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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 was a time when my son Chris asked for a Lego airplane set every few days for months.

Every few days, another ask. Different angle, same request. I kept saying no, and he kept asking anyway — undeterred, unbothered, completely immune to rejection.

I found myself genuinely impressed by that, even while holding the line. The kid does not take no for an answer. He just recalibrates and comes back. If he runs a business one day, he will be dangerous.

Eventually I stopped saying no and started thinking differently about the whole situation.

Here is what we did instead. We printed out a picture of the Lego set in black and white, divided the page into twenty equal sections, and I told him the rules: for every five useful things you do, you get to color in one section. Fill all twenty sections, and the airplane is yours.

He had one question. What counts as useful?

We worked it out together. Useful to yourself — exercise, homework, reading, practicing piano. Useful to the family — vacuuming, helping with dishes, doing something without being asked. The moment we finished, he walked straight to the piano and sat down.

When he finished playing, he came back. Dad, what else can I do?

He had breakfast. He played chess. He looked for things to contribute to without being prompted. The Lego set had turned every chore and self-improvement activity into a move in a game he wanted to win.

He thought he was gaming the system. I thought I was the one doing the gaming. We were both right, which is exactly how good incentive design works.

Then I tried the same approach with my daughter. For every chapter she read, I offered her five dollars.

Nothing. Barely a flicker of interest.

Before we go any further…

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Now, as I was saying…

Here is what I eventually figured out: everyone has a motivational currency, and money is only one denomination. My daughter's currency is nail polish, jewelry, clip-on nails, decorative pillows — things that have nothing to do with cash value and everything to do with what she actually cares about.

Once I understood that, the same framework worked perfectly. The mechanism was identical. The currency was different.

This is the thing most people miss when they try to motivate someone and it does not work. They assume the approach is wrong and give up on it entirely. They conclude that this particular person is just hard to motivate, resistant, or not driven by incentives.

That conclusion is almost always wrong. What happened is simpler: they used the wrong denomination.

My wife Anastasia is another example entirely. You would think that after years of running a business together, I would have figured this out sooner. (I did not.) What moves Anastasia is not a gift. It is recognition.

Specific, genuine recognition of the extra effort she put in — the thing she did that went beyond what was expected, noticed out loud by someone who was actually paying attention.

A few well-chosen words at the right moment do more for her motivation than a piece of jewelry from Tiffany. I know because I have tried both, and the comparison is not close.

The words land harder. They stay longer. A gift can be unwrapped and forgotten the same week it arrives. Being truly seen for the effort you made is a different thing altogether — it compounds, the way any good investment does.

Understanding this changed how I think about everyone I work with, not just my family.

In business, the principle is identical. Your subscribers are not all motivated by the same thing. Some want to make more money — that is the obvious one, and the one most marketers lead with every single time without questioning whether it is actually what their audience cares about most.

Others want more time. Others want respect, status, a sense of belonging to something, proof that they made a smart decision. If you communicate with all of them as if money is the only driver, you will reach the people for whom that is true and quietly lose everyone else.

The best marketers are the ones who figure out which currencies their audience actually holds. They do not assume. They pay attention to what people respond to, what they share, what questions they ask, what complaints they bring up again and again.

All of that is information about what actually matters to them. Once you know the currency, the incentive almost designs itself.

My son figured out the piano in one morning. My daughter started reading on her own terms once I stopped trying to pay her to do it. My wife's energy changed completely when I stopped trying to buy her goodwill and started actually noticing — and saying out loud — what she was putting in.

Same framework every time. Different currency every time.

Most people spend enormous energy trying to get others to move — their kids, their team, their customers — without ever stopping to ask what actually moves this particular person. They reach for the tool that worked last time, on someone else, in a different situation, and wonder why it is not landing.

The tool is usually fine. The currency is wrong.

This is true in parenting. It is true in management. It is true in marketing, where the instinct is to find the one message that works and blast it at everyone, rather than understand that the audience sitting behind that list is made up of real people with different fears, different desires, and different definitions of what a good outcome looks like.

The people who figure this out stop pushing and start connecting. They spend less time crafting universal appeals and more time understanding the specific human in front of them. That is a harder skill to develop. It is also the one that compounds the fastest.

Figure out what the person in front of you actually values — not what you assume they value, but what they actually do. Everything else follows from there.

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