Buckle Wank: kryptonite to my FU Position.

I used to hand over a kidney before I'd hand over my best work for free.

The good stuff. The edge. The gear they actually pay me for. The thought of giving it away for nothing put a cold clench in me, somewhere behind the wallet, climbing.

So I didn't. I clutched it. Shined it. Buffed it up daily, locked it away, admired the gleam.

Finest hoardsman in the district.

Then the lever went off.

You'll remember the lever "A tennis coach once cornered Richard Branson and asked him the only question that mattered".

I built it because I can't be trusted to decide the same thing twice. It runs one question, every time. Job, or royalty. Am I about to go do the work, or am I about to own the thing.

It looked at a room full of people who weren't mine and it said, flatly, that's the royalty. Go.

So I did the thing every cell in me was screaming against.

I felt my sphincter come up through my throat and shake my hand on the way past.

I stood up in a room that wasn't mine, in front of customers who weren't mine, and gave away something ridiculous.

Not the vault.

Just enough absurd value that they went at it like starving people at a smorgasbord.

I kept going. Three cities. Give the ridiculous thing, ask for nothing.

Here's what the give was for.

Travis has been laying it out all month - PART 3: FU Position with Less than $1k (Recommendation read the whole series).

The customer is the GOLD! Not the sale. The CUSTOMER.

That room was full of gold. It just wasn't mine YET! (Mwahahaha)

The give was how I got at it.

Walk in, hand over something genuinely valuable, and strangers in someone else's room walk out as my clients, my cash and my ASSET!

That is the whole trick. I didn't build an audience. I got in front of one and turned it into mine.

How, exactly, belongs to Ronin. Not mine to hand out.

But it turned into six figures. Inside a month.

Off four or five hours of me actually doing anything.

Read that back. Not the money. The HOURS!

And here's the part the grind misses.

That six figures was just the front end.

Most people take the cut and move to the next room. Front end, pocket it, gone. One deal, one slice, done.

But here's the thing; this ain't no one trick pony. That was the first iteration. Same room, same play, and it keeps delivering.

Rinse and Repeat, Baby - Rinse and Repeat!

So the front end keeps on paying.

And here is the kicker.

Behind it sits the back end, the customers are mine now, and I get to keep helping them, keep selling to them, for as long as I'm useful.

One give.

Both ends compounding.

That's the bit Ronin drills.

Everyone's chasing the one-off score. Ronin's the whole machine behind it.

Which brings me back to the bloke I can't stop thinking about - My son recites poetry about a bloke who got world-class at a job that no longer existed.

The stockman, shining his buckles while the train pulls into the siding behind him.

Here's what I never said out loud.

He was polishing a turd. Mirror finish, forty years of it, on a thing that was never coming good. And he couldn't see it.

That's TURDPOLISHITIS! (look it up, it's a real thing or at least should be, symptoms Buckle Wank). The chronic kind. Can't smell it, can't see it, forty years down.

That was me. Egg cup on the shelf and everything.

I only turned around because someone got into my head a while back and never left.

Travis.

Through the Ronin room.

So that's the honest answer to where it starts.

Not a course. Not a tool. A room.

I walked into Ronin, and the thing that changed how I decide and how I get paid was already in there, sitting about. It found me. I wasn't even looking.

It turns out I can't polish a turd. I just got so nose-blind I couldn't smell the stench everyone walking past could. Yet again, I was the last to know.

Turns out there's a cure for turdpolishitis, though.

It's a room. And that room's called Ronin.

So here's the only thing I'll ask.

I'm not going to explain Ronin to you.

I'm going to ask if you want me to point you to the door.

Same as last time.

Pick your lever.

Shit yeah! Point me at Ronin before I polish another turd!

FU!!! I'll keep polishing the buckles.

Hold on. Googling turdpolishitis. Nothing yet.

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