Author: admin
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You’re not even trying.
“If my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions.” – Pulp Fiction
You think you’re trying, but you’re probably not.
(how’s that for a harsh truth?)
Instead, you’re:
Thinking about trying.
Watching videos about trying.
Imagining yourself trying, and then jumping to conclusions about whether or not trying is even worth it.
Or, maybe you’re one of the rare few who actually kind of tried:
You put in a bit of effort, saw lukewarm results, and decided to either:
Stop trying Try something else instead Or just keep simulating trying in your mind instead of actually doing it in reality, because failing in your head is less painful than failing in real life.
Whew.
I know this message isn’t winning me any friends…
But if the truth hurts, then pain is our ally.
And maybe trying to avoid pain is the whole problem.
Maybe the pain of trying and failing and getting up and trying again even though our nose is bloody and our legs are wobbly and our friends and family are wondering if we’ve lost our mind and we’re starting to wonder the same thing because what if after all this work it still doesn’t work out, but fxck — what if it does…
…Is just the price of admission?
Trying, really trying, is actually quite simple.
All you do is show up every day and work on the same thing, for as many hours as you can, with the full force of your focus, for 1-3 years, without quitting or jumping to something new.
Do that, and your chances of success are surprisingly high.
But first, you need to understand what trying isn’t:
Creating 10 pieces of content and then disappearing is not trying.
Working out once or twice a week and wondering why you’re still not in shape is not trying.
Doing a month of cold outreach before giving up or switching strategies is not trying.
Going on four dates before deciding “there are no good ones out there” is not trying.
Failing at one business and quitting rather than pivoting, iterating, and re-launching is not trying.
Doing just enough activity to feel like you’re trying even though you’re not going as hard as you know you can is not trying.
So no, you’re probably not trying. Not yet.
And that’s the good news.
Because imagine what will happen when you do…
- T
P.S. I’m closing applications for one on one coaching tomorrow.
If you’re interested, here’s where you can get the details and apply today.
“Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming. It’s easier to raise $1,000,000 than it is $100,000. It’s easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s. – Tim Ferriss
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Troll Me a River
Crazy thing is you’re building something.
You’re creating content and growing your audience, hell. Like many of us. You’re trying to make a living from your ideas and work.
But then…
Some miserable piece of shit crawls out from the internets sewers to tell you that you’re either a fraud, scammer or worse.
Welcome to the internet. Where broken people tend to get together and tear down anyone who dares try.
The thing is, fundamentally they’re incredibly unhappy with their own lives, so they make it their life mission to drag everyone else down to their level of misery.
They see someone building something and I mean it could be anything, which indirectly reminds them of their own inaction, cowardice and their failure to create anything meaningful. So they attack cause it’s so much easier to tear down than to build up.
These aren’t successful people taking time out of their busy lives to critique your work. These are basement dwellers whose greatest achievement is reaching level 50 in whatever video game is currently consuming their existence.
(Don’t get me wrong. I like a little video game action here and there…)
They have no audience, no business, no creative output of their own and on the surface they’re just consumers who moonlight as critics.
They target creators because creators represent everything they’re not.
They’re not brave enough to put themselves out there, disciplined enough to create consistently, resilient enough to handle criticism and keep going anyway. Cause we know how hard and exhausting it can be most of the time. It’s something they’ll never fathom.
The troll’s psychology is simple. If they can’t build, they’ll destroy. If they can’t create, they’ll criticise. If they can’t succeed, they’ll make sure everyone else fails too.
They hide behind fake profiles and anonymous usernames because they’re cowards. They punch up at people who are actually doing something while contributing absolutely nothing themselves. They mistake cynicism for intelligence and cruelty for honesty.
Every minute they spend attacking you is a minute they’re not spending building their own thing. Every nasty comment is proof that they’d rather be a spectator than a player. Every attempt to tear you down is an admission that they’ve given up on themselves. Which all in all is pretty damn sad if you look at it from an empathetic lens.
Don’t let broken people break your momentum. Don’t let people who’ve never built anything convince you to stop building.
Best thing to do is block them and delete their comments cause if you interact with their negativity, it’ll slowly bleed into your own output.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. If you want a write up about the pathology of a troll with a little more depth you should definitely check out this Medium article. It’s an oldie but a goldie and don’t let those damn trolls win when they start to show up.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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What would Kobe do?
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In 2011, my young company, EGTBasketball, was running a business model I call:
“What Would Kobe Do?”
Answer: Everything.
Product launches. Affiliates. Paid ads. SEO. VSLs. Emails. Content. Five offers. Four funnels. Three traffic sources.
Maximum effort. Zero scale.
And it was working, kind of:
We were generating revenue, but swung wildly between 0-30k per month because I was always chasing the next sale rather than building a machine that generated sales on command.
And so I lived in chronic anxiety:
Never knowing how much cash would be coming in, always fighting to stay afloat, terrified my business would sink the moment I stopped to rest.
I knew I badly needed to simplify and focus on one core strategy…
And my mind fought a constant tug of war between offers and business models, churning through options until the tension tied my mind in knots and paralyzed my decision making.
I wasn’t lacking knowledge or ability, I was lacking clarity:
I was too close to the problem to see the solution, as though I was trying to read a label from inside the bottle.
That’s when I met Paul Reddick.
Paul is a grizzled marketing veteran who had been quietly running a multi-7-figure business selling a program for baseball pitchers.
I’d heard of him in an obscure audio interview (Podcasts weren’t a thing back then), dug his contact details out of some back-alley website, and begged him to coach me.
Within an hour, Paul had cut through the entire tangled mess I’d created and laid out the perfect business model for my skill set, offer, and avatar.
Within 6 months, my business looked like this:
Run paid ads to an opt-in page Send daily emails To sell the core EGT program (plus upsells)
My workday shrank from 10 hours to 3.
My revenue grew to 50k/month, perfectly stable.
Within a year, we cracked 100k/mo, and then pushed smoothly beyond it.
It was as though I’d been caught in a street fight, nose bloody, legs wobbling, struggling to survive, before Paul emerged from the shadows and knocked my opponent out cold with a single strike.
That’s the power of coaching:
A skilled coach — who has already won the battles you’re currently fighting — can step in and create a path to victory almost instantly.
Even today, 15 years and 8 figures later, I continue to work with three different coaches across multiple domains of life.
And I personally coach a small handful of founders who are serious about scaling to 7 or 8 figures this year.
If you’re interested, I just opened applications for the first time in 12 months.
I only have three spots available, and I’ll only be accepting applications until Friday.
So if your business is currently generating at least 20k/mo, and you think this might be a good fit:
Here’s where you can get the details and apply now.
Working with Paul Reddick transformed my business.
And that business transformed my life.
It would be an honor to do the same for you.
- T
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An invitation for entrepreneurs
If you run a profitable business, and you want to scale to 7 or 8 figures this year, I have an invitation for you.
Here’s the the backstory:
Ever since I built Elite Guard Training to 8 figures in lifetime revenue, I’ve received dozens of requests from founders who wanted one on one coaching.
And I’ve always declined.
I made plenty of money from my own business, and had plenty of work to do on that business.
Coaching always felt like a distraction, so I refused to do it (at any price).
Then, around 2020, I began to remove myself from Elite Guard Training.
I started working more “for fun” than for profit, doing creative work I felt inspired to do, rather than work I felt required to do.
And, somewhere along the way, I started doing what I swore I’d never do:
I started coaching.
Not as my primary business, but casually, with a small handful of clients.
And I quickly realized:
I like it.
Actually, I really like it…
And, more importantly:
I’m damn good at it.
My strange, hybrid-background of…
15 years in business Scaling EGT to 8 figures in lifetime revenue (and 7+ figures per year for nearly a decade) A decade of intensive training in meditation, Taoist qigong, plant medicine, and depth psychology
…Turned out to be the exact blend of inner and outer expertise that lends itself perfectly to one on one coaching.
I realized I could cut through any problem a founder was facing, see into their mind and business like an x-ray, radically clarify their strategy, and engineer clean plans of attack within minutes.
Ben went from 60k/mo to 120k/mo within 4 months (and we had tripled his business within 6 months).
Andy & Ethan had been stuck at 0 for a year and a half — within 8 months of working together they hit 30k/mo and growing.
Mason cracked 40M in total revenue, his brother Colton cracked 3M, and Adan did 100k in profit after a single call.
(more results here, and more on the way)
So that’s the backstory.
Here’s the punchline:
For the first time in 12 months, I’m accepting new applications for one on one coaching.
I only have three spots available, and I’m only accepting applications until Friday.
So if your business is currently generating at least 20k/mo, and you think this might be a good fit:
Here’s where you can get the details and apply now.
If I feel I can help you, I’ll reach out personally with more details.
If not, I’ll let you know, and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.
Either way:
I look forward to, hopefully, helping you build the business that changes your life.
- T
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I shouldn’t have beat this NBA All Star
“The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have.” – Naval Ravikant
In late 2014, I made a power move.
It was expensive, risky, and unheard of in the industry at the time.
But it had the potential to turn my young basketball training company into a juggernaut.
So I closed my eyes, wrote a check, and shot my shot.
What happened next is still one of the biggest mindf*cks of my career.
Here’s the story:
In an attempt to increase the “credibility” of my training programs…
(which had all been created by me — a 6’1” white kid from Canada who got hurt before he could play a single game of college basketball)
…I signed NBA All Star Bradley Beal to produce a jump shooting program for my brand:
Everyone I spoke to — friends, advisors, even my own email list — said:
“An NBA player in your videos? Holy sh*t nobody has ever done that. This is going to be enormous.”
Excitement grew as we rolled through our pre-launch campaign, and my expectations began running wild.
Could this be our biggest launch ever?
Could it double our biggest launch ever?
What’s even the ceiling on this thing?
Finally, with hype at a fever pitch, I set the program live.
Then I logged into our shopping cart and immediately started hitting refresh.
But instead of the tidal wave I was expecting, I saw…
Droplets.
One at a time, slowly, sales trickled in.
Slowly? Trickled?
That is not what I expected — or, what I paid for.
Shaken, I frantically started stress-testing our funnel to see if something was broken.
But everything was running fine.
Fine?
By the end of the launch, I’d just barely broken even on the giant check I wrote Brad…
Not to mention the full-stack video team I’d flown in to shoot & edit the program, and every other contractor, developer, and agent who contributed to this giant waste of time.
It was an expensive lesson to learn, but I learned it loud and clear:
Authority and credibility are not nearly as important as relatability.
Sales of my own programs dwarfed Brad’s by several zeroes, because what I lacked in authority I made up for by deeply understanding the experience my customers were having.
I knew the pain of being stuck on the bench, watching players who don’t work as hard as I do get the playing time I wanted … sitting on the back of the bus after a 2 point game with a knot in my throat … rushing to my room because I’m ashamed to tell my parents how the game went … collapsing on my bed, close to tears, wondering if all the work I was putting in would ever pay off.
And so when they looked at me, they saw a version of themselves:
Someone who had been through exactly what they were going through, and had found a way to the other side.
But when they saw Brad, they saw a mirage:
Something they wanted badly to attain, but was so far away they couldn’t wrap their mind around it.
The same is true in the online space today:
Founders often think they need Hormozi’s numbers or Huberman’s scientific background to be successful.
And yes, if you want to sell 100M worth of books in 3 days or grow a science podcast to 10M subs, you’re gonna need clout.
But for every Hormozi and Huberman, there are literally thousands more founders quietly growing 7 & 8 figure businesses simply by being relatable:
Understanding the experience your customer is having.
Speaking to them about it in their language.
And helping them solve their problems from the level they’re at, rather than shouting down at them from above.
So if you feel overwhelmed, under-qualified, and silently a little depressed every time you watch a Hormozi video, remember:
You don’t need to be Hormozi to be successful.
Credibility creates logical trust, but relatability creates emotional trust.
And emotional trust creates customers.
- T
P.S. I just opened applications for one on one coaching for the first time in over a year.
A few important notes:
I’m only accepting applications until end of next week, before we shut the doors again. It’s expensive, and your revenue must be at least 20k/mo to apply. I’m only accepting 3 new clients (this is full one on one mentorship, and my commitment level is very high).
If you think this might be a good fit, here’s where you can check it out today.
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Why does everything feel like wet cardboard?
And what can we do about it?
I had to try really hard to not do the whole RE: RE: RE: No, Seriously, Why Does Everything Suck Now type of subject line…
You know me better than that.
I may or may not have also had a shower beer while thinking up and typing this on my phone.
I hear you though. I feel you in my bones like a low grade fever that won’t commit to being a real illness or whatever.
And my favourite topic is boredom…
…and I need you to lean in close for this because I’m only going to say it once before I get distracted by a thumbnail of a man reacting to something.
Boredom isn’t the absence of stimulation. That’s the lie they sold you. Boredom right now, in this particular historical moment, is the overflow of it.
People play it off as if we’re starving. But we’re actually drowning in high fructose content slurry pumped directly into our face by ones and zeros that were specifically, surgically, engineered to make you feel like you almost had a good time.
Almost. Always almost.
It’s like going to vegas and It’s basically a dopamine slot machine that only pays out in IOUs.
But there’s always a sinister undertone.
This is also where my kind of cold, clear eyed narrator voice kicks in and says pay attention, this part matters. The machine doesn’t want you satisfied.
Satisfied people close their laptops. Satisfied people go for walks and call their friends and cook something that smells good. The machine needs you hovering. Twitching. Scrolling past the thing you actually wanted to find, because if you find it, you stop.
So what do we actually do? Because “just log off, man” is advice that lands with all the practical utility of telling someone to simply not be sad or can you not just stop being depressed?
Here’s what you gotta do. You go coarse grain when everything is fine grain. You pick the long thing, the book with the heft to it, the film that takes its time like it owns the place, the conversation that has no agenda and no endpoint. You make your brain work for its dinner instead of letting it snack on content pellets all day like a lab rat with a PhD in self destruction. (Did I just reference the Universe 25 Experiment? Yes I did. Enjoy that rabbit hole)
You have to make something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be shared. The act of making… Of putting your hands on something and pushing it into a shape that didn’t exist before is the single best middle finger you can raise at the boredom machine, because the machine cannot make.
It can only remix and repackage and serve it back to you with a little notification bell.
Final thing… The uncomfortable, bracing thing that tastes bad going down but works, you have to tolerate the gap. The gap between wanting something and having it. The gap where you sit in the slightly uncomfortable silence and don’t immediately reach for the phone. That gap is not the enemy. That gap is where your actual brain lives. It’s dusty in there. It smells like an old library and a little bit like anxiety.
But it’s yours.
The boredom was never the problem, it was more of a light symptom. The problem is you’ve been taught to be afraid of your own mind at rest.
Stop being afraid of it. Feed it something real. See what it does.
You’d be surprised what you brain meat can push out into the world.
Stephen Walker.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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I am grateful
That you show up every time and read my emails and reply and just interact.
I’ve had so many great conversations and also views on the topics and ideas I write about and share with you, that doing this is what keeps me going.
I genuinely appreciate you taking a little sliver of time out your day to spend some time with me and again for that I am grateful.
We all know the world is not in a great place right now and a lot of people are being affected by it all, but the best thing we can do is stay positive and optimistic that things will change.
I love a little bit of a soap box rant on the things I’m passionate about/against and so are you…
And as long as we continue to show up to the best of our abilities, I think things will work out.
You’re the best c̶u̶l̶t̶ group of people I know.
Stephen Walker.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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The Art of Whore
Here’s a little social media “game” for us folks who still require those platforms to feed into our own platforms…
After all.
Our audience/clients/customer numbers aren’t going to increase themselves magically (I mean I wish they did) but we still have to do some work and well, it’s time to make things fun again.
We know that everyone with a ChatGPT subscription is now an expert on whatever topic is floating around and is running hot off the social media presses.
(Minster of foreign affairs and war time policy anyone?)
What you seem them do is input their vague surface level info to the Masjine and out it churns some splooge of the lowest calibre.
At first I got annoyed at it, cause you had people who have never really written anything longer than a 140 character tweet, to now (on the surface it looks good) emulated pulizter prize levels writing.
What I’ve been doing very sneakily over on the old bird app is inserting myself into the niche conversations happening there in the market I’m operating in.
I’ve been come a topical conversation whore. Some people call me a reply guy which is cool. What they don’t know is that I’m slowly turning people into my way of thinking because I’m neatly challenging these slop pushers with logic and reasoning, while also being human.
It’s a wild concept. Imagine sounding more human than those peddling trash.
Yes you need to know what you’re talking about and you don’t even have to know that much anymore because the bar is so low. Yet all you need to do is engage with people who genuinely looking to either educate themselves or make an informed opinion without being misled.
Who would’ve thought that in 2026. Taking a few minutes out of your day could win people to your side when there’s way too much noise and not enough signal out there.
Have conversations. Point people in the right direction. Show them that you stand for something and slowly but surely they’ll find themselves in your world and they’ll wonder “Where have you been all my life!”
Stephen Walker.
P.S. I’m working as fast as I can to polish up and re-write a lot of the topics I’m going to be covering in The Escape Hatch. I’m also working on creating a structure you can follow if you really just want to run with the ideas in there. I don’t have a deadline for when it’ll be done, so I’ll end up drip feeding content there to keep you going until I share a “road map”
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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The great dumbification
The world is systematically dumbing itself down to feed the dopamine starved masses, and we’re all complicit in this intellectual race to the bottom of the barrel…
Everything is getting shorter, simpler, more digestible.
Books become audiobooks become podcast summaries become TikTok highlights become tweet
sized nuggets of “wisdom” that fit perfectly between ads for teeth whitening kits and crypto scams.
(Crypto scams have been WILD on Twitter, especially more so since all of this war shit has gotten more legs etc)
We’ve taken complex ideas and pureed them into baby food for adults who can’t be bothered to chew.
Netflix adds speed controls because sitting through a 90 minute movie is apparently too fucking demanding.
News becomes headlines. Headlines become notifications. Notifications become emotional reactions to things that may or may not have actually happened.
The algorithms are optimising for engagement and hell to us going deep on ideas and thoughts and going for enlightenment.
This is all junk food for the brain, designed to keep you clicking, scrolling, consuming and best of all…
Never thinking, never questioning, never sitting still long enough to form an original thought.
Dumbification is destroying you…
- Your attention span is dying. You used to be able to read books. Now you struggle through long emails. Your brain has been rewired to expect constant stimulation, making deep work feel like torture instead of flow.
- You’re losing critical thinking skills. When everything is pre-digested and spoon fed, you stop learning how to analyse, synthesise, and form your own conclusions. You become a consumer of other people’s thoughts instead of a creator of your own.
- Your tolerance for difficulty is evaporating. The moment something requires effort. Like real cognitive effort, you bail. You’re training yourself to quit when things get challenging, which means you’ll never develop expertise in anything that matters.
But listen up. You can undumb yourself starting today…
- Read actual fucking books again. Not summaries. Not highlights. Complete books by people who spent years thinking about complex problems. Start with one chapter a day and build your attention span back up like a muscle.
- Embrace boredom. Stop filling every empty moment with content. Sit in silence. Let your mind wander. Some of your best ideas are hiding behind the compulsive need to check your phone every thirty seconds.
- Seek out difficult material. Find writers, thinkers, and creators who challenge you instead of validating what you already believe. Read things that make you uncomfortable. Engage with ideas that don’t fit neatly into your existing worldview.
The dumbification isn’t inevitable.
Dumbification only happens when you pick easy choices over the ones that make you marinate in your own brain meat for more than 15 minutes…
Stop choosing easy, it’s that simple.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. Do the thing. Click the link. Join the group…
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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How to get behind 99% of people
“Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?” – Elon Musk
The voice in your head is right:
You’re not where you should be, right now.
In fact, you’re way behind where you should be.
The matrix must have slipped you the blue pill, ‘cause now you’re behind 99% of people, and if that doesn’t drive you into an anxiety-induced monk mode, you might be destined for modern slavery forever.
Now, be honest…
Deep down, you suspect I’m joking.
But that little bastard in the back of your mind still kind of believes me, and he’s actually pretty riled up right now.
So let’s try to calm him down with a little story-time and a warm cup of reality.
Here goes…
The other day, I had a coaching call with a 19 year old founder who is running a $20k per month agency.
Impressive, right?
He didn’t think so.
“I just feel like I’m so far behind where I should be,” he says.
“Everyone I look up to was ahead of me, at my age.”
I black out for a moment before drooling a response:
“Huh?”
“You coached Ben Bader. He was making way more money than me at 19.”
“Bro, Ben would have been the first to tell you he was ripping bongs in his dorm room at 19. He joked about that all the time. You’re years ahead of where he was.”
His eyes go wide.
“Oh… Well, what about you, then?”
“I hadn’t even made my first dollar, at your age.”
When we finally untangled the mess of false ideas in his head, we realized:
Not only is he not behind…
He’s actually ahead of everyone I’ve ever worked with, everyone I’ve ever met, and damn near everyone I’ve ever heard of.
If entrepreneurship was a racetrack, he’d be lapping us all.
And yet, he still believed he was behind.
That’s how insidious this idea is:
It tricks even the best among us into thinking that if we don’t have a Lambo by the time we graduate high school, we’re failing.
Meanwhile, most successful entrepreneurs don’t break through until their late 20s, at the earliest, and more often their 30s and 40s.
Don’t believe me? Check the scoreboard:
LinkedIn was launched by a 36 year old.
Red Bull was launched by a 41 year old.
Adidas was launched by a 49 year old.
Starbucks, a 51 year old.
The list goes on (and on, and on), because those aren’t the exceptions, they’re the rule.
And, most of the exceptions you see online — the 20 year old, Lambo-driving info-bros — are:
Exceptionally rare Usually exaggerating Often secretly broke, because they have big top-line revenue but almost no profit.
(not all of them, of course — but the percentage is so high it would shock you)
Now, I’m all for having a sense of urgency.
And don’t mistake this message as a reason to wait around for Mercury to align with Saturn so you can finally write your first Tweet.
But when that sense of urgency cannibalizes your creative energy and fills your head with anxiety and overwhelm, it’s time to pluck the Zyn out of that little bastard’s mouth and tell him to shut him the fxck up so you can finally think clearly again.
Bottom line:
The voice in your head is wrong.
But more importantly:
It’s not even yours.
It’s the voice of someone who made a post once that snuck a false idea past your filters when you had your guard down.
And now it’s time to put your guard back up.
Take back your mind.
And get back to work.
- T
P.S. Balance the message in the email with this one (starts at 1:08:52)
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How to stay clean in the online swamp
“Short-term and long-term results typically lead to different results, which are often the opposite.” – Eben Pagan
This morning, during one of my regular identity-crises about being a “business coach”, ChatGPT dropped this little banger:
There is no online lane that isn’t contaminated.
Self-development? Full of narcissistic gurus.
Spirituality? Full of delusion.
Plant medicine? Full of ego inflation and spiritual tourism.
Business? Full of scammers.
E-Com? Full of crappy products people don’t need.
If you reject a lane because others in it are gross, you will reject all lanes.
So the real filter isn’t category. It’s how you stand inside it.
The conversation reminded me of an OG business guru I used to follow named Eben Pagan.
I think he’s retired now, but when I was getting started back in 2010, he was the top dog in the industry.
He built a portfolio of info businesses that generated over 100M in revenue…
…And yet, in a space full of hype artists and get-rich-quick hustlers, Eben was — shockingly — clean.
He wasn’t renting Lambos and flexing doctored screenshots.
He was teaching high-level strategy, systems thinking, founder psychology, and meta-frameworks for scaling real businesses.
And in the online space, that type of grounded, strategic approach stood out like a clear, white sand beach in the middle of a swamp.
That’s how I see the online business space, sometimes:
A swamp, where gurus wave singles and pop champagne from the deck of their luxury cruisers, inviting customers to come take a dip (“for a limited time only!”), while pretending the fumes don’t stink.
Meanwhile, Eben was building a moat of crystal clear, blue ocean around his business…
…By thinking deeper, marketing with integrity, and actually giving a damn about the quality of his work.
At the time, I had no plans to enter the business coaching space.
(I ran my first business for over 10 years before I even considered privately coaching founders)
But I still remember listening to Eben’s “Get Altitude” program during my morning walks in the early days of building EGTBasketball, and thinking…
If I ever teach business, I want to do it like this.
Clean, honest, strategic, grounded in real experience, and aimed at the total development of the founder.
I won’t sacrifice that for any amount of fast money, and I don’t think you need to, either.
As GuruGPT said:
Every industry has its swamp.
And if you operate online, you’re going to be surrounded by forces that try to pull you in.
But if you’re looking out over that swamp right now, catching whiffs of the fumes, and fearing your only options are to swim, or fail…
Let this be your oasis.
You do not need to compromise your integrity for revenue.
Your freedom for money.
Or your inner development for outer success.
You can do good work, in a good way, and build a business you’re actually proud of.
And after seeing ~3 generations of businesses come and go over the past 16 years, I can say with full certainty:
You will be more successful, in the long run, if you do.
- T
P.S. If this landed for you, here’s the best place to go deeper.
“The next level, by definition, is something you can’t see and can’t understand.” – Eben Pagan
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Size doesn’t matter
I had an interesting conversation with a fellow creator today, who sadly got sucked into the world of generative AI.
They were lied to by some of our favourite marketing tech bros.
The lie was that generative AI would help you grow your audience indirectly because you’d be able to create more, which in turn would give you the chance to publish more content and thus you’d have fans/customers/clients flock to you.
And we all know that’s bs on the front end.
So much so, that this person decided to bin off their 20 super fans on their current Twitter account.
To then go and make a new account and re-brand everything using every AI tool available to increase their output of work.
How do you think it all turned out over the last year?
Not good. Not good at all.
What they forgot to mention previously was those 20 super fans were buying all of their work (Prints, stickers, buttons, badges etc)
They were just thrown to the curb like an old box of toys you grew out of as a kid.
The guru’s in general are still pushing the ideology of having massive amounts of followers = the most optimal way to be profitable, especially if you’re an artist and that shit is just wrong.
It’s just that it’s so easy to sell the bigger numbers and the lifestyle that surrounds it.
On top of that. Our brains are so fried from the constant dopamine addiction we put ourselves through when we go down a scroll hole of doom, that if we aren’t building the same lifestyles the big names are doing. Well, then we’re doing it wrong.
Their new account had a lot more followers, but those weren’t super fans. They were similar people sucked into the AI cult and in that short period of time of creating the new account they had less than 10 sales, where previously they were averaging about 10-20 sales a month off of their super fans.
Size truly doesn’t matter when it comes to this whole online game. It’s all about quality and the relationships you build.
Another thing you can do is just close your eyes and visualise yourself standing in a room in front of say 20 people, hell, you’ve probably been to parties with more people than that.
Don’t let the vanity metrics fool you.
Having a tight knit group of super fans is far better overall having ALL of the numbers with no connection.
Stephen Walker.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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Why you shouldn’t over socialise
Stop over socialising. Seriously.
Every coffee meetup, networking event, and “quick catch up” is stealing time from your actual work.
We get deluded into thinking that we’re building relationships. Although what we’re doing is just masturbating our social anxiety while our creative projects die of neglect.
Most socialising is just procrastination. You tell yourself you’re “putting yourself out there” when you’re really avoiding the hard, lonely work of creating something that matters.
Your best ideas don’t come from brainstorming sessions with acquaintances over overpriced lattes.
They come from solitude. From boredom. From having enough quiet space in your head for genuine thoughts to emerge instead of just recycling whatever bullshit you heard at last week’s mixer.
Hemingway wrote alone. Virginia Woolf wrote alone. Every great creative work was born in isolation, not in some co-working space surrounded by people pretending to hustle.
Say no to most social invitations. Guard your alone time like it’s your most valuable asset.
And no. I’m not advocating becoming a complete shut out to the world.
Just saying no to 99% of everything will put you ahead.
Social media platforms and the influencer/gurus are all liars. They promote this picture perfect set up online but behind closed doors they’re truly dying to switch off.
So start doing it before it’s too late.
Stephen Walker.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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Hemingway would’ve hit send
There’s this Hemingway quote that shows up on every basic bitch’s Instagram story next to a picture of a typewriter they’ve never touched and a whiskey glass they bought off of Amazon.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Everyone quotes it. Nobody fucking does it.
And I get why. Because right now, writing one true sentence feels like juggling live grenades while the thought police take notes.
The world has made it crystal clear what happens when you say the honest thing.
The thing that doesn’t fit inside this week’s approved vocabulary list. (Feels like something straight out of 1984 tbh)
And you see it all the time now. You get reported by professional victims. Flagged by the bots designed by cowards.
Deplatformed by tech overlords who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.
Dogpiled by strangers who didn’t read past your first sentence but have PhD level opinions about what you “really meant.”
Your name ends up on some blacklist you didn’t apply for. Some soulless AI in a server farm decides your words are “problematic,” and suddenly you’re shouting into the perpetual nothingness that used to be your audience.
And what usually happens? You fucking soften. You hedge like a nervous politician.
You add more disclaimers than a pharmaceutical commercial. You run every sentence through an internal focus group of “what if Karen from accounting gets offended” and what emerges is this pathetic, beige, room temperature slop that says nothing, offends nobody, and dies quietly between a sponsored post for protein powder and someone’s avocado toast.
[deep breath]
And you call that writing.
It’s not writing. I’d call it intellectual masturbation for people too scared to climax.
Hemingway knew something every frightened creative needs tattooed on their forehead right now.
Writing was never supposed to be safe.
The moment you sit down to say something genuinely true.
I mean structurally, uncomfortably, dangerously true about this fucked up world we’re living in, you’re committing an act of rebellion.
I mean look at all of this Epstein files bullshit and the unlimited amounts of conspiracy theories that are bleeding out onto the internet now.
He said write hard and clear about what hurts.
Not write soft and vague about what’s comfortable. Not write whatever today’s mob will tolerate. Not write what the algorithm jerks off to.
Hard. Clear. What actually fucking hurts.
He also said every writer needs a built in, shockproof shit detector. Yours should be going off right now like a smoke alarm in a meth lab.
You start to feel it every time you scroll through the sanitised wasteland of social media.
Every time you read something and think “that’s not even half the truth, but nobody’s got the balls to say so.”
Every time you write something real, feel its weight, then delete it because you’re terrified of the consequences.
That detector is screaming. You’re just pretending you can’t hear it because facing the truth feels scarier than living the lie.
Here’s what Papa Hemingway understood in his bones, what he proved every time he put words on paper…
The cost of not writing the true thing will destroy you faster than writing it ever could.
Not your follower count. Not your brand partnerships. Not your precious reputation.
You. The part of you that actually matters. The machinery inside that makes your words worth reading instead of just worth scrolling past.
Every time you pull a punch, you teach your soul to flinch. Every time you swap the real word for the safe word, the real word gets harder to find.
I sure as shit don’t want to lose the sentence. And I also don’t want to lose the instinct to write sentences worth losing followers over.
(Cause we’re not going to make everyone happy. I mean that’s boring anyways)
And once that instinct dies. Once you’ve trained yourself to self censor before you even know what you want to say, you’re not a writer anymore.
You’re a content producer. You’re elevator music in blog form.
Hemingway didn’t write to be liked. He wrote to be true. And the truth was frequently ugly, uncomfortable, and completely unwelcome at polite dinner parties.
He wrote about war without making it romantic. He wrote about love without making it pretty. He wrote about the long, quiet ways people destroy themselves, and he did it in short, brutal sentences because truth doesn’t need decorations or sparkles.
That’s what’s missing right now. Not more content. Not more takes. Not more sanitised wisdom that’s been focus grouped into meaninglessness.
The world is missing writers with the balls to write the true sentence.
The one sitting in your chest like a tumour. The one you keep almost saying. The one you’ve typed and deleted six times because you know, you it’s going to cost you something.
Write that sentence.
Hemingway would’ve hit send and told anyone who didn’t like it to kiss his ass.
So should you.
And even if you don’t write as much. Paint, write the song or have the conversations…
Stephen Walker.
P.S. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” He said that too. Notice he didn’t mention checking whether your blood was brand safe first.
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
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7 am in Mexico City
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka
It’s 7 am in Mexico City.
I’m sitting in the only good coffee shop that opens this early, wrestling with the blank page.
This doesn’t happen often.
I’ve been writing these emails for over 15 years, so usually the words flow pretty easily.
But today I have something important to tell you, and I’m not quite sure how to say it.
For context:
We’ve had a huge flow of new subscribers join us over the past week.
(if that’s you, welcome — if you’ve been here a while, you’ll want to see this too)
So I should probably take a moment to tell you exactly who I am and what I do…
…And make it simple, clear, and compelling enough to keep you reading.
The problem is, the simple answer would be a lie.
Sitting around the campfire at our retreat last summer, a long-time attendee put it this way:
“When friends ask me what we do here, I never know what to say.
We build businesses, but it’s not just about business.
We go deep on self-development and spirituality, but it’s not about that either.
We talk about training the mind, life strategy, relationships, communication, human potential — basically everything.
What we do here isn’t about any single topic.
But when we bring it all together…
This is, hands down, the best place in the world.”
Moments later, as the fire began to die down…
Long-time coaching client Mason Vranes turned to me and said:
“That’s your greatest strength… and biggest weakness.”
Mason’s business, FundLaunch, just passed 40M in revenue, and he’s well on his way to a 100M exit before he turns 30.
So he knows the rules of the game:
Niche down.
Speak to one “avatar.”
Keep making your offer more specific until it clicks.
Then, hit the gas and scale it as hard and fast as it’ll go.
No doubt, that approach works:
It’s how my first business, EGTBasketball, cracked 8 figures in lifetime sales, and held the top spot in the basketball training industry for nearly a decade.
So I know it would be better for business if I crammed what I offer into a neat little box…
But every time I try, we lose what makes our work so uniquely powerful.
Since you’re here, I’m guessing you feel the same way:
There isn’t a single word that fully describes who you are or what you’re looking for, so being forced down a one-dimensional path feels like cutting off a piece of yourself.
The problem is, every available path feels one-dimensional.
Business gurus tell you spirituality is make-believe.
(sit down, shut up, work 12 hours a day, cut out all your friends, and when money doesn’t fill the emptiness inside, go make more money)
Spiritual teachers tell you ambition is ego.
(sit down, be peaceful, love everyone, wave these crystals at the chick with dreadlocks sitting across from you in the sharing circle so she likes your “vibes”)
Self-improvers tell you… well, a whole lot of sh*t.
(sit down, stop fapping, start maxxing, join my Skool community to farm that good aura so you can finally get ahead of 99% of people and escape the matrix so fast it feels illegal)
But that’s the internet, and it’s the only one we’ve got.
So you keep trying to fit yourself into systems built by simpler people with simpler goals…
But no matter how much content you consume, and how much progress you make….
It still feels like something essential hasn’t clicked yet.
That’s where our work begins.
I spent my 20s searching for a deeper path, as I scaled my first business while travelling to over 40 countries, training intensively in Taoist meditation and Amazonian plant medicine, and obsessively studying human potential.
I’ve spent my 30s, so far, in a “creative retirement”, writing, teaching, running retreats, and privately coaching 6, 7, and 8 figure founders.
I haven’t seen it all yet, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot.
And here’s the good news:
The most successful individuals I’ve worked with aren’t sacrificing parts of themselves to achieve their goals.
They’re not choosing between money and spirituality, outer achievement and inner mastery, ambition and relationships, or success and freedom.
They’re integrating all of it, because that’s what mastery is.
If that’s the game you’re playing, welcome.
You may have just found exactly what you’ve been looking for.
- T
P.S. Over our next few emails, we’ll talk more about this integrated approach to business, life strategy, and self-mastery.
In the meantime, here’s where I recommend going deeper.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”― Robert A. Heinlein
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Girl at the coffee shop
…had 47 browser tabs open like she was re-creating the matrix.
Eyes half shut. Posture of someone who’d been clinically dead for twenty minutes and just decided to come back because her coffee wasn’t finished yet.
Hair doing something ambitious. The laptop was practically breathing harder than she was.
“Rough day?”
“No. This is Tuesday.”
“What do you do?”
“I sell screenshots.”
Long pause. The type of pause where your left eye starts to twitch and your brain reboots…
“Screenshots… of what?”
“Ads.”
“You sell. Pictures. Of advertisements.”
“$37 a month. Updated every Tuesday.”
She turned the laptop around.
1,247 active subscribers.
$46,139 per month.
Selling screenshots.
My entire belief system left my body.
“Hold on. Where do you even get them?”
“Facebook Ad Library. Completely free. Public. I spend two hours scrolling and screenshot anything that’s been running longer than three weeks.”
“Why three weeks?”
“Because if an ad is still running after three weeks, it’s printing money. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that’s losing. The platform is doing the quality control for me. I’m just taking the receipt.”
“So your entire product… is screenshots you find for free on a website anyone can access?”
“Google Drive folder. 50 fresh ads every Tuesday. One sentence per screenshot explaining why it works. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“And people hand you $37 a month for that?”
She took a sip of her coffee.
“People hand me $37 a month to skip the two hours of scrolling they’ll never do. Time saved in the long run.”
“What’s your background? Marketing degree? Agency?”
“Receptionist. Got laid off eleven months ago.”
Eleven. Months.
Receptionist to $46K a month. Selling screenshots she finds on a free website, organised in a Google Drive folder a twelve year old could build.
“But… can’t people just do this themselves?”
She shrugged the way someone shrugs when they’ve heard this exact question 400 times and it gets funnier every single time.
“Can. Won’t. Different problem entirely.”
She picked up her coffee, turned the laptop back around, and disappeared into her 47 tabs like nothing had happened…
Now someone sent me this tale fresh off the LinkedIn bus. I re-wrote it a little to make it read better, cause people on LI are AI’d up to their nostrils.
Anyways. The lesson here is:
Simple is good and simple is profitable and in this chicks case. Very profitable.
While everyone is still gargling on the shiny metal balls of our future AI overlords. People who know people. Know that people are lazy shits.
As much as the techbros are force feeding that AI is going to take over everything. They forget that the majority of people don’t want to learn a new tool (Which is also very shit in light of new events) to then have to waste time to figure it out to do what they really need. They’d rather pay for what it is they’re looking for and be given it all down and dirty like…
Just like the people paying $37 a month for winning ads they can model.
Oh and guess what? This kind of thing is so easy to set up. You don’t need a blood sacrifice to finish it.
So think about it. What can you set up that’ll print money and make people’s lives easier?
Stephen Walker.
P.S. I’ll be throwing together a little doc that I’ll slide into The Escape Hatch
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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom
