I was uncomfortable, unhappy, and restless.

I didn’t want to meet new people, because I felt I was giving the wrong impression.

Something wasn’t right.

It took me months to figure out the real problem: My clothes don’t fit anymore!

Once I realized this, I had to decide what new clothes would fit the new me.

Like many of us, I looked to the style of glamorous and successful people.

I should wear what they wear since it works so well for them. I tried on many of their outfits, but nothing fit.

That was really disappointing, because I thought that’s why they share their choices with the world — so we can do what they do. I thought it would be that easy.

Eventually, after a lot of searching, I found clothes that are just my size.

But I couldn’t get them on!

There was no room at all.

I’m embarrassed to say I overlooked something obvious.

I was trying to wear new clothes on top of the old ones.

I didn’t realize I had to completely remove my old clothes before putting on something new.

It was easy to take off my old clothes for a few days, but just having them around made it too easy to put them on again.

They were so comfortable!

I’d been wearing these things for so many years that they really became my identity. If you put my old clothes on a mannequin, it would look like me.

What does that say about me, then?

We are what we wear?

Clothes make the man?

So, I had to completely discard them. It was sad — I thought those clothes would last forever. I documented them for archive’s sake, then gave them away.

I’m glad someone else can use them.

In this transition, before I put on my new clothes, I’m naked.

It feels weird. I’m surprised I’m allowed to go out like this.

Old friends hardly notice, but new people I meet are confused and can’t tell why I’m not wearing something.

An outfit would show them how I can help. (And that’s all most people want to know.)

• A power suit would show I can help their business.

• A monk’s robe would imply I could help their soul.

• Explorer’s gear would prove I could lead an adventure.

• A clown costume might at least make them laugh.

But nothing at all? They probably can’t use me for anything.

I get invited to speak at events, but it’s clear that they really just want the outfit I used to wear. I explain that it doesn’t fit, but they’re upset that I won’t put it on just one more time.

Don’t worry — I’m not going to be a nudist now. That’s inconsiderate to almost everyone. I’ll put on my new clothes soon.

But I’m just sharing this story in case your discomfort might just be that your old clothes don’t fit anymore.

via a Derek Sivers post

1. ask for help. especially when you’re scared of asking for help

2. you haven’t failed until you’ve given up

3. avoid people not aware of their fears

4. if someone you respect gives you dumb advice, think about it instead of discarding it immediately.

5. let the world tell you no

6. go to a rave get drunk & dance

7. have a concrete positive vision of the future

8. seek people who see the future

9. seek people who don’t get angry at you for saying what you think, being yourself, and doing what you believe is right

10. if you think you’re introverted, find better friends

11. you decide whether to live in the past or in the future with your every action

12. what will you regret tomorrow?

13. in 1 year?

14. in 10 years?

15. when a prisoner at auschwitz was trying to escape the gas chamber, other prisoners alerted the guards

16. never make decisions on the basis of tax rates

17. if you have more than a few months of runway, start spending more

18. at least 30% of the world’s smartest 22 year olds right now are in the bay area hustling to get an o1/j1/h1b

19. spend 10-20% of your time reorienting

20. ask the girl you like out

21. brain is a wet sausage

22. write google docs

23. meditate

24. be kind

25. reasonable priors are an oxymoron bc the world is just fucking weird

26. workspace can be drama free

27. if you’re 20, you’re probably underestimating yourself

28. update all the way

29. if you weren’t at Los Alamos in 1943, you probably thought nuclear weapons were 20 years away

30. know what you want

31. if you feel bad, low energy, depressed, demotivated, there’s probably a reason & there’s probably a solution

32. the smarter someone is the more they can afford to have terrible epistemics and still be successful

33. you are permitted to do what you believe is right

34. autistic visionaries are not natural-born leaders

35. risks are less risky than you think. take as many as you can.

36. be loyal to your friends

37. the richest people lose the most money, the most connected people get rejected the most, the most successful people fail the most

38. go do something that can fail

39. reflect on your day at the end of it and write down what you learned

40. don’t die (Vin here - Maybe the one and only thing I’ll ever post about Covid- I think a lot of people ignored this advice, and many died because of it. I don’t mean those who had to work in public. I mean those who didn’t. That’s all I’ll say about that…)

Reposted via Creative Commons from guzey.com

What ONE piece of advice do you want to share with the world? Let’s hear it!

1. get to the point

2. who do you want to be more like? write a list

3. set 5 minute timers and write next steps

4. set a 5 minute timer and start doing the next step

5. how do you feel – not think! – about your current top goal?

6. every document must have a specific goal written at the top of it

7. get to inbox 0 every day, unless you have a specific reason not to

8. set 1 minute timers to surface thoughts

9. close eyes when thinking

10. take Saturdays or sundays off

11. intelligence != genius

12. fewer better arguments

13. what’s the silver bullet?

14. cherish friends who tell you things that make you angry

15. sitting around on the floor with eyes closed thinking & having friends call you a coward both remain extremely underrated

    
    To read the rest of this article and get bonus articles every month and get access to all my ChatGPT ebooks, upgrade to my paid plan! :)

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1. let people tell you no. don’t make the decision for them. (i.e. follow up lots! - Vin)

2. expectation of progress towards a goal is key to motivation. we are not motivated if don’t know next step. we are not motivated if we don’t know what the goal is

3. when sending/receiving important email, snooze it for the date when you want to follow up

4. set 1 hour timers to surface thoughts in a google doc and 3m timers to write down next steps.

5. the more you know, the more easily you can see the next steps.

6. key about naps: no need to sleep. brain never fully on, never fully off. If I took a 20 minute nap and didn’t fall asleep, i just took an excellent 10 minute nap!

7. if you don’t have consistent scheduled time for your top goals, you don’t have top goals

8. what are you being a coward about? be specific

9. what are you ashamed of? be specific

10. what makes you angry? be specific

11. everything has an MVP & final version. MVP can usually be done in 10% of the time with a timer for 5-10-15 minutes & ensures you don’t get stuck. what’s the mvp of your current top goal?

12. working on the hardest problems requires incredible amount of courage. acknowledge & embrace fear.

13. strong intuition doesn’t mean intuition is right.

14. even if high level intuition is right, without grounding actionable implications likely completely wrong.

15. seek ground truth and poke reality. don’t settle for proxies or for winning arguments.

16. never defer key beliefs. do everything possible to find ppl thinking from first principles rather than from what’s reasonable or what someone else believes

17. be suspicious if you haven’t felt awkward today

18. ppl good at thinking think that thinking is everything; people good at doing think that doing is everything. doers dismiss thinkers & thinkers are scared of doers.

19. if there’s something on your mind, write it down & get it out. maintain full attention on what you’re doing.

20. if you did a sequence of actions 3 times, make a checklist

21. if you have a thought and you don’t like it, you can tell your brain that you don’t like it and drop it.

22. add questions & ideas you want to get back to later to anki, snooze tabs, schedule them in asana.

23. send cold emails. assume that everyone is a friend.

24. always have a timer on top & use it to avoid getting stuck

25. be sus if you haven’t spent a few years feeling like a loser when everyone else was getting ahead

26. if you never feel a particular emotion, it’s probably the brain suppressing awareness of it or suppressing the emotion directly

27. people think that others have same motivations as them

28. people protect themselves by projecting their fears on others

29. you can decide to pay or not to pay attention to things

30. what’s the default decision?

31. be sus whenever you want to read & research instead of figuring something out yourself. it’s usually avoidance caused by fear.

32. grab a piece of paper and write a feelings diagram asking “why” endlessly

33. run, don’t walk. literally. “Slow is fake”

34. poke at whatever your 15-year old self felt & believed in.

35. you’ll learn 10x more by talking to the paper’s author for 30 minutes versus reading it for 30 minutes

36. you can’t improve what you can’t measure. if you want to improve on ground-truth, measure ground-truth

37. never give up

38. be as specific as possible. “agi takeoff fast”: define “agi” “takeoff” “fast”

39. we become the people whose opinion we care about

40. we become the people we spend the most time (physically and mentally) with

Reposted under Creative Commons via guzey.com

Hit reply and let me know if you want more like this!

What ONE life hack has helped you the most?👇

1. i’m scared that they might be better than me at everything and that i’ll be out of job if they try to do whatever it is i’m doing

2. drop everything and work non-stop on a single thing if decide on the right thing to do

3. exceptionally clear writing

4. fast when it matters, slow when it doesn’t

5. really get “if you’re not sure what to do, just do the right thing”

6. deliver on an agreed schedule, even if it means getting best effort rather than perfect thing (and their “best effort” tends to be impressive given the timeline)

7. figure out assignments from people they respect on their own and deliver way above expectations on them

8. ahead of me on important thoughts, questions, insights, achievements (if very young: ahead of me at their age)

9. are clearly much better than me at >=2 important things

10. seriously ask the biggest questions & do their best to go all the way answering them

11. keep promises

12. impatient yet patient; brilliant yet dumb

13. ask questions that make people they talk to smarter and more specific

14. not scared of interrupting people

15. do what’s required to get where they want to get (rather than only doing what they’re good at)

16. have specific, correct hot takes (if young, on the path there)

17. delivered a ton of interesting projects that weren’t helpful for anything in particular (whether it’s writing, coding, leading or anything else)

18. learn really fast & you can see it from their behavior

19. actions reflect beliefs

20. have a history of embarrassing cold emails

21. have a promise of good taste

22. i have no clue how they’ve done what they’ve done

23. take ideas seriously

24. type really fast (clearly a spurious correlation but still interesting)

25. ok with being low status & not afraid to do things that are not viewed as “normal”

26. consistently surprise me

27. not afraid to majorly change a (successful) career path, if needed

28. when i look at their resume i feel embarrassed for myself

29. have 6 months+ periods of unemployment/underemployment

30. don’t give up (eventually)

31. see the future

32. don’t settle for proxies, zoom all the way in & out

33. keep doing what they believe is the right thing in the absence of any positive feedback or only negative (even if only perceived) feedback from others

34. have thought through everything

35. use first principles when there are no priors & use priors when there are priors

36. extremely curious

Reposted via Creative Commons via Guzey.com

His disclaimer of the above list is reprinted below:

“I’m often asked about the signs of exceptional talent I’ve observed, probably because I spend too much running around talking to people & observing things, instead of doing anything useful.

Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, and Tyler Cowen are the three names that come to mind when thinking about this question. Of my writing, Intelligence killed genius and (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders are most relevant.

Take this post as more of a no-filter brainstorming exercise rather than a list of requirements or anything of that sort and please don’t go around telling everyone that Alexey will only work with people who dropped out of undergrad and type really fast. It’s called “omens” for a reason & there’s a good chance I’m going to wake up tomorrow feeling embarrassed for half of it (unfortunately I’m terrible at interpreting omens and don’t know which half yet!).”

What ONE sign do you see indicates someone has exceptional talent?

1. why did you do something you regret?

2. what have you promised to do and not done yet?

3. what’s the top 1 work goal today?

4. what’s the top 1 personal goal today?

5. is the failure condition clear?

6. when was the last time you talked to someone you really admire?

7. what have you learned about yourself in the last year?

8. what are you going to regret in a year?

9. what’s the most common advice you give to people?

10. do you follow it yourself?

11. what can you do in the next 60 seconds that will make you feel proud of yourself?

12. who’s consistently ahead of you?

13. why don’t you catch up?

14. where in the world is your tribe?

15. do you believe in yourself more than you believed 5 years ago?

16. what are you trying to do?

17. what’s the next step?

18. what do you have no competitors in?

19. what do you feel behind on?

20. what’s the silver bullet?

What one question do you ask yourself the most?

Questions reposted under Creative Commons via guzey.com

It’s easy to give useless advice that feels profound.

For example, one of the pieces of advice I give most often to people is to write more. So a few months ago I suggested to a friend of mine that they should write about the situations in which they started procrastinating and explained that writing forces you to think about what exactly happened and thus would help with their productivity issues. A couple of weeks later I asked them how did it go and they told me that they did this a couple of times but it wasn’t useful, so they gave up on writing things down. I asked them if I can take a look at a couple of notes that they took and this is when I realized how shitty the advice I gave them was.

Here’s what they did based on my advice:

1. opened Roam Research

2. wrote down a literal description of the incident that happened with what the events that preceded it

At this point, they

1. didn’t actually think about the problem

2. didn’t take any actions to actually remedy it

3. are about to forget about their note ~forever

4. are about to give up on writing things down

Here’s what I do when I notice that I have a pattern of behavior I don’t like and what I was trying to communicate:

1. open an incoming.md file in which I write down any notes for further processing

   • having just one file decreases friction of writing thoughts down massively and makes me much more likely to write notes

2. write a description of what happened with my thoughts on what caused it

3. think about specific actions I can take in future similar situations

4. open my todo program (Amazing Marvin) and add a task that roughly says “did i do the specific action i was planning to take” a week into the future (this task can then be re-scheduled into the future any number of times as a reminder)

   • any time I encounter this reminder, I write down any new thoughts on the issue to incoming.md

5. clean up incoming.md every Sunday by deleting/moving into Roam Research all notes older than 1 month, so after 1 month I return to the initial note I took and, in case I did not solve the problem completely, IN A SEPARATE NOTE I summarize whatever happened to the problem in the meantime, what I did, what I’m going to do in the future

   • thus I will return to that new note 1 month later again and see what happened

   • returning to every note 1 month later enables gradual thinking and tinkering with habits and thought processes and often leads to new thoughts or insights, while also naturally integrating spaced repetition and increasing retention of ideas

   • this also effectively allows me to write letters to myself 1 month into the future, which is often very helpful

6. move off old notes to Roam Research and tag them and occasionally check older notes with the tags in question to see long-term progress

7. continue to do the steps above indefinitely until the problem is solved

Three observations:

1. it’s extremely difficult to communicate the process above verbally in a casual conversation where you have like 30 seconds of talking time before people start feeling weird and where you’re limited by the working memory of your friend

2. it’s extremely easy to mentally collapse the process above into something like “have you tried writing cases when you start procrastinating down?” and forget about all of the other elements of this strategy that actually make it useful

3. I actually do all of the steps above because I’m insane and obsessed with this stuff and simply “write down the situation” does not facilitate the emotional connection needed for this habit to stay in place

We are all different people

People differ a lot in their levels of conscientiousness, extraversion, energy, ambition, curiosity, independence, risk-seeking, fame-seeking, neuroticism, conflict-aversion, obsessiveness, etc. By default, high conscientiousness people don’t understand low conscientiousness people. High extraversion people don’t understand low extraversion people. High energy people don’t understand low energy people. It’s actually worse than that because “high neuroticism” or “high ambition” can actually mean a ton of different things. (a)

Even if someone shares our thinking style (so we feel like we have good rapport and understand each other well), they probably differ from us in a lot of other crucial personality aspects and thus are unlikely to understand our attitude towards life by default. Everyone (including me) tends to really underestimate how different we all are.

I probably have ADHD and I’m not good at doing what other people tell me to do. This doesn’t prevent my grandmas who’ve known me for my entire life and who spent thousands of hours with me over the years to keep telling me that I should just get a normal job. Even our closest ones have surprisingly little insight into our mental states.

Note the “by default"s above. If you only have 3 minutes of conversation time, you will probably only be able to hear the default advice, either modeled on the person who’s giving the advice themself or on a very crude model of you. But if you have an actual conversation or you know each other really well, it’s quite likely that you’ll be able to articulate your thought processes much better, to figure out what exactly makes you click, and will get advice that is actually tailored to you. It’s ok to take an hour or more to discuss a difficult decision with a friend.

If you’re giving advice, it’s helpful to

1. make sure that the person cares about solving the problem in the first place (rather than just venting, feeling obliged to want to solve the problem…)

2. make sure that the person does not have psychological blocks around doing anything about the problem (anxiety, learned helplessness) or figure out how to work around them

3. make sure that the person’s internal traits and ambitions match the thing you’re suggesting

We are systematically wrong about why we do the things we do

Of course you’re not guaranteed to get good advice in any case. A risk-loving CEO will probably not tell you that the reasons behind them burning cash launching new products are boredom and the desire for novelty. And a risk-averse CEO will probably not tell you that the reason they’re not launching new unproven products while allowing themselves to be eaten by startups is because they’re afraid of failure.

Correspondingly, the former CEO and the latter CEO will probably give you different advice on important life decisions, each backing up their advice with very seriously-sounding reasons. And even if they do realize that they’re risk-seeking or risk-averse, the former has probably convinced themself that people lose by being too cautious while the latter has probably convinced themself that people lose by being too reckless and will give you advice corresponding with their life philosophy, probably not realizing and thus not telling you how they arrived at this conclusion that informs every aspect of their thinking. All of this is especially true for “taboo” topics. Nobody wants to be considered reckless and nobody wants to be considered a chicken, meaning that people will be especially self-deceptive in such domains.

People are systematically wrong not just about their fundamental traits but also about everyday desires and emotions. Parents who “want the best” for their children but actually just live their own failed ambitions (a) through them is one classic example. ‘When John F. Kennedy was asked about the level of involvement and influence that his father had held in his razor-thin presidential victory over Richard Nixon, he would joke that on the eve of the election his father had asked him the exact number of votes he would need to win: There was no way he was paying “for a landslide”.' (a)People bad at small talk deciding that small talk is useless is also a good one.

To summarize: people generate systematically wrong explanations for their behavior and they will give you systematically bad advice if they reason from wrong explanations from their behavior. If you pay attention, you will notice this everywhere. We are really good at self-deception.

We are systematically wrong about why the things we do work for us

Most advice is basically people mistaking correlation for causation.

Leo Polovets

When things go bad, we try to fix them, but the truth is quite often things return to normal all on their own or due to external factors but to feel that our actions made them better.

For example, I’m writing a post on how to make waking up easier right now. I’ve had giant troubles getting out of bed in the morning for as long as I can remember myself, however I finally managed to start waking up with an alarm consistently a few months ago and figured that ok, I’ve been doing it for a few months, I’m pretty confident in what I’m doing, I think I should write about this – everyone I know has exactly the same problem after all. So I wrote 2,000 words about this over a few weeks and then lost the ability to get out of bed easily. I still don’t know what happened.

The simpler the problem the person is facing, the more difficult it is to fix

Mistake I’ve made many times: seeing someone with a simple problem and thinking “not to worry, this just needs a quick fix and they’ll be on their way!” instead of “what level of hidden dysfunction is keeping even this simple problem unsolved?”

Michael Story

Imagine someone is terrible at email: they take a long time to respond, they read emails and then forget about them until the person on the other end follows up a week later, they can’t send themselves a reminder-email and be sure that they’re actually going to read it, etc.

Here are potential reasons for why this could be happening:

1. they have literally just never heard of “inbox zero” and the “mark as unread” button in Gmail

2. they are bad at managing their time in general and they get overwhelmed with email easily; they find it difficult to say no to people and they don’t read/reply to emails as a way to avoid discomfort from having to say no or risk being overwhelmed with commitments; or they’re plain busy and unable to reply to or to even read 100 emails a day

It’s extremely easy to hear about someone struggling to stay on top of their email and go “oh, not being terrible at email seems pretty simple. You just need to open email every morning and make sure you get to inbox 0. That will solve most of your problems.” It’s extremely unlikely that the person you’re talking to literally just never thought about that. Note that all the issues in point (2) are much more difficult to solve than (1).

Ditto for “go to the gym” (exercise-induced vomiting?), “spend less time on twitter” (inability to cultivate friends in real life? compulsive avoidance of work?), “leave the job that makes you suicidal” (no savings? $$$ vesting over the next couple of years?), etc.

When someone tells you you should go to the gym, they’re probably not thinking about a million of personal factors that make going to the gym easy for them. Even worse, it’s quite likely that it was actually difficult for them to start going to the gym, but they managed to develop the adaptations necessary for it to be a consistent habit (e.g. “just going” to the gym even when they don’t quite feel like going, short-circuiting potential negative motivation/overthinking spirals - how?), and these habits have now just become parts of who they are, so they’re not thinking about them and are not realizing they were acquired at this specific point in time.

Returning to my discussion of fixing a pattern of behavior I don’t like, there are many moving parts and background processes that are idiosyncratic to my system and to my personality, like me having an incoming.md file that ensures future review of notes, using Amazing Marvin, which enables low friction but extremely persistent endless reminders, actually using Amazing Marvin rather than checking it once a month but ignoring it day-to-day, having special Roam Research pages and tags that make looking up old notes easy, caring about this shit a lot, and probably a bunch more stuff I’m forgetting now.

Simply grafting it on anyone’s life is unlikely to work and disentangling all of the elements and gradually installing all of them is actually pretty hard because the structure of such systems is typically very path-dependent, driven by personal exploration and working largely because of the emotional attachment developed to it in the process of this exploration. Of course creating such an emotional attachment is possible (one reason why summarizing self-help books that spend 200 pages trying to do this for a single idea is stupid), is worth trying, but it’s not easy to do and you should not be discouraged that it doesn’t work 100% instantaneously.

When simple advice does work

Simple advice works when it forces you to think, reminds you of something you forgot about or nudges you in the right direction, and more often takes the form of questions or general suggestions/pointers. For example, “what’s your plan for doing X?” or “what was the original reasoning behind doing X?” are often actually very helpful.

Nate Soares wrote about this beautifully in Obvious advice (a):

It’s surprising how often the advice that I give people who come to me asking for advice cashes out to some form of “well, have you considered doing the obvious thing?”

For example, when someone comes to me and says “help, I have a talk I have to give and I’m going to be terribly nervous and I dread it, what do I do?” it’s often surprisingly helpful for me to ask, “well, what sort of things would make you less nervous?” Or someone comes to me and says “I find myself just playing video games all day, how do I stop myself?”, I first ask, “have you considered what sorts of things you’d rather do besides play video games all day?”

In many cases, the obvious prompts aren’t sufficient. But in a surprising number of cases, they are. I still often find this advice useful myself: when my attention slips, I am often helped by someone just asking me to consider the obvious — “what would make the task less dreadful?” or “have you thought for five minutes about alternatives?” or “have you considered delegating this?” and so on.

Our brains are basically undercooked sausages and it’s both terrifying how easy it is to forget to do all of the obvious things regularly and very encouraging because the bar for doing better is set so low. This is why I think weekly one-on-ones (therapy, coaching) are actually really helpful.

Be careful when taking advice

It’s especially difficult to figure out what we really care about when we’re young and we should be vigilant to not be swayed by people who are older and who seem like they know what they care about or by our peer group which, as a whole, always seems to know where it’s moving.

The only adults teenagers are really exposed to are teachers and professors and I, for example, was very prone to seek advice from those I especially admired. I think I realized that I do not share some of the most important traits for which teachers and professors are selected (lack of desire to build things irl; intellectual play as one of the central pleasures in life, etc.) and that I probably shouldn’t listen too carefully to what my favorite professors think about life a bit too late.

I studied economics in the university and there were two standard paths among people around me:

1. PhD in economics

2. finance/consulting

I think I realized that the actual reasons for these are usually

1. “I don’t know what I want and I don’t want to have a jerb”

2. “I don’t know what I want but people in finance/consulting make a lot of money and have high optionality so why not”

also a bit too late and I’m glad all the banks and consulting firms I applied to rejected all of my applications. I felt the pull of having a prestigious job incredibly strongly, even after my blog became fairly popular and I think I got very lucky that I failed to find a job, despite earnestly trying to do it for a long time.

The advice we are given is systematically biased not only because people are just bad it figuring out how shit works but also because advice can’t be isolated away from the relationships we have. If a friend suggests you to drop out of school and start a startup or write full-time, they will partly be to-blame for what happens to you when you make that decision (and unconventional life decisions do often end poorly). Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM applies to advice too and advice you receive will be systematically biased in favor of safe choices.

One way out of this is to perhaps explicitly ask something along the lines of “what’s the most outrageous advice you can come up with? what advice are you scared of giving me because you think I’ll blame you if it fails?" and to remember to try to figure out why they believe the things they tell you, why the made the decisions they made, and why they tell you these specific things whenever someone shares advice with you.

Finally, do remember that most people only did 1 or 2 things in their life. The probability that one of them is exactly what you should be doing with your life is very low, and they probably know next to nothing about everything else.

Conclusion

Giving good advice is both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult. It’s usually helpful to note the motivation, personality, personal circumstances, etc. of the person on the other end of the conversation and to give both of you enough time to figure out what’s really going on. And yet, sometimes “just do x” is the best advice you could give and sometimes hearing “just do x” is the best advice you can hear.

Reposted via Creative Commons via guzey.com

1. what are you thinking about these days?

2. what’s the most embarrassing cold email you’ve sent?

3. what does good future look like?

4. what are you absolutely certain in?

5. what’s one actionable from last meeting?

6. what are the key questions? 

7. why not take a pen and a piece of paper, go offline for 1 hour and resolve one of them?

8. what do you want?

9. what’s slowing you down the most?

10. when was the last time you took 3 months completely off?

11. what’s your destiny?

12. how can you do better?

13. when was the last time you asked for help?

14. what inspires you?

15. what are you devoted to?

16. what are you confused about?

17. why will you fail?

18. did the person actually tell you no or did you just assume they would?

19. when was the last time you did something you’ve never done before?

20. when should one give up?

Reposted under Creative Commons via guzey.com

One of my favorite quotes:

“A fool doesn’t learn from their mistakes.

A wise man learns from his mistakes.

A genius learns from the mistakes of others”.

1)

Back when I started my online magazine, we had 300,000 visitors a month but no idea what to do to grow the company.

I met an advisory team who found me an investor within one month, and raised 250,000 bucks.

2)

I once posted on the technology forum “Hacker news” I can grow any social media account and know a lot about content. What should I do with this?”

A message board user named Austen Allred reached out and said “We should write a book on what you know about social media, adding in what I know about SEO, PR, and affiliates”

A few weeks later we launched the book.

It ended up being the biggest ever growth hacking book launched on Kickstarter and in total the book did a little under 250,000 bucks in revenue (let alone MUCH more in clients I got from the back of it, connections, talks, etc)

Subscribed

3)

After I had been posting content on Facebook for a few weeks, I wanted to monetise my audience. I heard about Dan Meredith, someone who made his main living from the audience he writes for (even though his audience was not that big).

He told me what to sell, how to sell it, when to launch, and when to close the launch.

I made 50,000 bucks quickly and six figures within six months of the first time we spoke (courses, coaching, consulting, ebooks, etc).

In these examples, think about the people who have tried to do what I did and got mothing in return…I wasn’t doing anything particularly original:

I very well could have ended up like the majority of people who tried to do the above - not making it work and moving onto something else.

But because of the guidance they gave me (very little time spent with each person) they put me on a quick path to doing well.

Starting this substack was an idea from one of my mentors.

Point is: Mentors are the difference between making it, and not.

And if you want me to mentor you, there are 12 hours left on my Cyber Monday 0ffer.

If you've ever wanted my brains to solve your problems, you have 24 hours to secure me working with you to solve your biz problems live, one-to-one!

Common issues I resolve on these mentoring calls:

> Integrating A.I./ChatGPT throughout your company e.g. content strategy, cold email strategy, etc

> Finding your secret sauce to give you a competitive edge

> Looking to create channels to solve customer problems

> Strategy for side-hustles

SO if you want me, pick one!

1) One "power-up Zoom"

If you haven't launched yet/just starting out/have small budget:

One 45-60 minute Zoom where I'll have you fill out a questionnaire I read in advance so I understand your goals and issues, then a Zoom where I lay out exactly what I'd do, up to and including three months of planning:

200 bucks if you reply "power-up zoom" to this email

2)

One months' strategy and advice calls

FOUR 45-60 minute Zooms where I'll have you fill out a questionnaire I read in advance so I understand your goals and issues, then a Zoom where I lay out exactly what I'd do, up to and including three months of planning:

750 bucks if you reply "power-up month of zooms" to this email

3)

Three months' strategy and advice calls

Reply to this email with "three months zooms!" and I'll reply - Need to see if we're aligned before I commit. Excited to see who replies though!

Below are some previous people I’ve helped:

hit reply with "power up zoom" "one month of power up zooms" or "3 months of zooms" if u want my help!

Common issues I resolve on coaching calls:

> Integrating A.I./ChatGPT throughout your company e.g. content strategy, cold email strategy, etc

> Finding your secret sauce to give you a competitive edge

> Looking to create channels to solve customer problems

> Strategy for sidehustles

> Anything else you need!

I offer three ways to get my brains this Cyber Monday:

1) One "power-up Zoom"

If you haven't launched yet/just starting out/have small budget:

One 45-60 minute Zoom where I'll have you fill out a questionnaire I read in advance so I understand your goals and issues, then a Zoom where I lay out exactly what I'd do, up to and including three months of planning:

200 bucks if you reply "power-up zoom" to this email

2)

One months' strategy and advice calls

FOUR 45-60 minute Zooms where I'll have you fill out a questionnaire I read in advance so I understand your goals and issues, then a Zoom where I lay out exactly what I'd do, up to and including three months of planning:

750 bucks if you reply "power-up month of zooms" to this email

3)

Three months' strategy and advice calls

Reply to this email with "three months zooms!" and I'll reply - Need to see if we're aligned before I commit.

Excited to see who replies though!

Below are some previous people I’ve helped:

Hit reply with "power up zoom" "one month of power up zooms" or "3 months of zooms" if u want my help!

1. Team doesn't execute fast.
   
   Many people, even in startups, are in their comfort zone and don't appreciate how many things need to be tried, and how many things fail, before product/market fit is hit.
   

2. Team can't accept reality.
   
   Easy to live in delusions "This will work!" feels good! But…
   
   When I point out all the ways it won't, they argue and resent me rather than accepting the information. And...
   

3. Team does not believe in me as much as the "key man" who brings me in. Sidenote: I am not normally told they think this, haha
   
   

4. Dev team do not want to create new features/iterations that I see as critical for success. Likewise…
   

5. Team is arrogant and believes they know better.
   
   Sometimes they're lazy, but I am brought in because I've done it all, driven 100 million+ people to websites, sold millions of dollars in eCommerce, etc etc, and yet...they know better having done close to zero marketing ever (!) Likewise…
   

6. Team is not honest with me.
   
   You need to be able to say "That's an awful idea" or "We do not have bandwidth to do this"
   

   If you have a coach…Don't agree with them on the call then in the background not do it.
   
   If you can't do something, tell me, I can come up with another idea! Likewise..
   

7. Team doesn't have the staff/bandwidth to execute my requests/experiments but doesn’t tell me (I need to know what a team can and can't do and plan ideas accordingly) 
   

8. Co-founder doesn't want to spend money on small bits of SAAS software or test campaigns.
   
   Like the music artist who schedules all social media posts manually as they don’t want to pay ten bucks for something like Buffer, “everyone wants to be an entrepreneur until it comes to spending their money”
   

If you’re looking to be coached by me and agree

to the above, reply to this email, I do like helping y’all do big things :)

I’m currently looking through *every single friend and follower* on every social media profile,

And asking people if they want to catch up.

I have no agenda, nothing to sell.

You always think busy/smart/successful/rich people will ignore you, but I’ve been amazed at almost every person being happy to jump on a call with me.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to let relationships slide as you get busy, but one thing I’ve noticed:

The information I learn from these people is better than anything I can find on the internet.

In fact, it’s of the “red hot secret sauce” variety that I won’t even be talking about on here (sorry!)

I recommend it! 

Put it on your to do list!

Meanwhile, if you want to say hi and let me know what you’re up to, please hit reply or drop a comment, I’d love to hear it!

If you leave a comment, you may also connect with others who might want to hire/partner with you.

A good format is:

> This is what I do or plan to do

> One thing I need is…

…and feel free to ask my advice on anything in the comments!

Hit reply or comment, I’d love to hear from you!

Vin

…I hate selling.

I hate it with a passion.

That doesn’t mean I’m not good at it.

I’ve been the only salesman at all my companies, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for my magazine business, and doing a milli or 2 selling for my own businesses.

Sales is the hardest thing to outsource, and the MAIN bottleneck why you can’t remove yourself from your company.

But the new market/business I’ve found is a gamechanger.

Unlimited scale potential- no selling EVER, you choose the clients you want to start paying you.

Wanna see how the “up to 20 bucks per lead” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)

I want everyone reading this to see the potential of a newsletter business.

Reply to this email if you want my main ChatGPT book (which did over $50,000 in sales) as a freebee for signing up to my newsletter.

As well as seeing exactly what I’m so excited about, you’ll find 5 newsletters with massive budgets (Many are around $65,000 per month!) and can afford to pay around $4 for each email they bring in.

And the best part?

All of these 5 are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

Do this and reply to this email with your address to get the book (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)

Here’s how it works:

You get one subscriber to sign up to your newsletter (I can get you one for $1 - $3)

On the post-signup screen, all of the below will pay you the amount you see for EVERY signup you send them (as long as they are interested in them by opening the newsletters, which is just targeting correctly)

SO

You get someone to subscribe to your newsletter (which I can help you with) and they see a screen with 5 of the below featured

“You may also like these newsletters”

If they click all 5 and open the newsletters, BOOM! You will be paid around $20

Now, not everyone will click all 5 newsletters, but stats show most people will subscribe to one or two, so that’s MINIMUM $4-$8 and maximum $10.50 for every subscriber who signs up to your newsletter.

Do you realise what is happening here?

It’s the HOLY GRAIL of marketing.

Adspend instantly liquidates.

Most of the time, you acquire a subscriber or follower, cross your fingers and *HOPE* you make money from them in the future.

You know what that means?

You better have a great offer.

You better price it right.

You better do a unique launch to make sure they even see the offer, as most of your posts aren’t seen on social media. If the offer goes to an email list, you still have the above issues (right offer, right price)

How many times have you thought an offer would KILL and it didn’t sell?

How many times have you thought “what’s the point of all this effort getting followers or email subscribers if I don’t make money from them”

What I’m telling you about here is the solution.

Think about it:

1)

You will breakeven on virtually every dollar you spend (as long as they want to signup to your newsletter)

2)

You also gain a potential future customer (priceless - Why do you think there are hundreds of newsletters lining up to give you $3+ per subscriber - because the lifetime value of an email subscriber is way more than that)

3)

So with that new email subscriber you can sell to them forever (e.g. premium membership to your newsletter or private Facebook community, access to you etc.) AND they are more likely to see your messages than on social media, where you wrestle with algorithms and you’re up against Alex Hormozi’s new “$100 trillion leads” launch (coming soon 🤣)

This is part of a series I’m writing on why newsletters are the future of internet marketing, and the new “money printing” machine. Reply to this post if you want to know more about how you can grow your newsletter (or a brand new newsletter) with me 🙂

Wanna see how the “up to 20 bucks per lead” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)

There is more than one ad network that is looking for people with active audiences.

Like the recommendations I talked about yesterday, there is more demand than supply - i.e. there is a LOT of people looking to advertise in newseltters, but not enough newsletters offering space (This is a brand new invention, you are in EARLY because you follow me. Aren’t you lucky?)

So

The average CPM is $40 to place an ad in a targeted newsletter.

So, with a 50% open rate (which you should have, especially if you’re working with me), you will be paid $20 for every 1,000 people who open your email.

So if you have 5,000 subscribers and send 5 newsletters a week?

You make 1,000 bucks every week with this method.

No "discovery" client calls, no funnels, just sending out a newsletter.

Above are some newsletters looking to advertise currently:

If you want more info on how you can set this up, comment below/hit reply, I’m making a guide of everything needed to start and grow a newsletter business…

Wanna see how the “up to 20 bucks per lead” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)

Alex Hormozi broke the (business) internet last month when he gave the house away without charging anyone last week, and already there is a LOT OF talk that that’s an innovative, working model.

Don’t sell low-ticket, just give stuff away.

Facebook CPA's are going up, and many Facebook marketers are reporting a lower take-up of upsells if people do grab a low-ticket product for seven bucks or whatever.

I doubt I will ever sell another low-ticket eBook again.

Instead, any ebooks or low-ticket products I create will go in my premium membership/community.

The holy grail as a business owner is stable, recurring bucks.

This is why I am going IN on my newsletter business, and am growing it as my “main” product as of the recurring bucks it gives me (either monthly or yearly upfront).

If you saw my previous posts on the two INSANELY EASY ways to monetise a newsletter (getting paid for recommendations, and ads ran from your newsletter), you’ll know there has never been a better time to run a newsletter business.

Wanna see how the “Make up to 20 bucks per lead instantly” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

I have wasted months, maybe years, of my life, coming up with, planning, creating content for, and trying to push offers that no one wanted.

Some of the best years of my life not exactly wasted, but MAN If I had the newsletter biz model ten years ago, I wonder what I’d be doing in life now.

Anyway, if you want to retire like I do, read “8 ways a newsletter business is a safer bet to 1milli+ in revenue”L

1)

You won’t get the offer (The thing you’re selling) wrong in a newsletter business.

Within the first 30 days of you having a newsletter (and having 1k+ subscribers), you’ll be able to monetise it via recommending other newsletters and running ads in your newsletter.

2)

Near-instant moneyback on adspend.

You can grow your audience at a cost close to zero because you can instantly monetise them by being paid to recommend that they follow other newsletters who will pay you very good money.

3)

By not asking anyone to buy anything, you are massively decreasing the chance Facebook, Google, or anyone else will ban or limit your ads.

You’re asking people to take a free action (“Sign up to a newsletter”) Facebook and Google like that.

4)

You don’t have to search for affiliates.

There are new softwares popping up all the time you can use to grow your newsletter.

These services have endless people looking to pay you to send them subscribers, or swap a shoutout in your newsletter for a shoutout in someone else’s which has the same audience

5)

Much easier to create a “faceless” brand.

You don’t need to be on video, you probably don’t even need pictures in your newsletter!

So if you feel burned out by being the face of your company, a newsletter business could be amazing for you.

6)

You can close to instantly make your money back on your adspend because the people who sign up to your newsletter can be offered other newsletters to subscribe to, who will pay you for every active subscriber.

This is VERY different to “paying to get a follower or subscriber for free and *hoping* with fingers crossed that they will buy something later.

And with a growing audience and more money coming in, you can hire people to remove yourself from the business!

You’ve been meaning to do that for a while, right? ;)

7)

The business plan is laid out, you don’t need to do any thinking.

You’ll get paid to send subscribers to other newsletters, and for people to advertise in your newsletter.

DONE.

FINISHED.

All you have to focus on is writing great content, an engine for getting subscribers in (like ads, if you work with us)

8)

Email growth platforms have AMAZING referral systems built into their platform.

So if someone recommends three people to sign up, theyb get one prize, if they recommend 5 they get another, if they recommend 10 maybe they get a free one-on-one consult with you on Zoom!

This turns your fans into little selling machines, ensuring it is much less likely that you won’t have enough people in your audience to make this a viable business.

If you want to grow a newsletter with me, let’s talk!

I need money upfront to scale my ads to $1,000+ a day so am offering discounted rates for those who want to grow in the business/marketing/engrepreneur niche by being in my recommended newsletters.

Hit reply or drop a comment if that’s you!

p.s. Wanna see how the “up to 20 bucks per lead” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture

)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)

My biggest issue for the past 5 years Removing myself from my business has meant I haven't got to enjoy the fruits of what I've built.

This article will show you how to NOT have this awful fate await you :)

My personal brand has (and is) sustained me financially for nearly ten years, but time and time again, it needing to be “me” has slowed down my business growth more than I’d like to admit.

It’s one reason I’m so excited about building newsletter businesses.

It’s still a content business (my area of genius!) without me having to be attached to it, AND it doesn’t have video.

If there’s one reason I’m not one of those massive, viral, internet marketers?

I just didn’t want to be on camera.

If you’re playing the personality brand game on social media and trying to reach a large audience, it’s pretty essential you’re on camera (and no, bulking 300 posts in advance doesn’t really cut it, a big chunk of successful videos of the likes of Gary Vee are them reacting to news as it happens, or informal videos/livestreams as they go about their day)

I love how a newsletter businesses frees me up to do what I’m best at (cool, weird, ideas to make a business go viral and make more revenue), which will be my main tasks once I’ve outsourced the content to my team.

If you want more info on how you can set up your own newsletter business, comment below or hit reply and drop your email, I’ve made a guide of everything needed to start and grow a newsletter business (as a freebee)

Also...

Wanna see how the “up to 20 bucks per lead” system works/my own newsletter business?

Do this (takes 30 seconds):

Go to: 

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «

& drop your email. 

(DISABLE ADBLOCKER if you have it on before you drop ur email

-u will NOT see the good bit otherwise)

****

Hit the PINK button & Signup to the 5 newsletters on the thank you page (see picture)

***

Study the 5 newsletters when they are sent to your inbox, clik on links to find out more about what they do.

Each one has a massive budget (Many are around 65,000 bucks!) and can afford to pay around 4 bucks for each email they bring in.

***

These newsletters are available to you on *DAY ONE* of you launching your newsletter business (!)

***

If you want my cheatsheet of how you can setup ur own newsletter biz, end-to-end, reply to this post with the email you signed up on my site with and I’ll send you the cheatsheet with step-by-step instructions!

(But make sure you signup first!:

» https://bit.ly/3Zrq8XV «)