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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 once sat down at a coffee shop, filled out a fake application, and spent three hours on the phone trying to con Tony Robbins' sales team.

It did not go the way I planned.

A mentor of mine told me to go study how Tony Robbins' people sold high-ticket coaching. Not buy it. Study it. So I settled in with my coffee and filled out their application with convincing detail.

When they rang, I was ready. I had a notepad. I had a plan.

I threw every objection I could think of — I can't afford it, I need to think about it, now isn't the right time. I wanted to see how they handled each one so I could write it all down and use it myself.

They handled every single objection so elegantly that I signed up for a $10,000 coaching program.

The call lasted nearly three hours. By the end of it, I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to be the one running the experiment. I was going through some things personally at the time, and somewhere in hour two, I stopped being a spy and started being a customer.

I handed over $10,000 and got on weekly calls with a coach from Vancouver for the next twelve months. I learned more from that year than I would have learned from any notepad full of transcribed objection handlers.

Which is saying something, because I had dozens of those notepads.

That is what it looks like to study something at the level it deserves.

Here is something I have never been shy about admitting. I am terrible at creating things from scratch. A blank page is my enemy. Writing an email with nothing to work from, building an offer with no reference point, developing a webinar out of thin air — I am completely incapable of doing any of it well.

My brain does not work that way. What it does well is look at something that's already working and figure out why. Then take the underlying structure, strip away the specific words and ideas, and rebuild it in my own world.

Early in my career, Frank Kern's emails were my template for everything. I would take one of his pieces, study the structure underneath it, then rebuild it with my own topic and my own words or even copy it word-for-word.

His copy reads like a conversation with a friend over a beer — zero sales letter energy —, and I was convinced that if I could figure out how he did that, I could eventually do it myself. It took a while. He's that good.

Before we go any further…

Simon Wood got laid off from Ogilvy with two kids, endless bills, and no paycheck.

He googled "how to make money online" out of desperation and found affiliate marketing.

The problem was that every course taught the same tired formula. Build a squeeze page. Drive traffic. Hope people opt in. Follow up with emails. Pray something converts.

Simon watched most affiliates fail because their landing pages looked exactly like everyone else's. Visitors had seen the same boring forms a thousand times before and just clicked away.

He spent years testing different approaches until he stumbled across something most affiliates had never heard of…

When he made one simple change to how visitors experienced his landing pages, sales tripled overnight.

Fast forward to today, and he's made $5.6 million on ClickBank using this method.

By 2pm today, Simon is hosting a live training where he'll show you his exact three-step system. 

You'll see how to pick proven offers on ClickBank, how to set up his conversion method in under 15 minutes with no tech skills, and how to drive traffic using Google search ads with images for as little as 7 cents per click.

You can start with just $5 per day.

Now, as I was saying…

Everything else I've done has been modeling. My first product was me taking a research John Assaraf had already done and repackaging it in my own language. My second product was similar. My approach to webinars, to managing a list, to running affiliate campaigns, to building landing pages — all of it came from watching competitors who were ahead of me, understanding what they were doing, and adapting it to what I was building.

I would go further than most people are willing to. I would pretend to be a prospect and get on calls with people selling high-ticket programs. I'd record the calls. I'd transcribe them. I'd study the language patterns deliberately. I'd throw objections at them — I can't afford it, I need to think about it — just to see how they responded. Most of the time, I filled my notebook and walked away.

That’s why I spent $10,000 and gained a year of coaching.

The principle underneath all of this is that as a beginner, you need to steal like an artist.

It means you take the concept and apply it in your own way. You understand why something works — the structure, the psychology, the sequence of ideas — and you rebuild it from those bones. The words and the specifics belong to whoever made them. The understanding of why it works belongs to whoever is paying close enough attention.

Most people in this business spend enormous energy trying to invent things. New angles, new hooks, new frameworks, new approaches. Some of that is genuine innovation. A lot of it is refusing to look at what's already working because it feels like admitting you don't have all the answers yourself. Most people in this business do exactly that.

The people who move fastest are almost never the ones inventing from scratch. They're the ones who find something that works, understand it at the level of first principles, and rebuild it in their own voice for their own audience. That process is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than staring at a blank page every single time.

I have competitors to thank for most of what I know about this business. I watched what they built, studied how it worked, and used that understanding to construct my own version of it.

That is how people who are serious about learning actually learn.

Here is the thing most people refuse to accept about the blank page. It is not noble. It does not prove you're original or creative or above learning from what already exists. It makes the process harder, slower, and less predictable than it needs to be.

Every craft has a tradition of apprenticeship for a reason. You study what the masters did before you earn the right to depart from it. The writers who create the most original work have almost always read more widely than anyone else in the room. The marketers with the sharpest instincts have almost always spent more time in other people's funnels than their competitors ever bothered to.

You study what works. You take it apart. You understand it. Then you build something that's yours.

And sometimes, if the people you're studying are good enough at what they do, you end up handing over $10,000 in a coffee shop when you were only supposed to be taking notes.

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