I can tell you step by step how to make money on the internet, how to become so productive it feels illegal or how to learn faster than 99% of people. But without you actually doing it, it is just theory.
Most people get paralyzed by the fear of "getting it wrong", but that fear is exactly what’s keeping them average.
My goal for this newsletter is to reframe your relationship with failure, help you embrace the 'mistake-first' mindset. I’ll show you
- why making mistakes isn't just a byproduct of success—it’s the only way to get there
- how to lower the stakes of your experiments,
- how to speed up your feedback loops, and finally start making the right kind of mistakes
If you stick to the end, you'll walk away equipped with how to extract the lessons hidden in every failure you encounter, and how to use those failures as your competitive advantage.
Fail Fast. Take Risks Now
"I would encourage you to take risks now. You don't have any kids, you don't have a family, you don't have a mortgage. As you get older, your obligations increase. And once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself, but for your family as well. It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do it, before you have those obligations." — _Elon Musk
You see, as children, we love to adventure. We love to discover. We love to figure things out. We make mistakes and learn from them. We touch fire.
But then, our learning stops being about real mistakes.
It starts being about the traits our parents and teachers dislike in us. The traits they find annoying or uncivilized. The traits they don't think will lead to the version of success they were conditioned to believe is the only one true path, and they haven't opened their mind to the discovery that there is never only "one true path."
From the moment we entered the classroom, we were conditioned to view a mistake as a bad thing. A wrong answer didn't just mean you needed to study more; it meant you were "bad" at the subject. It meant a lower grade, a disappointed look from a teacher, or a sense of shame in front of your peers. And if you were not lucky, you were punished by your teachers and scolded by your parents.
We were taught that the goal of learning was to be right on the first try.
But here is the trap: If you only ever do what you know you can get right, you aren't learning—you’re just performing.
By the time we graduated, most people developed a "analysis paralysis." We became so terrified of the red pen that we stopped experimenting. We stopped learning.
I have one message to those who come to me asking about how to discover their passion. Go and try new things.
Life is about experimentation. Learning what you like and don’t like. Seeing what works and what doesn’t. Slowly making small upgrades in the traits, skills, and wisdom that your character holds. These small boosts in experience and upgrades lead to massive results in the game of life (sometimes you don’t even notice them until you reflect on your progress).
Most people stopped learning after graduation. Most people stopped asking the "stupid" questions and stopped searching for the deeper meaning of Life. We stopped taking the risks necessary to actually master a skill. We traded our natural, childlike curiosity for a safe and predictable path.
Now, as adults in the internet space, that same conditioning is holding you back. You’re waiting for the "perfect" strategy, the "perfect" business model, or the "perfect" time to start—because you’re still subconsciously terrified of "getting it wrong".
Understanding Comes From Experimentation
How do you know anything about reality?
How do you know what’s true or what’s false?
How do you know what you should or shouldn’t do?
You were told by another person in society who learned in society.
99% of what you know was not discovered by your own testing or experimentation.
Where did other people get their information? Other people.
Every piece of information you get is from other people who knew nothing when they were born.
After you learn to walk and talk, the next step you take as a child is to go to school, so let’s use that as an example.
School boards determine what should be taught in school. But parents heavily influence the school board. Where do parents get the notion of what should or shouldn’t be taught in school? From their schooling and parents.
As you progress through public school, you pick up habits, refine your behavior, and develop your language from other students and teachers. Where do students and teachers learn their habits, behavior, and language?
By now, you’re nearly a clone going into the formal education system.
Let’s run through this a bit quicker…
The students and educators in the universities are coming from the schools. The people who teach children in the schools come from the universities. The people who taught the people who teach in universities also come from universities. Can you see how this is groundless and circular?
Society determines information as true from scientific journals and publications. To be published, you must conform to the bias of the publication. Who created the publications? People whose bias was shaped through their PhD education, taught by someone with a PhD education.
While you are at school, how do you complete your assignments? You research sites like Wikipedia when the articles are coming from the universities. You find the Wikipedia page through a search engine like Google.
Google determines what is displayed based on what’s most profitable or popular to serve up. Google gives authority to pages based on linking and link authority. Google places more authority on links coming from universities.
The only way to break this cycle is through radical self-education and relentless self-experimentation. You must become the primary researcher of your own life. Those who refuse to experiment remain trapped in the "default state," perpetually chasing the degree, the job, the shiny title. They chase these milestones believing they lead to security. They fail to realize that trading your time for a capped salary is the fastest way to ensure you never achieve true financial freedom. If you do not understand the reality of how value is created, you will spend your life climbing a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall.
Once you begin to test reality for yourself, the path forward becomes undeniable — starting a business is the only logical step toward true independence.
While a job might provide a paycheck, it will never give you the financial independence you crave. A business is the only vehicle that guarantees the two pillars of a modern, meaningful life: time freedom and location freedom.
When you build a business, you stop being an item on someone else’s balance sheet and start building a system that works for you. You move from being follower of society’s script to a creator of your own life. You aren't just chasing money; you are building a life where your income is decoupled from your hours, allowing you to design your days, work from anywhere, and finally own your time.
If you can solve a problem for yourself, you can solve it for others. And in the digital age, that is the most valuable skill you can possess.
Entrepreneurship Is The Next Logical Step
Those who fear making mistakes become poor in life. The greatest mistake is not making mistakes.
You need to try and then fail and then adjust until you get results close to what you want.
Experimentation is how you make mistakes, thus, experimentation is the only way to achieve what you want in life.
You need to be able to identify when things aren’t working, go back to your strategy, and experiment with something new.
Here’s the thing:
Most people try and try and try just to fail and fail and fail because they try to match someone else’s map to their territory.
Courses, books, podcasts.
They don’t realize that these things are maps.
They are guides. Not truth. They are useful, but only if you understand that they are nothing but a candle off in the distance that guides you through a dark room. They do not determine the direction of your steps or if you stumble into a pit of snakes.
Further, you do not have access to someone else’s state of mind. You do not have access to how they perceive the world. You do not have their same exact identity.
This leads to one crucial and counterintuitive realization:
Mistakes are the only source of truth.
Not the thoughts in your head. Not the advice of a billionaire.
Failure is the only teacher that is absolutely 100% tailored to your situation.
Failure has a signal-to-noise ratio or 100:1.
But you hate failure.
You let it rule your life.
Everything you learn that is not derived from mistakes is derived from theory. It is derived from a map. It is but a conjecture formed through the interpretation of mistakes made by another person.
It’s okay that you made a mistake. When you’re doing something (especially something new), mistakes are bound to happen. It’s normal. But you must take responsibility for your mistakes.
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. — Albert Einstein
You are responsible for all the actions that you do.
Learn from your mistakes and move on.
Speed is necessary if you want to move forward with your life.
You can’t sit there and keep thinking about your mistakes. If you’re not a lazy person who sits all day and does nothing, then mistakes will happen. You can’t sit there, afraid of making mistakes; you must jump into the unknown.
Remember, mistakes are the only source of truth.
While I believe the magic you’re actually looking for is in the experimentation you’re avoiding but can’t see because all that’s on your mind is avoiding the work, this holds a hint of truth.
There are few days that go by where people don’t ask:
What are you going to regret more?
Taking the wrong path – which is the only way to find the right path – and gaining more experience than you ever have in your life…
Or staying the same.
It’s not a difficult decision.
Do the work that leads to results and forget the rest.
If you think you need a huge capital, a team or a fancy set up to start a business—the only vehicle that guarantees true freedom—you are lying to yourself.
I’ll talk about this in a future letter.
The world is rapidly shifting from manual labor to creative work.
Our ancestors used antiquated tools to hunt for their survival.
Technology has come to solve mundane and boring tasks so that we can focus on the most important tasks: creative work to hunt for our survival.
Entrepreneurship is modern-day survival.
Entrepreneurship is how we solve problems with modern-day tools for our survival.
You solve problems, create solutions in exchange for Value.
In exchange for Money.
Money is a universal exchange for value.
In short, how do you make money online? Actual money?
You start a business.
You need a product and customers.
Shocking, I know.
Your job, as a business, is to attract people to a product so they can hand you money in exchange for it.
Ask yourself this question:
"But where do I find people to solve their problems for exchange of Value (Money)?" Social media.
This is why you need a brand that will represent you in the digital space to sell your skills, solution (product/service) to people in exchange for value (Money).
To reiterate, you are building an audience to have a traffic source to your products. If you don't build a product you can sell you you'll be assigned a product to sell. The earlier you understand and accept this the better.
Those who never learn how to promote their own work (through social media, digital marketing, and ethical persuasion) will spend the rest of their lives promoting someone else's work (and never wake up to the fact they could 10x their earning capacity by selling their own thing).
If you can solve a problem in your life, you have what it takes to start your own business.
If you can solve a problem at your job you are qualified to start a business.
A business is the only thing that can give you the power to do what you want. It is not just about money.
You need to update your mental software from “Get a job and do that for the rest of my life” as a default setting to:
- get a job,
- start a personal project,
- turn that project into a business,
- make enough money, leave my job,
- and focus on scaling my side hustle as the new path.
You see, everyone needs money.
The easiest way? Get a job.
And 9-5 jobs aren’t bad.
However, it’s not optimal.
You might be earning a profit, but:
- You’re not following your purpose by working a job you hate
- You’re not free if your boss calls you at night, telling you to show up tomorrow on your day off. If you say no, you lose your job
- You don’t have time to enjoy life
- You don't get time to spend with family because you’re required to work like an animal
You start smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol to “get rid of” the stress.
You may not have been able to avoid a job altogether, but you could sure as hell get out of it before other life responsibilities start to pile up.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick
