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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.

Back in 2015, the Fantastic Four reboot came out. I say this was terrible, and I say it as someone who genuinely enjoys a mediocre action film.

My wife, Dennis, and I figured this out about twenty minutes in. We looked at each other, acknowledged it quietly, and then sat there for another ninety minutes watching the rest of it anyway.

When it was over, and we were walking out, I asked them both why we stayed. They gave the same answer without hesitating: we paid for the ticket.

That answer stuck with me longer than the movie did.

We paid for the ticket. Which is true, and also completely irrelevant, because the money was gone the moment we handed it over at the box office.

Leaving twenty minutes in or staying for the full two hours was not going to change that. The ticket was spent either way. The only thing still available to us was our time, and we chose to spend that too — badly — because of the money we had already lost.

There is a name for this. It is called loss aversion, and it is one of the most well-documented features of how human beings make decisions.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for research showing that the pain of losing something is roughly twice as motivating as the pleasure of gaining the same thing. Which means we do not make decisions based purely on what is in front of us — we make them based on what we are trying not to lose, or trying to recover, even when recovery is no longer on the table.

This is also, as far as I can tell, the entire explanation for shiny object syndrome.

Think about how it works. Someone invests in a program. It does not produce results. Logically, they should stop, reassess, and change course.

Instead, they invest in another program, and another after that, chasing the point where the total invested finally produces something proportional. Years pass, and multiple investments accumulate. The results never quite materialize. They keep going anyway, because stopping would mean accepting that everything spent so far achieved nothing — and the mind finds that conclusion almost physically painful to reach.

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Now, as I was saying…

From the outside, this looks like irrationality. From the inside, through the lens of loss aversion, it is almost inevitable.

Each new program is not really a fresh start — it is an attempt to recover what was spent on the last one. The more someone has invested, the harder it becomes to walk away, because walking away means admitting that everything spent so far is gone. The mind resists that admission. It keeps looking for the move that makes the previous losses mean something.

This was around the same time — the mid-2010s — when I spoke to a truck driver who called me the day after investing in one of my programs. He said he needed to ask for a refund. His wife had texted him saying she was done. Investing with me was the final straw — she had watched him pour money into online business opportunities for long enough, and this was where she drew the line.

He was gracious about it. He made clear it was nothing personal. He just needed to show her that he valued their marriage more than the chase he had been on. I refunded him without hesitation.

I kept thinking about him for days afterward. The graciousness, the clarity, the fact that it took his wife's leaving for the pattern to finally stop. That is not unusual. For many people, the external consequence arrives before the internal awareness ever does.

What I kept thinking about afterward was the phrase he used: the final straw. That implies a very long sequence of previous investments, a mounting pile of evidence that something was not working, and a continued inability to stop.

He was caught in the same psychological trap that keeps people in movies they hate. The sunk cost had become the reason to keep going rather than the reason to stop.

I have been there. At one point, I invested twenty thousand dollars with someone I met at a seminar. He made a strong impression. I decided on the spot that he was the person I needed to work with.

What I got in return was one Skype call — Skype was still how everyone communicated back then — and then silence. He stopped responding entirely.

It took me close to a year to fully accept that the money was gone and that accepting it was my responsibility — he did not force me to write the check. I chose to. That distinction mattered. (The mentor's line I think about most: when you are stuck inside the frame, you cannot see the picture. I was very much inside the frame.)

The self-awareness required to break the pattern is not complicated, even if it is genuinely difficult to apply. Write about yourself in the third person.

When you are evaluating a new investment, do not write "I am thinking about joining this program." Write "Igor is thinking about joining this program." Describe your reasoning as if you were observing someone else making the decision. What does that person look like? What is driving them? Are they investing because they genuinely believe in this specific opportunity, or are they investing because something inside them cannot stop trying to recover what was already spent?

The question worth asking before any significant investment is simple: Is this meaningfully different from what I have tried before, and do I understand specifically why it is different? If the honest answer to either part of that is unclear, the answer to the investment is probably no.

People who have been investing for years with limited results do not have a program problem. They have a behavior problem. The next program will not solve a behavior problem. Only changing the behavior does that.

Results come from changing what you do. They do not come from doing the same thing one more time in the hope that this time it breaks differently.

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