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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.

I have stood in front of a mirror and shouted affirmations at myself. More than once. More than a hundred times, if I am being honest about it.

I did it for a long time. Long enough to know with certainty that it does not work.

Repeating something into the void does not make it true. It does not change your vibrational frequency.

It does not rearrange the molecules around you into a more favorable configuration.

It is just noise that you make at your own reflection.

I understand why people do it. The self-help industry has spent decades selling the idea that your thoughts are the primary variable — that if you can just get your thinking right, the results will follow.

Think and Grow Rich. The Secret. An entire category of publishing built on the premise that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is a thinking problem.

It is not a thinking problem.

You cannot think your way to being rich. You cannot think your way to being happy. You cannot think your way out of debt.

Thinking the right thoughts while taking no action produces nothing. The action is still required, regardless of what you are thinking while you take it.

Before we go any further…

Most people chase the sexy online business models. They want to start private label products and personal brands…

So they burn through their budget, which was hundreds of hours, and quit before they ever make a dollar.

My buddy Luke has been making money online for over 20 years, and his company is on the Inc 5000 list. 

He's helped absolute beginners collectively make millions of dollars using a method so unglamorous that most people overlook it completely.

He flips used textbooks on Amazon.

His student Randy has done over $5 million. Seth from the UK has done over $3.6 million working two to three hours per day. Patrick started as a broke college student with a maxed-out credit card and has done over $500,000.

We just recorded a training where we walk through three different ways to make $10,000 per month flipping books. We show each method live so you can see which one will work best for you…

And they all work without a website, email list, ads, or any content creating.

The replay comes down soon, so I urge you to check it out now:

Now, as I was saying…

The reason affirmations fail is more specific than that, though. They try to create positive expectancy without giving you a reason for it. You are standing at a mirror telling yourself you are successful and wealthy and confident, while some part of your brain is watching this performance and quietly noting that the evidence does not support the claim.

That part of your brain is correct. And it wins.

Genuine positive expectancy — the kind that makes you more likely to take action, to persist, to try things without giving up after the first obstacle — comes from one place: a strategy that you have reason to believe will work.

If you are following a proven approach, if you have seen evidence that people like you have succeeded with it, if you understand the mechanism well enough to trust it, you will develop real expectancy. Not the performed kind. The kind that is quiet and steady and keeps you at your desk past the point where most people close the laptop and find something easier to do.

That is what affirmations are trying to manufacture. The problem is that they are trying to manufacture it without the underlying evidence. You cannot build a convincing feeling of certainty on top of nothing. The brain knows.

So what do you do instead of standing in front of a mirror?

Put your phone in another room. Then put it further than that — a lockbox, a safe with a key.

The further the phone is from your body, the more work you will get done. If you genuinely struggle with focus, removing the phone alone handles roughly half of the problem before you have done anything else.

Get work done first thing in the morning, before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. Wake up and move directly to the work — no phone, no news, no social media, no checking anything. The longer you delay the start, the more time your brain has to generate reasons why today is not the right day.

Watch what you eat. Sugary food causes a crash, and the crash feels like depression, and depression kills focus and motivation. This is advice I find tedious to give because it sounds like something a nutritionist would say at a wellness retreat. It is also just true.

Close your open loops. If you had an argument with your spouse this morning and cannot stop thinking about it, the mental bandwidth is gone and the work is going to suffer for it. Go resolve the argument, come back, then work. The loop will not close itself while you are sitting at your desk trying to ignore it.

ADHD is worth naming here because it is more common among entrepreneurs than most people realize. (One useful description: starting a million different projects like a rabbit on cocaine and finishing none of them.) If that sounds familiar, the single most important thing is narrowing your focus until something reaches completion. Fifty half-finished projects produce nothing and cost you the one thing that actually builds momentum: a finished result you can point to. One finished project produces evidence. Evidence produces the belief that the next project is worth starting.

The procrastination problem is almost always a project-size problem. The task feels too large, so your brain flags it as dangerous and routes you toward something easier and more immediately gratifying. This is not weakness. It is the brain doing what brains do — seeking the path of least resistance.

The solution is to take away that excuse by making the first step small enough that refusing it starts to feel ridiculous.

Break it down. An email sequence starts with the first word of the first email. A complete campaign starts with the first subject line.

A thousand-mile journey starts with the first step — and I know that is a cliché. Clichés become clichés because they are accurate.

Whatever you are avoiding, find the version of it that is small enough to be impossible to refuse. Assign a deadline to that step, not just to the finished project. Deadlines at the project level are too remote to create urgency today.

Affirmations are an attempt to feel ready before you begin. The problem is that readiness almost never comes from feeling. It comes from moving, and moving reveals whether the strategy is working, and seeing the strategy work is what creates the real confidence that the affirmation was trying to manufacture.

Get a strategy you can believe in, because real confidence is a byproduct of evidence. Remove the phone. Close the loops. Break the project into something you can start right now.

Do that instead of talking to your reflection.

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