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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.

Not long ago, I had an interesting conversation with a guy who works in IT. He’s the kind of person who spends most of his day writing code, and when he’s not writing code, he’s usually fixing the code he wrote earlier. According to him, a fairly typical cycle in his world involves spending months building a piece of software, followed by another six to twelve months ironing out bugs and unexpected issues once the system is live.

When you hear that process described out loud, it doesn’t exactly sound efficient. But apparently that’s just the nature of software development.

At some point during the conversation, I showed him ChatGPT. I asked him what programming language he used most often, and he said Java. Then I asked him to describe something his team had recently spent a long time building.

He explained that they had written software designed to index a certain type of messy data — data that looks like complete gibberish when you examine it and normally can’t be organized in any meaningful way.

So I typed a short description of that task into ChatGPT.

Within seconds, lines of code began appearing on the screen that essentially performed the same basic function he had just described. It wasn’t perfect production code, of course, but it was surprisingly close to what his team had spent months developing.

I looked at him and said, “So you and four other people spent six months building this. Can you imagine what you could do by yourself if you had something like this working alongside you?”

He wasn’t impressed.

His argument was that artificial intelligence could never match the creativity of a human being. Humans think differently, he said. Humans bring imagination, intuition, and judgment to the process.

And to be fair, he might be right in certain situations. There are fields where creativity plays a central role and where the outcome depends on inspiration or artistic interpretation.

But coding isn’t quite the same thing as painting a masterpiece. Most of the time, it’s a logical exercise. There’s a goal, there are parameters, and you write instructions that move a system from point A to point B.

Eventually, I realized we were drifting into one of those debates where neither person is really listening anymore — the kind where two people keep arguing simply because they’ve already chosen their side.

So I stopped pushing the point.

But the conversation stayed with me because it reminded me of something I’ve observed for years.

Human beings are incredibly inefficient.

We like to imagine ourselves as disciplined creatures who wake up every day and perform at a consistent level. Productivity culture reinforces this idea constantly: wake up at five, stick to the routine, execute perfectly.

But real life doesn’t work that way.

Some weeks, you sleep well, and everything clicks. You’re focused, motivated, and ideas seem to flow effortlessly. Other weeks, you’re tired, distracted, and struggling to concentrate on even the simplest tasks.

Sometimes you have a stressful situation in your personal life. Sometimes something unexpected happens and pulls your attention away from work entirely. And sometimes you simply wake up feeling mentally foggy and unproductive for reasons you can’t quite explain.

Performance goes up and down like waves.

Once you accept that reality, something interesting happens. You start appreciating businesses that rely less on daily effort and more on systems.

This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved the type of business we run. The results we see this week are often the result of work that was done months ago. Systems that were built earlier continue operating in the background, whether I’m having a productive week or not.

That doesn’t mean you can stop working forever. If I remained unproductive for several months in a row, eventually the system would slow down, and the results would reflect that.

But good systems create something extremely valuable in the meantime.

They create runway.

Before we go any further…

Your favorite celebrities didn’t pick email by accident.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has all the fame and fortune in the world, yet he chose to launch a daily email newsletter. Matthew McConaughey writes one every Friday. Oprah runs nine separate email lists.

When Louis C.K.’s career imploded, one email to 45,000 subscribers made $1,000,000 in 12 days and helped him sell out tours and hit the New York Times best-seller list.

Email quietly powers everything from $997 courses to seven-figure launches and concert tickets. In The Second Act, I show you how to build your own list using the Greenhouse Method.

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Now, as I was saying…

That concept was introduced to me years ago by my friend David Dekel. Runway simply means having enough stability in your business or finances that if something unexpected happens, you have time to deal with it without immediately panicking.

If you have six months of runway, you have six months to solve problems before things become urgent.

David takes this idea to a level that still fascinates me.

I’ve watched him do the same thing several times over the past decade. He’ll build a system that generates about $100,000 per month with a small team. Everything is running smoothly, the business is performing well, and most entrepreneurs would use that momentum to push even harder.

Instead, David sometimes decides he’s bored.

So he stops working.

The first time this happened, I called him a couple of months later and asked what he’d been doing.

His answer was almost surreal.

“Nothing,” he said.

Watching movies. Playing video games. Grabbing sandwiches with his daughter. Occasionally going to the gym.

No product launches. No ad campaigns. No frantic hustle.

Just life.

To me, that almost feels like listening to someone describe a different universe. My brain is wired to believe there’s always something productive to do. Even when work slows down, there’s another idea to test, another campaign to improve, another system to build.

But David approaches it differently.

And in some ways, he might actually be closer to the real goal.

Because the purpose of building a business isn’t to create an endless list of tasks for yourself. The purpose is to build systems strong enough that the business continues moving forward even when you’re not actively pushing it every day.

That’s the distinction many entrepreneurs miss.

They build jobs for themselves.

But the people who experience real freedom eventually build machines.

Machines powered by systems.

Systems don’t wake up tired. They don’t lose motivation. They don’t get distracted by personal drama or stressful weeks.

Humans do.

Which is why the more time you invest in building systems rather than relying on bursts of productivity, the more runway you eventually create for yourself.

And runway, as it turns out, is one of the most valuable assets a business can give you.

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