing for me ever again because that means they take home all the profit and I get the scraps like Oliver Twist.

• I never want to have to speak corporate w*nk talk ever again and say stupid phrases like “synergy” and “let’s circle back on this.”

• I want to spend every waking hour with my real family, not some pretend corporate family that lays off its family whenever the economy suffers a minor blip because of a war, recession, or shortage in gasoline.

• I want to own everything I build and create.

• I want to develop real skills.

• I want to use my creativity and imagination daily.

• I want to politely say no to customers who are a pain in the ass, rather than being forced to work with them and kiss their smelly asses.

While I’m far from perfect and still have many more goals I want to achieve, I feel like I’ve entered a new era by retiring from corporate, and there’s no way I’m going back to being a slum dog employee in a cheap suit and neck tie noose. My brain is still healing from corporate life, but I’ve nearly recovered.

If you’ve experienced something similar, let me know in the comments.

P.S.

I just dropped my personal story of how I made $6M+ online since leaving corporate forever.

(Honestly, I was stunned at the dollar amount when I did the math)

I always feel weird telling my stories.

But posted anyway in hopes that it inspires you.

You can see that story right here