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Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

His name was Sammy, and he thought I was a drug dealer.

I had just pulled up to the coffee shop in my new car — $86,000, paid by check at the dealership. Sammy was walking out with his cup as I was walking in. We had worked together at a factory that made FedEx devices. He was in his early forties. I was a kid who had decided a day job was not his future. 

He looked at the car. He looked at me. He said: "Are you a drug dealer? Can I buy some drugs?"

He was laughing when he said it. My former boss used to say there's a truth in every joke — jokes are only half jokes, and the other half is what the person actually thinks.

Sammy had no framework for how someone like me could legally accumulate that kind of money. In his mind, the only explanation was something criminal. It did not occur to him that I had spent years working two jobs simultaneously, selling my desktop computer to buy a laptop, paying a hundred dollars a month for mobile internet just so I could sneak away during my security guard shift and work on my business in the dark.

That the car was the result of thousands of small decisions made in rooms where nobody was watching.

That is not a story I told Sammy that morning. You cannot explain compound effort to someone who has spent his career calculating the minimum amount of work he can do without getting caught.

I smiled, went inside for my coffee, and did not think about Sammy again for a very long time. Some conversations are not worth finishing.

Before we go any further…

My buddy Luke runs a business you've probably never heard of, even though his company is on the Inc 5000 list and he's helped absolute beginners collectively make millions of dollars flipping physical products online.

The reason you haven't heard of him is simple. He doesn't need stages or seminars because the method works so well that he can run everything from a laptop.

The product he flips is not sexy. Used textbooks.

But when you're making over a million dollars doing it, it becomes sexy pretty quick…

And you can do it all without private labeling, a website, an email list, ads, SEO, or social media.

All it takes is buying books low on one website and selling them high on Amazon.

His student, Randy, crossed a million dollars and is now over $5 million using this method. 

Seth from the UK has done over $3.6 million working two to three hours per day. Patrick started as a college student with zero dollars and a maxed-out student credit card and has done over $500,000 since then.

The market is massive. Books are by far the biggest category on Amazon with billions of dollars in sales, and Amazon started their entire company selling books for a reason.

This Thursday, we’re hosting a free training where he'll show you three different ways to make $10,000 per month flipping books. 

We’ll demonstrate each method live on the training by finding profitable deals in real time and showing you exactly how the software tells you what to buy and what to sell it for after all fees.

Now, as I was saying…

The Sammy encounter was funny, in retrospect. The harder ones were not.

My father had been an entrepreneur himself back in Ukraine. That history made him more specific in his warnings, not more sympathetic. He had seen businesses fail. He understood the cost.

He wanted me to stop before I damaged myself further, and he said so, repeatedly and clearly. He was being a father who could not see what I could see.

My best friend from the Air Force Academy handled it differently. He simply disappeared.

He went completely silent. Phone calls ignored, meeting requests declined, messages unanswered — every channel closed. He cut me off as completely as if I had died — and for a while, that is almost what it felt like.

No argument, no confrontation, no explanation. Just silence.

Nobody in my immediate world believed this was going to work. My girlfriend at the time — my wife now (and still the most skeptical person I know, which I mean as a compliment) — was supportive in her own way, though even she could not have told you with confidence that any of this would amount to anything.

I was broke, my English was rough, I was working two jobs to stay alive, and the people who knew me best had quietly written me off. When I told people I was going to make money on the internet, I became the punchline of every conversation I was not in. I heard about those conversations secondhand, which turns out to be its own particular kind of fuel.

Here is what I eventually understood about all of it.

The doubt was information, not verdict. Every person who laughed, every friend who stopped returning calls, every family member who tried to redirect me toward something safer and more legible — they were all showing me exactly who they were and what they could see from where they stood.

They could not see it. That was data about them, not a judgment on the idea.

The ones who cannot see what you are building will never be convinced by your explanation of it. They will only be convinced by the result. And by the time the result exists, you will not need their approval anymore. You will have outgrown the version of yourself that wanted it.

My father changed the moment the first real check arrived. No conversation required, no presentation — just a number on a page that he could see with his own eyes. Sammy changed the moment he saw the car, standing outside that coffee shop with his cup.

The friend from the Air Force Academy — I still do not know what happened there. I have made peace with not knowing.

What I do know is this. The people around you when you are starting are almost never the people who can hold your vision. That is a reality about timing, not a criticism of them.

Most people are living inside a model of the world that leaves no room for the kind of outcome you are reaching for. When you describe it, they genuinely cannot picture it. They see where you are standing right now, and they draw a straight line from there to wherever they expect people like you to end up.

Your job is to refuse to accept that line.

The English got better through daily practice — speaking, reading, writing, every single day without exception. The money came through relentless reinvestment of every dollar that came in before I could spend it on anything else. The isolation passed, because it always does, and because results speak in a language that everyone eventually understands, whether they want to or not.

Nobody hands you the permission slip. Nobody stands up and says: Yes, we believe in you, go ahead. You write the permission slip yourself, and then you go cash it.

The people who doubted me did not stop me. They showed me exactly the gap between what they could see and what I could see.

I just had to be willing to live in that gap long enough.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.