Author: admin

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.

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

“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

​

​

​

​

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

…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

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

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

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

Right?

​

Wrong.

​

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:

​

“You’re screwed.”

​

Business has never been harder, they say.

​

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

​

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.

​

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.

​

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

​

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.

​

First it was “SEO is dead!”

​

Then “blogging is dead!”

​

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…”

​

Every year, it’s the same story.

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

…Here’s the honest-to-God truth:

​

In some ways, online business has never been easier.

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

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

​

(this is business, after all)

​

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

​

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

​

(that’s literally what saturation means)

​

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

​

Every era has upsides and downsides.

​

And — big secret:

​

There are always about as many upsides as downsides.

​

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

​

Put your head down.

​

Put your blinders on.

​

Delete Instagram (she’s not worth it).

​

And get to work.

​

• T

​

P.S. In case you missed it:

​

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

​

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

​

​

​

​

​

​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