45:41Graham Cochrane · Talking Head
The 3 Hidden Reasons You're Still Broke
A 45-minute framework for diagnosing and deleting the invisible beliefs, models, and metrics that keep entrepreneurs financially stuck.
May 26thThe argument in one line.
Hope is a strategy: a doom-filled information diet shrinks your expectations and your motivation, while deliberate optimism keeps you building when everyone else retreats.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A solo business owner or creator who feels worn down by doom-scrolling and has noticed it killing your motivation to build or launch.
- An entrepreneur deciding whether to invest, hire, or launch during an uncertain economy and wanting a mindset case for moving forward.
- Someone who keeps the news on all day and wants a concrete, small action to reset how they feel about the next year.
SKIP IF…
- You want market analysis, forecasts, or tactical business strategy; this is a mindset and habits talk with a personal-story evidence base.
- You're uncomfortable with faith references; the argument leans on Bible passages about expectation and creation.
The full version, fast.
Constant negative news, much of it unsourced and recycled by people with a phone and an opinion, shrinks your view of the future and makes you selfish and passive. Building a business means working now for rewards later, so a bright view of the future is what powers the work. The speaker backs this with his own slow first years, a book that earned $192,000 in 90 days, and buying land during 2020. His action steps are a low-information diet and a quiet exercise of imagining and writing down your ideal next 12 months.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:40
01 · The promise and the rant
Opens by promising a way to have your best 12 months while others panic, then admits he hates consuming YouTube, Instagram and news feeds right now.
01:40 – 07:00
02 · Why the news got worse
News was always negative, but now it is recycled from unsourced posts by non-journalists. He ties this to why positivity matters for people who want to win in business and life.
07:00 – 11:40
03 · Reward, risk and a smaller future
Entrepreneurs work unpaid now for rewards later, powered by belief in a better future. Doom content shrinks that view and makes people selfish and passive.
11:40 – 16:40
04 · Hope is a strategy
Reverses his old line that hope is not a strategy. Expectation sets what you do, illustrated by his book launch earning $192,000 in 90 days.
16:40 – 22:10
05 · Be delusional: Musk, Bezos, 2020
Founders are called delusional before they are called successful. He shares buying land and building a house in 2020, and Buffett's fear-and-greed line.
22:10 – 26:00
06 · Why optimism is attractive
Everything awful has passed before. Hopeful people draw trust and clients, and finish 12 months further ahead than those who shrank. He endorses a low-information diet.
26:00 – 28:37
07 · The 12-month action step
Cut negative content, then close your eyes, imagine your next 12 months in business and family, write down what resonates, and get to work.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Entrepreneurs work first and get paid later, so the only thing that powers the work is a belief that the future will be better than the present.
- Doom-scrolling does not make you careful. It shrinks your view of the future and hands your power to people with a phone and an opinion.
- Hope is a strategy because it sets your expectations, and your expectations decide what you are willing to do today.
- Fear sells because it earns clicks, which is why predicting the end of the world has always gotten attention.
- Negative news used to come from credible journalists; now it is often recycled from someone else's unsourced post.
- Warren Buffett's 'be greedy when others are fearful' is about human nature, not timing the market.
- Calling yourself a realist is often a flattering label for pessimism, and the payoff of feeling informed fades quickly.
- Optimistic people are more attractive as leaders, parents, spouses, and business partners, and negative influencers earn clicks but rarely deep trust.
- Every inventor and founder who changed an industry was called delusional first, so a little deliberate delusion is a feature of success.
- A year of acting while others hunker down puts you twelve months ahead of people who shrank and waited.
- Capping social apps at 15 minutes a day is a practical low-information diet, and even that is probably too much.
- Closing your eyes and picturing where you want to be in 12 months shows which parts of the vision carry real emotional weight.
Hope sets the expectations that drive your work.
WHAT TO LEARN
Building anything means working now for a later payoff, so the picture of the future you carry decides whether you keep building or shrink back.
02Why the news got worse
- Most online negativity is unsourced and recycled, so check where a claim comes from before letting it change your plans.
- Fear content earns clicks, which is why it keeps coming; knowing the incentive helps you stop treating it as a forecast.
03Reward, risk and a smaller future
- Doom-scrolling does not make you cautious. It narrows your view of the future and drains the motivation to build or serve others.
- Work done now for rewards later depends on believing the future is better, so protect that belief the way you protect cash.
04Hope is a strategy
- Expectation shapes action: expect a harder year and you plan small, expect a better one and you invest, launch and keep going.
05Be delusional: Musk, Bezos, 2020
- Founders in the video's examples were called delusional before they were called successful, so some deliberate optimism is part of the job.
- Investing follows the same human pattern: people sell in panic and buy at the top, so act against the crowd's mood, not on timing.
06Why optimism is attractive
- Past crises passed, which is the case for continuing to build during one, since a year of action puts you ahead of those who froze.
- Optimistic people earn more trust as leaders, parents, and business partners, even if negative voices earn more clicks.
07The 12-month action step
- Cut or cap one negative feed, then picture and write down the 12-month future you want, using whichever details move you emotionally.
Terms worth knowing.
- Low-information diet
- A deliberate reduction in news and social media consumption, popularized by Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek, so negative content stops shaping your mood and plans.
- Reality distortion field
- A phrase used to describe Steve Jobs's ability to make people believe a seemingly impossible goal was achievable, so they rose to meet it.
- Delusional optimism
- The speaker's term for choosing a positive expectation of the future despite negative headlines, so that you keep acting while others stall.
Things they pointed at.
24:30bookThe 4-Hour Workweek (low-information diet)
Lines you could clip.
28:20
“Fear sells, but hope scales.”
11:40
“I actually think hope is a strategy, because hope gives you an expectation of a bigger future, and expectation is your superpower.”
06:00
“Doom-scrolling doesn't make you careful. It makes you smaller and hands your power to people with a phone and an opinion.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
Right now, it feels like the world is falling apart, and yet some people are quietly building their best year ever. Same economy, same algorithm, same headlines. So what do they know that everyone else doesn't?
In this episode, I'm going to show you what they know and how the next 12 months can be the best 12 months of your life and business while everyone else around you is panicking. And fair warning. it's going to sound a little crazy.
Can I be honest with you for a second? I kind of hate YouTube right now as a consumer. I love it as a producer because it allows me to serve you and creates clients for my business.
And I genuinely love creating this content. But I'm going to be honest, I hate consuming it right now. I hate consuming Instagram.
I hate consuming news feeds. I hate consuming Facebook, which I'm never on. I mean, I hate all of it.
And the reason I hate it is because it is getting increasingly negative. And it's negative across a lot of different categories. Okay, if it's the news, the news has always been negative, in case you didn't know.
It's always been negative. They don't report good news. They report bad news, plane crashes, diseases, wars, angry politicians, economies, like the news has always been negative.
Nobody watches the news anymore on TV. Nobody reads the newspaper anymore, by and large. But we still consume the news.
We're getting it in our feeds. But here's what's even worse. We used to get negative news from credible sources, educated people.
And no offense, but right now we're getting our news from people with a phone and an opinion. And oftentimes those people... are getting that information from someone else with a phone and an opinion.
They're just regurgitating it because guess what? It got a lot of views and clicks and reshares, so they're going to talk about the same thing. No offense to these people, and I'm not saying that they're not educated, but they are not credible journalists.
They are just your broke uncle with a phone and an opinion, just some kid in a college basement with a phone and an opinion, and they're regurgitating stuff that they see half the time, which isn't even true. There are things that are posted that no one has done a shred of research into. And again, I'm not saying the mass media journalism is always squeaky clean, but these people are professionals, and at the very least, they are doing their research to find a source.
Where did we get this news from? The internet, there's no source. People just share whatever they want to share.
There are all kinds of things, and then people reshare it. And it gets... It's like rumors have always been so spreadable, and now with the internet, they've spread it even worse.
So you're getting negative news that's made up now. Negative news by itself that's real is already enough to depress you. Now negative news that's made up is even worse.
And don't get me started with conspiracy theories. And if you're a conspiracy theorist, stop. Okay?
Just stop. It's not helping anybody. It's certainly not helping you.
Even if you don't care about anybody else but yourself, you're not helping yourself, which we'll get to in a minute. The internet is just full of this stuff. And I hate it.
It's like, why am I more agitated than ever before in my life? Why am I more on edge than ever before in my life? And let me get to why this matters, because this is not a rant.
I want to help you today. And if you know my heart, you know how I want to help you. And if you're already hating this episode, then you don't know my heart, but you can hate it anyway.
It's totally fine. I want you to win in life and business. I am a business coach.
My clients want to win in business. And the reason they want to win in business is because they want to win in life. Because life takes money and life takes time.
And if a business is run well, you'll get both. So I want to give you more money and more time. The problem is, if you want to be massively successful in life and business, guess what you have to be?
Positive. Shocking. But you have to be a positive person.
What do you mean, Graham? Let's think about this. Entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, all of us take a risk.
We decide to build something, serve someone, put our money into something without any promise of being paid back in return. We literally put our blood, sweat, and tears into something. hoping that it'll bless somebody else so much so that people will pay us later and we'll get rewarded later.
We take on the risk. We don't go to work and get paid. We go to work and not get paid, and there's no promise of getting paid in the future.
That sounds crazy. And it kind of is, if you think about it. But it's not crazy if you understand what would be the motivation.
Why would we do that? Why would I put my head down for a year? While I'm broke and on food stamps with a wife and a baby and a mortgage and build content for free on YouTube and build course after course and offer after offer only to make $10 ,000 in my first year of working full time.
Why? Because I wasn't working for that first year. I was working for that second and third year.
when I made $60 ,000 in year two and $120 ,000 in year three, I was working and giving up and sacrificing and losing in the short term because I had a positive outlook about the future. I believed something about the future that was positive. I believe that the future is better and the future is brighter.
And so that's the only thing that can give me power enough in the present to do something as silly as make content for free on YouTube for people that don't even know me. Why would I do that? And if you're a content creator, by the way, and someone's giving you hate on your comment, congratulations.
Those people don't know what they're doing. They've never put anything out there useful in the world, but you have, and you gave it to them for free. For free.
95 % of the people that watch my videos or listen to my podcast will never pay me a dime. They won't even buy my $29 book that can put millions of dollars into their bank account. They won't even do that.
And I understand that's the math of the game that I'm playing, but I'm telling you, the only reason why I would put out content for free with no promise of being paid in the future is because I believe the future is brighter than the present. I believe there will be a reward. Human beings are very simple.
We do things because of reward. Do you have a kid? Are you a parent?
I promise I'll take you to the park. I promise I'll take you. We'll go get a donut at Dunkin' Donuts.
I'll get you your favorite thing. If you just clean your room. I'll give you a treat if you just stop screaming in the store.
We are reward -oriented creatures. And there's nothing wrong about that. It just is, right?
It just is. But it makes sense when you understand that. So the only reason I would sacrifice and build a business and serve people for free in the first couple of years is because I believe something powerful about the future.
Does this make sense? Okay, the reason I bring that up is because when you are constantly doom -scrolling and listening to incorrect news, fake news, and I'm not even making fun of the major media. I'm talking about all of your broke friends on the internet with an opinion in a phone.
reporting fake news, making up stuff, recycling news that they thought was shocking and crazy. It's not even real with no credible source. The problem is if you are consuming all that stuff, or let's just talk about the real negative news.
There's wars in Iran, the economy, inflation, gas prices are up, blah, blah, blah. The more you pay attention to that, what do you think happens? Your view of the future gets smaller.
Oh, it's getting so bad. It's so hard. Oh gosh, it's all going to fall apart.
Next year is going to be awful. AI is going to take over. It's going to be awful, right?
We create all these doom scenarios because the news is telling us that. And why is the news doing that, by the way? It's what gets clicks.
Fear sells. Always has. Man, if you want to make a lot of money, predict the end of the world.
People make fun of you, yes, but you will get a lot of attention. It's crazy. It's crazy.
Okay? This has always been happening. Fear sells.
So that's why they're going to keep doing it. So just in case you didn't know, that's why they do it. But if that's what you consume, you know how they say you are what you eat?
It's true online. You are what you consume online. You become a negative person.
And now your version and your view of the future is smaller. Oh, it's going to be bad. My children's generation is going to struggle.
Says who? Every generation has only gotten better. We are living in the greatest time of the world.
Our ancestors would have loved to have air conditioning and a magical device where you press a button and someone brings you food while you watch a glowing box on your wall that has endless entertainment that a king would love to have. Are you kidding me? The world is worse right now?
No, it's not. No, this is how brainwashed we are by the media. It's the best it's ever been.
It's only going to get better. Are there going to be problems? Yes.
Am I crazy to think there's always been problems? And I have a prediction that's actually always going to come true. As long as there are humans on this planet, there will be problems.
And there will be pain. And there will be suffering. Because of humans.
Because we screw it up. Okay? So can we move on from that and not be shocked that there's pain and problems and suffering?
And can we get to the fact that things are better now than they've ever been? And they will continue to get better. And it's going to be because of the entrepreneurs.
the inventors, the people who take a risk and create new, better things for us. So if doom scrolling is giving you a smaller view of the future, it's just going to get bad. What do you think that causes you to do?
That causes you to shrink. It causes you to have no real motivation. Why worry about building a better offer if the world's all going to be blown up next year?
You might as well just eat Cheetos at home. Spicy hot Cheetos at home and Mountain Dew, right? With as much Red 40 in it.
You might as well just look out for yourself. So the negative news and the recycled rumors and the garbage that's online actually makes you selfish. It makes you self -protective, makes you inward focus.
It shrinks your future. So you don't have the power, even if you wanted your future to be brighter, you don't have the power to do it. You know how people say hope is not a strategy?
I'm sure I've even said that. Hope is not a strategy. And when I say that, now I kind of cringe saying that.
What I mean when I have said that in the past is hope isn't enough. Like you need to have a real strategy to accomplish your goals. That's why people hire me to help them with strategy.
But I cringe when I hear myself say that in the past now because I actually think I'm wrong a little bit. I think hope is a strategy. Because when I think about it, hope that the future will be better and brighter.
is what gives you an expectation of a better, bigger future. An expectation is your superpower. We talked about this a few weeks back in the book of Matthew, chapter 7.
Seek and you will find what you're seeking for. So if you want something great, you should go look for it. If you want something great, you need to expect something great.
If you expect the world to be a piece of crap, the world's going to become a piece of crap for you. If you expect life to be harder in the next 12 months, it's gonna be harder for you. If you expect life to be better and easier and more abundant for you in the next 12 months, it will be better, easier, and more abundant for you in the next 12 months.
And so I do think hope is a strategy because when you're hopeful about the future, your expectations about the future are big, it empowers you to do what's needed today to create that future. When your hope is gone and the future is small and negative and pointless and bleak, then you become disempowered and you don't have the motivation.
You do not have the intrinsic motivation to do what you need to do, to delay gratification, to build something, to serve someone else that won't pay you right now but could pay you in the future. Does this make sense? Like a year ago, when everyone was saying the world is falling apart, if I had listened to that, I wouldn't have written this little book here, The Effortless Business, my third book, okay?
I wouldn't have written this book because I would have been like, what's the point? Who's going to read this? How is this even going to make me money?
It's just going to be a lot of my time. And I'll be writing it for just my closest friends and maybe some super fans. Why even do that?
If I had felt that way and I just gave up on this dream, then guess what wouldn't have happened? I wouldn't have launched this book earlier in January and in the first 90 days made $192 ,000 off this bad boy. And now we're recurring around $30 ,000 to $34 ,000 a month.
from this book. How insane is that? I would have given up that kind of revenue.
And then not only that, but the people whose lives have been changed by the book who really find a ton of value out of it. I would have given up all of that if I'd given into the doom and the gloom. But I didn't.
Fortunately, I didn't. Fortunately, I am typically a positive person. I believe the best is yet to come.
That's what gets me out of bed every morning to go build something new for you. That's what gets me out of bed every morning to do this episode. The idea is simple.
Hope about a better future is the secret sauce to creating that better future. When you succumb to the doom, it doesn't make you what people think it's going to make you, which is careful. That's what all my preppers think.
Oh, I should be careful. It makes you smaller. It shrinks you.
It removes the power from your hands. It makes you powerless. Preparing for the end doesn't make you powerful, my friend.
Saying everything's going to be bad doesn't make you powerful. It actually abdicates your power. It gives your power to the media, the schmucks with a phone.
That's what it does. So here's my strategy for you. Be delusional.
You need to be delusional. You need to create your own, as Steve Jobs from Apple said, you need to create your own reality distortion field. I don't actually even know if he said that, but that's what people described, that he had this reality distortion field.
They would say, Steve, it's going to take us 11 months to... get this microchip thing solved or the power issue solved on this new computer. And he'd say, do it in five months.
Like, that's impossible. He's like, no, it's not. Do it.
He lived in an alternate reality. And guess what? People rose to those expectations.
He understood the power of being delusional. The delusional word has a negative connotation, but it shouldn't. I mean, I don't know how else to describe the most successful people in the world.
And I'm not talking about whether you like these people or not. So please put your thoughts of them as a human aside, their political alliances as a side. Can we just be grownups for a second?
Let's just look at the data. Who is the richest man in the world? Elon Musk.
People have been calling him delusional forever. When he wanted to build rockets and put them into space, delusional. Especially when those rockets blew up and he lost almost all of his money.
Do you know SpaceX almost went bankrupt? He's delusional. Electric cars will never get mass popularity with Tesla.
Delusional. He wanted to buy Twitter. People called him delusional.
Right. He's the richest man in the world. I don't care about money as a measure of someone's worth.
You understand what I'm saying. I'm just talking about pure data on who is the most successful business person in the world. It is Elon Musk.
Jeff Bezos. In the middle of the 90s, leaves his high -paying Wall Street job before he even got his Christmas bonus that year. It wasn't even a smart time to quit his job.
He should have just quit after the bonus to move to Seattle to start a bookstore on the internet called Amazon. Literally, his boss said he was delusional. He's crazy.
Crazy. One of the richest men in the world. And it's changed everything about online shopping for all of us.
Every inventor is considered delusional. There's authors that are considered delusional, writing ideas in a book that they think are delusional until those ideas go on to sell millions of copies and help inspire millions of people to change their lives for the better. You have to be a little uninformed on purpose, a little delusional about the state of the world in order to be successful.
2020 was an interesting year, right? COVID was happening, and I found myself buying a piece of land. and building a house in the middle of a pandemic.
But we were already down that road. Late 2019, we were looking at houses, couldn't find one. So early 2020, I think January, we met with some builders.
We signed an agreement to build a house. We went looking for a lot. We found a lot.
And in April of 2020, we bought it. And I was like, is this a good idea? Is the world coming to an end?
Because everyone said it was. Everyone's like, the world as we know it will never... ever be the same.
And yet we were building a house and putting all of our money into this new build. And people are like, this is a bad idea. Turns out to be the best time ever to buy a plot of land, lock in building costs on a house, because within three months of us locking the building costs, we'd already bought the lot a few months earlier, the value of that lot doubled, and the cost of building went up by 30 % to 50%.
So within a year, by the time we moved into the house, let's just say it this way, we already had an extra million dollars in equity just because of when we decided to move forward. I got lucky. I understand that.
But you know what I did? I moved forward when everyone else around me was saying, this is crazy. This is a really bad time to buy a house, Graham.
Turns out it was the best time to buy a house. And this is where humans get it wrong. It's the same in investing.
Hopefully you're an investor. Hopefully you're invested in the stock market and in real estate and other things. If you're not, you are going to be broke the rest of your life.
So become an investor. Investors win. But it's hard to be an investor because there's so much fear and all this clickbait.
And you ride these waves of people saying, now's the time to sell. Now's the time to buy. It's always a time to buy, never a time to sell.
You should be a long -term investor. Buy and hold always wins. But I love this phrase.
from Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor of all time, former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, billionaire. He always says, when everyone else is fearful, be greedy. And when everyone else is greedy, be fearful.
And what he means is, when the market's doing great and everyone's like, oh, it's only going to go up and up and up and up and up, they're getting greedy. They just can't see it ever going down. That's when you know it's probably going to go down.
So just be a little more cautious. When everyone else is fearful, saying, oh, it's falling apart. The market's falling apart.
It's another Great Depression. It's never going to go back. We're going to lose our money.
That's when you want to be greedy. That's when you want to start buying because everything's on sale. And human beings just don't do things for logical reasons.
They say they do. They act smart. I'm telling you, they have college degrees.
They might even be professional investors, but they do everything backwards. When everyone says doom and gloom, they sell when they should be buying. When everyone says, it could never go bad.
They keep buying at the top when they should be selling or slowing down or holding cash. This is less about timing the market because no one ultimately can time the market. It's more about human nature.
Does this make sense? So in COVID, I was doing things that were scary. Buying land, building a home, a custom home.
I was launching new communities and masterminds when everyone's literally, I had clients say, can we even sell online anymore? The world's falling apart. I was like, bro, do people still need your help?
Yeah? Well, guess what? 2020 turned out to be the best year to be selling online information products.
It was the first time millions of people even heard about online courses, and then they became online course creators and jumped on the bandwagon that I had been on for 10 years at that point. It was a great time to be selling. Great time.
The government was printing money and giving it to us to stay home, and everyone was at home online with nothing to do. I made millions and millions of dollars. My business 5X'd that year.
I'm just telling you, you have to believe. Because everyone said, oh, it's going to be so bad. We shouldn't invest.
We shouldn't buy. We should just hunker down. I said, guys, this is scary.
This is unprecedented. But this too shall pass. Like everything else that's ever happened in the world.
When World War I happened, it was probably incredibly scary. That too passed. When World War II happened, I'm sure that was very scary, that too passed.
The Cold War in the 80s, right? I don't know if any of y 'all grew up learning to hide under your desks in school in case there were bombings. Like, how crazy is that?
You look at the movies that were made in the 1980s, they were crazy dystopian future movies because that's the pulse of the people back then. They're like, this is the end. The 1980s is the end.
Bro, what are we talking about? That's 40 years ago. ton of prosperity since.
The internet hadn't been invented yet. Like, what are we talking about, people? Right?
Everything that's awful has passed. It always will. But there will be another awful thing.
But we too shall get through that. And my whole point is not about the politics. And my whole point is not about the news.
My whole point is how do you be like the top 1 % that are winning right now? How do you ensure that the next 12 months of your business are the best 12 months? Despite everyone else freaking out and being chicken littles and saying the sky is falling, you have to decide to stop being a chicken little.
You have to decide to stop being the boy who cried wolf. I know it feels empowering in the short term to be the person saying it's all bad. And I know.
And I'm smart because I know the conspiracies and I know how bad it is. So I can tell you that I saw it coming. I told you so.
I prepared. You benefit from that. There's a reason why you succumb to that.
There is some element of a benefit you get for that. Because again, we do things out of reward. And so the reward you get for that is feeling pride, feeling like you knew something that somebody else didn't know, feeling informed, feeling like a realist, which is just a positive spin on being a pessimist, which is so hilarious because you're a pessimist.
but you're trying to have a positive outlook on your pessimism, calling it realism, you get a reward for that. But I'm telling you, it's like that, and then it fades. If you're delusional, is what they call us and what they call me, and you say, hey, the world's going to be better next year.
It's going to be even better in five years. Ten years, watch out. And thus, I'm going to keep building.
I'm going to keep investing. I'm going to keep serving. I'm going to keep growing as a person.
Then you're going to win. Because your business is going to grow because you are moving closer towards your goals while everyone else is shrinking and playing small. And here's a side benefit, by the way, of being delusionally hopeful and positive about the future.
It's more attractive. It's more attractive. I know negative people get clicks.
I know negative influencers online get views and reshares. But they don't get really truly endeared to their viewers. They don't build trust.
I think in a world where everyone's negative and everyone's talking about conspiracies and everyone's angry and bitter and everyone's doom and gloom, if you can be the one person that's saying, hey, things are going to be better, I believe in you. I believe in us. I believe in our ability to figure things out.
I believe in our ability even to come together. I believe in the human spirit's drive to make their world a better place. their God -given, God -imaging drive to take the resources we have and multiply them for good, rearrange them for something better, right?
The Bible says that God created everything out of nothing, ex nihilo, right? There was nothing and he created everything. Only God can do that.
You and I... are made in the image and likeness of God, the book of Genesis says, so we are creators like God, but we're very, very different. God creates things out of nothing.
We create new things out of existing things. And that's okay. We're not supposed to be as powerful as God, but we're pretty amazing.
He gave us a bunch of resources, metals, natural resources, our brain, ideas, you know, and we take these resources... And we refashion them into new products and services and solutions. Isn't that cool?
And that's the most attractive person you can be around. Someone who's like, hey, let's go build something new. Let's go build something better.
How can I make this better? You're going to be more attractive as a spouse. You're going to be more attractive as a parent.
You're going to be more attractive as a leader in your community and industry. People are going to want to do business with you. In 12 months, when the world hasn't ended and they're predicting some other end and some other reason why it's bad or whatever, you will have gotten 12 months further ahead on your goal.
What everyone else has just shrunk and prepped and stayed scared and small. And they're going to look to you and they're going to need you. And you're going to be in a better position to serve them because your future thinking, you're delusional in a positive way.
You are honestly taking Tim Ferriss's suggestion from 2007 in the four -hour work week. when it was first published, of the low -information diet. That's really your strategy, is to go on the low -information diet.
Back then, he was saying, stop watching and reading the news. Unfortunately, now no one does that. They just watch and read YouTube and social media and TikTok, and that's where they're getting their news.
And that's even worse. It's gotten even worse. So I actually co -sign on Tim's idea.
Go on a low -information diet if that helps you stay positive. It helps you stay delusional in a good way. So maybe let's end with that action step for you.
I want you to decide to cut and ignore the negative content online. And I don't know what that looks like for you. Maybe it's cut out one app.
Maybe it's like me put a timer. I put 15 minutes a day on all social media apps on my phone. It locks me out after 15 minutes.
And that's probably 14 minutes too much. So decide what you want to cut to go on a more of a low information diet. And then here's what I want you to do.
I want you to do something that might be... weird if you've never done this before, but it might be the most freeing thing and exciting thing you've ever done, is I want you to draft the future you want to create over the next 12 months. So what I mean by this is I want you to start by actually closing your eyes.
When you have time today, maybe it's right after this episode, I want you to sit in a quiet place, close your eyes, and just imagine where you want to be in 12 months in your business. How much money do you want to be having come in every single month? How many hours do you desire to work every single week 12 months from now?
What kind of clients do you want to be serving 12 months from now? Then I want you to think about your family. I want you to think about what weekends and evenings look like, what vacations you want to take in the next 12 months, what house you want to move into, what car do you want to drive, taking your kids on daddy -daughter, daddy -son dates, mommy -daughter, mommy -son dates, whatever that is.
I just want you to picture it for a minute, 60 seconds, two minutes, three minutes with your eyes closed. And see which part of that vision gets you excited. Like, has an emotional resonance with you?
Because I can't make something up for you. I don't know what matters to you, but you do. When you find a picture of a 12 -month future that resonates with you, that hits you on an emotional level, then I want you to write that down.
And then here's a crazy idea. I want you to turn off the news, be delusionally positive, and get to work. Go create that future.
It's not going to create itself. No one's going to bring it to you, and no one's going to tell you that it's possible. Everyone's going to try to talk you out of it so you can join their negative Nancy party, but we're not going to do it.
Remember, fear sells, but hope scales. Let's be delusionally hopeful about the future. Let's go scale the business and the life we want.
Stay delusional, my friend. I'll see you on another episode real soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Same economy, same algorithm, same headlines, and yet some people are quietly building their best year ever. The host opens by naming that gap, then spends 28 minutes arguing the difference is what they expect from the future.
Named ideas worth stealing.
25:00concept
Low-information diet
Cut or time-limit negative feeds and news so they stop shrinking your expectations. He caps social apps at 15 minutes a day.
Steal forany founder who loses focus to doom-scrolling
26:30list
Draft your next 12 months
- Close your eyes in a quiet place
- Picture business income, hours and clients
- Picture family evenings, weekends and vacations
- Notice which parts spark emotion
- Write it down
- Turn off the news and get to work
A short visualization exercise that ends in a written 12-month vision.
Steal forannual or quarterly planning
How they asked for the click.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
