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Once a week, I take one idea and put it under the microscope. Sometimes it’s about business, sometimes it’s about how people think, and sometimes it’s simply an observation about the world around us. If it challenges the way you see the topic, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.

There was a period in my childhood when we were rich. Or at least that's how it felt.

We always had sweets in the house, good furniture, and an American car — which, if you grew up in Ukraine in the nineties, you already know what that meant. It meant your family was doing something right. Kids at school noticed things like that. I noticed that they noticed.

Then one day, without anyone sitting me down to explain what was happening, the sweets stopped. The conversations my parents had behind closed doors got quieter and longer. The air in the apartment changed in a way I couldn't name at the time, but I understood it completely in my body.

And then my parents asked me to break my piggy bank.

His name was Billy. He was shaped like one of the ducklings from DuckTales. I'd been filling him for years with whatever coins came my way. Birthday money. Change left on the kitchen counter. The occasional coin I found on the street that felt like a small miracle. Billy was mine, and he was full, and I was proud of him.

When my parents asked, I just picked him up and broke him. Happily. Without a question, without a second thought, because they needed it and he was there and I was old enough to help.

We sat down at the kitchen table together and counted the coins. Sixty-two Ukrainian hryvnia. Maybe a little more. Enough to buy groceries for the whole week with thirty hryvnia left over.

One thing before I continue…

Glenn Kosky was a surveyor in the UK before he discovered affiliate marketing.

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Most affiliate systems teach you to spend months building landing pages, autoresponders, lead magnets, and follow-up sequences before you see a single dollar.

Glenn built something completely different. His system that works in just 20 minutes per day and generates 7.2K daily without any of the traditional list-building drudgery.

The breakthrough came when he figured out how to let people clone his entire setup instead of building one from scratch.

We just recorded a training where Glenn breaks down all three parts of his system. 

You'll see exactly how he's generating thousands per day, how the cloning process works, and how you can replicate the same system starting today.

He walks through real examples from his own campaigns and shows you the exact steps to get this running without spending months on setup.

The replay is available now and will come down soon. I urge you to check it out and see how you can get this system 95% done for you.

Back to what I was saying...

It was winter. My mother was going to walk to the market, and I insisted on going with her because it was my money and I wanted to be there when it was spent. I remember that walk. I remember being cold and not caring about being cold. I remember feeling useful in a way that a kid that age almost never gets to feel.

What I didn't know, walking to that market with my mother in the Ukrainian winter with sixty-two hryvnia in her pocket, was why any of it was happening.

I found out later. My father had invested in the wrong opportunity and ended up owing ten thousand dollars to a loan shark named Makar. Nikolai Makarenko. Makar liked my dad, which was the only reason the situation didn't end worse. Business is business, and my father was on the hook for a number that, in that time and place, was almost impossible to imagine repaying.

To give you a sense of scale: when my parents sold the car and the apartment, everything they owned, and paid Makar off, they had exactly one thousand dollars left. That was it. Everything they had built, everything that had made us feel rich, everything that had meant something to me and to the neighbors and to the kids at school — gone. And what remained fit in a single envelope.

My father made a decision. He got on a plane and took us to Israel. My grandparents on my mother's side took us in and helped us find our footing. My parents started working immediately, giving up on learning Hebrew in exchange for short-term paychecks — which I think was a mistake, though I understand why they made it. Six months later, my father had an heart attack and underwent open bypass surgery. For years after that, he was unable to work. We lived on my mother's salary and my grandparents' support.

They never recovered. That's the honest version of the story. My parents never bought real estate or made a financial move that changed the trajectory. The debt they carried when we landed in Israel followed them, grew, mutated. For most of my childhood and adolescence, we lived in a perpetual overdraft that swung between negative ten thousand and negative twenty thousand dollars. My father sometimes had to take out a loan just to cover the overdraft fees — borrowing money to pay the cost of having none. That is a particular kind of exhaustion that I watched from close range for years.

I made a decision somewhere in there, gradually, and then all at once, that I was going to learn how money actually worked. That I was going to figure out the thing my parents never figured out. That the story they lived was the story I was going to rewrite.

When I made my first six-figure year online, the first thing I did was start paying off their debts. Then I bought them an apartment and put them on a monthly allowance. For the last ten years, my parents never had to worry about money. They lived with the kind of financial security they had never managed to build for themselves, and I got to be the reason for it.

I think about Billy sometimes. The blue duckling. The sixty-two hryvnia. The walk to the market in the cold.

I think about how happy I was to break him open, and how I had no idea what I was actually holding that day. The coins, and the first real understanding I ever had of what money means — that it's what stands between your family and the cold. That it's what lets you say yes when the people you love need you most. My parents couldn't always say yes. I watched what that cost them. The least I could do was make sure they never had to break another piggy bank again.

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