To piggyback off Kevin, who piggybacked on Maliha... here's a micro-win I got this week (direct message I sent to John): I got a gift from the Magi -- I wrote up a post on Substack mentioning a publisher about an insight I picked up from one of his posts. He dug the post and we're currently having a discussion about a potential partnership. I'm not technically hoping for anything to happen, and I did it without expecting anything in return. But if it happens, I could potentially end up with a couple hundred subs. His publication has about 10k or so. I'm currently at three subscribers. Anyway, just thought I'd let you know.

Piggy backing on Maliha's Update, I thought I'd share an update on the Threads win's I discussed the last time around. First, Maliha caught wind of some of my success, gave it try, and decided it's not for her, at least not now. I don't blame her... There's a lot of crap out there, and social media is not for everyone. But over the past few years I've learned a thing or two, and one of the things I experimented with recently is something I'm calling "Buyer Persona Battleship". It's where, with the assistance of Chat GPT, you quickly map out 11 mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive buyer personas who are best fit for whatever it is you have to offer, and identify what the main motivation they have for achieving whatever benefit your offer or service provides. Then, again with Chat GPT, you quickly map the map out the primary pain points, desires, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings across all 5 stages of customer awareness. Then, again with Chat GPT, you quickly turn all those insights into 100s of very simple audience callouts inviting people to check out your profile on Threads. And for whatever reason... the Threads algorithm deems this very simple, rudimentary posts as "highly personalized" and therefore fit to show to tens of thousands, or sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. Where most posts get 500-1000 views. These get thousands. No matter your follower count. It's kind of insane, but it makes total since when you understand how the social algorithms work. Which is basically: show people content hyper personalized to them. The result is a simple piece of content that looks something like this: "If you spent your 20s or 30s digging yourself into debt but deep down you desperately want to become financially free, I hope you find my page." This is a real post from one of my clients who teaches Financial Independence and investing, and it got 189,000 views while generating 1,600 news followers for his account. And while we can't be 100% precise on measuring email subscribers according to individual posts, the estimate is around 100 new email subscribers from this post alone.

I'm back. If you haven't read my emails over the past few days, Merry Christmas. I've been at home, visiting family, and eating, often too much. But now it's time to get back to work? At least it feels that way for me, because I'm a bit of a workaholic. That's ironic, because the whole reason I quit my 9-5 job 12+ years ago and started doing stuff for myself was that I'm lazy by nature, and I wanted to work less, and have more free time. In the words of Ernest Hemingway, about the topic of work: "It’s a hell of a habit to get into and it’s just about as hard to get out." But I've set my mind to getting out of it. In other words... I'm trying to get as much (or more) important stuff done... while having more free time. In still other words, I'm trying to improve my productivity, while reducing my business. What about you? Where do you stand with respect to the concept and promise of "productivity"? Productivity yea? Productivity nay? A New Year's resolution for 2026? Or just the opposite? Lemme know below by making your choice below, or comment away if none of the choices suits you:

I bought the audiobook from John's link and I got 27 HOURS of unmarked audio from a smattering of live events, workshops, webinars etc. That's not necessarily a problem, but... I can't navigate the book because it has 25 chapters unhelpfully named Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc. So I have no clue what every chapter covers. The only thing I want to know right now is: which chapters cover the "Influential Writing" part that John talked about in his email with the SL "The bible of persuasion". Anyone knows?

... it might be worth sending out an email to promote the Dan Kennedy seminar recordings on Audible that @Anthony La Tour wrote about a few days ago. I was in the middle of moving apartments two days ago. No time or brain power to really write an email. I basically pasted Anthony's writeup into my own email, and hit send. So far, about $260 worth of Audible bounties on Amazon. (The regular Amazon affiliate program pays peanuts, but the bounties when somebody signs up for Audible are big.) Not "pay for a house" kind of money... but still nice for a single email. And if that's not enough, I had more people replying to tell me "thank you" for alerting them to this offer than I've had in weeks or maybe months.