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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.

There's a famous story about how Steve Jobs got the idea for the iPhone while meditating.

When that story made the rounds, every yoga teacher and breathwork guru and meditation coach treated it as proof. Sit still long enough, quiet your mind, and brilliance will arrive on schedule. That was the promise.

I bought none of it.

I've tried meditation. I was terrible at it. I could never build the muscle, and I've made peace with the fact that I'm a problem-solver, not a dreamer. I don't sit around waiting for lightning to strike. Ideas don't visit me in the shower. (Probably because I'm too busy singing in there.)

For years, this bothered me. I'd watch one of my closest friends pull a brilliant idea out of thin air over dinner. No effort. No struggle. The idea just arrived, fully formed, like it had been waiting for him to sit down. That has never once happened to me.

So I built another way. And the way I built turned out to be far more reliable than waiting around for inspiration to show up.

Before we go any further…

Most investors know three ways to build wealth: 

- Property

- Stocks

- Business ownership.

Each one works…

But  each one also requires significant capital, significant risk, or significant time before it produces meaningful returns.

There's a fourth category most investors have never seriously looked at because they don’t even know it exists.

It produces recurring monthly income that compounds as the asset grows…

It requires a fraction of the capital traditional investments demand, and carries none of the downside risk that comes with leveraged real estate or market-exposed portfolios.

I call it Mailbox Stacking, and this Thursday at 12pm EST, I'm hosting a free training breaking down exactly how it works, what kind of returns it produces, and how to build one from scratch.

Now, as I was saying…

Here's how it actually works for me.

I keep several problems open at the same time. I got this from my friend Richard Shepard, who told me he runs up to twelve open problems in his head at any given moment. Some are business problems. Some are health. Some are relationships. Some belong to his clients. They have nothing to do with each other.

And by holding all of them in his mind with real intention, his subconscious quietly goes to work in the background. Overclocking, if you want the gaming term. The solutions start surfacing when he least expects them.

When I'm stuck on something, I refuse to sit in front of a blank page. A blank page terrifies most people, and it should. Your brain hates a blank slate. Stare at one long enough, and you can feel yourself shutting down.

Give your brain a target, though, and everything changes.

There's a book I recommend constantly called Thinking Inside the Box. The author's whole argument is that good ideas come from constraints. The tighter the limitation, the better the solution. He fills the book with examples of people facing problems so restricted that the obvious answer was off the table, which forced them to invent an answer nobody else had.

That's the part most people get backward. They believe wide-open freedom produces good ideas. The opposite is true. Boundaries produce good ideas.

So whenever I face a problem, I start with the limitations. What can't I do here? What's off the table? What's the actual goal I'm aiming at? Once I've answered those questions, my brain locks on like a guided missile and gets to work.

Then comes the part almost nobody is willing to do.

I implement immediately.

Most of the time, the first solution falls flat. Nine times out of ten, honestly. But that failure hands me something I could never get any other way: real feedback from the real world. Fresh data. And that data points me straight toward the next thing to try.

This is where so many people get stuck. They camp out in the "I don't know what to do" phase for weeks. Sometimes months. They want certainty before they'll move, and certainty never arrives. The willingness to try something you already suspect will fail is one of the most valuable habits you can build, because the failure itself becomes the teacher.

Now here's my favorite part, and it's the one I'm least precious about.

A huge chunk of what people call my "creativity" is really just elegant theft.

When I want to get good at something, I go study the people already winning at it. I'm a big fan of first-person shooters. Every time I start a new game, I'm awful. So I go watch the best players on Twitch and YouTube, I see exactly what they do, and I copy it. Simple.

Business runs on the same engine. You surround yourself with operators who are already getting the result you want, you study their moves, and you model them into your own world. You can even pull from industries that have nothing to do with yours.

FedEx came from the overnight check-clearing concept in banking. The fast-food drive-through? Borrowed from banking, too. One industry quietly lifts an idea from another, reshapes it for a new context, and walks away with credit for invention.

There's a book called Simplify that's packed with these cross-industry examples, shared in a way that lets you drop them straight into your own business. That's the kind of reading that actually moves the needle.

So if you've been sitting on the sidelines telling yourself you can't build a business because you're "not the creative type" or "not a big idea person," let me pull that excuse out from under you right now.

You can win this game as a pure problem-solver. All you need is a specific problem, a clear set of constraints, the guts to implement before you feel ready, and the humility to study people who've already cracked it.

That's the whole thing.

Anytime you see me do something that looks creative, understand what really happened. I found the idea somewhere, I reshaped it, and I put it to work faster than the next guy.

You can do exactly the same.

P.S. Want to know why I care so much about this topic? I broke it down on this podcast episode. Listen, and you'll see why it should matter to you, too.