A therapist asked me if I could shift my mindset from ‘achievement’ as the goal to ‘effort’ as the goal, and I can’t stop thinking about that. I’m aware that I look like a complete psychopath from the outside. I trained myself to work 80-90 hours a week after realizing everything in business takes so much more effort than anyone ever accounts for. In fact, it is so common that people underestimate how much work or how long something will take that someone named a law for it. Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Nobody realizes they are underestimating everything, and everyone is doing it constantly. It’s a wonder that humans can be as competent as we are and still be completely naive to our own patterns of behavior. Unfortunately, there are real consequences for being naive, at least at this time in history. Throughout human existence, entrepreneurship has been a few people sprinting to make progress while the rest of the world stands still or bursts into chaos. From an entrepreneurial stand point, we’ve been running a marathon, to eventually cross the finish line into an age of abundance. Every entrepreneur is trying to create their own little ecosystem of abundance, and on a long enough timeline those little ecosystems will pop up more and more, getting more resilient with each market change. This cycle will repeat until we have created so much value that we can automate goods and services. Once goods and services are automated (which is what an economy is built on) we will have achieved abundance for the first time. That comes with its own set of problems, which I’ll gladly take over our current issues, but until then, we’ve got to innovate our way out of this broken world. WE UNDERESTIMATE EFFORT Every entrepreneur that tried to make it will tell you that it’s so much harder than they could have ever imagined. Small business owners, which are the majority of business owners, are typically operating with very limited resources. The fact that anyone can make a company run at all is amazing, considering the enormous effort and resources that takes. It’s the most surprising lesson of entrepreneurship—realizing that the entire population is underestimating the amount of work it takes to make society function, let alone improve.

Over the past few days, I’ve had some fascinating conversations here in this community, including a private chat with @Bryson Bossley . Those conversations got me thinking. And last night, I couldn’t stop thinking. One thought led to another. Ideas connected. Questions became bigger. And somehow, I ended up writing a speech and turning it into a video. So please, WATCH THE VIDEO FIRST. And if you recognize yourself in what I’m saying, if something in that message resonates with you… Come back and read this. ——— What Can We Build Together? 50,000 minds. Thousands of skills. Countless ideas. And yet… most of us are still trying to succeed alone. Think about that for a moment. What if the greatest opportunity in this community isn’t the next AI tool, another course, or another business? What if it’s the person reading this right now? Someone here might have exactly the knowledge you’re missing. Someone else might need exactly what you already know. And the strange thing is… Neither of you even knows the other exists. Isn’t that a tremendous waste of potential? I made this video because I believe we’re overlooking something extraordinary. It’s not another tutorial. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves. What could we achieve if we stopped trying to do everything alone and started combining what we’re already good at? Maybe we don’t need another thousand ideas. Maybe we need to connect the people who can bring them to life. And maybe it starts right here. Not with another complicated system. Not with another promise of success. But with people discovering each other. So let me ask you three simple questions. 1. What are you genuinely good at? 2. What do you need help with? 3. What would you build with others? Don’t overthink your answers. You don’t need to impress anyone. You don’t need to sell yourself. Just be yourself. Because somewhere among the people reading this, someone might have exactly the missing piece you’ve been searching for.

If you've been following along, I swear I am not getting shiny object syndrome. I'm not going to start building robots tomorrow. But it's on the docket. Here's why... People are trying to build humanoid cleaning robots, but that's not the right move. The ICM method demonstrates, by the nature of it, a future where robots have specialty jobs, rather than an all-in-one perfectly dexterous machine. And maybe we do get there eventually, but I'm watching what these companies are trying to do with the cleaning robots and I think they're doing it all wrong. The future is not the terminator-maid. Women buy house cleaning, for the most part. They don't want a big heavy ass machine toppling on their kids or pets. They don't want a human inside the robot, which, by the way is how the company in SF is managing to do this. It's creepy and weird, and we're a long way from a robot being able to hand wash the dishes. No. The future for house cleaning is homes that are self cleaning, and/or wally---not the terminator--but a team of wally's that assist. Even in house cleaning, I'm betting that a human stays in the loop. Somebody has to service the robots, at the very least. As soon as I can afford it, and once we're cruising with our ICM system installed, I'm going to start developing robots. At least, I will hire someone that works towards this. If I can make a fleet of cleaning robots, we're gonna be the coolest cleaning company that has ever existed. And just maybe we can change the world, too.

I decided to re-commit to my business a month ago, after a few years of what I call the entrepreneurial rumspringa. Now, I ask myself just one question everyday: what's the constraint? In the last 3 years I attempted to start 5 different businesses, all while listening to business podcasts, and taking business courses. This period could be summed up as an era of financially paralyzing shiny-object syndrome, since those distractions came at a cost. It's not a coincidence that I have not made any financial progress in the last several years while I've been stretched across multiple areas of interest. Thank goodness that I finally learned that the dabbling has to end if I am going to go far. Also over the last few years, I have had many conversations with entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs about what leads to success. SO many people believe that success is largely luck, which doesn't sit right with me. There's a saying that "success leaves clues," which means it's gotta be a lot more than just luck, if clues = patterns of behavior. All people have the same 24 hours in a day, so how are some people running billion dollar businesses and others get stuck for years at a time? From what I can tell, the entire formula for success -- whether it's done accidentally or intentionally -- is to remove the constraint of the business every time it gets stuck. This holy-grail concept is simple but not easy. Success requires that one both *recognizes* what is stopping the business growth and *refuses* to work on anything else until that thing is resolved. Most people cannot handle this. I heard someone say that being in business is like sitting in your living room with a trash fire next to you and being fine with it. And it's true! And not only is it true, but it's a skill to learn. Every time I ask my small business owner friends if they know what their constraint is, they list 10 things at a time. I have yet to see someone in that category tell me outright "my constraint is x." I get the impression that small business owners, for the most part, would rather be naive to their constraint than be forced to identify it. Rather than narrow it down to just one bottleneck, they are more comfortable tackling multiple issues at once, even if that stalls their growth. The more I talk to them, the more I see how insanely common it is for this archetype to be ADD at full speed in multiple directions at once. This has helped me recognize it in myself, and I'm determined to put an end to that madness, cause I want that bag more than I want to indulge that ADD, if you know what I'm sayin'. I truly can't stand the idea that I've spent enormous amounts of time on work that could have literally just *not* been done at all, and my financial situation would not have changed a bit.

Found a piece of my own client work this week that had been sitting stalled for thirteen days. Fully drafted. Ready to go. It was stuck because one handoff step never happened, and nothing caught it until I stumbled on it by accident. Around the same time, I'd been asking clients a blunt question: what are you actually paying me for? AI can build the website, write the ads, draft the campaign now. Three separate conversations, no coaching between them, same answer: assurance. They're not marketers. They don't know what's happening day to day. They want to know someone trustworthy is watching it. So the plan was to automate proof. AI reads the data, drops five plain bullets into the agenda instead of a generic monthly PDF. Here's what we did. Here's why. Then I looked at why nobody caught the stalled one. I never had a name for "stuck because someone outside the loop hasn't gotten back to me" as its own thing, separate from normal waiting. Both just read as "waiting." If you can't tell the two apart, nothing will flag the difference until you trip over it by accident. If the product is "I'll make sure it's handled right," the proof of that can't be an AI summary nobody double-checks. An unchecked summary just hides the same invisible-work problem one layer deeper. When part of your process depends on a real person outside your system getting back to you, how do you tell "still waiting, that's normal" from "quietly stuck," before you stumble into it by accident? Who's actually watching for that, if you're honest? I had been disciplined about not building a UI for my ICM because I thought it was a waste of time. But now I feel like I need a dashboard for KPIs and statuses so I know what's actually going on under the hood. Anyone else running into this? And by ICM I mean my Operating System or Second Brain.