Author: admin

And then funny thing is, you paid for it too.

The lie is so fucking obvious that I’m embarrassed it took me this long to call it out.

In the MMO space. They told you that flashing income screenshots and Lamborghini photos would attract high quality clients to your business.

They sold you the dream that “income attracts income” and all you need to do is show people how much money you’re making to get them to pay you money.

And in the wise words of my favourite comedian of all time, George Carlin: It’s bullshit. Complete, grade A, premium bullshit.

But hey. Income porn looks good from a visual point of view. It looks sexy on Instagram reels and your Facebook feed, but you attract broke people who are desperate to make money fast.

(Yes. We’ve all been there. We’ve all started back in the day by Googling: “how to make money on the internet”)

But when you do all this online flashy bullshit about all the riches they can have. You end up getting clients who are more interested in your bank account than your actual skills.

You start to build an audience of wannabe entrepreneurs who think success is a Instagram story away and I mean if you’ve seen Instagram within the last 6 months. Holy shit balls it’s bad.

The thing is. These are not good clients. These are not people who will pay you premium prices for quality work. These are bargain hunters and dream chasers who will nickel and dime you to death while expecting miracles.

But your favourite guru frames it like it’s easy.

“All you need is $100 and this software and you can be raking in $5K per month in as little as 90 days!” Sure, it’s technically possible. (LLM bros lol)

But so is winning the lottery. Both require a combination of skill, timing, and luck that most people don’t possess.

What they don’t tell you is that those 90 days involve working 12 hour days, failing repeatedly, learning skills you didn’t know existed, and dealing with rejection that would make a telemarketer cry. They don’t mention that most people quit after week two when they realise that “passive income” requires active effort. I mean damn. Can’t I just push a button and make my millions?

People are lazy fucks who want results without work. Gurus know this, so they sell the dream and leave out all of those nightmarish steps. They show you the destination but hide the fucking mountain you have to climb to get there and the mountain sucks cause it’s covered in snow and there are wolves out to eat you, oh and you’re climbing barefoot AND it’s -20 degrees outside…

The coaching space is especially rotten with this too. Every other LinkedIn post is some “coach” showing off their Shopify dashboard or their course launch numbers, pretending that screenshots equal expertise, which we all know they don’t.

So you need to stop falling for it. Stop buying courses from people whose only credential is making money selling courses about making money or coaching coaches that coach coaches to coach coaches.

Fuck that noise.

Real expertise doesn’t need income porn to prove itself.

Stephen Walker.

Oh look another obnoxiously long url you should click on to join the escape hatch where cool shit will be posted for free

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Fear weaponizes your imagination against you.” – Jed McKenna

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Last week, I downloaded Instagram for the first time in 8 years.

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Turns out IG is a key middle-of-funnel conversion mechanism for Hinge leads in Mexico City…

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So the upside, I figured, would easily outweigh the downside.

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Right?

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Wrong.

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The moment I opened the app, I was slammed with ads from coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches who coach coaches, all of them saying some version of the same thing:

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“You’re screwed.”

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Business has never been harder, they say.

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It isn’t 2020 anymore, you can’t just press the internet button and make money fly out.

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You actually need a system, now, and the only system that works is my system, because every other system is so, like, 2021, and if you don’t install my system in the next 3 hours AI will run away with your business and your wife and leave you eating lonely microwave dinners with nothing but the cat for company, and he never really liked you anyway.

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The good news, they say, is you can book a “discovery” (sales) call with my “team” (outsourced sales agency) so we can help you “install” (buy) my system before it’s too late.

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If I sound old and cranky, that’s because I am.

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But I’m also old enough to know bullsht when I see it, and it’s the same bullsht gurus have been peddling since I started back in 2010.

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First it was “SEO is dead!”

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Then “blogging is dead!”

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Then “your cat is dead! — now you have to eat those microwave dinners alone because you didn’t install my system when you had the chance — just kidding, for a limited time only…”

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Every year, it’s the same story.

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The characters change, but the bullsh*t stays the same.

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After 16 years online, running multi-million dollar education businesses through ~3 generations of changes…

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The SEO, blogging & affiliate era (2010 - 2015)
The social media era (2015 - 2021)
The creator era (2021 → today)

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(and now, of course, the AI era which I suspect hasn’t truly begun, yet)

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…Here’s the honest-to-God truth:

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In some ways, online business has never been easier.

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My first website cost $5k, took 4 months to build, and had less functionality than a free WordPress template.

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The first app I built cost a quarter million dollars to launch, and 5-figures in monthly overhead to maintain.

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Not to mention, for the first half of my career, everything sold online was assumed to be a “scam”.

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These days, you can sit down with a cup of coffee at breakfast and have a fully-functioning business before lunch.

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And, you can do it at near-zero cost.

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Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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(this is business, after all)

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The market has never been noisier or more saturated, for example.

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But that also means there are more founders, having more success than ever before.

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(that’s literally what saturation means)

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So please, don’t let the gurus scare you.

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Every era has upsides and downsides.

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And — big secret:

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There are always about as many upsides as downsides.

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The platforms may change, but the fundamentals always stay the same:

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Put your head down.

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Put your blinders on.

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Delete Instagram (she’s not worth it).

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And get to work.

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• T

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P.S. In case you missed it:

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​Here’s 16 years of business advice in 72 minutes.​

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(no fear-mongering, no Lambos, just high-level, battle-tested strategy that applies to every era of business)

​

​

​

​

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

Got a few people reply who were hesitant about getting Telegram, cause they thought I was going to do what everyone and their dog is doing, which is build an “app” on Skool.

And frankly. That’s a valid question.

Firstly. The app ecosystem sucks. It runs like shit on your mobile phone and even if you’re paying for the premium features, people are still getting blasted with adverts to join similar communities as yours…

From a security standpoint, comparing Telegram to Skool…

Telegram is a bank vault, where Skool is essentially a cardboard box with a “please don’t steal sign on it”

Telegram offers end-to-end encryption for secret chats, meaning your conversations are scrambled into unreadable code that only you and your recipient can decrypt, this also applies to your groups you create and the content you decide to house on it too.

The thing is, even Telegram itself can’t read your messages.

Skool on the other hand?

It’s a centralised platform storing all your data on servers that governments can subpoena, hackers can breach, and corporate overlords can data mine for profit.

When you’re building communities discussing sensitive topics, do you really want some Silicon Valley company having full access to every word your audience shares?

Telegram keeps your communications private by design, while Skool treats your data like a product to be analysed, stored, and potentially monetised.

One platform was built by privacy advocates who fled authoritarian regimes. The other was built by entrepreneurs who see your audience as a revenue stream.

Now I’m not saying that I’m going to be creating a community that’s going to overthrow a government or whatever.

It’s just a place for me to store ideas, while giving people a place to rest their weary legs while they try run away from social media permanently.

I mean, have you been paying attention to what’s happening in the real world?

The UK’s Online Safety Act is tightening the noose.

The US is teeing up legislation that would make your grandmother’s Facebook wall a regulated utility.

Every centralised platform is one bureaucratic sneeze away from becoming a surveillance tool that makes your members uncomfortable, quiet, or gone.

And social media?

That’s already finished. It’s a rage-bait cemetery where 300 ChatGPT clones post the same “most people won’t tell you this” carousel while an algorithm decides who sees your stuff based on how angry it makes strangers.

Verified blue-tick wankers pretending life is perfect while behind closed doors we know it’s not. Although that won’t stop them from schilling some bullshit empowerment course to you and happily keep you on that hamster wheel.

Anywho.

You know what to do.

Stephen Walker.

Definitely not an obnoxiously long link to get you to join my Telegram group.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

You walk into a coffee shop.

It’s one of those coffee shops.

The kind where the barista has a tattoo of a French press on their forearm and the menu board looks like it was written by a calligrapher having a panic attack.

The line is six deep. The espresso machine is screaming like a banshee being fed into a wood chipper.

There are seventeen mobile orders backed up on the counter, and somewhere in the back, a blender is doing war crimes to a bunch of ice cubes.

You get to the front. The barista.

Bless their overcaffeinated heart, is already looking past you, already mentally juggling four oat milk lattes and a whatever the hell a “cortado” is.

They’re doing their best. They are a human being in a hurricane of dairy alternatives.

And you say to them “I don’t want black coffee.”

The barista nods. Or maybe they don’t nod. Maybe they just vibrate at a frequency that suggests acknowledgment. They turn around. They do things. Steam happens. Thirty seconds later, they slide a cup across the counter.

It’s black coffee.

Of course it’s black coffee, I mean you clearly asked for it right?

And you stand there, holding this mug of liquid darkness, wondering how the hell you got here.

You specifically said you didn’t want this. You were clear. You stated your case. You communicated like a grown adult human person (or so you thought, duh)

I need you to tattoo this somewhere you’ll see it every morning, maybe on the inside of your eyelids or whatever…

You didn’t tell them what you wanted. You told them what you didn’t want. And the only actionable noun in that sentence was “black coffee.”

That barista heard two words through all of the yap yap…

BLACK. COFFEE.

The “don’t” got swallowed. The “don’t” evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. The “don’t” never stood a chance.

This is all about your brain though.

Your brain is that barista.

Your brain is an overworked, under appreciated, slightly frazzled meat computer that is constantly processing a multitude of sensory input, emotional garbage, intrusive thoughts about whether you locked the front door, and the inexplicable urge to remember the lyrics to “Mambo No. 5” at three in the morning.

Your brain is busy. Your brain is juggling flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a pit full of your childhood traumas.

And when you tell your brain “I don’t want to fail,” your brain hears: FAIL.

When you say “I don’t want to be broke,” your brain hears: BROKE.

When you say “I don’t want to screw this up,” your brain grins its terrible little brain grin and says, “Oh, we’re thinking about screwing things up? GREAT.

Let me allocate all available resources to imagining, in high definition cinematic detail, every possible way we can screw this up.”

There’s actual science behind this, by the way.

I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.

A psychologist named Daniel Wegner called it ironic process theory, which is the most perfectly named thing in all of psychology because it is, in fact, deeply ironic.

Wegner told people, “Don’t think of a white bear.”

Guess what every single one of those people immediately thought about? A big, fluffy, undeniable white bear, lumbering through the tundra of their consciousness, refusing to leave.

The brain cannot process a negative without first conjuring the thing it’s supposed to negate. You have to build the image before you can try to un-build it.

And by then, it’s too late. The bear is in the room. The black coffee is in your hand. The failure is playing on a loop in your skull like a terrible movie you can’t walk out of.

This isn’t just woo woo law of attraction stuff, either. I mean, it is that too, if you’re into it. The whole “the universe delivers what you focus on” thing.

Fine.

Sure.

The universe is a space barista, and it’s very busy, and it only catches the nouns. I can work with that metaphor.

But you don’t even need to believe in manifesting or crystals or vision boards made out of magazine clippings to understand why this matters.

This is just how attention works. This is mechanical. Your reticular activating system. That’s the bouncer at the door of your conscious awareness, that lets in what you’re focused on and filters out the rest.

If you’re focused on debt, you will see debt everywhere. Reminders of debt. Evidence of debt. Opportunities to acquire more debt. Your brain will be extremely helpful in confirming that yes, debt is the central theme of your existence, because that’s what you told it to look for.

You told the barista “black coffee,” and by God, you’re getting black coffee.

So what do you do instead?

You tell the barista what you actually want.

“I’d like a lavender oat milk latte with an extra shot.” Specific. Positive. Actionable. The barista now has something to make, not something to avoid. That’s a fundamentally different task.

Sports psychologists figured this out ages ago. You don’t tell a golfer, “Don’t hit it into the water.” You know what a golfer’s brain does with that sentence? It takes a beautiful, panoramic mental photograph of the water. It studies the water. It falls in love with the water. And then the golfer’s body, being the obedient servant of the brain’s attention, sends the ball right into that water with the accuracy of a guided missile.

Instead, you say, “Aim for the center of the fairway.” Now the brain has a target, not a fear. The mental image is the fairway, green and wide and inviting. The body follows the picture. The ball goes where the mind was already looking.

This applies to and I cannot stress this enough, basically everything.

Don’t write your goals as a list of things you want to avoid. “I don’t want to be unhealthy” is garbage. Your brain just heard “unhealthy” and is now Googling symptoms of diseases you don’t have.

Try for the most part…

“I want to feel strong and energised.” That’s a destination. Your brain can work with a destination.

Don’t frame your creative work around what you’re afraid of. “I don’t want to write something boring” cause you just put the word BORING in forty foot neon letters across your imagination.

Try…

“I want to write something that makes people feel like they’ve been punched in the heart in the best possible way.” Now there’s a creative brief your muse can sink her teeth into.

Most of us spend an astonishing amount of our mental energy describing, in exquisite detail, exactly what we don’t want. We are poets of avoidance. We can articulate our fears with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a revival preacher.

Ask someone what they don’t want, and they’ll give you a forty five minute TED Talk with slides.

Ask them what they do want, and they’ll stare at you like you just asked them to solve a differential equation in Klingon.

The real work is building the positive image. Getting specific about what you want. Giving your brain your overworked, overwhelmed, beautiful disaster of a barista brain, a clear order.

Walk up to the counter of your own mind. Look it dead in the eye. And say with your whole chest:

“Here’s what I’m having.”

Then watch it get made.

Specificity is key.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Got a few replies asking about what other things will be shared in that group.

So I might as well drop the full menu.

These are just a lot of notes and concepts I’m researching and building but it’ll cover everything from:

Psychology & Human Behaviour, Sales, Marketing, Creativity, Trading & Markets, Making Money Without Losing Your Soul and Meta concepts / Why This Group Exists

Here’s the other bullets, however things are subject to change over time…

The “confession close” used by a legendary door-to-door Bible salesman from Mississippi that works almost disturbingly well over text especially on high ticket offers where the prospect has been burned before

Why the worst thing you can do after someone raises an objection is “handle” it and what a 1960s car lot manager called “the lean back” that turns objections into buying signals almost involuntarily

The single sentence that saved a dead deal worth over $40,000 and why it works precisely because it sounds like you’re walking away from the money

How to use “strategic silence” inside a DM conversation to create so much tension the prospect closes themselves (this feels deeply uncomfortable the first time you do it)

A technique stolen from high stakes hostage negotiators that makes people feel “heard” at a level so deep they’ll hand you their credit card just to keep the conversation going

Why “adding more value” to your pitch is often the fastest way to kill a sale and the counterintuitive thing top closers do instead that looks almost lazy from the outside

The “broke dentist” problem that explains why most people who are great at their craft are terrible at selling it and the embarrassingly simple shift that fixes it in about 48 hours

What a bookie in East London taught me about “reading the weight of money” in a sales conversation and how to know the exact moment a prospect has mentally committed before they’ve said a single word of agreement

Why your “lead magnet” is probably repelling the exact customers who’d spend the most money with you and the strange type of freebie that attracts ravenous buyers like blood in shark water

The “newspaper obituary test” for writing subject lines, hooks, and headlines that makes the whole “how do I get attention?” question almost irrelevant

A marketing lesson hidden inside the way cult leaders structure their “introductory” meetings used ethically, this is the most potent onboarding sequence I’ve ever seen (and it costs exactly zero dollars to implement)

Why “niching down” the way most marketing coaches teach it actually traps you in a coffin sized box with no leverage, no pricing power, and no joy and the far more profitable way to think about your “who”

The “Grateful Dead model” of audience building that turns casual followers into lifers who buy everything you make, defend you in public, and never once ask for a discount

How to engineer “I was JUST thinking about that” moments inside your content on purpose, on schedule, every single week using a framework from a retired political speechwriter

The one type of email almost nobody sends that generates more replies, more trust, and more sales than any launch sequence, welcome series, or “value stack” ever created

Why the best marketing you’ll ever do looks nothing like marketing and what it looks like instead (There’s a reason Michelin stars are awarded by a tyre company)

A positioning trick from the luxury watch industry that lets you charge 3x to 5x more than your competitors while your audience actually thanks you for the higher price

The “shitty room” method used by a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright to generate more usable ideas in 20 minutes than most people produce in a month of “brainstorming”

Why consuming more content to “stay inspired” is the creative equivalent of drinking saltwater when you’re thirsty and the one daily practice that fills the well without draining it

The strange connection between boredom and creative breakthroughs and how to manufacture “productive boredom” on command even if your life is chaotic and overstimulated

A counterintuitive constraint method used by a famous ad agency in the 1960s that turns creative block into creative fuel in about fifteen minutes (this works for copy, content, product ideas, and even trading setups)

Why “finding your voice” is terrible advice and what actually happens neurologically when someone develops a style people recognise and crave

The “magpie principle” of original thinking that explains how every genius you admire actually got their ideas and why it means you’ve been dramatically overcomplicating the creative process your entire life

How to use what a jazz musician calls “wrong notes on purpose” to make your content, your offers, and even your personality magnetically distinctive in a sea of beige sameness

The “casino owner” mindset shift that separates traders who make money over 10,000 trades from traders who blow up every 6 months and why it has nothing to do with your system, your edge, or your risk management rules

Why the financial “news” you’re consuming is engineered to make you do the exact opposite of what would make you money and the one information diet that actually correlates with better returns (it’s almost offensively simple)

A position sizing method borrowed from a blackjack card counter that keeps you in the game long enough for your edge to actually show up even if you hit a losing streak that would make most traders tap out

The “emotional P&L” concept that explains why some traders are technically profitable but still miserable and why fixing this is the single fastest way to also improve your actual P&L

What a retired pit trader told me about the real reason most retail traders lose money and it’s not spreads, not commissions, not “the algorithms,” and not lack of education (it’s something far more uncomfortable to admit)

The “Sunday night acid test” for knowing whether your trading approach is sustainable or whether it’s slowly hollowing you out like a parasite wearing a suit

Why the best traders I know spend less time looking at charts than beginners do and what they’re doing with that extra time that actually gives them their edge

A psychological framework from competitive poker that helps you tell the difference between a genuinely good trading idea and one your ego is dressing up in a fake moustache to sneak past your risk rules

The “reverse journal” technique that reveals your real trading patterns not the ones you think you have, but the ones your account statement proves you have (this is uncomfortable but it’s worth about ten courses)

Why “passive income” as sold by the internet gurus is a lie and what actual financial freedom looks like for people who still want to feel something when they wake up on a Monday

The “Enough Number” exercise that takes about 9 minutes and shows you exactly how much money you actually need to live the life you want, which for most people is shockingly, almost embarrassingly, lower than the number they’ve been chasing

A question a Benedictine monk asked me that completely rewired how I think about money, ambition, and the quiet dread of “making it” only to discover the view from the top is just a car park

Why the hustle culture crowd and the anti hustle crowd are both wrong and the third option nobody talks about because it can’t be turned into a clickbait headline or a course

The “integrity premium” that makes certain people’s businesses almost recession proof and how to build it into your own operation without becoming some insufferable “purpose-driven” cliché

How to spot the exact moment a money making opportunity crosses the line from “smart leverage” into “selling a piece of your soul on layaway” before you’re in too deep to walk away

A brutal but clarifying exercise from a palliative care nurse’s research that reveals whether you’re building something you actually want or just running from something you’re too scared to face

Why this group is on Telegram instead of some shiny custom app and what that tells you about how we think about your attention, your data, and your phone’s home screen

The real reason most “communities” turn into ghost towns within 90 days and the one structural decision we made on day one that makes The Escape Hatch almost immune to it

Why we will never have 10,000 members and why that number would actually destroy the thing that makes this place work

What happens inside this group that cannot happen on Twitter, on a podcast, or inside a course no matter how “premium” the course is or how big the guru’s following…

Yes that’s a meaty one to get through.

And now I’m going for a nap.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

P.S. There is no P.S. I’m tired.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

It feels like an eternity since I sent the last email.

Best friend didn’t die, which is obviously good and he also jokingly said that I’m supposed to die before him anyways…

So it just goes to show that a dark sense of humour can get you through pretty much anything.

(He’s recovering well too btw)

I’m finally settled back up North again after taking an extra break because of all of the fuckery that went on.

It was a needed break because even though what happened to my friend was horrible. It was a wake up call we both needed.

It left him and I talking about a whole bunch of things we used to go on about when we worked together and did all the nerd shit in the I.T. world, where we should probably write a book or 3 on it but anyways…

(It did take me 10 minutes to figure out how to get my laptop to work again, cause who knew that not opening it up for a few weeks could lead the not so fully charged battery to be dead…)

Equally, I’m grateful for everyone who reached out via email to check in on me. I appreciate you.

I’ve also yeeted myself off of social media. Just straight up deleted the apps off my phone completely. No more Facebook or Instagram.

I’ve kept Twitter because It’s mainly used as a lead generation outlet, cause believe it or not.

Those people are genuine in comparison to all the peacocking and outright performative bullshit you see on the other places. I don’t know what it is about those places but they just leave me angry, even if I’m just scrolling through it.

So if I haven’t replied to anyone who happens to follow / are friends with me on there. My bad. Although you could’ve just emailed me innit…

With that all being said.

I’ve finally created a place where we can hang out where I can brain dump everything I know, while still having that human element of 1 to 1.

I want to keep it low-key as the kids would say and frankly I don’t even care if you join or not. It’s mainly a dumping grounds for what I’m doing, or working on and if you want to satisfy your nosey tendencies I’m sure you’d join in.

You can be as anonymous as you like or out there too. Whatever floats your boat.

Anywho…

Here are the types of things I’ll be drip feeding into this little world as I research, build and create them…

Why the most persuasive people in any room almost never "try" to persuade anyone and the strange 19th-century parlour trick that explains exactly how they do it (most psychologists won't touch this with a barge pole)

The "Dead Man's Hand" principle of human decision making that lets you predict what someone will do next with eerie accuracy, even if you've never met them before.

A dirty little cognitive bias retail stores have exploited since the 1920s that works even better inside a Telegram chat than it does on a shop floor (and no, it's not scarcity or social proof)

What a disgraced Navy interrogator accidentally discovered about getting people to reveal their deepest objections, without ever asking them a single question.

The real reason people "ghost" on you after saying they're interested and why it has almost nothing to do with you, your offer, or your follow up (this one stings, but it's liberating once you see it)

How an obscure 1947 hypnosis paper explains why most marketing falls on deaf ears and the two word "pattern interrupt" that snaps even the most jaded prospect out of their scroll coma.

Why trying to "build trust" the way the gurus teach actually destroys trust with the exact people most likely to buy from you.

The "kinked garden hose" phenomenon behind almost every self sabotaging behaviour you've ever had and the absurdly simple way to unkink it (a trauma therapist friend shared this with me after three whiskeys and I haven't been the same since)

A little known finding from behavioural economics that shows why people who set goals the "SMART" way are statistically more likely to quit than people who do something far lazier and less respectable.

The "status game" hiding inside every conversation you'll ever have and how to spot whether someone is playing for dominance, for approval, or for something much darker (once you see this you can't unsee it)

These just a few little bits from the psychology and human behaviour things I've been deep diving on. There's going to be a whole bunch more to come and well, if you like to have your brain meat massage a little bit. You should join or not...

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

P.S. Download the app. Make an account and you can choose to be who you wanna be or not. It’s entirely up to you.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom