This essay is exactly the opposite of what you think.
One hour a day sounds like some nice little self-helpy advice, where you drink a green smoothie, take a cold plunge, and high-five everyone at the gym. Self-help advice is nauseating. Go read Jim Rohn if that’s what you want. Tell him I said hi. Wait, he’s dead. Scrap that.
I’m not here to give you some cookie-cutter motivational talk.
All that does is make you feel good for the moment, but you never actually change. What I’m going to explain in simple terms works and doesn’t require you to be a bro. It’s rarely spoken about, and it’s incredibly contrarian.
Your dream life can be built in an hour a day if you understand this…
The daily practice everyone secretly skips over and they don’t know why
Your dream life is probably based on having freedom.
But to get freedom you need free time. And to get free time you need to be able to work less. And to work less you need money. Yep.
You can’t avoid money. You can virtue signal your ass all the way to LinkedIn and call me a brown-haired, blue-eyed f*gg0t with too much privilege all you want. Money is crucial to have the life you want.
Without money, you have a 24/7 mental illness that drives your decisions based solely on “how much does this cost me.”
This repels people and opportunities from your life.
It’s survival mode, and that leads to a scarcity mindset more scarce than catching a fart in the wind. I’d rather butt f*ck a rhino in Africa than sit around all day stressing about whether my bowl of fantastic f*cking noodles costs $5 or $5.50.
What a waste of time. So what’s the habit you must practice every day? Sales and marketing. Let me rewire your brain, though, about what that means.
Sales = Helping people
Marketing = Sharing your ideas
Wait, what did you say Timbo? That’s right. Everyone wants to skip sales and marketing because they don’t understand the meaning of the two words.
What happens when you become a purple-haired hater of this habit
Society hates sales and marketing.
Want proof? Let me explain. If you refuse to do sales and marketing, the only other option is to work a job. Dan Koe explained this to me better than anyone I’ve ever met. “Working a job is just having someone else do the sales and marketing for you.”
A year ago, I met the most useless human being I’ve ever come across. She yelled at me for asking her whether she wanted 1-1 help. Like, she threw a tantrum worse than my 9 week old baby with a face full of vomit.
She reported me to some government agency lol.
Total psycho.
Her argument was that “upselling” (offering someone more help) was unbelievably unethical. She said her 30 years working in the sales team at Microsoft made her an expert in sales.
Here’s the paradox: she thinks she works in sales.
She doesn’t understand that the sales team at Microsoft doesn’t sell anything. The Microsoft logo does. Oh, and Microsoft is the f*cking king of upselling the sh*t out of people lol.
Doing 1 hour of sales and marketing a day is how you slowly become self-sufficient. Once you have those two skills, you no longer need the backing of a corporation that micromanages you into the ground.
You’ve got to be cringe if you wanna be successful
Why don’t people do sales and marketing?
They think it’s cringe. If you dig deeper you realize it’s because they think they’re too good for it. They want someone else to do it. “The book publisher is taking care of sales and marketing for me.”
No, they f*cking aren’t.
The best person to do sales & marketing of your personal brand, product, or service is you. No one will sell better than you.
People don’t want to feel cringe because secretly their ego is in their way. Their ego tells them “this is beneath you.” Or “your work will speak for itself.”
But it won’t. And thinking that way keeps you poor.
An idea becomes cringe when critics online say it is. There are loads of critics who fling poo at people like me doing sales and marketing all day long. It makes for great social media content. It’s entertaining. And it helps people who are lost in life continue to believe the lie that they don’t need to do sales and marketing.
The only reason critics hate on sales and marketing is, ironically, because they themselves can’t successfully do it. So they say it doesn’t work.
They get paid in ‘likes’ for doing so.
And perfectly well-intentioned strangers see their content and think, “Yeah, screw sales and marketing, I hate it too.”
This creates a flooded market of romantic artists and wannabe business owners who can never get the lifestyle they want or pay their bills because they’re all being brainwashed by the same anti-sales-and-marketing MLM.
Hang with losers and become a loser.
If you think about it, worrying about whether what you’re doing is cringe is actually the same as saying “the societal masses don’t think what I’m doing is cool.” See how stupid that is?
To be successful you must do the opposite of 99% of people.
Why? Because the average person is fat, broke, pessimistic, worships politics, and watches Fox news all day until their brain cells are fried. Why would we care if they think what we’re doing in life is cringe?
You’re on the right path if people call you cringe. You should hope to dear god you get called cringe and have a celebration party when you do. It means you’ve made it.
But there’s a deeper problem…
When you say you don’t want to be cringe you’re focusing on yourself. That’s selfish. Instead, it’s better to focus on the outcomes you can produce with your skills and experience.
In my case, I’m willing to look like an absolute turdburger with mental illness, skinny arms, and stories of diarrhoea in front of all of y’all all so I can help you improve your life. It’s an act of selflessness, and that’s what it takes to be successful.
It’s not about you. It’s not about your pissy little feelings of being cringe.
There’s a great example of this: Tim Ferriss. Years ago, he had a successful little podcast with a gazillion downloads and everyone from LinkedIn to Shopify sponsoring it. He was on top of the world.
Every little Silicon Valley bro wanted to kiss him on the d*ck and take him out for a Japanese vegan lunch.
Then one afternoon at a conference something permanently changed his life.
A guy named Silas was trying to get Tim’s autograph. But multiple times Tim was busy and didn’t get a chance to sign it. But Tim being a good guy and all decided to go out of his way to do it on his way out of the conference.
Just before Tim signed the book for Silas he said, “Who is this signed book for again? And what should I write to them?”
Silas froze. He became emotional. His face went red. His hands shook.
Silas eventually explained that his brother had taken his own life. After a long pause Silas said:
“People listen to you. Have you ever thought about talking about these things? About su!c!de or depression? You might be able to save someone.”
Tim promised he would. Shortly after he wrote an essay about how he nearly took his own life in college. That essay saved countless lives, including friends of mine. Tim later revealed his story of being s*xually abused by a childhood babysitter. More lives saved.
All because of Silas.
See the difference? Tim was willing to be selfless and save people from taking their own lives, even if it made him look bad or less of a cool bro. Ultimately, it made Tim even more respected and gave him a massive career boost.
The cringy things you’re afraid to say and do are holding you back in life.
The way other people sell and market is probably disgusting
You’re right about that.
But you don’t succeed in life when you focus on what you don’t want, or when you focus on what the bottom 1% of society says.
Most sales and marketing IS terrible and overdone. It does look disgusting. The Lambo selfies are annoying. The bikini babes with their perfect skin and delicious green smoothies might be a thirst trap for h0rny dudes.
What does that have to do with you though?
Worry about yourself. Even better… if most of the market is pushy, unethical, sleazy, and transactional that is a huge opportunity for you. You can be the opposite. You can show people how to sell and market in a better way.
Most of society does zero sales and marketing. And the tiny fraction that does, do it in the worst possible way. All I see in this conundrum is an opportunity. You must too.
Spend 1 hour a day doing these simple things
Your dream life is on the other side of using sales and marketing to achieve a basic level of wealth. But this is a broad topic. Every man and his black and white dog has an opinion on it.
It’s easy to spend 4 years studying it and get nowhere. Let me give you the shortcut.
1. Make it a cookie-cutter James Clear habit
James wrote the bible on habits.
If you understand, like I do, that sales and marketing are the missing piece of everything you ever wanted in life, all that’s left to do is do it. Make it a daily habit.
The easiest way is to schedule one hour a day in your calendar. I recommend doing it before 9 AM because it’s before the world wakes up to distract you.
Remember this:
Nobody is good at the start.
Nobody is bad after 10,000 attempts – Stijn Noorman
2. Follow this distribution playbook I stole from a 17 year old girl
Marketing is just sharing ideas. This gives you distribution.
Build distribution, then build whatever you want. With distribution you’ll never have to worry about money again.
A year ago, I met a 17 year old girl online. Nice chick. As I got to know her, I found out a secret. She’d built a $50K a month income stream with nothing more than 5000 Twitter followers.
She left me scratching my head.
Until then, I always believed you needed millions of followers and to “build an audience” for years before you could make money. Wrong.
She did it in under a year. With 5000 followers. At 17.
17!
And she never told anyone her age. She did a great job of hiding it (badass).
You can reach your dream life and achieve moderate wealth following the same playbook.
Choose one social media platform
Write on there every day
Aim to hit 5000 followers
Reply to comments
That’s what the 17 year old did. Not hard. Doesn’t require you to be an expert or have Einstein-level IQ.
3. Clog up people’s inbox with a newsletter
The social-media-only gurus never make money.
The reason is they think they can make money by just posting short-form tweets and dopamine-dripping TikTok videos.
But the world now wants depth.
Newsletters are a place for depth, and when you create one it builds relationships with people better than a dumb-dumb TikTok video.
Newsletters are also a form of public thinking. They connect us. They allow us to discuss complicated topics. Yet they don’t take 20 hours to read like a book.
Your distribution playbook to gently market yourself must include a newsletter.
4. Do the most obvious thing in the world
The amateurs just want to sell.
They use sales scripts. They make offers. They post “DM me for more details.” The internet doesn’t work like this. People hate ads. And they hate being sold to even more. The goal isn’t to sell anything.
Just start conversations.
Conversations lead to opportunities, sales, business partners, sponsorships, etc. It takes more time to start a conversation, which is why no one does it, but it’s much more likely to lead you to an opportunity or a sale.
5. Increase the level of trust in an increasingly skeptical world
Without trust there’s no way anyone is giving you money. So…
Show up every day so people can rely on you
Share what you think will help others
There’s one other tool… Youtube. Start a small Youtube channel. Long-form video is incredible for helping people get to know you better, and therefore, trust you more (if you’re worth trusting and are legit).
The downside of Youtube is the barrier to entry is higher. It takes longer to master and grow, but the levels of trust are highest there.
The 20/20/20 rule
Use a 20/20/20 split: 20 mins writing (Marketing), 20 mins engaging with others (Distribution), 20 mins starting 5 new conversations (Sales).
Bringing it all together
If everything I just wrote sounds like clickbait to you, you’re too skeptical.
If you follow the 5 steps above and do them for an hour a day, you will 100% build your dream life. People less smart than you are doing it. And…
The economy is moving in this direction.
Contractors, consultants, and non-salaried workers are becoming the norm. It makes sense. As AI makes the world more efficient, the requirement to have humans come to work every day between 9-5 to collect a fixed paycheck to warm a seat makes no sense.
We’re moving to an outcome-based economy. We’re moving to a proof-of-work economy. And doing sales and marketing for one hour a day perfectly aligns with this new operating system.
Don’t get left behind. Do what feels cringe. Focus on helping others with your skills. Share your ideas. Have fun doing it. And fart in the face of critics more. It’s fun.
