Not $10k a month. Not passive income while you sleep. One dollar, from a stranger, for something you made.

Not that easy to answer, huh?

Most people have skills, some free evenings in a week, and they’ve watched enough “how I make $30k a month at 22” videos to fill a full weekend. What they don’t have is an answer to two boring questions:

• What exactly can I sell?

• Where will anyone see it?

I was one of them. I watched a lot of those, got intrigued and decided to see for myself.

My first Fiverr order came about 5 days after I put up an album cover gig. Glad it did, because otherwise I’d have forgotten about it after a week.

$15, from a guy who wanted an abstract album cover. It took me 20 minutes in Affinity. I had fun, If I had more time, I’d spend it designing things just for the sake of it.

Then delivered, accepted, paid.

It was that easy. So easy that I started believing internet money is real and accessible to anyone.

In my 5 ways post I ended the Fiverr part with “Then again, traffic source. You need that for every offer.” and left you there. This is the rest of it.

Apart from the steps, I’ll tell you why I’d start with Fiverr and not with your own website, an Instagram page, an agency or a course.

1. The theory (short, I promise), why Fiverr, picking the skill, turning it into an offer.

2. Parts 3–5: building the gig in one evening, getting the first order, and what to do after it. I wrote this assuming it takes you one weekend at most.

3. Already know what you’d sell? Skip to Part 2.

If you’ve never made any money online, do it not for the dream of getting rich, but for the experience that opens doors to more ideas. Learn in the process, it really is the best teacher.

There’s a one-page worksheet at the very bottom, so you don’t have to Ctrl+F every time you get stuck.

Why $1, and why Fiverr

The theory part. 3 minutes.

Every online business boils down to two things: somewhere people find you, and somewhere they can pay you. Traffic and payment.

Most after-work projects die between those two. You build the thing, then you need an audience, then a website, then a payment page, then a logo (obviously), and 3 weeks later you have a Canva folder and $0.

None of those things are hard to get around, but getting around things is what we want to avoid. We want the most straightforward, low-friction way there is, and Fiverr is just fine for that. You can (and probably should) drop it later on.

Buyers are already searching there, they pay through Fiverr, and you withdraw to PayPal. It’s like renting a shelf in a supermarket that’s already full of customers: you don’t build the store, you put your thing on the shelf. They take 20% of every order as rent.

Is that where I’d want to be in 5 years? Hell no. Good place to start? Yeah!

The first dollar matters more than it sounds: before it, every evening you sit down and ask “is this stupid?”. After it, you ask “what do I sell next?”. It’s a common experience, I’ve heard it from many people. I’m telling you to show you it’s possible, and you get a bag of chips as a bonus.

Fair warning though: Fiverr isn’t what it was a few years ago. In early 2026 it had 2.9 million active buyers, almost 18% fewer than a year before, and AI took some of the simplest gigs. It still works, but it’s not a guarantee, so there’s a plan B at the end.

Part 1: Pick the skill

Find one thing you can sell in the next 2 weeks. Not the thing you’d love to sell in 5 years, narrow your sight to the next 14 days.

Last week I gave you 5 questions about the person you were 2 years ago. If you answered them, you already have a list. If not, grab a pen now, because this part is all questions.

Think of every message you’ve ever got that started with “Can you quickly…”.

• What do people ask you to “quickly” do? Fix their CV, make a logo for their cousin’s barbershop, sort out their Excel?

• What do coworkers come to you for, even though it’s not your job?

• Has anyone ever told you “you should charge for this”? For what?

• What did you google 100 times before it finally clicked?

• What file could you deliver in under 90 minutes, tired, on a Tuesday?

Write down 3 candidates. Now run each one through 3 filters:

• You’ve done it before. At least 5 times, for yourself, a friend, or at work. Learning a skill from zero and selling it the same month is two projects, and you have time for one.

• You sell output, not hours. My English tutoring paid per hour, and the hours can’t be stretched. An album cover is a file. As I wrote last time: “The client doesn’t care if it took me 15 hours or 15 minutes to create.” Mine took 15.

• It fits one evening. If one order eats your whole Saturday, you’ll hate it by the third order. Aim for something you can deliver in 1–2 hours after work.

Then search each one on Fiverr. If you find nothing, nobody’s buying it there. If you find 10,000 gigs, it’s too easy to do.

Need ideas? Things that pass all 3 filters for a lot of people with a 9-5: album and podcast covers, YouTube thumbnails, fixing or building Google Sheets, rewriting a CV in English, translating, cutting a podcast into 30-second reels, setting up a Notion workspace, product descriptions for Etsy sellers.

Pick one. Just one. You can add a second skill when the first one has paid.

Note: Fiverr is FULL of scammers. Run every file someone sends you through VirusTotal before you open it. If an offer is too good to be true, it’s not true. If someone wants to talk on Telegram, it’s a scam.

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Part 2: Turn it into an offer

Make “I do graphics” into something a stranger can buy in 10 seconds.

“I do graphics” is a skill. “3 concepts for your single in 12 hours” is an offer.

A buyer scrolling Fiverr doesn’t check who you are (remember last week?). They check three things: Is this my problem? Does it look like it works? Is it cheaper than figuring it out myself? And don’t worry about “Who am I to sell this?”. You’ll be surprised how happy people are with your mid work.

Your offer has to answer all three before they scroll past.

See the difference? The strong side has one buyer, one result and a deadline or a guarantee.

One buyer + one result + delivery time = offer.

A small service is easier to sell than a product, and a great way to start. You don’t need a course, a brand or even a website to do it.

The price

Start lower than your ego wants. Fiverr’s minimum is $5, but you don’t have to go that low. If you decide to anyway, remember there’s no advantage in being the second cheapest.

Say your basic package is $25. Fiverr keeps 20%, you get $20. If it takes you 30 minutes, that’s $40 an hour for something you’d do at your desk anyway.

Fiverr gives you 3 packages, so use them:

• Basic: the smallest version. 1 concept, 3 days.

• Standard: the one you want them to buy. 3 concepts, 2 days, source file.

• Premium: everything, fast. It mostly exists to make Standard look cheap.

A lot of numbers, I know. If you’re reading this tired on a Thursday, let’s make a deal: tonight, write only the offer sentence.

“I will [result] for [who] in [time].”

The packages can wait until your next block.

Who am I to sell this?

The offer is written, Fiverr is open, you’re one click from publishing, and last week’s sentence shows up:

“Who am I to sell this?”

That’s what The Builder Identity Install is for. 14 days, 18 minutes a night, $27.

You find the sentence that ended your last project, write your answer to it while you’re rested, and log the nights you did the work anyway. If you do all 14 days and nothing moves, I’ll refund you.

Get The Builder Identity Install

Founding Builders, it’s already in your tier!

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A skill, a way of doing things that took you years to figure out and now feels so natural that you don’t label it as hard.

Today it’s how to kill “Who am I to sell this” sentence and make money against your will.

Who am I to

Before the Identity Install went live, I rewrote the sales page several times. Every version started with some form of “I’m not a psychologist, but…”

Heck, I’ve even rewritten the skeleton, because every new idea looked better than the last one, which is a different trap.

The thought always goes the same way:

I have an idea for a template → I google it → a guy with 1M followers sells the same thing for $49 → who am I to sell this? → I abandon the idea.

How many of your ideas died at the third arrow?

The thing is: “Who am I to sell this?” assumes you’re applying for the job of the world’s best. Nobody holds that job, and nobody is hiring for it. You’re applying to be useful to one person who is one step behind you. That’s all.

You’re not dumb and you’ve certainly taught someone in your life. You don’t think of charging your kid for teaching them how to ride a bike, but someone who can’t and really wants to learn would gladly pay.

I chose this example on purpose, because what may be your 10,000th attempt is someone else’s first.

Who’s actually buying

You didn’t learn to drive from Lewis Hamilton. You learned from a tired guy in a Kia Rio with a second brake pedal, who had been saying “clutch, clutch, CLUTCH” for 15 years. Was he the best driver in the country? Hell no. Did you pass? Probably.

He wasn’t selling to Lewis Hamilton either. Experts don’t buy your $27 template, beginners do. And a beginner doesn’t need the best person in the world, he needs someone who still remembers being where he is now (which the best person in the world usually doesn’t).

I taught English online after my 9-5. I’m Polish. My students didn’t need Shakespeare, they needed someone who could explain why “I have been” and “I was” aren’t the same thing.

When I started, I wasn’t sure I was the right person for it. Within a few days I realized the people I taught were a good few steps behind me, and even someone with half my knowledge would do just as well.

Your teachers in school weren’t the best in the business, but you can still write and do math.

Being the best ≠ being useful.

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How you sound when you believe it

The sentence doesn’t only stop you from selling. When you sell anyway, it leaks into how you describe the thing. Have you ever seen a post that starts with “Sorry for the self-promo”? Did you buy anything from it?

Weak

• “I’m not an expert, but…”

• “It’s just a simple template, nothing special.”

• “Sorry for the self-promo.”

• “Pay what you want, if you want.”

Strong

• “I’ve done this for 8 months. Here’s what worked.”

• “The exact template I use every Sunday.”

• “It’s $27. If it doesn’t help, I’ll refund you.”

• “It’s for people who work 8 hours and have 1 hour left for this.”

The strong side never says “I’m the best”. It says what you did, for how long, and who it’s for. That’s what a buyer checks.

The refund line is the cheapest way to calm the voice in your head. You think it works, and if you’re wrong, they get their money back. Nobody gets hurt, except your ego for 5 minutes.

What the voice says back

Your brain has a whole list of bullshit arguments that sound like humility. Let’s answer them:

“There are people way better at this than me.”

Yes. And they’re busy selling $2,000 coaching to people who are already good. The guy who started last month can’t afford them, and wouldn’t understand half of it anyway.

“Everything is free on YouTube.”

Every recipe is free online too, and cookbooks still sell. People pay for someone to put it in order and save them 40 hours of watching videos at 1.5x speed. Many educators give away everything from their paid products for free, messy and scattered across hundreds of posts and videos. People pay for a concrete A-to-B path anyway.

“What if someone calls me out?”

Then you learn what to fix. Honestly, most people won’t even notice your launch. That sucks for sales, but it’s great news for your ego.

“I’ll sell when I’m ready.”

You’ll feel ready around the same time you feel like an expert, which is never.

2 years ago you

So what can you sell? Grab a pen and answer a few questions first:

1. What can you do now that you couldn’t do 2 years ago?

2. What did you google 100 times before it finally clicked?

3. What do coworkers or friends ask you to help with? (fixing their Excel counts)

4. What mistake cost you the most time or money?

5. Would 2-years-ago you pay $10 to skip it?

If the answer to the last one is yes, you have something to sell. The person you were 2 years ago is your first customer, and there are a lot of people like him right now.

Start today

Tonight, take 18 minutes and answer those 5 questions. Pick one answer and write one sentence about it in the strong version: what you did, for how long, and who it’s for.

“I did [X] for [time]. Here’s how, for people who [situation].” (That’s also your bio btw)

Don’t build anything yet. Don’t google who else sells it (you already know how that chain ends).

18 minutes, 5 questions, 1 sentence. That’s it.

P.S. Next Thursday’s deep dive picks up from here: making your first $1 online. Choosing the skill, building the offer around it, and using Fiverr as the vehicle, step by step. The first half is free. Hyper Achievers and Founding Builders get the full walkthrough.

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.

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$7.99 a month or $79 a year. Cheaper than a coffee or the course you didn’t finish.

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Nobody forced me to do the second one (if anything, the opposite), and nobody will force you to do yours.

Building after work happens in hours where nobody holds you accountable but you.

I hate when work-life balance advice is written by people who quit their jobs years ago. They remember the 9-5 like you remember high school: selectively. So here’s how it looks from someone still inside it.

Work after work kills work-life balance

If you want to build something that gets you out of the 9-5 before official retirement, and you can’t afford to quit it now, work-life balance doesn’t exist.

Sorry.

Assuming you don’t want to spend most of your life on someone else’s rules, you have 3 choices:

1. Employee -> solopreneur. The default path for us here. Build a project you enjoy after work, one that will eventually buy you freedom. Something you own, something you control, something that comes from the actual you. A lifestyle business, as Ali Abdaal put it nicely.

2. A career that pays well enough to pursue FIRE in 20-30 years. You still build after work, but without thinking about the money it makes.

3. A job you enjoy and can comfortably do until retirement, or even until the end of your days. That usually doesn’t pair with a good salary, though.

Which one are you on right now?

For 1

Focus on what you want to do before what brings money.
If you hate it, you won’t be able to carry on after a whole workday.

AchievR is not the most profitable thing I can do after work.
I literally have an alternative in my bookmarks that pays by the hour, and pays well.

But I like doing it.

I’ve had a few people reach me on Twitter with the same message:

“Hey bro, you can automate your writing 100%!”

Ok, but I don’t want to. I want to write.

I write a very rough draft to jot down my ideas before I forget them, then I give it to Claude so it can turn it into something readable. That’s how it should be used. You sketch the whole thing, AI only adds colors.

Focus on something you can build. The problem with most day jobs is that you build nothing for yourself, sometimes not even skills.

Years pass, and if you haven’t been smart with money, you can wake up with nothing to show for the thing you’ve devoted most of your waking hours to.

If something progresses, it progresses for your boss and your boss’s boss.

You often hear people complaining about how bad today’s economy is. What you don’t hear is how the whole paradigm changed the moment we got the internet.

Being born poor in the wrong part of the world 50 years ago was a much worse sentence than the same circumstances today. Today the entry ticket is a laptop and wifi.

My first money online came from CS:GO skins when I was a teenager. It was pennies, and I gambled it away, but it was possible. I’ve seen people making businesses of that and of many other things I wouldn’t even think of.

I wrote about that and 4 other ways I’ve made money online here:

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For 2

Honestly, that might be the best case, for one major reason. It’s nice to go home and just close the money box in your head knowing everything takes care of itself in those 8 hours and now you’re free to do whatever you want not caring if it makes a single penny.

You can hang out without checking whether your own thing is succeeding.

I have one problem with this approach, though: I hate working for someone else.

For 3

If you already have that job, close this tab and go enjoy your evening.

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Do seasons

Instead of thinking about work-life balance day by day, think about it like seasons of the year.

A season of intense work, then a season of chilling.

During the intense season, evenings belong to the project. The block happens whether you feel like it or not. Full grind. You’ll like it after enough repetitions. Once it becomes part of your identity, it’s hard to find that feeling of fulfillment anywhere else.

It will still be hard, though. To not go crazy: the chill season.

Do anything you want without guilt. Catch up on the shows, play video games, see people more often, drink, eat.

Ironically, you may notice this season gets boring much faster than the grind one. You couldn’t wait for it, and now you have a new idea you want to test. The grass is always greener.

Why not do a little of both every day?
Because you sit on the bed thinking about the project, then at your desk thinking about the bed.

It’s like changing your windshield washer fluid from summer to winter in the morning, then back to summer in the evening. It’s easier to switch seasons by weeks than by hours.

I usually encourage you to put everything in the calendar. Here I say: switch when you feel like it.

The hard part

The chill season runs itself. Nobody needs a system to play video games.

The grind season is where it breaks. You come home after 8 hours, sit down at the desk, and one sentence shows up:

“I’m too tired today.”
“Who am I to do this?”
“What if I waste a year on this?”

Sound familiar? One of those probably ended your last project.

That’s what The Builder Identity Install is for. 14 days, 18 minutes a night, $27.

You find the sentence that ended your last project, write your answer to it while you’re rested, and log the nights you did the work anyway. The goal is to become a person who builds after work, tired or not.

If you do the 14 days and nothing moved, I’ll refund you.

Get The Builder Identity Install

Founding Builders, it’s already in your tier.

P.S. I’m looking for someone with deep knowledge about agentic AI. If that’s you, hit me up here on Substack or just reply to this email!

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.

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The first money I ever made on the internet came from a video game.

I’ll tell you which one at the end.

Here are 5 ways I’ve made money online after school, then after work, and how I’d turn them into projects with full-time potential today.

1. Teaching English paid fine until I ran out of hours

I taught English online, it was a side gig after my 9-5.

I was a tutor at a company that sells one-year (or longer) courses to corporations and individuals.

I was logging onto a platform, setting myself available and students could call me. I had a few regular students, the company provided materials, 100% work from home, I was playing Minecraft between calls.

Seems perfect.

One big problem though—not enough hours. The platform only got traffic late afternoon and the max I could do was about 3h/day.

Even though the hourly rate was good, it wasn’t enough. And I had to teach kids too, which I hated.

Income was hours times price, and both have a ceiling. Especially after work, I only had so many hours.

I genuinely enjoyed teaching, but it wasn’t scalable in that form—which was why I eventually stopped.

How I’d make it full-time:

I’d stop selling one hour to one person.

Groups first. 5 people paying half the hourly rate is 2.5 hours of pay for 1 hour of evening.

Then I’d go narrow, as English teaching is saturated. Say, English for Swiss architects aiming to work in the US.

Then something recorded, built from the questions students ask every week. Something created once that would be my flagship.

So, less focus on selling hours, more focus on selling a product which is recorded one time, then marketed in lessons and...

Traffic engine. My own place where students can find me, organically in the best case.

Instagram to newsletter, newsletter to lessons landing page, lessons to show the value of my teaching and point to the course.

2. Print on demand scales, as long as Amazon lets you stay

I did print on demand for a good few months, mainly on Amazon (Merch and KDP).

If you’ve never touched it: KDP lets you upload books to Amazon and earn royalties from them.

Every time someone buys your book, Amazon prints it, sends it to the customer and you get a cut. Merch is the same with t-shirts, except you have to apply first and wait to get accepted.

All you do is the design, the cover and the listing. Amazon handles the rest.

The catch is that pretty much everybody who ever touched a computer can create a simple notebook, and the get-rich-quick crowd floods Amazon with them.

You either land on the first page of a keyword or you’ll never be found, hardly anyone goes to the second page.

And one trademark you didn’t check will get you banned or even sued.

Amazon was about 90% of my earnings. Other platforms played a minor role.

It is scalable though. A design you upload once keeps selling without you touching it.

I had a YouTube channel about it too, and truth is, you can make more money teaching print on demand than doing it.

How I’d make it full-time:

Amazon first.

You can get banned for no reason. My Amazon account linked to KDP got banned for “too many returns”. I’d never returned a thing.

Once you get banned it’s over. Amazon treats customers way better than sellers.

All things considered, it’s still a hegemon and the only chance for decent organic revenue.

Second path is any POD platform (like Redbubble) + your own traffic. After all, it’s a very convenient business, the dirty job (dealing with customers) is handled by the platform.

This + creating content teaching it. If I have that knowledge anyway, why not package it into a course and sell it?

If somebody forwarded this to you: one post a Thursday, for people building something after work.

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3. Fiverr album covers paid well for the minutes they took

If you’ve never used it: Fiverr is a marketplace for small freelance jobs. You put up a gig, one service for a fixed price, like “I will design your album cover”.

Buyers search and order, you deliver the file. Fiverr takes a cut of every order.

I mostly made album covers, I like designing, it was fun, paid... good for the time I spent on it. And I did 0 external promotion, it just lived its own life.

How I’d make it full-time:

It’s not the same as teaching. If someone pays you to teach them for 1 hour, you teach for 1 hour and can’t do anything else during that time.

An album cover is a file after all. The client doesn’t care if it took me 15 hours or 15 minutes to create. Surprisingly, most took closer to 15 minutes. 30 at most.

Priced well enough, it’s doable to hit a satisfying hourly rate.

Then again, traffic source. Necessary if we’re talking any money near full-time.

4. My music channel got views and couldn’t earn a cent

About 6 years ago I ran a music channel on YouTube.

It was slowing down popular songs and adding reverb, which had insane popularity for some time.

The problem was copyright. Doesn’t matter how many views I got, I couldn’t earn a cent from a video.

To be honest, I don’t know how it is now. I guess it’s saturated due to AI, anyone can generate an hour of music today.

And since July 2025 YouTube doesn’t pay channels built on mass-produced, repetitive content.

How I’d make it full-time:

I wouldn’t start this one today with music I don’t own.

I’d only use music I made or licensed properly, and once the channel got popular enough, it would charge for promoting other people’s music.

Alternatively, turn it into a “play it on TV as background noise/ambient” type of channel with an original twist.

Know somebody who wants their after-work project to start paying? Send them this one!

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5. My first money online came from CS:GO skins

About 10 years ago, my first $ online came from trading CS:GO skins. I eventually lost everything on betting and roulette, glad I didn’t have a credit card back then.

I put it here more as a fun fact than an actual after-work project idea, but it was my first lesson in buying cheap and selling to someone who wants it more.

5 questions before you give a project a year

Assuming you want to monetize it.

“Who am I to sell this?”

Look at the full-time plans above again.

2 of them end the same way. Take what I already know, package it into a course, sell it.

That’s the step where a lot of after-work projects stop, usually on one sentence:

“Who am I to sell this?”

Or

“What if I waste a year on this?”

Both are sentences that end side projects. Knowing where they come from is step 0.

That’s what The Builder Identity Install is for. 14 days, 18 minutes a night, $27.

Long story short: You find the sentence that ended your last projects, write your answers to it while you’re rested, and log the nights you did the work anyway.

The goal is to transform your identity into that of a person who does what you want to do. Right now, something stops you.

If you know what it is, great! If not:

find out

If you do the 14 days and nothing moved, I’ll refund you.

Founding Builders, it’s already in your tier!

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.

Subscribe now

P.S. Want every deep dive plus the Builder Paths through the archive? That's the Hyper Achiever tier.

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I buy it by hand, but I don’t decide it, and I don’t have to feel like it.

My writing had nothing like that for years, so every evening was a new decision, made by someone with 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 years of practice at being an employee. That’s around 11,000 hours.

Then at 19:43 I asked a builder with a few weeks of practice to beat him, no wonder I didn’t do much.

Every habit book tells you to be consistent, and you’ll become the kind of person who does hard things, but that’s step 3. Trying it before 1 and 2 will fail.

Step 1 is matching your identity, installing consistency into it instead of relying on willpower, which is a fast-burning and unreliable fuel.

I had the order backwards.

There’s a point where doing the work costs you less than skipping it. People chasing FIRE have a name for it, the crossover point. By the end of this post you’ll know where yours is and how far away you are.

FIRE, which stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, is an idea of retiring at an earlier age by investing. A well-known concept that many people bought into, including me.

Financial-wise it is reasonable, clear and simple, not always easy to execute. Takes tons of patience. But once you get the idea and realize that it’s real, it’s more difficult to abandon than to keep doing, because the prize is worth it—financial freedom.

Which is basically just freedom. You may not be in prison, but if you have to spend most of your waking hours in a place you don’t want to be at, doing things you don’t want to do, with people you don’t want to see, are you really free?

Identity-wise it’s unclear and difficult. It takes tons of effort, and it’s easier to abandon than to keep going. But the prize is even better—the ability to change, to shape your identity in a desired direction. The skill to become the person you want to be.

Put very simply: you want to be a pianist, so you make that your identity. You’re the person who plays piano, therefore you don’t have to force yourself to play it, as that’s what you are.

As with financial FIRE, small investments compound over time into big results. Identity FIRE is the same, and it has the same parts: deposits, savings rate, withdrawals, crashes, and a point where it starts paying for itself.

Identity FIRE, in one sentence: one deposit of 18 minutes or less, on 6 evenings out of 7, sized for your worst evening, until doing the work costs you less than skipping it.

As always with Deep Dives, no unnecessary talk, just pure useful value.

1. Motivation pays for 9 days

2. The identity with more hours in it gets the evening

3. The first deposits have to fit the person you are now

4. Six small evenings beat one big Saturday

5. A missed evening costs less than what you say about it

6. Past the crossover point, skipping costs more than working

7. Three answers on one page beat a 30-day plan

Apparently there was a problem with yesterday’s poll, so you can vote here.

1. Motivation pays for 9 days

I’ve started many projects, many times. All of the projects that failed, failed not because I saw no future for them, but because doing them was hard, and I was treating hard with willpower and discipline while thinking of myself as a person who doesn’t do those kinds of things.

Every restart looked the same. Domains bought. A logo I spent more evenings on than the first post. Pretty Notion page built (notice most of those actions are designing, I had no trouble calling myself a designer).

Then about 9 days of real work. Then one evening went wrong, then I stopped opening the folders.

I blamed the work for being hard. Looking back, most of it was easy. It just didn’t fit who I thought I was.

Something hard for you is easy for someone else and you can always bring your identity closer to that someone else.

If you identify as an introverted gamer, booting up the game on Friday evening is an automatic process requiring no thought. That’s person A.

If that same person gets invited to a party with a lot of people, Friday evening now requires making unfamiliar decisions and fighting discomfort, which is not present for an extraverted party goer. That’s person B. For A, taking this action conflicts with an established identity.

I gave 2 identity examples on a spectrum, so you can identify with A or B.

Although both playing a game and going to a party are common and easy things to do, for person A going to a party is like a dentist visit, while for person B playing a single-player game on a Friday night is as weird as going to bed at 21:00 on a Friday.

They both don’t feel comfortable, and how easy or hard the things actually are to do plays little role here.

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So what carried me through those 9 days of doing things that didn’t fit me? Motivation.

Motivation works like a bonus at work. It’s real money, and it’s paid once.

The mistake is what you do with it. You plan a whole new lifestyle on a one-off bonus. An hour every evening. A post every day. The 5:00 alarm.

Maybe yours was the first Saturday with a 10-hour binge or “I’ll post every day this month”.

For about 9 days the bonus pays for all of it. Then it runs out, and the cost of doing something that isn’t you is still there, as big as on day 1.

So if motivation only covers the first 9 days, what pays for an ordinary Tuesday?

2. The identity with more hours in it gets the evening

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

— Epictetus, Discourses 3.23

Around 2,000 years old, and it’s the order I got backwards for 4 years. I did the “what” and waited for the “who” to show up.

You have roles in life: son, daughter, employee, football teammate, writer, coach. Each of those requires a different part of your flexible identity.

Now, I want you to think of identity as an account.

You can have one, you can have many, like in a bank. The one everyone has is the current one.

For most people reading this, the current account is the employee one. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. The 11,000 hours from the top of this post. Your builder account has a few restarts in it.

If part of your identity is being a smoker, smoking costs nothing, because it matches who you are.

If you don’t perceive yourself as a runner, going for a run will be hard. Even though it’s just running, it will cost much more than smoking, because running is not something that you do.

I called identity flexible, but bending it requires effort. It’s not like steel, rather a solid memory foam.

Actions that don’t match get paid in willpower, and willpower works like a card with a daily limit. Your job swipes it all day.

The employee account pays for its evenings without swiping anything. Opening YouTube costs it nothing. Answering one more work message costs nothing. At 21:09 the account with more hours in it wins by default.

The more repetitions of an action, the more the action becomes who you are, and the easier it is to perform the next one.

You can do it both ways:

1. Negative: cut reps of the actions that feed the identity you’re leaving. -

2. Positive: add reps of the actions that feed the identity you want. +

You can divide it by role, and by negative and positive actions, and match them. The template to do that (Notion and print) is at the bottom of this post and in the resource library.

For example:

• Employee (the current account, thousands of reps). Keep the 8 hours and do them well. Cut: work Slack after 18:00, “one small thing” for work at 20:30.

• Builder (the new account, a few reps). Add: the project file open before the phone, one paragraph, one post out on Thursday. Cut: the video “for inspiration”, the third redesign of the Notion dashboard.

Which leaves a problem. You have to be the person before the evenings get easy. But the only way to become someone is to do what they do.

So which one goes first?

3. The first deposits have to fit the person you are now

“Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.1

Builders. I didn’t pick this one by accident.

Look at how FIRE deals with the same problem. You need investment income to retire, and you can’t have investment income without investing first.

People don’t wait for investment income before they start saving. People save out of the job they already have.

And they start with an amount they won’t miss. Nobody moves their whole salary into ETFs in month one.

Identity works the same way. You fund the builder out of the employee’s budget, in amounts so small the employee doesn’t notice they’re gone. The employee can’t veto 18 minutes. It can veto 3 hours every evening, and it will, around day 9.

James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits:

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Good start. But how do the votes get counted?

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A new person has a value of 0 assigned to them. Every good action is +1, every bad one −1. I wrote about that in Tired is not a verdict. Here’s the part I didn’t say then.

When you get to know somebody, you count how often, and you barely look at how long. A coworker who brings you a coffee every morning for a month is “the nice guy”. The one who helped you move house once, for a whole Saturday, is “the guy who helped me move that one time”.

You judge yourself the same way. You work out who you are partly by watching what you do, like an outside observer would. The observer counts evenings. Hours barely register.

So a deposit has two rules.

1. It fits your worst evening. The one after a long, tough day when your head is empty. If the deposit only fits good evenings, every bad one becomes a gap, and you will have plenty of bad ones.

2. It leaves something behind that didn’t exist before. A paragraph. A fixed bug. A listing with a price. The whole rule is in Tired is not a verdict: one unit of work in one sitting.

The size will feel embarrassing. Good. The employee won’t bother fighting something that small.

My first month of working out was doing different variations of push-ups. My first month of AchievR (All Things Self Improvement then) was just putting fragments of my old mental health book somewhere on the internet.

You can start tonight with those rules. One deposit, something left behind.

I’ll be straight about how it goes, because it went this way for me.

Two things will break it.

The deposit will be the right size, and at 21:09 the sentence that ended your last projects shows up.

• “I’ll catch up on Saturday.”

• “I’m not ready.”

• “It’s too hard for today”

• “I’m not cut out to do those”

You’ll have nothing written to answer it, so it’ll win.

Then week 2. One bad evening, then a second one, then the old verdict comes back louder:

“See? I always quit.”

There’s no evidence yet to point at, so you’ll believe it.

That’s what The Builder Identity Install is for. 14 days, 18 minutes a night.

Days 1 to 7 find the sentence that repeats across your dead projects, and you write the answers to it while you’re still rested. Days 8 to 14 collect four nights of evidence, one of them on your worst evening on purpose, and tie the whole thing to one person, by name.

Autopsy. Rewrite. Evidence. Anchor. AREA!

$27. Do the 14 days, and if nothing moved I’ll refund you.

Get the Install

Paid subscribers have the rest of this deep dive below.

Founding Builders have the rest of this deep dive and the product. This one and every one after it.

One question is left, the paid half starts with it.

If every evening is a deposit, does it matter how big the deposit is?

4. Six small evenings beat one big Saturday

“If you wish to be a good reader, read; if you wish to be a good writer, write.”

— Epictetus, Discourses 2.18

In the same chapter, Epictetus tells his students how to stop being angry. Count the days you weren’t. “I used to be angry every day, after that every other day, then every third, and then every fourth day.”

He didn’t ask for zero. He counted how often. A habit tracker, nearly 2,000 years ago.

It’s easy to get the idea of FIRE. You can calculate how much you need in 5 minutes, set a goal, stick to it for decades and that’s the whole plan.

With identity, it’s abstract. Actions are not as easily comprehensible as numbers.

So let’s turn them into one.

Your identity has a savings rate. It’s the share of your evenings that vote for the builder.

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I’ve always had a project.
Something I was working on in my free time. Sometimes moving slowly, sometimes irrelevant, but always mine.

Which has 2 sides.

It was mine and... it was mine. Which meant I was fully responsible for a project and its success, and that can get heavy.

Every project started the same way.

Big energy. Big plans. Novelty excitement.
Then work got busy, and the project turned into something I’d get back to when life calmed down.

So I tried systems.
I read Deep Work and blocked 90 minutes every evening after day job.
I copied a 5 AM morning routine off YouTube.
I lost a whole Sunday building a Notion dashboard.
I downloaded two habit apps and chased the streaks.

Each one held about 9 days.
Then one evening went wrong, the app closed, and I never opened it again.

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So I did the autopsy.

Mostly me staring at old folders and feeling mildly embarrassed.
I expected to find bad time management, wrong tools, projects too big for my evenings.

The same sentence was sitting in every folder.

“I’ll just catch up on Saturday.”

Yeah, guess what happened.

It sounded completely reasonable every time, which is how it got past me.

Under the sentence sat the problem.

For 8 hours a day somebody hands me the brief, sets the deadline and approves the work.

Then I sat down at my own project and nobody handed me anything.
So I waited. For energy, for clarity, for the right week.

The only “right” week is the next week. The only right week is this week. This day. This hour. This minute.

I was running an employee’s self-concept while trying to do a builder’s work.
Every system I bought went on top of that employee, and none of them made it past day 9.

That’s when I got it.
The work you do after 17:00 comes out of who you think you are after 17:00.
I’d spent years fixing the work.
The person doing it was still an employee.

The Builder Identity Install is what I built to go underneath.
14 days, 18 minutes a night, 40 pages you print and write in.

It runs in 4 steps, in a fixed order. I call it AREA.

1. Autopsy. Your dead projects, dated, until the same sentence shows up in all of them.

2. Rewrite. The five sentences employed people tell themselves about their side projects, which are their real projects.

3. Evidence. Four nights, and one of them is the worst evening of your week, on purpose.

4. Anchor. One person, by name.

How each step works is in the workbook.

The problem: you keep starting, you keep stopping, and every new system dies on the first bad evening.

What you walk away with: exact sentence that ends your projects, 6 answers to it you wrote while rested, 4 nights of evidence on one page, and a card on your desk for 19:43 on a bad Tuesday.

In short: a proof that you can change your identity to a desired one.

I set 24 September as the launch date back in August.
Yesterday was 24 September. Today, it goes out for everyone!

Now run your own version forward five years.
Busy evenings, a folder of drafts, a domain you’ve renewed twice.

Same embarrassing answer when someone asks how the project’s going.

Same frustration that comes with working for someone else.

Same dissatisfaction with not creating anything of value—and at the same time, not having time for anything.

Nothing bad happens in any single week.
And that’s how five years go past.

$27 is two books you’d buy and not finish.

Get the workbook · $27

If you’ve never started and stopped anything, skip it. You don’t have material for Day 1 yet.

Do the 14 days. If nothing moved, write to beniamin@achievr.co and tell me which day was the waste of time. You get the refund and keep the workbook.

14 days. 18 minutes. Start tonight at 19:43. New identity that builds.

I'm ready

P.S. Founding Builders, it’s already yours. Nothing to do.

Roughly 85 hours.

I have no memory of struggling to find the time for it. It happened in the evenings where things I’d called important sat on a list and didn’t get done.

Those things didn’t lose to tiredness. They lost to Dexter, tiredness turned up afterwards to explain it.

I don’t enjoy writing that down. It says I’m lazy rather than hardworking, and lazy isn’t an identity I identify with.

It’s still a hard fact thought. And hard facts are how airplanes get built, so we’re going to use them.

It’s not “Who I am” it’s “What I do”

Upon meeting someone new, you make assumptions.
As time passes and you get to know them better, assumptions turn into beliefs.

Reshaping your identity is a process similar to meeting someone new, in a way.
There’s a difference though in how assumptions turn into hard beliefs.

A new person has a value 0 assigned to them, every good action is +1, bad -1.

It’s a very easy equation, addition and subtraction. But, when it comes to you, it’s not so easy anymore, it turns into integrals.

Actions confirm identity. Actions repeated consistently over time are habits. Habits create your identity. Like the quote:

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

Therefore the whole game is like chess: simple to understand, hard to master.

“I’ve already worked 8 hours” is true, which is why it wins

This is the excuse I hear most and it’s the only one on my list that’s completely honest.

You did work 8 hours. 10 with the commute.

You solved other people’s problems all day and left a lot of energy in a building you don’t own.

That’s a cost. I’m not going to argue with it.

The trick this excuse pulls is that it borrows the legitimacy of work you did for somebody else and spends it on your own project. The 8 hours definitely were real, so the sentence feels real, and it never gets checked.

So check it.

The question you can’t answer from memory

Were you equally tired on the nights you did the work?

Everybody says no.

Everybody is wrong.

The nights you worked don’t get filed as tired nights. They get filed as nights you worked.

Think about how your own head stores this.

• The Tuesday you fixed the bug after work is filed under “fixed the bug”, and the fact that you were knackered doing it never made it into the label.

• The Saturday you sent the three emails you’d been avoiding is filed under “sent the emails”, not “sent the emails on four hours of sleep”.

• The evening you wrote 300 words is filed under “wrote 300 words”, and by the next week you couldn’t tell me whether you were tired that night or not.

When you go looking for proof that you can work while tired, your head returns nothing.

But it happened—just never got stored under that heading.

That’s a memory problem, and memory problems get solved with paper.

If somebody forwarded this to you, subscribe here. One post a Thursday, for people building something after work.

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Rows beat a month of remembering. Here’s something you can start tonight:

One row a night for 4 nights.

Write it on paper and put it where your eyes already go. Wallpaper / phone’s lock screen.

I’ll be straight about how this goes, because I did it badly the first time.

On night 1 you’ll fill it in and feel slightly stupid, like a child with a sticker chart.

Night 2 you’ll forget until you’re in bed, and you’ll tell yourself you’ll do it in the morning, which you obviously won’t do.

The fix is that row gets written the second you close the file, before you stand up. It takes 15 seconds.

What goes in the “what I did” column

The column is unanswerable until you’ve decided what counts, here’s the rule I use.

One unit of work, in one sitting, in 18 minutes or less, that leaves something existing afterwards that didn’t exist before.

Every part of that is load-bearing.

One sitting rules out anything you’d have to come back to, which means it can’t fail halfway.

18 minutes or less puts it under the line where “too tired” is a fair objection.

Something existing afterwards rules out reading, planning, researching, watching tutorials and reorganizing your workspace. All of those feel like the project. None of them produce a row.

Examples:

• Write one paragraph.

• Fix one bug you already know about.

• Cut 30 seconds out of the footage you already shot.

• Write the listing for one item and set the price.

• Open the file, change one sentence, close the file.

That last one looks like cheating and it isn’t. On the night everything goes wrong it’s the difference between a row and a gap, and a row on a bad night is the whole point of doing this at all.

The last column is doing the work

The first 4 columns are a habit tracker and habit trackers are a solved, boring problem.

Without going into too much detail here, we’ll need information from column 5.

You rate, 1 to 5, how much you wanted to skip. Then you write down that you did it anyway, on the same line, 3 cm to the left.

After 4 nights you’re holding something your memory has never once produced: a night where wanting-to-skip was a 5 and the work happened.

4 rows will not change how you feel about yourself. A self-image you spent 10 years building doesn’t move in 4 days.

What 4 rows give you is something to point at when the feeling disagrees with you, which is a smaller claim and a true one. If you’re expecting the feeling to arrive on Day 4, you’ll quit on Day 5.

Might seem like nothing but it’s something, and the value of just something after years of relying on nothing tangible is just enormous. And a good starting point for further identity change in desired direction.

Rate it honestly. A log where every night is a 2 is a log you wrote to look good, and you’re the only person who will ever read it.

You must be honest with yourself to change.

Know somebody who keeps starting things after work and stopping? Send them this one.

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The thing I’ve been building

Changing your identity is what the last 3 weeks of posts have been walking through, and it’s what I’ve spent this month putting into one place.

The Builder Identity Install. 14 days, 18 minutes a night.

• Days 1 to 3, the autopsy. List your dead projects, date the week each one died, and write down what you told yourself that week. By Day 3, the thing stopping you is a sentence with a date on it. Easier to fight than “something is wrong with me.”

• Days 4 to 7, the rewrite. Thirty answers to the five sentences, already written by me. Then write six of your own for the one that’s yours, while you can still think straight. At 21:15 on a Tuesday, you don’t have to come up with anything. You read what rested-you already wrote.

• Days 8 to 11, the log. Tonight’s four rows, 18 minutes each. One of them goes on the worst evening of your week, picked in advance. That’s the row you’ll still point at in six months, because it’s the exact night the sentence said was impossible.

• Days 12 to 14, the anchor. Write one commitment small enough to survive your worst week. Send it to one person, by name. Then put the counter you wrote on a printed page on your desk. This is where quitting gets expensive. It’s the part still working in November.

By Day 14 you’re holding three things you don’t hold this morning. The sentence that ended your last 5 attempts. A counter to it you wrote yourself. A log of nights you did the work anyway.

It opens next Thursday. $27. With the post that day, you can start to change your identity.

If you want it the moment it opens, reply to this email with “install” and I’ll send you the link before it goes public.

Start the 4 rows tonight either way. Paper, pen, 5 columns.

The year passes whether you log it or not.

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.

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P.S. Want every deep dive plus the Builder Paths through the archive? That's the Hyper Achiever tier.

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What I never did, for about 4 years, was ask where the sentence came from.

I assumed it came from me. Some flaw with my name on it. Laziness, probably, whatever word you use at 23:00 when you’re annoyed with yourself not doing enough.

I sat down and wrote out the sentences that ended things. Not that easy it turns out, but I knew I must have something tangible. My excuse was there but as unnamed thought, running wild. I had to give it a label. And a leash after.

The exact words, put in one sentence that sounded reasonable at the time.

Came up with 5.

1. “I’ll start when things calm down.”

2. “Who am I to publish this?”

3. “I’ve already worked eight hours.”

4. “It’s not ready.”

5. “What if I waste a year on this?”

Count how many are yours. My guess: 3.

Every one of those sentences is correct, at work. That took me embarrassingly long to see.

“I’ll start when things calm down”

Is capacity planning, and at work somebody senior does it for you.

They decide what you have room for and they tell you.

You have never once had to fight for your own time, because the boundaries arrive already drawn.

Don’t wait for things to calm down because they won’t.

You either influence the world around you as it is, or the world around you influences you without asking permission.

“Who am I to publish this”

Is sign-off. Everything you’ve shipped in the last ten years had a signature on it before it left the building.

You learned shipping requires approval, and you learned it so well it stopped looking like a rule.

If you want to tell others about it, you’re someone who knows a thing or two.

You may not be correct, yet, but you know more than the person you’re targeting it to.

You have the advantage of knowledge that goes unseen so many times.

You’d be able to teach driving. You don’t perceive it as something complicated or unknown, you also don’t perceive it as a potential thing you can teach. There are driving schools though.

You can build a spreadsheet that does the calculation instead of you doing it by hand at the end of every month. Boring. Obvious. There are weekend courses on that and people pay for them.

You know which three questions to ask before you agree to a job, so you don’t find out in week two that the budget was never real. You learned that by experience and never thought about it again. Somebody is explaining it on YouTube to 40,000 people right now.

My point is you have more authority in the right people’s eyes than you think you do. Your obvious is someone’s WOW!

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“It’s not ready”

Is QA. It’s a good gate. In its original setting it holds the building up.

You left at 17:00. The software is still installed in your head and it’s still running. It still asks who approved this. Nobody uninstalls it for you, because nobody knows it’s there, including you.

So you sit down at 20:30 to work on your own thing and a system built for someone else’s building starts making decisions about it.

That’s why willpower doesn’t touch this. You’re running correct software in the wrong building, and you were promoted for having it.

“What if I waste a year on this?”

Yeah, what if? That one I’m leaving with you.

Do the other half of the sum while you’re at it. What does the year cost if you don’t. Write both numbers down and see which one you’d rather sign.

Number 3 I’m skipping on purpose. “I’ve already worked eight hours” is the heaviest one on the list and it gets the whole post next week.

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So that’s where they come from. Knowing that changed nothing for me on a Tuesday.

I’d have the insight on a Sunday afternoon, feel clever about it, and then lose to the same sentence on Tuesday at 21:15 anyway.

Understanding an excuse and beating it at 21:15 are two different jobs, and only the second one gets you a project.

At 21:15, after 8 hours of work, you cannot argue with anything. Being too depleted to argue is the actual problem.

An insight you had while rested does nothing for tired you, because tired you doesn’t get to use it. Tired you has to think of it, and that’s the one thing tired you can’t do.

So you don’t leave it to tired you.

You write the answer down in advance, while you’re rested, and you make it short enough to survive a bad night.

Here’s the one I use, run on the first sentence.

“I’ll start when things calm down.”

1. Things calmed down in March. I did nothing with it.

2. I’m not waiting for time. I’m waiting for permission.

3. Calm was never the input.

4. The weekend never catches anything.

5. There is no emptier week coming.

6. Eighteen minutes fits inside a busy week.

6 lines, 6 different jobs.

1 is evidence.

It names a specific past moment when the condition was met and you still didn't act, which kills the premise with a fact instead of an argument.

You need a specific date in there.

March, last August, or the two weeks off you took and did nothing with, not even rested.

2 renames it.

The excuse survives because it’s wearing a respectable word, and “waiting for time” is respectable. “Waiting for permission” is not.

Say the real thing and it loses most of its weight.

3 is flat denial.

It’s the shortest, on purpose.

This is the one that works at 21:15 when you’ve got nothing left.

Four words. You don’t have to construct it, just remember it.

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4 is aimed at the exact shape yours takes.

Mine always came dressed as the weekend, so mine names the weekend.

Yours might come dressed as after the wedding, or after the move, or once this project at work ships.

Write the version that names your specific thing.

5 kills the “later” the sentence depends on.

Every one of these excuses is promise about a future week.

Every one of those weeks arrives exactly as full as this one.

6 doesn’t argue at all.

It offers a smaller door. Eighteen minutes is small enough that the excuse has nothing to grab, and eighteen because fifteen is too standard, like something out of a productivity book, and nobody believes it.

Write two of your own under mine. Yours will be blunter, and blunter is better, because you’re the only one reading them.

Mine won’t sound like your head, and a line that doesn’t sound like your head won’t fire when you meet your problems.

Writing them is half the work. At 21:15 you are not going to open a document called counter scripts. You won’t remember it exists.

Put them somewhere your eyes already go: piece of paper next to the laptop, phone’s lock screen. I keep mine on paper because the phone is the thing I’m usually losing to.

Start with the sentence that repeats.

Go back through your dead projects and find the line that shows up in three of them. That one carries the pattern, and it’s the one worth six answers.

The excuse that felt worst at the time is usually a different one, and it can wait.

You’ll want to skip this on the grounds that it feels like affirmations, and affirmations are for smelly people with weird hair. I’d have said the same thing a year ago.

The difference is what you’re pointing at. An affirmation makes a claim about the future that you have no evidence for, which is why it bounces.

These point backwards, at things that already happened. March happened.

The weekend that caught nothing happened. You’re not talking yourself into a feeling, you’re reminding yourself of a record you already have.

Record is what makes these work. Five quits with the same line running through them is a pattern, and the pattern has a name, and once the name is written on a piece of paper next to your laptop it stops being weather and starts being a thing you can answer.

The sentence still shows up. Twice this week.

The difference is I don’t have to think of an answer anymore. I just have to read one.

You read this far, so you’re going to try it tonight. Two things are going to happen.

You’ll answer the wrong sentence.

One that feels worst is rarely the one doing the damage. Finding the real one means reading your dead projects against each other with a method.

And your six lines will run out of fuel. A counter-script only works if it’s true.

“I’m too tired tonight” sounds convincing, sounds reasonable enough. Calendar doesn’t care though, nor your goals. Were you equally

tired on the nights you did the work? Almost everybody assumes no, and almost everybody is wrong, because the nights you worked don’t get filed as tired nights. They get filed as nights you worked.

The record that makes it true can’t be built backwards. You collect it going forward.

What you just read is one page of Day 4.

The Builder Identity Install is the other thirteen days. It finds the sentence that repeats, writes the answers for all five, and builds the record that makes them fire at 21:15 instead of bouncing. 14 days, eighteen minutes a day, $27. It ships on the September 24th.

WAITLIST

Get on the list and you get it as soon as possible!

P.S. Those who got to tests, let me know how is the beta going for you!

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

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Ask me at a party, that’s the answer you get. It felt true every time I said it.

Here’s what was on my hard drive across the same four years:

• 17 half-finished newsletters

• A course outline from 2022

• A book manuscript that stops at chapter 4

• Three business plans

• A YouTube channel with 2 videos

Both of those things were true, at once. A person who writes, and a person with a drawer full of things he stopped writing.

I never sat down and looked at the gap between them.

Two records of who you are

Your identity is the choices you are making.

What you eat, where you go, what you do at 21:37 on a Tuesday when nobody assigned you anything and nobody is checking.

Which means you’re carrying two records of who you are. The one you say out loud, and the one your evenings have been keeping.

When they disagree, people reach for hypocrisy or weakness, then change the subject. Both are uncomfortable and neither one asks anything of you on Wednesday.

The gap is information. Specific information about yourself, sitting unread in a folder you walk past.

Failure teaches you nothing on its own

The line everybody knows is “you learn from your failures”. It’s true, partly.

A failure teaches you when you go back and read it. Otherwise, it’s just a bad memory, tied with anxiety and fear of trying again.

I did the avoidings. Every dead project got the quick verdict on the way past: I don’t finish things.

That’s when I would start another one, hoping (though deep down I knew it wasn’t true) that this time would be different, without learning anything from the previous ones.

Think of a mechanic who never lifts the hood. Hears a noise, decides the car is bad, buys another one. Five cars later, dumbass still doesn’t know what the noise was, and he’s poorer.

That was me with projects. Five cars, no idea about the noise.

Sake of comfort

As for the mechanic, when I said “doesn’t know”, what I really meant is not: wasn’t aware or had no information that would indicate something is wrong. He heard the noise for weeks. He knew what it was before he opened the hood.

I meant: Ignored for the sake of comfort.

Ignoring apparent problems for the sake of just not facing them is idiotic - when someone else does them. Car broke down?

Get it to a workshop. The fix is clear as day. Ego detached.

When you face a problem, say the exact same one, the fix is a very foggy day all of sudden.

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Because you won’t make it to work today. You will have to cancel weekend plans. You will have to pay for the fix, God knows how much. Ego attached

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Your graveyard is a transcript

5 dead projects is a record. 5 separate weeks where you chose something else, with dates attached to each.

A record that long repeats.

1 quit is an anecdote, you can explain it away with a bad month. 5 quits with the same line running through them is a pattern, and a pattern has a name.

The name is the sentence you said to yourself every time, and it sounded reasonable every time, which is why it kept working.

Excuse good enough for yourself

An irrational excuse is exposed. You hear yourself say, “I don’t feel like doing that,” and something inside you objects.

A rational excuse is accepted without issue and treated as a statement of fact.

The sentences that end projects are the second kind.

Mine was about the weekend. I’d tell myself I’d catch up on Saturday, and I believed it every time, across seventeen newsletters and a lot of Saturdays.

The weekend never catches anything.

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Knowing it doesn’t fix it

Worth being straight with you.

At 21:37, after nine hours of work, you can’t argue with anything. Being too depleted to argue is the actual problem, so a sentence you worked out on a Sunday afternoon does very little for you on a Tuesday night.

What it gives you is a target. Something specific enough to answer in advance, while you’re rested, so tired you has something to say instead of having to think of it.

That’s a separate piece of work and it’s most of what I’ve been building this month.

Two records

You’ve been keeping both for years. One you update by talking.

The other updates itself by doing, and by doing again, and again.

The way to overwrite the old identity is habit. And how you overwrite habits? And identity as a whole?

That’s what I’ve been building. It’s called the Builder Identity Install, a tool that takes you from the sentence to a record that says something different.

It walks you through the autopsy, then through overwriting the old identity with the one you want, until the actions come from who you are and there’s nothing left to force.

It ships this month, and before it does I want a handful of people to break it for me. Paid subscribers get first look. Reply with “autopsy” if you want the first 7 days. I’ll send them this weekend so you can test early for free.

I reply to every email but if I don’t, dm me here, on Substack.

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You said that last Sunday. And the Sunday before that one.

It’s the same chaotic week wearing a different date, and it repeats until you sit down and change something on purpose.

And it’s not that you don’t work. You do. The week just moves under your feet.

Monday’s plan meets Tuesday’s reality. A task turns out bigger than you thought. Wednesday hands you a better idea than the one you started with.

By Thursday you’re carrying three half-versions of the project in your head, and the evening goes to sorting out which one you’re even building.

That’s what progress looks like from the inside. Things change as you work, and without a system that absorbs the change, the change eats the week.

Nine steps, one page of paper, 70 minutes the first time, 30 once it’s running.

Not recommended, but if you’re short on time, jump to Chapter 3 and run it.

Chapters 1 and 2 explain what each half is for and hand you the reasoning. Chapter 3 is the run sheet with a timer against every step and specific tools linked.

What the Sunday Review is

One sentence: a fixed weekly session where rested-you reviews the past 7 days and makes decisions for the next 5, so tired-you only has to execute them.

One word: iterate.

If this week sucked, the easiest way to make sure next week doesn’t is finding what was wrong with it and deciding, in advance, what happens instead.

Sunday-you is rested. Sees the calendar. Knows Wednesday has the late meeting and Friday is a write-off. Good decisions, cheaply.

Tuesday-you sits down at 21:00 after eight hours of work and a busy evening. Ask him what matters and he opens YouTube, because deciding is expensive and he’s broke. Worse decisions, expensive.

So, don’t ask him. Decide Sunday, execute Tuesday.

Time spent planning buys back more time than it costs.

Two rules hold the whole thing:

1. The review and the plan are two different jobs.

2. Review always comes first.

Chapter 1: The 7 days behind you

30 minutes. Facts, diagnosis, cleanup.

In that order, and the order matters: you cannot fix a week you haven’t looked at.

The week was thinner than it felt

Seven dates and what actually happened under them.

Only things that moved.

“Wrote half the sales page”

counts.

“Thought about the sales page a lot”

does not.

“Researched”

counts only if something exists on disk that didn’t exist before. And no line here starts with

“I felt.”

It will look thinner than the week felt. That’s the point of doing it. You remember the week as busy, the page shows three things moved, and both are true. Only one of them ships a project.

This is also the step that kills the two lies you tell yourself every Sunday night:

“I did nothing this week”

and

“I was busy all week.”

Both feel true. Sunday review distills which actually was.

3 wins, or you quit within a month

Then three things that went well. However small.

If every Sunday only tells you what you failed at, you'll find a reason to skip next Sunday.

18 minutes on a dead Tuesday is a win. One uncomfortable email sent is a win.

Fixing the thing that annoyed you for a month (and took 5 minutes to complete) is a win.

10 problems is not a diagnosis

For everything that didn’t move: one sentence.

• “Didn’t touch the landing page because I never decided what goes on it.”

• “Skipped Wednesday because the meeting ran to 20:00 and I had nothing prepared for a short session.”

Compare that with:

• “I was lazy this week.”

That has no fix attached to it. It just feels bad, and feeling bad has never once produced a landing page.

Then the question that pays for the 30 minutes: of everything that went wrong, what one thing limited output the most?

One bottleneck. Hormozi built his approach on this: find the single constraint, put your leverage there, ignore everything else until it moves.

Ten problems is not a diagnosis. One is.

Finding it is one thing, fixing it is a skill. Sitting with the highest leverage task until it’s done, ignoring everything else, is a skill. An important one, and one that needs a lot of practice.

It’s boring. No decision about what to work on. No block in the calendar. Starting too late. A task too vague to begin. Phone within reach.

Whatever it is, next week’s plan has one job: make that specific thing not happen again.

Open loops rent space in the head you build with

Every unfinished small thing takes a slice of attention and keeps it. A dozen of them and you can’t settle when you sit down.

The half-set-up tool. The unanswered message. The 80% draft, the broken link, the friend you owe a reply.

Each one gets one exit: do it, schedule it, or kill it. “Maybe someday” is not a date.

The killing is the part people skip, and it’s the part that works.

Every dead loop you keep alive out of guilt is renting space in the same head you’re trying to build with.

I think I’ve already mentioned this somewhere.

Three numbers beat a page of reflection

This is what makes reviews compound instead of repeat. Same three numbers, every week, same corner of the page:

1. Sessions done vs planned. “3/3” or “1/5”.

2. Total build time. Minutes or hours, whatever your tracker says.

3. One output number for your project. Subscribers, words, videos, sales. Pick one and never change it.

3 numbers, 10 seconds. After 6 weeks you have a chart of your own behavior, and it tells you things no amount of reflecting will.

Like the fact that your good weeks all started with a Monday session, or that the month you “worked constantly” you logged four hours.

We like numbers. What we like more is watching numbers grow.

Chapter 2: The 5 days ahead

20 minutes. 4 decisions, in this order.

One thing that either exists next Sunday or doesn’t

“Work on the course” is not it. “Record and edit module 1” is.

The bar: if the week produced nothing else, would this still count as a good week? If the answer is no, you picked the wrong thing.

How to pick it when everything feels urgent?

• Which one moves the project closest to being real for someone else?

• Which one am I avoiding? That’s usually the one.

• Which one does this week’s constraint actually allow?

That last question is why the review comes first. If your constraint was “no time on weekday evenings,” picking something that needs 10 hours is planning to fail on purpose.

3 real blocks beat 7 imaginary ones

Not “I’ll find time.” Times in the calendar, placed around obligations that already exist.

3 > 7

You want seven, I know. But…

Buehler, Griffin and Ross asked students in 1994 when they’d finish an academic project.

• Average prediction: 34 days.

• Average reality: 55.

When asked for a date they were 99% certain about, only 30% made it.

You’re not the exception. Nobody is, that’s what makes it a bias.

Take the number that feels right and cut it.

That’s the whole chapter 13 in Morgan Housel’s “The Psychology of Money”.

His line is the one worth keeping:

“The most important part of every plan is planning on the plan not going according to plan.”

Money, evenings - same physics.

A plan built on your best week has no margin, so the first bad day takes the whole plan down.

A plan built on your worst week survives, and surviving is what lets it compound.

In practice that means underplanning on purpose. 3 blocks when you could fit 7.

3 real blocks beat 7 imaginary ones twice. Once on output, once because you end the week having kept your word to yourself. That second one is the whole game long-term.

Four placement rules:

• Energy first, gaps second. Put the hardest block where your energy is, not where the calendar happens to be empty. Mine currently is 5 to 7 AM, before the day gets a vote on it. (Why? That’s in the next deep dive).

• Same slots every week. Repetition removes decision. A block that moves is a block you negotiate with.

• Around real life. Wednesday has happy hour? Don’t schedule a block there and then call yourself undisciplined when it dies. Choose and experience the option you choose to the fullest without regret.

• Name them by output. “Record module 1 intro” over “Deep work session”

If you don’t know where your energy actually is, that’s a one-week experiment: rate your energy 1 to 10 at three fixed times a day for seven days. The pattern shows up fast.

Template in resource library under Framework Docs.

If you were to remember just one thing from this post, let it be this. I can’t even count how many times I’ve made this mistake, and I not learned from it.

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The week will change on you, what’s about the plan then?

1. Wednesday, you find a better way to do the thing.

2. Thursday, somebody sends you an opportunity.

3. Friday, you realize step 3 made step 1 pointless.

Your project has changed, so the plan you made on Sunday is now out of date.

This is the biggest problem with planning a week ahead. Things come up that are beyond your control, and they come up every week.

There is a solution. Not perfect, but it’s there.

1. Time blocks don’t disappear but move.

If an unexpected event comes up on Monday and you couldn’t stick to the plan, the Monday block moves to Thursday, and so on.

Alternatively, you can stack the blocks on Saturday and catch up.

2. A new idea, a new opportunity, or something you now want to reorganize goes on the list and waits.

Note: write it down specifically. “Rewrite the pricing section” instead of “pricing”, because in three days you won’t know what you meant.

That’s why review is 7 days and plan is 5 days, as weekdays are more predictable.

Split the pile or the pile wins

One more reason weeks feel chaotic: everything sits in the same undifferentiated heap.

Finish the module. Buy your mother a present. Answer the client.

Thirty mixed items in one list adds a lot of friction.

Split the capture into three buckets:

1. Daily errands.

2. Day job.

3. Your project.

Three lists of ten read like a Tuesday. One list of thirty reads like a wall. Same items, different start friction.

Armor the week before it hits you

Name what will try to kill the week, then write the response as an if-then sentence:

• “If the meeting runs past 20:00, then I do just the 18-minute version.”

• “If Thursday collapses, then Saturday morning is the makeup block.”

• “If I’m still scrolling at 21:37, then the phone goes in the other room, and I’ll just go to sleep.”

This isn’t motivational. Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 studies with over 8,000 people, and if-then plans came out at a medium-to-large effect, roughly doubling how often people actually do the thing.

It works because a tired brain is bad at making plans and fine at following them.

Rules are good because they are cheap to obey. The whole post comes down to: lower friction.

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Monday’s first move decides Monday

Write the first physical action of Monday’s block.

Verb + object, something you could start in 30 seconds without thinking.

Instead of

“start module 1.”

Write:

“open the slide file and record the intro.”

Why 5 days and not 7

A few more words on why plan Monday to Friday and leave the weekend empty.

1. You can’t see the weekend from Sunday. Somebody visits, someone gets sick, you get invited somewhere, the weather turns. Six days out, a weekend plan is a guess dressed as a commitment.

2. Every plan you break teaches you that plans are optional. Write 7 blocks, hit 4, and you learn to ignore with ease. Do that three weeks in a row and the review stops working, because you stopped believing it.

3. Empty weekend becomes your buffer. Wednesday collapses, Saturday morning catches it.

   ---

Chapter 3: The toolkit and the run sheet

Theory over. This is what you do.

Read more

The difference is not random. Clarity comes from what you do every day.

5 habits I keep for life. Boring, cheap, and they work. Especially after work.

1. Reading

I made it a habit to read before going to sleep. It’s like supper for the mind.

I have the 2 books I am currently reading on my nightstand. Right before sleep, I turn on a warm light in the small lamp clipped to my bed frame and read for at least 18 minutes.

I recommend physical books, it’s easier to grab a physical object, more satisfying to turn pages and see how far you’ve read and how much is left.

No such thing as too much knowledge.

2. Writing

There were months I didn’t publish here, but I never stopped writing.

I have a journal that I try to fill daily. Again, at least 18 minutes a day.

Even when my head is empty, I start the timer and by minute 18 I have something.

And by journaling, I don’t mean writing:

“Dear journal, today was a good day because I jerked off and ate a banana”.

I mean a tool for unraveling problems and framing your current struggles and uncertainties into something at least a bit more digestible.

Something to make current problems clearer, something that gives foggy plans structure.

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3. Working out

I prefer lifting weights, but any form of physical activity will do.

Apart from health benefits and all that good stuff we already know, it’s surprisingly easy to get hooked.

Necessity that is also enjoyable. Gym, swim, play.

4. Meditation

This one is the hardest to start but the cheapest to run.

No equipment, no membership, not even a lamp.

Sit, set a timer for 5 minutes, count your breaths. You’ll lose count, your mind will wander. Come back and count again.

That’s the rep, every comeback is one. Start with 5 minutes, not 18. This one scales later.

More here:

& here:

5. 5 Things you’re grateful for today

Before sleep, list 5 things from today.

Not “family, health” on autopilot, today’s specifics:

• the neighbor who held the door

• the idea that finally clicked after a long time

This trains your filter. You spend the day half-hunting for entries, so you start noticing good things while they happen.

Write them in the same journal from habit 2. Habits that share a page survive longer.

Start with one today. Supper for the mind. Serve it daily.

Bonus!

Every time I write about focus, someone asks what I take.

I’ve tested most of what gets sold as a focus supplement. Most of it did nothing for me, and I wrote that down instead of pretending otherwise.

Below: what I take, what the research says, what it did for me, and when to take it. Plus the ones I won't touch, and why.

Two things worth saying before you read it:

1. Nothing here beats sleep.

2. I’m not a doctor, this is my own log.

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You plan late into the night, you see the whole thing finished in your head and what wonderful things it will bring into life, fall asleep full of excitement.

Week three: you open the laptop, feel confused, feel like not doing it today. Close the laptop.

Sound familiar?

The spike is rigged

New projects pay you in imagination.

On day one you collect the whole reward upfront: working business, respect from others, money.

All of it imagined, none of it earned. Zero friction, pure dopamine. Your brain loves the prediction of success much, much more than the boring path toward it.

When the real work begins, along with all the worries and doubts that come with it, prediction stops paying.

Real work is an effort loan

Effort now, results later. The payout is bigger than what you put in, that’s why the thing is worth doing at all. The waiting is the price.

Day one didn’t cost you anything. The loan starts the moment you sit down to do the boring part.

The feeling files for divorce here. It signed up for the payout, not for the lending.

Motivation is sprint fuel

A 100 meter sprint is over before breathing matters. The body burns what’s already stored, and it’s empty in seconds. That’s motivation: stored excitement, explosive, gone fast.

Building after work is a marathon, months of steady output.

A marathon runs on different fueling: you drink while running, small and constant, legs never stopping.

Waiting for the next spike to carry your project is sprinting a marathon. Burst, collapse, walk, burst.

Bigger bursts won’t fix it. Fueling has to change, and that’s what the rest of this post is about.

Motivation leaves everyone: me, you, the guy whose productivity videos you watch instead of working.

Quitters and finishers lose the feeling at the same rate. They differ in what happens the first evening it’s gone.

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The wheel, part two

Almost two years ago, in The Talker And Doer, I wrote:

“Action fuels motivation and motivation fuels action. It’s like a very big and heavy wheel that spins smoothly once you put in the effort to build momentum. What can stop it is running out of fuel or small stones jamming the axle, but that’s a topic for another post.”

This is that post. Took me a while.

Running out of fuel is the honest stop.

You worked, you’re drained, you rest, the wheel waits for you tomorrow. Sleep fixes it. Everything's fine as long as you keep that cycle.

The stones are the killers, and you throw them in yourself:

• Waiting for the mood. The wheel doesn’t take mood as payment.

• Missing days. One missed day is a pebble. Two is a rock. That’s why you never miss twice.

• All-or-nothing marathons. Days of nothing, one heroic allnighter, days of nothing.

• Motivational videos as “warm-up.” Consuming the feeling instead of generating it.

In the rut post I drew this chain:

motivation fuels action → action fuels motivation → action fuels success → success fuels motivation…

Almost perfect. Almost. Every arrow assumes the wheel is already turning.

The hardest part is starting when you have nothing to show for yourself.

Burst-then-nothing cycle kills at the cold start.

Every restart is from zero. Zero is the most expensive speed.

Flip the trigger

Motivation can’t be the start condition, because it’s the output of starting.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” — Jim Rohn

Half right, Jim. Habit is also what gets you started. Motivation is a passenger, and passengers only board moving vehicles.

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Life gets in the way

And it’s not something you can avoid, if what you do is your priority enough you’ll find time for it sooner or later, even if not much.

The thing is what happens in between. A day without doing anything related to your project is a day when your motivation dims.

A week and you have to sit down and remember what you were even building.

A month and it moves from “the thing I’m working on” to “thing I used to work on.”

There’s no day where you decide to quit. You just stop.

Coming back to a project you left started and not organized well is like taking over someone else’s work.

They told you about it, a month ago, you nodded, and now you’re staring at their files trying to figure out what they meant.

It’s harder than starting something new, because at least new comes with the day-one spike.

So the goal is never letting it get that far.

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The floor is 18 minutes

You don’t need a new tool for this.

Use The 18-minute rule. Daily, timer, stop or keep going when it rings.

That’s the floor, the smallest session that still counts.

Keeping a heavy wheel barely turning costs little. Restarting it from a dead stop costs a lot.

18 minutes a day is you leaning on the wheel so it never fully stops.

Weekend binges fail for the same physics. Binge starts from zero, and you pay cold-start tax every time.

Where it goes wrong

1. Waiting for motivation to come. It comes back during or after work session.

2. Mistaking the new-project spike for commitment. That’s how serial starters are made.

3. Warming up with motivational videos. Start now, watch them while you eat or do chores.

4. Redesigning the whole plan mid-slump. Avoidance in disguise.

Try this now

1. Tomorrow (or today), start at a previously set time and place with 18 minutes any output. Mood not consulted.

2. For one week, rate your drive 1–10 at minute 0 and minute 18 of each session. Watch which direction it moves. Set reminders or you will forget it. Your proof, not mine.

Motivation will come back. It always does.

Make sure it finds the wheel already turning!

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P.S. If you’re reading this from deep inside the doing-nothing phase, I built a step-by-step way out: the Anti-Rut Framework. It’s the full reset. Realize, prioritize, remove, restructure. Turned into a workbook.

Then you sit down to your own project, the thing you actually care about, and somehow nothing moves.

You care more and do less. Makes no sense, right?

It does. Bear with me.

Walking in the fog

Point A is starting. Point B is seeing results.

The time between is like walking in the fog.

You know the destination is there, somewhere, you may even be sure of it.

But not seeing 2 meters in front of you effectively raises doubts from time to time. Especially when other things in your life are not going well.

The crucial thing to do then is not to give up. As blatant as the advice is, it’s the best thing I can tell you.

I wrote about clearing the fog itself before: How Lack Of Clarity Stops You From Making Progress.

This post is about something I missed back then—where the fog comes from in the first place.

Most of it comes from one hole: no structure.

School gave you rails

This is one of the reasons why so many young adults feel lost after leaving school or finishing college.

School, even some shit-tier degree, gave you structure.

You knew what happens in a year, you knew what happens in a month, you knew where the endpoint is and when you’ll get there. From day one.

Fixed hours, deadlines set by someone else, someone else checking your work, a finish line with a date on it. You never had to decide if today counts because the system decided for you.

After graduation, the rails don't disappear. They get handed to your employer.

Nobody will kick you out

The job gives you the same deal: hours you show up for, deadlines with consequences, someone waiting for the result.

You may have noticed you are more productive at your day job than at your own thing, even though you care about your thing more.

Now count what your own project gives you. No hours. No deadline. Nobody waiting.

It’s the only part of your life nobody built rails for, and it’s the part you care about most. Nobody will kick you out of your own project.

That’s the good news and the whole problem.

Paradoxically, structure and outside pressure, the two things you resent at work, are what make goals easier to hit.

It’s easier to do a good workout at the public gym than in a home one, it’s easier to study in a library than at your kitchen table, it’s easier to clean the flat when someone’s coming over, easier to cook properly for a guest than for yourself.

Same you, same task. Rails change things.

Build your own rails

You can’t make your project fire you. Every other piece of the job’s structure, you can steal:

1. Fixed hours. Pick the time, pick the place, same every day. Early morning or late night work best. Your desk and you, nothing more.

2. A deadline someone knows about. Self-imposed deadlines are easy to move, your brain knows who set them. Give the date to another person: an accountability buddy. I wrote how to pick one in The Talker And Doer. A deadline only you know about is not a deadline.

3. Stakes. The job has consequences, your project needs some too. Book something that pays upfront. Pre-sell before it’s ready. Money on the table.

4. A visible endpoint. Define what done means for the next checkpoint only, two weeks out maximum, checkable. Not the whole staircase, the next stair. The rest stays in the fog and that’s fine. You only need to see the next 2 meters. Then the next 2.

New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.

Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.

The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.

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How it looks in practice

This newsletter is the example.

It has working hours: 5-7 am currently (will write one about why too).

It has a public deadline, the weekly post, and it has someone waiting: you, reading this right now.

It has a checkpoint: one post. Never “build a newsletter,” always just the next Thursday.

Compare it to a project of mine that died. My music YouTube channel had none of that, and one day I just stopped uploading and never got back to it.

“I tried deadlines, I just ignore them”

Because they were yours alone, and quiet.

Deadlines fail when canceling them costs nothing.

Make canceling cost something: another person knowing, money already spent, a date said out loud in public. External pressure is cheaper than discipline.

And if even sitting down doesn’t happen, that’s a different problem, covered here: How To Do Hard Things Even When You Don’t Feel Like It.

Where it goes wrong

1. Copying the full school timetable. You have 2 hours, not 12. Structure the 2, leave the rest of your life alone. I genuinely think “just work 12 hours a day bro and you’ll make it” is bullshit, but that’s not for today.

2. Rails to nowhere. Fixed hours without a defined checkpoint is attendance theater. Busy, consistent, going nowhere. Endpoint first.

3. Stakes you can cancel quietly. If nobody would notice you dropping the deadline, you don’t have one.

4. Waiting for the fog to clear before you start. It clears by walking. Two meters is enough.

Try this now

1. Give your project working hours: same time, same place, starting today.

   Any calendar app will do.

2. Define the next checkpoint: checkable, two weeks out, written down.

   Sticky note in a visible place.

3. Add one external stake: tell one person the date, or pay for something upfront. Tonight, while it’s uncomfortable.

   Tell the person you don’t want to make a bad impression on or pay for an annual subscription.

School handed you structure for free. The job still does.

Nobody will kick you out of your own project. Except you.

P. S. That’s basically why the systems pillar exists and what the products under this pillar will deliver. First comes the identity product, Q3 2026. Systems next. Until then, grab a premium sub.

Any suggestions?

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To read next:

Just yesterday ideas were flowing and my fingers couldn’t keep up with my mind. Today, I can’t come up with one sentence that makes sense.

Why is that?

Fuel used up

Your creativity runs on the same tank as everything else your brain did today.

Think about what the tank paid for since morning…

Read more

Read more

Lose $100 or win $200.

Most people refuse.

Not because the math is bad, but because the feeling is bad.

The loss hurts more than the gain excites.

Now I will offer you the same bet, but 100 times.

Suddenly, it feels attractive?

The trap of reasonable one decision at a time

Now, you get two offers:

A. Take $240 for sure.

B. Gamble for a 25% chance at $1000, 75% chance to get nothing.

Set 2:

C. Lose $750 for sure.

D. Gamble with a 75% chance of losing $1000 and 25% of no loss at all.

Most people choose:

• Sure gain.

• Risky loss.

In fact, 73% chose the sure gain and gamble-on-loss combination (A then D), only 3% chose the opposite (B, C).

This reflects our typical attitudes: we are risk-averse for gains but risk-seeking for losses.

In other words, we often prefer a sure gain over a fair gamble and prefer to gamble when facing a sure loss.

Safe when gaining. Brave when losing.

Balanced, right?

Wrong.

Because you never stopped to ask the only question that matters:

What happens if I look at both decisions together?

When combined, the “irrational” choices beat the “reasonable” ones.

The option most people reject is objectively better.

If you frame the two decisions together, the BC choice becomes the winner.

Combining the gambles shows that the combination people mostly avoided actually wins over the one they favored.

In wide frame the BC option has a higher expected value, yet only 3% chose BC when decisions were presented separately. That was my first choice too.

In other words, our narrow framings lead us to pay a hidden premium out of both pockets: overvaluing sure gains and overvaluing avoiding sure losses, even if that means missing out on better overall deals.

Kahneman shows that if you only make one decision at a time, you’re unlikely to spot these inconsistencies—the right thing to do would be bundling them and then choosing optimally.

That is the cost of narrow framing. You solve problems one by one and end up with a worse overall life.

Note: This example, however good to show the phenomenon, doesn’t make a dramatic difference when you do the math. B+C wins over A+D, but only by $10 in expected value—a pretty slim margin.

I know it’s counterintuitive, but the goal here is to show a system of decisions, reasonable choices that lead to worse long-term outcomes.

If you’re still confused (I was too), the full explanation is at the end.

The rest of the post will be lighter, I promise.

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Narrow framing is why you give great advice but ruin your own life

When it is someone else’s problem, you are sharp, clear, and quick to point a good way to solve it.

• “Just go get a checkup.”

• “Just don’t buy it.”

• “It is obvious what you should do.”

Distance removes fog.

When it’s your decision (even faced with the same problem as your friend), suddenly it’s complicated. Risky. Uncertain. Loaded with consequences.

The problem did not change, but the position you look at it from did. You zoomed in.

I wrote a dedicated post on this topic, a part of it:

Narrow.

That refers to the problems of others. Only the tip of the iceberg is visible. From that point of view, the problem seems easy and the solution seems obvious. The pain seems more bearable too. You are aware that the situation the person is in sucks, but you see it from a distance, and that gives perspective and clarity.

Distance makes it easier to analyze others’ situations objectively. It removes the “fog” that otherwise can make things harder to see.

Giving advice to others, you operate from a place of emotional detachment - that’s why advice is actually good. If the advice itself is good and works on others, it has only one reason to not work well on you - succumbing to the fog.

Wide.

That refers to your own problems. Those are much bigger than anyone else’s. Aren’t they? Your problems are covered with the fog. The fog of your emotions, past experiences, and, most important, future consequences.

You will suffer the consequences, so you pay much more attention to the problem, it concerns you. But that is a trap. You search for a key to free from it but sometimes doors are just open.

Disconnect from your emotions and your ego. Look narrowly at your problems, it solves them.

Read the full post here:

Life punishes narrow framers

Under narrow framing, we focus on one decision at a time, just the tip of the iceberg, and we feel the emotional pull of sure gains or sure losses right away.

In broad framing, we see the whole iceberg: we weigh all combinations of choices together.

Kahneman says that wide framing “will be superior (or at least not inferior) in every case” of multiple decisions.

In practice, this means that bundling choices or using simple risk policies can prevent the mistakes that come from an up-close view.

This is especially visible in investing.

People who just buy and forget tend to end up richer decades later than professional stock pickers.

In fact, random stock picking, in the wide picture, seems to be no different than all the tactics and tricks you can use to “predict” the future. Insider trading doesn’t count.

There’s a fragment about it in the book.

Risk policies: the cheat code to rational behavior

Smart decision-makers do not reinvent the wheel every time, but create rules in advance.

Examples:

• “I always take positive expected value risks.”

• “I ship before I feel ready.”

• “I post even if the idea is imperfect.”

These are risk policies. They remove emotional negotiation from each moment.

Don’t debate every time. Follow the rule.

That is wide framing in action.

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Why you feel paralyzed even when the math is obvious

Because you frame each move as final.

You act as if:
– This decision will define your career
– This risk will define your reputation
– This failure will define your future

It will not. Unless you stop after it.

Single failures only matter to people who think narrowly.

People who think widely know that:

1. You win a few.

2. You lose a few.

3. You keep playing.

4. You get better at the game.

Often, this happens so slowly that we become accustomed to the current standard and fail to notice the progress we have made.

How to force wide framing in real life

Simple. Rules.

1. Write the long-term version

Instead of: “This might fail.”
Write: “If I do this weekly for 2 years, where will I be?”

Fog clears on paper.

2. Borrow someone else’s distance

Ask someone you respect:
“What would you do if this were your decision?”

3. Think like a trader, not a gambler

Gamblers obsess over single outcomes. Traders care about the long-term.
“I am playing a series, not a round.”

Your life is not the result of big decisions

It is the result of hundreds of small decisions framed narrowly.

Don’t evaluate each move as if it exists alone. It never does.

Zoom out.

If you liked the intro, you’ll like the book. Get it here.

If you liked the post, you’ll like AchievR’s content. Get deeper dives here.

Overwhelmed? Refresh your life position.

Any suggestions? Give me feedback here:

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If you find value reading AchievR, click the ❤️ & 🔄 button, so more people can discover it!

Here’s your reward for reading to the end, regarding the intro:

Matthew Rabin and Richard Thaler pointed out that “the aggregated gamble of one hundred 50–50 lose $100/gain $200 bets has an expected return of $5,000, with only a 1/2,300 chance of losing any money and merely a 1/62,000 chance of losing more than $1,000.”

AD BC explanation

2 boxes—you must pick one option from Box 1 and one option from Box 2.
After that, the results are added together to give your final outcome.

Box 1

You choose between:

Read more

Tomorrow never comes.

Sound familiar?

Read more

That’s like saying, “I just need to breathe better.” It sounds right, but it’s useless.

Your brain runs on limited attention units. Spend them badly and you go broke before lunch.

Focus is a skill that can be trained. Today, you’ll learn how to do it.

In this Concept Crackdown:

1. What focus actually is

2. Component 1: Clarity

3. Component 2: Attention control

4. Component 3: Energy Management

5. Component 4: Environmental changes

6. Component 5: Recovery systems

7. Common mistakes people make

8. The focus formula

What focus actually is

In one sentence: The deliberate act of directing limited cognitive resources toward one priority while ignoring competing inputs.

“Limited” is the keyword here.

You have a small tank of high-octane fuel each day (about 90 minutes of peak, resets after sleep).

Waste it on TikTok and doomscrolling, and by the time you sit down for real work, the tank is dry. More on that later.

Focus is:

• Like a laser that can be pointed at one thing at a time.

• Exhaustible resource.

• Value creator.

Component 1: Clarity

Nothing stops starting like a lack of clarity. I said it many times and will say again: making a very detailed plan of the exact steps you need to take is one of the best productivity hacks out there.

Think of your brain as a processor: a powerful unit that is useless if you don’t give it detailed instructions.

As in coding, one missing “;” can stop the program from running, your projects will be bugged too if you don’t have steps to follow.

“Just start” is one thing, but doing everything on the fly will unnecessarily take a lot of your mental power.

More here:

Speaking of clarity:

• You can’t focus on fog. Vague goals = getting lost.

• Be specific: “Write 300 words” beats “work on the book.”

• Every focus session starts with “what exactly am I focusing on?”

• Action: Before each session, write the exact steps. Perform one at a time. Don’t religiously stick to it, adjust if step 1 changed what needs to be done in step 2.

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Component 2: Attention control

The core skill here is catching yourself when you drift and coming back.

It requires a lot of practice, but you will get better over time.

Train your attention muscle:

• Notice when you've drifted without judgment.

• Redirect back to the task. You can put a piece of paper on your desk and make a dot every time you go back.

• Track how quickly you return (it gets faster with practice).

• Use external cues: timers, focus apps, simple pen marks on paper (like dots).

How to implement?

• Meditation—read more in the book.

• Focus on the present moment in whatever you do.

• Form the habit. Habit is the king of change.

• Focus on one thing at a time and one thing only.

More here:

Speaking attention control:

• Focus = returning quickly when pulled away. Train like a muscle.

• Kill multitasking: every context switch burns brain fuel.

• Action: Try 25–45 minute “attention reps.” Phone in another room, one tab only, one task. When distracted, note it and come back.

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Component 3: Energy management

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After breaking down every chapter, I'll show you what actually works for regular entrepreneurs, what's complete BS, and the one strategy that changed everything for his business.

This is Part 2 of my Million Dollar Weekend breakdown—where we get into the real money-making tactics.

Chapter 6: Social media for growth

This chapter starts with Noah telling us how he raised $30,000 from his audience for Bo Jackson’s charity bike ride.

Then he tells us how great it is to have an audience. We already know that. Real question—how to build it?

Lesson:

Unique angle and unfair advantage.

Take, for example, Ben Kenyon. Ben is the head strength and conditioning coach for the Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball team…

Unfair advantage here is as clear as day. Ben can start a YouTube channel or newsletter with very little competition.

Anyone can talk about NBA online, but Ben has a strong authority card in his hand. And even more important—insights!

“What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less?” In other words, why would anyone care to read his newsletter?

You can answer that for yourself (look below, Chapter 6 challenges). Do it before you start anything. Here’s a template:

I write about [topics]. [Results they will get from your offer].

More about that here:

Don’t make the same mistake I did—writing about anything that interested me. If you go to “Archive” and scroll for a while, you’ll see a random jumble of topics. Turns out that’s not the best way to write a newsletter.

Truth to be told, that’s something I struggle with a lot. Even today. I rebranded the newsletter, but I’m still not sure.

I’m for a lookout for that “That’s it!” feeling, but I can’t find it. Reply to this email and let me know what you would like to see here.

Content circle framework:

1. Core Circle: Start with a very narrow audience. Ali started with the medical school exams for British people. Your niche within a niche can be the most obscure thing imaginable, as long as it makes you and your audience passionate.

2. Medium Circle: As you move bigger, your content should overlap somewhat with what concerns your Core Circle, but it should appeal to a broader audience. Ali started talking about studying and productivity in general, since that’s required for all students.

3. Large Circle: Here you go for the largest audience possible that’s still related. Some of Ali’s most watched videos are about his salary—made possible by his medical video fame—or the latest Apple product—which he uses to increase productivity. All the circles should still include your core audience but keep expanding your circle of influence.

Keep in mind that something that works well as a YouTube channel won’t necessarily work well as a newsletter.

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Summary:

1. Write your unique angle.

2. Pick a platform.

3. Create.

Be the Guide, Not the Guru

Chapter 6 challenges:

1. Write out your unique angle. There are no right answers here. You can change these any time you'd like.

1. Who are you?

2. Why should people listen?

3. What are you passionate about?

4. What will you do for people?

2. Update your bio.

   Choose your one platform, and using the unique angle pitch you wrote out before, clean up and rewrite your profile/bio on that platform to reflect who you are and how you help your ideal customer.

3. Create your own Content Circle.

   Think back to your validation days: Who are the customers you want to appeal to and what’s the outcome you can create content for? What’s the unique point of view in your content they’d be excited to hear about?

4. Post one piece of content.

   Now it’s time to post content publicly. Now, this piece of content can come in any format.

Chapter 7: Email for profit

Noah starts by telling us how he 95x his per email revenue by telling a story instead of selling.

Lesson:

Normally, Nikola would have just written: “There’s a deal on this product and you get to save $1,000!” Throw in a buy button and that was my typical email. It was just “Go buy!”—not much more than that.

About $100/email

It started with a line I will never forget:

“If you get a boner when I whisper the word ‘Garamond’ into your ear .. . you might be interested.”

$9,563 in 24h. Garmond is a font, and they were offering a deal for Kernest, which included it.

Part of final copy:

…You see, my friend, today we’re reaching out only to the community of people known as font fanatics.

You know who you are!

If your knees go weak when I whisper, “GARAMOND.”

. . . you might be one of ’em….

Why is email so important? If you're interested in newsletters, you know that already.

To quickly sum up what Noah said:

• AppSumo generates $65M annually: nearly 50% comes from email (consistent for 10+ years).

• Email beats social media followers: 1M+ social followers < 100K email subscribers.

• Guaranteed reach vs. algorithm luck: 40K people open every email vs. unpredictable social reach.

• Email isn't dead: 4+ billion users check it daily (89% check every day).

• Platform risk: Algorithm changes killed LittleThings ($100M loss, 75% traffic drop). And you can get banned any time.

• You own your email list: It's portable if your business shuts down.

• Cost-effective growth: Growing/messaging email lists costs less than paid ads.

How to get first subs?

1. Create a lead magnet: something you will give out for free in exchange for an email (ebook, checklist, resource)

2. Get people there.

Lead magnet examples from the book:

• A checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video.

• A template for determining, say, a business’s profit margin.

• An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos.

• A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free. For me, it is 11 Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500/Day from Your Phone.

  ---

• A DIY carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table.

• A marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls.

• A landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of

  grass to use around the United States.

Getting your first 100 subs.

Noah’s advice—use your network.

My advice—start on Substack. Currently, that’s the best place on the internet to gather emails. Use any existing social media to direct people on your list.

The law of 100.

Photography professor Jerry Uelsmann split his photography into two groups: the Quantity group and the Quality group.

The Quantity group had to take 100 pictures to get an A grade by the end of the semester, and the Quality group could turn in just one photo by the end of the semester —but it had to be perfect to get the A.

Can you guess what happened?

The Quantity group kicked the Quality group’s ass—in terms of quality!

Why?

The Quantity group experimented more! They took tons of photos, learned from their mistakes each time, spent more time in the darkroom, and they got better with time.

That’s what the Law of 100 is about.

Quality beats quantity, but quantity is the way to learn.

• If you want to start a YouTube channel, publish 100 videos.

• If you’re doing a newsletter, write 100 emails.

• If you’re starting a new hobby like chess or guitar, practice for 100 days.

• If you’re creating a business, directly pitch 100 customers.

Do it 100 times before quitting. Consistency grows tasty fruits.

Summary:

Your email list is your most important asset.

Chapter 7 challenges:

1. Build your landing page. You can set up one like Julien’s for free with SendFox.com (a service I helped build).

You can use free sites: Wix, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Carrd, and Google Sites, or even Canva.

2. Update email signature and social media bios. Put your landing page address in your email signature and your social bios.

Guide I used to create my email signature:

3. Create a Lead Magnet.

   It’s time to create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration.

4. Set up an autoresponder.

   I happen to think SendFox.com (I helped build it) is pretty darned good, but there are a bunch of others that I recommend, like ConvertKit.com and Mailchimp.com.

5. The Law of 100.

   Commit to doing 100 emails, posts, or whatever action will move you closer to your goals.

A little help for you.

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Chapter 8: The growth machine

After Noah was rejected as a director of marketing at Mint, he came back with a detailed marketing plan. What happened next?

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Noah Kagan promises you can start a million-dollar business over a weekend. Here's what he doesn't tell you about why that might not work for most people.

Don't get me wrong, "Million Dollar Weekend" is packed with actionable steps, practical challenges, and value. But after breaking down each chapter, I realized there's a gap between Kagan's advice and reality for most people.

This breakdown is too extensive for one post, so I'm releasing it in two parts. I'll show you what works, what doesn't, and why you should still read the book yourself. Get it here (affiliate)

This post has the format of:

• Intro

• Lesson

• Summary

• Chapter’s challenges

Chapter 1: Just fu*king start

Noah’s Background: He went to Berkeley and was the 30th employee at Facebook, from which he was fired later.

Neat start that comes with a packet of skills and knowledge. Then he talks about his successful businesses. In short, there’s a lot to learn from this man.

Every chapter has its own challenges that will be listed at the end of each section.

Lesson:

What actually stops people from starting?

In 2013, I set out to solve that mystery and launched a course called “How to Make a $1000-a-Month Business.” I started with a group of five beta testers—a programmer, a horse trainer, and three people with ordinary day jobs—all of whom had everything they needed to start their own business.

Two weeks after we started, I was shocked to discover the entire group practically made ZERO progress. To understand what had happened, I got everyone in a room together and did some entrepreneurial group therapy, breaking down what was holding them back.

It turns out, it wasn’t a lack of skill, desire, or intelligence.

The whole group was derailed by the same two fears:

1. Fear of starting

2. Fear of asking

Start. That’s the whole lesson. Start without overthinking. Start when you aren’t ready.

Is there a right time for having kids? Probably? But surely not now? The same is true with business, and it’s much less scary than having kids.

I’ve written about this many times on AchievR (like here or here, for example).

To give you the wider picture, let’s list the most common causes for not starting and the cure for them:

• I’m not ready, I don’t know enough yet. Just start!

• I will fail. You will fail. You will learn. You will fail less. Just start!

• I’m not cut out for this. What’s that presumption based on? Was it enough to determine? Just start!

• There are so many things that could go wrong. Most of them are in your head. Just start!

I like the term “wantrepreneur” Noah is using. Don’t be one.

The freedom number.

It’s a number that will allow you to cover all the necessary expenses. It’s not the number for getting rich (yet), it’s the number that buys freedom.

I’ve had mine in mind for a long time. and believe everyone should have one. Come up with one for yourself (remember—starting).

From my eighteenth birthday until I turned thirty, my monthly Freedom Number was $3,000. Why $3,000? Because adding up what I paid for rent, the cost of the tacos and steak and wine I liked to eat and drink, and the plane tickets that would let me work from Argentina or Korea or Thailand, all together that came to a little less than $3,000 a month. At the time, that’s what my living expenses were. Roughly speaking: $1,000 for housing, $1,000 for food and travel, $1,000 for savings and investment.

Summary:

Act first and figure stuff out along the way. There’s no better lesson than failing and iterating on your own.

Super-successful people do the opposite—they take action first, get real feedback, and learn from that, which is a million times more valuable than any book or course. And quicker! […] Any analysis ahead of action is purely speculation.

Chapter 1 challenges:

1. Ask someone you know for a dollar investment in you and your future business—one measly dollar!

2. Ask one person you respect for a business idea.

3. Choosing your Freedom Number.

Chapter 2: Embrace rejection

Noah tells a little story about his dad, who sold copiers with a hard, foreign accent.

“Love rejections! Collect them like treasure! Set rejection goals. I shoot for a hundred rejections each week, because if you work that hard to get so many noes, my little Noah’le, in them you will find a few yeses, too.”

Lesson:

Ask. That’s the whole lesson. Because what’s the worst that can happen? Noah doesn’t say it that directly, but—have no shame in asking for what you want.

Most people don’t directly ask for what they want. They drop a hint here and there, and then are disappointed they didn’t get it.

We cringe at people like this, but we’re jealous after the question is answered.

Rejection is scary, it hurts. But it also doesn’t matter. None of those people who made fun of your cold DM will come to your funeral. Even more, they won’t remember it tomorrow.

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk turned a decade of no’s into a chart-beating hit. Whatever you are doing, it won’t take 10 years for you.

Who is the type of person that starts a million-dollar business?

• The type of person who asks for what they want.

• If you want a new job at a new company, you have to ASK for it.

• If you want more money from your boss, you have to ASK for the raise.

• If you are selling something, you have to ASK the customer to buy it.

• Even at home, if you want your spouse or kids to treat you better, you have to ASK them.

I once did sales training for various renewable energy companies. This involved identifying homes that looked like they needed upgrades, knocking on doors, making small talk (which I hated), and then pitching our product (which was a solid offer). Some people were scared, others were rude, and a few were downright hostile. But it was an experience that made cold DMing people online feel like a peaceful walk in the forest by comparison.

This is going to suck, but there’s something very satisfying about casting this net.

What do you need?

• Persistence: most nos are actually a “not nows.”

• Follow up: a lot.

• Selling is helping: If you believe your product or service improves the lives of your customers, selling is just education. And here’s when I have an ask:

  AchievR is a highly nutritious media diet for your brain.

Summary:

Ask. Ask a lot. Ask despite discomfort.

Chapter 2 challenges:

1. The Coffee Challenge: Go to any coffee shop or anyplace in person. Make a simple purchase and ask for 10 percent off.

Chapter 3: Finding million-dollar ideas

The chapter starts with another story—about the business that flopped, sank $100k+, and how that led to $15 million opportunity.

It is deadly to build a business without first verifying that there are paying customers

Lesson:

…when it comes to generating business ideas, customers come first. Before the product or service. Even before the idea. To build a business, you need someone to sell to.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has emailed me saying, “What do you think of this business idea?”

My auto-reply? “Have you asked what the customer thinks?”

Steve Jobs said, “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards.”

[..]

If you do it this way, you’re assured of nailing the three Ws of business right from the start:

• Who you are selling to?

• What problem you’ re solving?

• Where they are?

The core lesson here (which repeats in the book many times) is that you need to test your idea first, to see if customers are there and if they will pay for the solution you provide.

Founder first vs customer first approach:

Okay, you have an idea for a dog-walking app. How would you go about doing it? Here’s the way most people—most wantrepreneurs—would do it:

1. Spend hours at home thinking about the app (and coming up with clever names for it).

2. Set up an LLC

3. Spend $100 hiring their cousin to draw a cool logo. Set up an LLC.

4. Watch YouTube videos about apps and programming and business. And dogs.

5. Consider signing up for a developer boot camp and quickly realize coding is hard.

6. Buy the domain name for the snazzy website they’re going to build.

7. Look into hiring a developer on Upwork, and quickly realize it’s prohibitively expensive.

8. Give up. Again.

vs:

1. Call or text three people right now who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog.

2. Turns out none of these dog owners have problems walking their dog. You discover their real problem is finding dog sitters when they’re traveling.

3. Ask for their next travel dates and have them pay you a deposit.

They pay: jackpot!

Personal network.

Long story short: Noah describes how he launched AppSumo (discounted software bundles) by emailing the Imgru founder and an important person at Reddit. I can’t help but notice this part is not relatable at all.

Email to Chris Slowe, Reddit’s founding engineer:

Wanted to treat you to a breakfast at Pork Store Cafe to give you some suggestions on the site and run by a cool promotion I’m working on with Imgur.

You free this Wed at 9am?

If any mortal like me and you were to do this, we would never get an answer. And that’s when the brilliant plan would stop.

However, the lesson is there. And it’s valuable—use your existing network. People you already know can be a great potential. You are on some WhatsApp groups, Discords, etc. Everyone knows this, few use this. Combine with the lesson from before—asking.

Finding business ideas.

And the 3 questions you need for that:

1. What’s the most painful (aka valuable) problem you can solve for people...

2. That you also have passion for and/or unique expertise in...

3. For the largest niche possible that you belong to and understand . . .

Business is all about solving problems, pains, frustrations. You’ve got enough of them, and some are shared with other people, some you know way more about than others. Solve your own problems, win-win.

A tip I really liked is latching onto existing products. Like stickers for an iPhone, PS5 custom controller skins, or cool Lego displays.

It’s easier to sell to a large group of people who’ve already spent money on a product or service.

Summary:

Ask. Ask a lot. Ask despite discomfort.

Chapter 3 challenges:

1. Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc.

2. Solve your own problems. Use the questions (above) to find three ideas.

3. Write down two accessorizing ideas in your MDW Journal.

4. Use search engine questions and Reddit forums to find two more ideas.

Chapter 4: One-minute business model

Students of Noah’s Monthly1K challenged him to make $1k in the next 24h from the ideas they chose. The beef jerky idea was the winner. The next 2 chapters show how this business was later sold for $120k.

In this chapter, you will learn how to determine if the idea has $1M potential.

Lesson:

3 questions to help you decide on the business:

1. “Is this a million-dollar opportunity?” You’ll research the market to find out.

2. “What’s my model?” You’ll create a simple budget by sketching out revenue, cost, and profit, so you know how many units you’ll need to sell and for how much to make $1 million.

3. “What if it turns out it’s not going to work?” You’ll pivot and evolve: You’ll use customer feedback to adjust the variables of the business (pricing, model, offer, category—all that) into something bigger and better.

Find customers that will pay.

You, dear reader, are a surfer. What you’re selling—the product or service—is your surfboard. The market is the wave, and the wave is what matters most.

Even if you’re a great surfer with an amazing board, you will still fail if you don’t have a good wave to ride.

You don’t have to hop on a new trend. There are many examples in the book, including selling dog treats and cookies. Students are generally broke, solving rich people’s problems pays—you get the idea. Example:

…Robert Samuel. After getting fired from his customer service job at AT&T, he noticed the frenzy created by every new iPhone release. So he put an ad on Craigslist in 2012 to validate whether anyone would pay for him to wait in line. When he was paid $325 for his first fifteen-hour stint, he knew he had a wave.

Today, his business Same Ole Line Dudes (SOLD) employs thirty dudes and dudettes, charging a $50 minimum up to two hours and $25 for each additional hour to wait in line for everything from hot new sneakers to the DMV to the newest iPhone release—and Robert himself takes home $80,000 a year.

To have a million-dollar business, you need a million-dollar opportunity—how do you prove you have one?

1. Is the overall market dying, flat, or growing?

2. Is this a million-dollar opportunity?

For 1:

Use Google Trends/Ads Manager, as well as Facebook Ads. Keyword research, any other tool to determine the market’s potential.

For 2:

1. Pick a price point you think will be ideal for your customer.

2. Multiply that by the number of ideal customers.

3. Does that equal at least a million dollars? Yes or no?

Noah gives an example of beard oil.

• Problem: Beards are itchy

• Solution: Beard oil

• Google Trends: Flat with some growth

• Size of market: 2,500,000 people

• Cost of your product: ~$50

• Total Value: $125,000,000

• Million-dollar idea? Yes!

How to generate your own $1M?

As you won’t take 10, 5, or even 2% of the market—what would it take for $1M?

Revenue (all the money you make) — Cost (how much it costs to make it) = Profit (what you get to take home)

Our Beard oil sells for

$ 50.00

Cost to make, package, and ship

$ 37.50

Profit per unit sold

$ 12.50

Target Profit

$ 1,000,000

Profit per unit sold

$ 12.50

Total sales needed

80,000

This will never be that easy, but it gives you a rough mental image that you will base further decisions on.

AND, we are skipping the competition aspect here, which in this example is massive.

Pivot and evolve.

Coming back to jerky:

1 Bag of Jerky

$ 20

Cost to acquire, package, and ship

$ 15

Profit

$5

Uh-oh . . . That meant:

Target profit

$ 1,000

Profit per unit sold

$5

Total sales needed

200

In 24h? Too much. Solution: recurring sale—subscription.

I also realized that if I sold to offices that offered snacks, it would be easier to find customers with larger disposable budgets. Plus, I figured I had a lot of close friends at companies who could buy for their employees or refer me to their office managers.

Once again, connections. A huge part of business. Pitching offices to buy your jerky sub would definitely take more than 24h.

One-time sale: $20/1, 200 sales needed after costs.

6-month subscription: $120/1, 33 sales needed after costs.

AND, we are skipping the burnout aspect. Not that difficult to find a high-potential idea, very difficult to find an idea that won’t burn the absolute shit out of you.

If you do a non-obligatory thing that you don’t care about for the pure sake of money, you will burn out. Profitable ideas are often boring as hell! Does doing taxes for crypto traders sound sexy? I bet there’s money in it.

Overall, the book has a lot of shortcuts. Worth reading, solid, but some aspects are simplified to the maximum.

If all this info is overwhelming. I recommend coming back to it a few times. Chapter 4, steps 1-4 in the book if you want a deeper dive. Now let’s move on.

Summary:

Validate the idea before starting anything.

Chapter 4 challenges:

Find your $1M idea, like above.

Chapter 5: Validate your business by getting paid

You wonder how that 48h jerky challenge ended up?

Read more