You are receiving this newsletter because you are already on our email list, having requested a copy of one of our resources. If, for any reason, you don't want to get this free email newsletter, reply with the words “opt out.”

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.

A few years ago, I was at a birthday party for my close friend Jana, a Russian guy living in Israel.

Also at the party was a man named Dima. Dima was an engineer at Intel. In Israel that is a serious job — he was pulling around seven thousand US dollars a month, which is genuinely good money in that country. Stable, respected, the kind of career a parent brags about.

At the time, I had already made my first million without ever having a job. My only reference point for employment was minimum wage positions where you were treated like furniture. So Dima and I were not coming to this conversation from the same place.

We got into it about money. Money mindset, what success actually means, whether freedom matters more than security, how you define winning. The kind of conversation I genuinely love and that most people find exhausting. You could feel that we were on completely different frequencies — not angry exactly, just fundamentally oriented toward different versions of what a good life looks like.

Then he said it.

"I would rather be healthy than rich."

I laughed. Not a polite laugh — I actually laughed at him. Because what he had just said was one of the most revealing things a person can say about how they think, and he had no idea.

I would rather be healthy than rich. I would rather be a good father than rich. I would rather have a great marriage than be rich.

These are all the same sentence. They all carry the same hidden assumption: that wealth is a trade. That somewhere in the fine print of becoming financially free, you have to hand something over. Your health, your relationships, your integrity, your peace of mind.

Pick your poison, pick your price.

Why do you think you actually have to choose?

Dima was not stupid. He was conditioned. He had spent his entire adult life inside a system that rewards the exchange of time for money and presents that as the only available arrangement. A good salary for long hours, stability for flexibility, security for freedom.

Within that system, wealth does look like a trade, because the only path to more money is more stress, more hours, fewer evenings at home. The system is not lying to you exactly. It is just describing itself and calling it the whole picture.

Before we go any further…

I want to ship you a free physical copy of List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire (just cover S&H).

The book shows you how to build multiple streams of income from a single email list without working more hours or taking on more responsibilities.

I've made over $20 million with email lists. I've tried dozens of ways to build a location-independent business and failed at most of them until I discovered a specific way to build an email list.

Inside the book, I show you that method…

Plus, you'll discover the AI prompt blackbook that powers my list-building lifestyle, how to create passive income that keeps coming while you sleep, and how I turned a $200 ad campaign that bombed into an email list of 4,331,656 subscribers.

When you grab your free copy before Sunday night, you'll also get $3,251.88 in bonuses, including my top 12 email templates, the 60-second capture page formula that generates up to 80% optin rates, and the high-quality traffic source I use to build my list automatically around the clock.

I'll also give you the audiobook of my brand new best-selling book, Zero To Online, completely free. 

Zero To Online is my no-fluff guide to starting a profitable online business. It shows you which ladder to climb, which skills to monetize, and how to build an email list that prints money. 

It’s only available til Sunday night, so I urge you to grab it now.

Now, as I was saying…

The more you study rich people — actually study them, read the books, watch the documentaries, go through the biographies — the more you see that the trade is not universal. It is common in some cases, completely absent in others, and almost always a product of how the business was built rather than an inevitable cost of building it.

Yes, some people get rich and get divorced. Elon Musk has been married multiple times and has more children than most people can keep track of. Bezos built the largest company in history, and his marriage ended.

These are real. Nobody is hiding them. And sixty percent of the general population is miserable and also getting divorced, without the billions. So the data does not actually support the theory that money is what breaks things.

My parents almost divorced when we were going through our worst financial period in Israel. My father walked into my room one night after a fight with my mother, looked at me, and said: the only reason I am not divorcing her is because of you. I was fifteen or sixteen. He said it the way you state a fact, without softening it, like something I needed to understand about the situation we were all in.

They were always fighting about money. Not about love, not about fundamental incompatibility. Money, every single time. The same argument cycling through in different clothes.

Money did not destroy my parents' marriage. The absence of money nearly did.

There is a book called The Millionaire Next Door. The main finding will surprise most people. The average American with four million in net worth looks nothing like the version in your head.

No Ferrari, no yacht, no second divorce. He owns some kind of shop or runs a small business. He has been married to the same person for decades.

His kids went to state schools. He drives a sensible car and lives in a neighborhood where people have no idea what he is worth, because nothing about his life announces it. (The book calls this person the millionaire next door for a reason — he is genuinely next door, and you walk past him every day without knowing.)

Rich, healthy, married, present. Living a life that would bore a tabloid writer to tears.

These people exist in enormous numbers. They simply never appear in documentaries because their lives lack the conflict that holds an audience. The narrative of wealth-as-destruction gets repeated because it is interesting, not because it is representative.

The choice Dima believed he was facing was not real. It was a story he had absorbed so completely that it felt like physics.

You can be healthy and rich. You can be wealthy and married. You can build something significant and still be home for dinner, still know your children, still take care of your body.

It is not guaranteed. It requires intention. It requires building the right kind of business rather than accumulating obligations dressed up as opportunities.

The goal of everything I do is to show people that this is available to them. That the trade is optional. That the version of wealth requiring sacrifice of everything else you care about is one version, not the only version, and probably not even the most common version among people who actually get there.

Dima went back to Intel on Monday. I hope he is doing well. I also hope, at some point, he started asking the question he never thought to ask at that party: why do you think you actually have to choose?

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