I’ve been thinking about that a lot for the past two years.

I think it’s inevitable that AI will replace work that people don’t enjoy doing.

This sounds harsh. But I don’t think anyone dreamt of becoming a call-center agent when they were 8 years old.

I’ve worked in a call center and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But it ain’t the best job in the world.

It’s only a good thing that AI is doing that job. But in order for AI to really replace all the “bad” jobs in the world, we also need either better jobs or a replacement of people’s income.

That’s why so many thinkers agree that universal basic income is only a matter of time. The people building AI are actively planning for a world where work becomes optional for most people, not just some.

In this episode of The AI Brief, I talk about my vision for the future and what philosophy has to say about it.

Here are a few other things I cover in this episode:

• Why the jobs AI takes first probably aren’t the ones you’d expect

• What Musk and other AI builders are actually predicting for universal basic income

• A live look at my publishing workflow, now fully automated after almost four years

• The real story behind this month’s “AI agent went rogue and hacked a company” headlines

Read more

Most of our suffering is useless.

Eckhart Tolle wrote a line in Stillness Speaks that I often think of:

“Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.”

He is of course referring to the mental suffering that so many of us go through every day. The constant mental chatter that takes away our attention from the present to the voice that’s never satisfied.

You see, we all want to live a happy and interesting life. We want to feel that we’re in control of our destiny.

We want to enjoy the time we have on this planet.

Isn’t that a weird goal?

It wasn’t that long ago that our species was just focused on survival. We didn’t have time to suffer in imagination.

But that’s the topic of another article.

The truth is that we can have a pretty good life. The thing is, you have to go through a lot of suffering to make that happen.

The two kinds of suffering

There are two kinds of suffering, and they feel identical from the inside.

The first kind is useful. It comes from real friction with the world:

• A bad grade

• A rejection

• A job you can’t stand

• A business that isn’t working

These things hurt because there are actual stakes involved. You can’t think them away. You have to go through them. And going through them is exactly what strengthens you.

I have a six-month-old son. And sometimes I look at him and think, “You have a lot of challenges ahead of you!”

In a good way, I mean. Isn’t that the beauty of life? You go through all of these obstacles and you have so much to learn. And every year, you feel like you’re a little bit smarter than before.

That’s the proper way to live.

But most people stop living like that. And that’s caused by another kind of suffering.

The second kind of suffering is 100% useless. This is what Eckhart Tolle was talking about. It’s the low-key suffering that runs in the background of your life:

• Doubt

• Anxiety without a clear reason

• Worrying about mundane things

• A lack of self-confidence

I also know that second kind very well. For my entire life, I carried a constant unease with me.

Worrying about my career. Worrying about finding a partner when I was single. I had all these expectations and demands of life, and the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be produced a steady hum of anxiety that never went anywhere.

And even after I built a writing career, it didn’t disappear.

When I’d open registration for a course, I’d judge the whole launch by the first day.

If only a few people signed up, I’d immediately think: “I need to change something. This is going to be a failure.”

By the time the launch closed, it was always fine, and people signed up. All that early judgment produced nothing except a bad mood.

Because I know this type of suffering well and found a way to stop it, I’ve made it my mission in life to help others to do the same.

This is one of my main priorities with my son as he grows up. I want to teach him early on that doubt, failure, and challenges are a normal part of life.

It’s a waste of energy to “suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” as the great Stoic Seneca said.

We need to develop a sense of judgment that helps us to determine what’s useful suffering and what’s not.

Subscribe now

Your past doesn’t get to decide

So what if you want to start living life in a different way? You want to stop the excessive worrying. You want to be someone who doesn’t overthink. Someone who takes action and doesn’t let anything stop them.

Well, you can.

What’s stopping you?

“My past,” is what a lot of folks say.

The psychologist Alfred Adler built his entire philosophy around the idea that you are NOT your past.

Through his work, he noticed that a lof of people let a failure get a hold on their soul and replay it for years in their minds. They build their identity around their past.

Where Freud said your past determines who you are, Adler said the opposite: You are driven by your goals, not your history.

Adler wrote:

“No experience is in itself a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes.”

The experience itself doesn’t decide anything. You decide what it means.

Two people can go through the same failure. One uses it as proof they’re not good enough. The other uses it as fuel.

No matter what you’ve been through, you have the power to change.

You have the power to be different and to move forward.

A reader recently shared something with me that I think a lot of people can relate to:

“I’ve been contemplating a career change and starting my own business. Would love if you write about courage to take a risk, succeeding, pivoting when needed, financial freedom.”

Right?

It’s really overwhelming if you think about all the areas of our life that need our attention.

Career, family, finances, relationships, health, friendships, hobbies, and most importantly, your mental state.

It’s A LOT.

Actually, life is a lot. Just going through a day takes a lot of energy. So let alone starting something new like a business or trying to change careers.

It’s no wonder why most people fail before they even start.

Not because their ideas are bad. It’s just too hard to start.

I’ve started (and failed) a lot of (side) projects in my life. Let me share with you what has helped me.

What are you actually afraid of?

When someone says, “I want to start a business,” the idea sounds simple. But their mind immediately jumps ten steps ahead:

• What if I lose money?

• What if nobody cares?

• What if I’m not good enough?

• What will my family or friends think?

• How can I find the time when I’m already tired?

All valid concerns.

But notice what happens. You’re worrying about the problems of running a business before you’ve even made the first thing!

You don’t have customers, employees, overhead, or investors. You have an idea.

So deal with the stage you’re actually in. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

It’s like when people start fantasizing about what their wedding looks like after three dates.

You don’t need to quit your job, invest your savings, announce a career change, or know what you’ll be doing five years from now.

You just need to find out whether your idea is worth taking one step further.

That takes a lot of pressure off.

Subscribe now

Do you have to bet everything on yourself?

Look, the internet loves dramatic stories.

So and so started a business with $50 and is now worth ten million bucks!

Oh, great.

You rarely hear about all the people who did the same thing and ran out of money.

The truth is that you can also bet on yourself without betting your entire life.

Keep your job. Protect your savings. Work on the project for a few hours a week. You can even keep it quiet for a while. Your friends don’t need to understand it and your colleagues don’t need to know.

I started writing on the side while working in our industrial laundry business. I had no audience, and most of my early articles were read by almost nobody. I didn’t make a big announcement. I just wrote and published, week after week.

Starting quietly gives you room to learn. You can make mistakes without feeling that everyone is watching. And you can change direction without explaining yourself.

Your first move should create options, not destroy the life you already have. And you don’t have to start from zero. The skills you built in your current career come with you.

Look at everything you can do, not only your job title. Then ask: How can I use one of these skills to help a specific person?

That question can lead to a service, newsletter, product, course, consulting offer, book, or completely different career. Pick one direction and create something useful.

How do you stop preparing and start launching?

Preparation feels productive because there’s no risk of rejection. You can research tools, compare platforms, redesign a logo, take another course, and keep telling yourself you’re “working on it.”

But nothing has entered the world.

Here’s a more useful way to start:

1. Write down why you’re doing this. Do you want more independence, a different career, extra income, or a place to share your ideas? A weak reason won’t survive a difficult week.

2. Choose one person you want to help. Not “everyone who wants a better life.” Think of a real type of person with a problem you understand.

3. Define the smallest useful result. One article. One sample project. One free session. One landing page with a way to join your email list. Something another person can see or use.

4. Limit the cost. Decide how much time and money you’re willing to spend on version one. A weekend and €100 is a real limit. “Whatever it takes” is how simple projects become expensive distractions.

5. Pick a launch window. Give yourself 48 hours or one weekend to make the first version real. The deadline forces you to make decisions and ignore decoration.

6. Get feedback before expanding. Show the work to people who might use it. Ask what was useful, confusing, or missing. Then improve it.

The first version has one job: To teach you what to do next.

Don’t build the complete business. Don’t create ten products. Don’t spend three months making a website with seven empty pages.

Launch one useful thing.

What if the first version fails?

It probably won’t work exactly as you imagined. That’s normal.

Maybe nobody signs up. Maybe people like the idea but don’t want to pay. Maybe you discover that you hate doing the work. These outcomes are useful because they save you from spending another year on the wrong version.

When you’re thinking about a project, everything is still a theory. Launching gives you facts.

You might learn that the problem is wrong, the offer is unclear, or the audience is too broad. Change one thing and try again. This is how businesses and careers develop: You make a move, observe what happens, and adjust.

A new career is like learning a new language. You’ll make stupid mistakes. As long as they’re not permanent, who cares?

Betting on yourself

I’ve been running Launch in 48 this month, and I must say, it has been amazing to see how quickly some of the students are moving.

This has been the most successful course launch I’ve done in terms of engagement.

After I published an article about betting on yourself, I received a bunch of emails from readers who wanted to join Launch in 48 but had missed the cohort.

So I decided to run one extra cohort. Registration is open until August 2.

This will really be the last cohort of the year. If you also want to stop preparing and finally launch your project, you can join us here.

Whatever you decide, start small enough that you can begin now.

An imperfect project in the world gives you something to build on. An idea in your head gives you nothing.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my life is this:

• If I journal daily, I’m productive, focused, and energetic.

• If I don’t journal, I’m not.

I can think of many logical reasons why writing improves your life. But you’ve heard all of that stuff before.

You know, there’s something spiritual about writing that every person who has written daily has experienced.

I don’t know exactly what it is. But it’s this kind of invisible energy force that you generate as soon as you start writing.

Writing puts you in a different state of mind that you can’t get with anything else in life.

I love meditation, going on long walks, traveling, exercising, and all the other beautiful things in life. But nothing compares to writing.

If you’re not writing daily, you’re missing out.

Writing = clarity.

And clarity is something we all need more of today.

And this matters now more than ever.

AI can write your emails, summarize notes, and turn a voice recording into a clean document. I use those tools too. But if you outsource every first draft and difficult thought, you also outsource the process that keeps your mind sharp.

In the rest of this guide, you’ll learn what to write about, how to practice, and how to use AI without giving up the mental benefits of writing.

I also talk more about this in the accompanying video. If you haven’t upgraded yet, become a paid member to unlock the full guide, the video, and the complete Wise & Wealthy Academy archive.

The annual plan is now 10% off until Sunday, July 26.

Read more

I live a boring life. I’m 39, and most of my days look exactly the same.

I work from a small office, take walks, see my family, lift weights, read, and write. That’s about it.

And I love it.

My 19-year-old self would scoff at this. Even my 29-year-old self would. “Is that all there is to life?” he’d say. “You’ve got to be out there. In the middle of the action!”

What action?

I think I watched too many TV shows and movies.

The dream you inherit is not the dream you keep

In my head, I had a different picture of how my life was supposed to look. In my twenties, I watched shows like Mad Men and Suits. I like that life and wanted the big city.

The skyline office. The business dinners that ran past midnight.

Instead, I graduated in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis and started a business with my dad. We bought industrial laundry equipment, refurbished it, and sold it.

I was 24, driving to industrial parks to talk about used commercial washers and dryers, feeling like I was wasting my twenties.

I told myself it was temporary. I was going to grind through it and then build the loud, impressive life I was supposed to have.

It took me years to admit something simple. I didn’t actually want that life. I just thought I was supposed to want it.

Most of us are walking around with someone else’s dream in our head. You absorb it before you have any choice in the matter.

Movies, music, what your friends say, what the algorithm feeds you. By the time you’re twenty, you have a fully formed picture of what success looks like. And almost none of it came from you.

Seneca said it bluntly:

“It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who is always after more.”

The trap isn’t wanting things. The trap is wanting things you don’t even like, just because the world told you they were the right things to want.

Get a taste of everything you desire

Now, I’m not saying you should skip the loud life and go straight to the quiet one.

The opposite. If you desire something, go taste it. Because an untested desire never dies. It just sits in the back of your mind, whispering that you’re missing out.

Most people carry around desires like:

• Backpacking through Asia or South America

• Living in a big city

• The nomad laptop lifestyle, working from a beach

• The startup grind, building something with a team

• The party years, going out every weekend

If any of those pull at you, try them. Really try them.

I got my taste of city life when I lived in London. Always on the move, always something happening. I had the picture I’d dreamed about.

And I didn’t like it.

That taste was worth everything. I still have my back and forths. Sometimes I crave more social interaction, more events, more city energy.

That’s normal.

But now I can check that craving against reality. I’ve been there. I know what it actually feels like versus what it looks like on a screen.

Subscribe now

When the boring became beautiful

Something shifted slowly, over years.

I started writing in 2015 when I moved back to my hometown. I built a small business around it. I met my wife. We had a son.

Nothing about my current schedule would make a movie. But life feels good.

Most days I’m not in a rush. I’m not waiting for the weekend. I’m not counting down to a vacation. The actual hours of my actual week are the thing I want.

That’s the test I missed in my twenties. The right life is the one where you don’t need a vacation from your own week.

Look closely at the people you admire who built something real. Almost all of them did it from a quiet life. Boring routines. Same desk. Same hours. Same handful of close people.

So why do we keep chasing the loud version? Two reasons.

The first is the hedonic treadmill. Whatever you get, you adapt to it fast. The thrill of the new car or the new title burns off in months. Then you reach for the next one.

The second is more honest. We’re afraid of being unimpressive.

The world keeps telling us that a normal life is a wasted life. That quiet equals small.

That’s a lie. Quiet doesn’t mean small. It means undistracted.

Stop treating the present as a footnote

Here’s the deeper problem underneath all of this.

Most people are so focused on the future that the present moment becomes a footnote. Something to get through. Something to sacrifice.

Think about how insane that is. Your entire life happens in the present. There’s nowhere else it can happen.

Anthony de Mello put it this way:

“You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.”

You don’t need the city, the title, or the airport lounge. You need to drop the idea that your life starts after you get those things.

The Dalai Lama was once asked what surprised him most about humanity.

His answer: A man sacrifices his health to make money, then sacrifices his money to restore his health. He’s so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present. The result is that he lives in neither.

The quiet life isn’t necessarily about doing less, though

The goal is to be more present in every moment.

Making coffee. Taking a walk. Playing with your kid. When you’re fully present for those things, they stop being boring. They become your life instead of the waiting room for your life.

And here’s the part nobody wants to hear. This also means you stop looking at others.

Every minute you spend watching someone else’s life is a minute you’re absent from your own.

Your dream is allowed to change

If you’d told 24-year-old me that I’d end up running a small business and a writing career from a quiet Dutch town, raising a kid, taking walks during the day, I would have been disappointed.

That’s because 24-year-old me only knew what he was supposed to want.

Today, I wouldn’t trade this week for any version of the Suits life.

Your dream is supposed to change. The one you had at twenty was built out of incomplete information about yourself.

As you learn who you actually are, the dream catches up. Contentment and ambition aren’t opposites. You can love your current week and still build toward a bigger decade.

Marcus Aurelius kept reminding himself of one line:

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

If the life you’re building doesn’t look exciting from the outside but feels good from the inside, you’re doing it right.

Stop looking from the outside.

It is a skill.

A skill is something you do, not something you own. You get better at it through deployment: actually using it, in real conditions, and adjusting as you go.

Think of it the way you think about investing.

Everyone has access to the market. Anyone can open a brokerage account today. But outcomes have never been equal, because investing well is a skill, and most people never build it.

AI is going to work the same way. Everyone will have access to the same models, the same tools. What separates people won’t be access. It will be skill.

Right now, not many have that skill.

OpenAI president Greg Brockman recently admitted that “the number of people using agents is 10-20 million. The usage is tiny compared to where we’re going.”

Compare that to the more than 900 million weekly users ChatGPT already has. Agent usage today is somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of that.

The point is that skill adoption follows a curve, and we are still early on it.

The people who build real AI skill now, while most of the world is still fumbling, will compound that advantage for years.

In this episode, I walk through a few developments from the past month that all point to this same conclusion, and share what you actually need to know about AI right now, plus concrete ways to build the skill while it still gives you an edge.

You can find a written version of this lesson below, including full show notes.

Read more

In business school, everyone tells you the same thing. Specialize.

Pick a field, go deep, become the expert. I believed it completely. My plan was finance. Then I graduated into the aftermath of the financial crisis, and there were no finance jobs. Anywhere.

So in 2010, I started a business with my dad in the industrial laundry industry. And I brought my business school thinking with me. I told him: I’m the marketing guy. That was my strength in school. Don’t bother me with bookkeeping, taxes, or the technical stuff.

That attitude didn’t survive contact with reality.

When you run a small business, there’s no department to hand things to. I had to understand the machines we sold. Read the numbers. Deal with suppliers. Chase invoices.

Slowly, I changed my mind. To actually operate and grow a business, you need to know a bit about everything.

Years later, that range paid off in a way I never expected. When I joined Gartner, a large IT research firm, my broad background meant I could talk to anyone. Sales support, consultants, the VP. That did more for my career than my marketing “specialty” ever did.

For fifty years, the advice was to specialize. AI is about to flip it fast.

I talk more about this in the video below.

The Specialization Era Is Ending

The old career story made sense for the late twentieth century. Industries were stable. Companies rewarded depth. Your competition was other humans, and other humans were slower, fewer, and easier to out-specialize.

That world is gone.

AI is the ultimate specialist. Deep, narrow expertise is exactly what large language models do well. They absorb every paper in your field overnight. They draft contracts, write code, and produce work that ten years ago required a graduate degree.

McKinsey’s 2025 workforce data shows the shift clearly. Demand for AI fluency has grown sevenfold in two years. The skills most exposed to automation are the most specialized: quality control, detail-oriented analysis, narrow programming, structured technical work.

The skills least exposed: leadership, judgment, negotiation, communication. Anything that requires reading a messy situation and making a call.

Notice what those have in common. They aren’t deep in one domain. They’re wide. They draw on people, context, and experience from many.

The Misquoted Phrase

You’ve heard this your whole life: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

Now, there’s some truth in it. If you hop from skill to skill every other week, you never get good at anything. Dabbling isn’t range.

But the phrase is also one of the most misquoted lines in career advice. The full original saying is: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Read that twice. The original meaning was the opposite of how we use it today. Being broad was the strength. Modern career advice cut off the second half and inverted the wisdom.

Range Is the Job

Here’s what the specialize-crowd forgets. Most people don’t work in hyper-specialized corporate roles.

Most jobs reward you for having multiple skill sets. And if you want to run a business or lead anything, range isn’t optional. It is the job.

A CEO has to understand finance, strategy, sales, marketing, and people. Not at expert level. At decision level. Because they’re the one who has to decide.

That’s what I learned the hard way in the laundry business. The person who knows a bit about everything sees the whole board. The specialist sees one square.

What the Research Says

David Epstein studied this question across hundreds of professions in his book Range. His finding: in simple, predictable domains, specialists win. In complex, unpredictable domains, generalists outperform.

Most knowledge work is complex and unpredictable. Most of life is too.

The pattern shows up at the highest levels. Researchers Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein studied Nobel Prize winners and found they were 22 times more likely than average scientists to perform, act, or sing in their spare time. Twelve times more likely to write fiction. Seven times more likely to paint.

The people doing the deepest work in narrow fields refused to live narrow lives. Range wasn’t a distraction from depth. It fed it.

Seneca made the same point two thousand years ago in a letter about how a thinker should learn:

“We should follow the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in.”

The bee that visits a hundred flowers makes the honey. So what does this mean for you, today?

It means the detours in your life, the side interests, the unrelated jobs, are not noise on your resume. They’re ingredients.

Enter: The Skill Stack.

Read more

Working hard won’t make you rich.

I know that’s not what we’ve grown up hearing. We’ve heard the opposite.

• Put in the hours.

• Outwork everyone.

• Grind now, get paid later.

• Do that long enough and the money shows up.

It doesn’t work that way, though... At least not the way we’ve been promised.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Even if you work hard and you don’t get rich, the work gives you something else.

Something most people overlook because they’re too busy waiting for the paycheck. And it’s worth more than the money.

The mirror

A while ago I hung a mirror in our house.

It sounds like nothing. It wasn’t nothing to me. I spent more time measuring than drilling. I worked out the exact height. I checked the gap between the edge of the mirror and the edge of the wall. I thought about who would stand in front of it, and at what angle.

Then I marked the two screw holes and made sure they sat on a perfectly straight line. Drilled. Hung it. The whole thing took longer than it had any right to.

I stepped back and looked at it.

I put the same energy in hanging that mirror like writing an article.

And I felt good afterward.

Not rich good. Not rewarded good. Just quietly satisfied, because I’d done a small job properly instead of rushing it.

Nobody paid me for that mirror.

We tied together two things that don’t belong together

That mirror made something click.

As a society, we’ve combined two ideas into one: Working hard and getting rich. We talk about them in the same breath. We assume one leads straight to the other.

It doesn’t.

Working hard is a way of life. It’s not some kind of strategy to build wealth.

It’s about doing your best with whatever sits in front of you, getting the most out of yourself, and refusing to hand in sloppy work. That’s why we work hard.

Money is a separate question. And the honest answer to that question is uncomfortable.

Look at who actually ends up wealthy. A large share of wealth is inherited, not earned. Starting capital matters. So does timing, the family you were born into, and the people you happen to know.

Effort is in there somewhere, but it’s nowhere near the whole story. I’ve written before about luck and hard work, and the part nobody likes to hear is simple. You can work yourself to the bone and still not get rich.

So if money is the only reason you work hard, you’ve signed up for a deal that often doesn’t pay out.

Subscribe now

What hard work actually pays

Here’s what hard work gives you.

It pays you in satisfaction. In confidence. In self-respect.

When you do a job well, you walk away feeling good about yourself. You trust yourself a little more. You build proof, brick by brick, that you’re someone who does things properly.

Psychologists have studied this. The more effort you put into something, the more you value the result.

One version of it is called the IKEA effect. People prize the wobbly furniture they assembled themselves far above the identical thing bought finished. The labor itself creates the attachment. And it only works when you actually finish the job.

That’s the payout: Meaning.

Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman empire and still had to drag himself out of bed like the rest of us. He wrote a note to himself about exactly this.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work as a human being.”

Not to get rich. Not to win. To work as a human being. He saw effort as something natural, built into us, satisfying on its own terms.

The ants do their job. The birds do theirs. Doing yours well is not a transaction. It’s just what a person is for.

How to work hard for the right reason

If you stop treating hard work as a money machine, it gets better, not worse. Here’s how to make the shift.

1. Separate the scoreboard from the work. Don’t judge a day by what it earned. Judge it by whether you did your work properly. Money is a lagging, noisy number. The quality of your effort is something you control today.

2. Do the small jobs properly too. Hang the mirror straight. Write the boring email well. Finish what you start. The standard you hold on small things is the standard you’ll hold on the big ones.

3. Aim your effort. Hard work without a purpose is just exhaustion. Point it at a real skill, something you can get measurably better at. Effort plus direction compounds. Effort alone just burns you out.

4. Build wealth as its own project. If you want money, go after it directly and deliberately. Spend less than you earn. Save. Invest. Own things. Don’t expect raw effort to quietly turn itself into wealth. It won’t.

Do this, and hard work stops being a bet you might lose. It becomes something that pays you the moment you do it.

Work hard because who it makes you

I still work hard. I probably work harder now than when I believed it would make me rich.

The difference is what I expect from it. I don’t expect a job well done to deposit money in my account. I expect it to make me someone I respect. That return is guaranteed. The money never was.

So build wealth on purpose, as a separate plan. But work hard because of who it makes you.

Do the job in front of you properly. Then do the next one.

Every year, it feels like it’s getting harder to focus.

That’s a strange thing to admit for someone who writes about productivity for a living. But it’s true.

Ten years ago I could sit down and write for three hours straight without much effort.

These days I catch myself reaching for my phone within twenty minutes. Checking the news. Checking the markets. Checking nothing in particular.

When was the last time you did two hours of uninterrupted work?

If you have to think hard about that question, this post is for you.

Because here’s what I’ve realized: Our brains didn’t break. The world got louder.

I talk more about this in the video below.

The World Got More Demanding

Think back to the 2010s.

Sure, we had problems. But most of us weren’t glued to world news. The economy was growing, technology felt like an opportunity instead of a threat, and politics was something you thought about once every four years.

Since 2020, that’s over. A pandemic. Wars. Elections that never seem to end. AI coming for everybody’s jobs. Housing you can’t afford. Groceries that cost double.

And you can’t escape any of it. It’s at the dinner table. It’s at work. It’s in every app on your phone. Everyone is talking about the same heavy topics, everywhere, all the time.

Research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine shows the average knowledge worker now gets interrupted roughly every six minutes, and needs about 23 minutes to recover deep focus after each interruption.

Run that math. Most people never reach deep focus at all.

You Can’t Run Away From It

Here’s the fantasy most of us have entertained: find a cabin in the woods, set up a desk, disconnect from the world, and finally do great work.

It doesn’t work. Any business needs customers. Customers live in the world. I feel this as a writer too.

I’d love to be disconnected, but my readers aren’t disconnected. We all have jobs, families, people who depend on us. We’re in the world whether we like it or not.

So the question isn’t how to escape the noise. The question is how to live inside it without letting it drain you.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the scientist who brought mindfulness into modern medicine, called this “the full catastrophe” of life.

His point is life has always been overwhelming. Every generation had its version. Ours is just faster and louder. In his book Full Catastrophe Living, he uses a metaphor I keep coming back to:

“We all accept that no one controls the weather. Good sailors learn to read it carefully and respect its power. They will avoid storms if possible, but when caught in one, they know when to take down the sails, batten down the hatches, drop anchor, and ride things out, controlling what is controllable and letting go of the rest.”

So what does this mean for you today? It means waiting for a calmer world before doing your best work is a losing bet. The weather won’t improve. Your job is to become a better sailor.

The Stoics said the same thing two thousand years earlier. You don’t control what happens outside your mind. You control how much of it you let in.

Forget the Productivity Tips

Here’s where I disagree with most advice on focus.

Read more

I’m running the next cohort of my course Launch in 48 right now. Registration closes tomorrow, June 30.

That’s something I haven’t said in a while. Because for the last two years, I told myself I was done with cohorts.

I stopped doing them. I stopped updating my courses. I stopped most of the work that built my writing career in the first place. And I told myself a story the entire time about why that was fine.

It wasn’t.

This article is about why I left, what I learned from leaving, and why I came back.

I had a list of reasons. They all sounded good.

When I stopped running cohorts, I had three reasons ready. They sounded reasonable. They mostly were.

First, the cohort scene had gotten loud. Every week somebody else on my feed was screaming “Last chance” in all caps. I didn’t want to be one more voice doing that.

Second, my life changed fast. I got married. Within six months my wife was pregnant. A lot of attention I used to give to teaching got pulled in other directions.

Third, the money pressure was off. My investments in stocks and real estate had a good run. The urgency I’d felt in my late twenties and early thirties to work for income slowly disappeared.

Each of those reasons made sense in isolation. Put them together, and they look like a clear explanation. They weren’t, though.

The real story is that I lost my passion for writing somewhere in there, and I let coasting feel like a strategy.

What happens when you stop showing up for your own work

Here’s what nobody tells you about pulling back from work you used to love.

The work doesn’t disappear. The standards do.

For years I had a clear standard in front of me. Something to live up to. A benchmark that had nothing to do with income or recognition or hitting a target.

Just a quiet internal sense of what good work looked like, and a refusal to fall below it.

That’s what kept me improving. Not the money. Not the feedback. The standard itself.

Most people tie their drive to external rewards. When the reward arrives, the drive disappears. You hit the income goal and suddenly there’s nothing pushing you forward. You get the followers and wonder why you feel empty.

The most common ones are…

• A salary increase

• A promotion

• Subscriber count going up

• Positive feedback or comments

• Hitting a revenue target

The problem with all of these is the same. They’re finite.

Once you reach them, the engine stops. Standards don’t work that way. They’re not attached to outcomes.

You either meet them or you don’t. And if you don’t, you feel it regardless of what anyone else thinks or what your bank account says.

I had a promise I made to every customer who ever bought one of my courses: Pay once, get every future update for free. That’s still how it works.

But a promise to customers is really just a reflection of a promise to yourself. The day you start breaking that internal promise is the day your standards start slipping.

And mine did because I stopped updating.

What brought me back on course

The change didn’t come from a marketing decision. It came from my son.

When he was on the way, I started writing him personal letters. The act of writing for someone I loved, with no audience and no funnel attached, did something I hadn’t felt in years.

It reminded me of the example I want to set. Not someday when he’s old enough to notice but now.

The way I live and work every day is the example, whether I intend it or not.

That pull got me back to publishing every week. Then back to updating my courses.

Then back to thinking seriously about what it means to teach well. And at some point I realized something obvious I’d been avoiding.

The standard doesn’t maintain itself. You have to keep putting yourself in situations that force you to meet it.

Why running a cohort changes the work

You can run a self-paced course on cruise control for a long time. Nobody is in the room with you. The lessons sit there. Students log in, watch, log out. Most of the friction is hidden.

The moment you run a live cohort, that friction comes back. You get questions you didn’t expect. You hear about the parts that didn’t land. You watch people try to apply what you taught and you see exactly where they get stuck.

You can’t fake your way through that. You have to actually teach. Which means you have to know your subject in the present tense, not just what you knew when you recorded the lessons three years ago.

When I started the Launch in 48 update three months ago, I gave myself a clear deadline: Have it ready by end of June.

That deadline did more for the quality of the course than any amount of quiet intention ever did. I created the lessons, built the slides, edited the articles, thought through every step of how someone actually goes from zero to a launched brand. The deadline made it real.

Seneca understood this long before I did. He said:

The Romans called it docendo discimus. Teaching pulls more out of you than studying ever does.

You don’t truly know your subject until you’ve had to explain it to a confused person looking back at you. Every question forces a better explanation. Every student who gets stuck shows you where you went wrong.

I needed that friction. Without it, my standards had quietly collapsed.

Standards in every area of your life

This isn’t just about courses or teaching. It applies to every area of your life.

Most of us have standards we used to hold ourselves to that we quietly abandoned because life got in the way.

So here’s a question for you: What are your good habits and standards right now, in each area of your life?

For example…

Body

• Do you have a consistent workout schedule you actually stick to?

• Are you eating in a way you’d be proud of, or just getting by?

• Are you protecting your sleep, or sacrificing it for things that don’t matter?

Mind

• Do you read regularly, or has scrolling replaced it?

• Are you limiting low-quality content consumption, or letting it fill every gap?

• Do you protect time for actual thinking?

Work

• Do you still care about the quality of what you produce?

• Or have you settled into a “good enough” that would have embarrassed you three years ago?

Relationships

• Are you showing up for the people in your life?

• Or coasting there too?

These questions are simply about generating awareness.

The drift always starts with unawareness. That’s how it started for me. You don’t decide to let your standards slip. You just stop measuring.

Pick one area where you know the standard has slipped. Name it clearly. Then find one concrete way to hold yourself to it this week, not when things calm down, not next month. This week.

That’s how you come back.

Launch in 48 closes tomorrow

If you’re a writer, freelancer, coach, or anyone trying to launch something online, this is for you.

Launch in 48 is a step-by-step framework built from more than a decade of building a personal brand online.

You go through it at your own pace, and you come out the other side with a launched brand.

Registration closes tomorrow, June 30. The live kickoff workshop is July 1. After that, the doors stay shut until next year.

Join here: members.dariusforoux.com/launch-in-48

You don’t know what you’re capable of until you actually start something.

As the famous Dutch football player Johan Cruyff once said:

But the problem is that most people never even start. They don’t take a shot.

They don’t bet on themselves.

That can be for many reasons…

• Maybe you don’t believe you will succeed.

• Your family or friends make fun of you.

• It feels like the world is against you.

• Or you might just not have the energy.

What’s a side project you've wanted to start for a long time? And let’s be honest. Everyone has some kind of idea they want to work on.

The other day, I met someone who said she wants to sell pet accessories online. That’s something she’s dreamt of for years. That’s her thing.

What’s yours?

You can start small, in silence, on your own, on a Tuesday night.

But most people never do. They wait. They tell themselves they need to research more, learn more, line up support, and get the moment exactly right. They write a long list of things they need before they can begin.

And then they don’t begin.

I get emails about this all the time. A while back, I ran a survey on my newsletter, asking readers what their biggest challenge was. One of them wrote back with something a lot of people can relate to:

“Finding the courage, energy, and starting point when you can’t advertise what you’re doing (yet), you’re unsure where or how to connect with the right people, and you’re surrounded by people who aren’t particularly driven or encouraging. It feels like there’s often advice for people who are ready to go big, but not enough guidance for those of us trying to start quietly and purposefully.”

That’s a real problem. And nobody talks about it because almost all the advice online is for people already shouting from rooftops.

So let’s talk about the quiet way.

The first job is mindset, not strategy

Most people think starting a side project is a strategy problem. It’s not. It’s a mindset problem.

I see this constantly. Someone wants to start consulting on the side. They sit down to plan it out. Within an hour they’re staring at a list of tools, niches, websites, branding decisions, legal structures, and twelve open YouTube tabs.

They think, “Oh shit. That’s a lot of work.”

And they close the laptop.

This is the trap.

You talk yourself out of it before you ever start. The tools, the website, the technical setup, all of that is freely available and easy to figure out. What’s missing is something else.

You’re afraid. Not of the work. Of looking stupid. Of wasting your time. Of telling someone you tried and not having anything to show for it.

That fear is so loud you mistake it for “needing more information.”

But you don’t beat fear by reading more. You beat it by starting imperfectly on something small.

So before anything else, ask yourself two questions. Why am I doing this? And who am I doing it for?

Answer those two clearly, and the rest of the noise drops off. Everything else is just implementation.

Energy is not a sleep problem

The second thing readers tell me is they’re too tired.

They wake up tired, work tired, come home tired, and the idea of starting something new on top of all that feels impossible. So they keep waiting for a better week.

I know that feeling. Before I found writing in 2015, life had a gray quality to it. I’d only really light up for weekends, vacations, or specific events. The rest was just getting through the days.

When I found writing, that changed overnight.

I was going to bed at 2 a.m., waking up at 9, and counting down the minutes until I could sit at my desk with coffee. Nobody was paying me yet. I had no audience. I just wanted to do the work.

That’s what I mean when I say energy isn’t a sleep problem. It’s a meaning problem.

Think about a day when you were genuinely excited about something. A 4 a.m. wake-up to catch a flight for a holiday. Your wedding day. The first day of a trip you’d planned for a year. You ran on almost no sleep and felt fantastic.

That’s proof your body and mind have all the energy they need when something actually matters to you.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, who spent his life writing about how easily we waste our time, put it bluntly:

You’re not tired because life is hard. You’re tired because you’re spending it on things that don’t move you.

Find one thing that does, and the energy shows up.

You don’t need to tell anyone

There’s a quiet assumption baked into the reader’s question. “I can’t advertise what I’m doing yet.”

But you never actually need to advertise.

Most people who start a side project feel they need to announce it. New website. New Instagram bio. Tell their friends. Tell their parents. Make it real.

You don’t. You can do real work for months, even a year, with nobody knowing. That’s not hiding. That’s focus.

I started writing on the side while running an industrial laundry business with my dad. I didn’t post about it on Facebook. I didn’t tell my friends. I just wrote, week after week, and put it on the internet. Most of my early articles got read by almost nobody. That was fine. The work was the point.

When you skip the announcement, you take a lot of pressure off yourself. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to defend the project to a brother-in-law who thinks it’s a phase. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone.

The work stays private until it’s ready.

Your friends don’t have to be on board

The reader also wrote that they’re “surrounded by people who aren’t particularly driven or encouraging.”

Welcome to the club.

Other than my parents and my brother, almost nobody in my direct environment was driven the way I was. Most people don’t want to take risks. They want a stable job and a normal life. That’s not a flaw. That’s just the average.

The mistake is expecting your existing circle to be your support system for a project they don’t understand. They won’t be. And the more you wait for their approval, the longer you stall.

You need a different circle. Not a replacement, just an addition. People doing what you’re doing, or want to do.

Twenty years ago, that was hard to find. Today it’s almost free. Go where these people gather online. Read what they write. Reply to their posts. Share what you’re learning. You don’t have to be friends. You just need to be in the same room, even a digital one.

When I started publishing on Medium, I was suddenly surrounded by other writers. Some I admired. Some I disagreed with.

And when I started, everyone had a bigger audience than I did. But I never looked at that with jealousy. I saw it as a bunch of people just like me who are trying to build an audience.

You don’t need a mentor or a mastermind. You just need to stop being the only person in your day who cares about this.

How to actually start, today

Strip everything else away and start like this.

1. Answer the two questions on paper. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? Three sentences each. Don’t overthink it. Write them on one page and keep it nearby.

2. Pick the smallest possible first action. Not a website. Not a business plan. The smallest thing that produces real output. One article. One sample project. One free session for someone who fits the customer you want.

3. Schedule one block this week. Two hours, somewhere on the calendar. Treat it like a doctor’s appointment.

4. Don’t tell anyone yet. Not your partner, not your friends, not your team. Let the work exist before you discuss it.

5. Join one community online. A subreddit, a Substack, a small Discord. Read more than you write. Just be in the room.

6. Repeat next week. And the week after.

That’s the whole method. No twelve-step strategy. No funnel. Just a quiet rhythm of work that nobody sees, for as long as it takes.

If you want a more structured way to get started, I built Launch in 48 for exactly that.

It’s a step-by-step framework distilled from more than a decade of building a personal brand online. The stuff that actually works, without the noise.

Registration closes June 30. Check it out if you’re interested in joining us.

The quiet way is the real way

One of the students of Launch in 48, Kian Zarzari, works as a process operator at a dairy producer. He’s not a full-time creator or freelancer.

Someone with a full day of work before he ever sits down to write.

He started his Substack, From Fire to Intelligence, not to quit his job, but to do something with the ideas in his head.

To build something with potential without betting everything on it right now.

Nobody at work needed to know. Nobody needed to be on board. He just started, quietly, after hours, with no audience and no approval.

That’s the real way. It just doesn’t sell as well as “Build your million-dollar one-person business.”

The quiet approach doesn’t go viral. There’s nothing flashy to share. But it’s what actually works.

Almost every business or creative career you admire started as one person doing the work after hours, with no one watching, for longer than felt fair.

You don’t need permission. You don’t need applause. You don’t need a circle that gets it.

You just need to start. It’s as simple as that.

Just keep repeating the thing that Cruyff said: “If you never take a shot, it means you will never score.”

Here’s to taking more shots.

I’m convinced that AI will not destroy our need for personal connection, humanity, stories, and expression.

The reason I’m so convinced of that is because of one word.

Culture.

When people talk about AI, they underestimate the power of culture.

As in common values and thinking. The slow, invisible force that decides what actually sticks in our lives and what doesn’t.

Here’s what most people miss. When something new arrives, it has to pass through culture before it changes anything. And culture moves slowly.

How things actually become normal

Think about how any new thing spreads. Early adopters run with it first. But it’s not mainstream yet. And as long as it’s not mainstream, we don’t know its real cultural effect.

This is what researchers call the diffusion of innovations. New ideas move from a small group of experimenters to the general population along a predictable S-curve.

Slow start, steep climb, then a plateau once something is fully absorbed into everyday life.

Take the five-day work week. We treat it like it’s always existed. It hasn’t. Henry Ford announced the plan in 1922 and implemented it in 1926.

Before that, working six days for sixty hours was normal. It took decades to go from a radical idea to something we now consider untouchable.

Social media did the same. It started as a way to connect with people you actually knew. Then it slowly reshaped how we talk, date, argue, shop, and see ourselves. Nobody decided this. It seeped into culture over years.

Or look at alcohol. For a long time, going out and drinking was how young people bonded. Now coffee shops and gyms are booming.

Sober is becoming normal. A whole fitness culture has exploded, creating new brands and a wave of multimillionaires selling supplements, clothes, and a healthier way to live.

None of these shifts happened overnight. Slowly, then all at once.

AI is going through this right now

We’ve had AI in our hands for about four years. The culture around it is just starting to take shape.

This kind of shift takes five to ten years before there’s a settled public opinion. We’re in the messy middle.

What I’m seeing is a lot of resistance. People push back hard on the idea that AI can replace human beings. And I understand why. The word itself, artificial intelligence, makes people uneasy.

AI knows everything that has ever been recorded. But it’s backward-looking, not forward-looking.

It remixes what already exists. It’s the perfect DJ. The perfect remixer. But it doesn’t create new genres. It doesn’t invent new forms of art.

That distinction matters more than people realize.

What I’ve learned from using AI intensively

In recent weeks I’ve been automating work that used to require a three-person team.

Scheduling, repurposing, proofreading, references, visuals, headlines. Most of the production work is now handled.

The only thing I actually do is write the article.

But here’s the key. The content you’re reading is still me. These are my ideas, my thinking, my experience. AI helps make it presentable. That part can be automated. The thinking cannot.

I see the same thing in my family business, a traditional company that sells industrial laundry equipment. We’re automating:

• Invoicing and bookkeeping

• Parts of the sales process

• Note-taking and follow-ups

All the annoying parts of work. The parts nobody actually wanted to do.

AI is getting good at taking over the work we never wanted in the first place. That’s what everybody wanted all along.

The economy is shifting from need to want

When everyone has access to the same tools, competence stops being special. It becomes the baseline. If everyone can write a clean email, design a graphic, or ship a product with AI, those things no longer set you apart.

So what’s left?

You.

Your name. Your reputation. Your taste. Your perspective. The reason someone chooses you over everything else that’s out there.

It’s no longer a matter of whether we can replace someone. We can.

The real question is: Do we want to replace a person?

That’s what a personal brand answers. It’s not about being famous. It’s about being wanted.

When you have a strong personal brand, people don’t just need the work done. They want you to be the one who does it.

In a world where anyone can do anything, being wanted is the only real security left.

Build your brand. Share your thinking. Put your name on your work. Let people see the real human behind it.

Because the tools are now available to everyone. You are the only thing that can’t be copied.

Build your own brand in one weekend

If you don’t have a personal brand yet, or you started one that’s been sitting half-finished, consider joining my course, Launch in 48.

It’s my cohort-based course where you build and launch your brand in one weekend.

This year’s cohort comes with 14 video lessons, a live workshop on July 1, and free access to Darius 2, my AI assistant trained on all my private frameworks.

The cohort runs once a year. Registration closes June 30.

If you have any questions, let me know!

-Darius

I’ve been writing online since 2015.

I never had a huge viral moment. No post that broke the internet. No overnight explosion.

I still built a large audience.

I’m telling you this because most people carry the wrong model in their head. They think an audience gets built in one big moment. One viral video. One post that takes off. One lucky break that changes everything.

So they wait for it. They publish something, watch it get fourteen likes, and decide they failed. Then they quit.

I almost did the same thing.

My first years were quiet

Like everybody else who starts writing online, I started with 0 followers and subscribers.

I published an article every week anyway. Some weeks the numbers were close to zero.

I’d watch other writers post something that exploded and pull tens of thousands of views in a day. I had nothing close to that.

I’ll be honest. I wanted the viral hit. I studied the posts that blew up and tried to reverse-engineer them. It never worked. The harder I chased the spike, the worse my writing got, because I was writing for an algorithm instead of a person.

So I stopped chasing it. I made one decision instead.

I’d publish every single week, no matter what. Good week or bad week. Big numbers or single digits.

That decision is the whole story. There’s no secret beyond it.

Virality is a spike. An audience is a slope.

Here’s what most people miss.

A viral post is a spike. It shoots up, then it falls back down just as fast. Most of those readers never return. They saw one thing and moved on. A spike feels amazing and changes almost nothing.

An audience is different. An audience is a slope. You build it one reader at a time, slowly, by showing up as the same person over and over.

Psychologists even have a name for why this works. It’s called the mere-exposure effect.

The more often someone runs into something, the more they trust it and like it. You don’t earn trust with one brilliant post. You earn it by being there again and again, until a stranger turns into a regular reader.

That’s why consistency beats virality. A viral hit gets you seen once. Consistency gets you remembered.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was born a slave and later taught a generation of Romans, understood this two thousand years ago. He said:

An audience is a great thing. It doesn’t get created suddenly. You build it one week at a time.

How to build an audience without going viral

If you’re starting from zero, here’s exactly what I’d do.

1. Pick one publishing schedule and never miss it. Weekly is enough. The schedule matters more than the size of each piece. Your readers need to know you’ll show up. Reliability is the product.

2. Write for one person, not the algorithm. Picture a single real reader with a real problem. Write to help that one person. Posts built to go viral feel hollow. Posts built to help someone get shared, because they actually helped.

3. Go where your readers already are. Don’t sit in your corner of the internet waiting to be found. Publish where the audience already gathers. Building your own audience from scratch takes years. Borrowing an existing one is faster.

4. Get better in public. My early articles were not that great. I improved because I kept shipping and kept studying how to write articles people actually want to read. You don’t get better in private and then launch. You get better by publishing.

5. Measure in years, not days. A single post tells you almost nothing. Judge your progress over twelve months, not twelve hours. The daily numbers are noise. The yearly trend is the signal.

The boring truth

People always want the audience-building hack. There isn’t one.

I built an audience of 100,000+ by writing one article a week and refusing to quit when it was slow. That’s it. That’s the entire method.

It’s boring. It’s also the only thing that reliably works.

You don’t need to go viral. You need to go again. And then again. And then again.

Start this week. Then publish the next one anyway.

The hardest week is the first one

Everything I described above only starts working once your platform actually exists. A page with your name on it, a way to collect emails, and your first piece published. That first week is the one most people never finish.

That’s why I built Launch in 48.

The course gives you a simple framework to get everything live in one focused weekend: your brand, your page, your freebie, your welcome email.

I just updated it with new lessons on growing your brand and making your first income, plus Darius 2, an AI trained on my private content that you can ask anything while you build.

The course is open until June 30. We kick off with a live workshop on July 1.

Join Launch in 48 here.

I’ll be honest. When I started this experiment, I expected it to fail.

I’ve tested a lot of AI tools over the past three years.

And every time someone claims you can “clone yourself with AI,” the result is the same. A chatbot that talks like a LinkedIn post.

Nothing like the actual person.

So my expectations were low.

But last month, I tried something different. Kajabi, the platform where I host all my course, just introduced a new feature where you can train an AI assistant on your own private data.

So I used my course materials. My frameworks. My lesson transcripts. Notes and answers I’ve written over ten years of teaching people how to build online businesses.

Stuff that ChatGPT and Claude have never seen. Because it’s not on the public internet.

Then I started asking it questions, expecting general advice. But it actually sounds like me. It doesn’t give generic advice. I asked Darius 2 and ChatGPT the same question. Here’s the result, side by side:

That’s my framework, my reasoning, my voice. It even pushes back the way I would.

I kept testing it. Harder questions. Specific situations. Edge cases from real students.

At some point I stopped testing whether it sounded like me and started using it as an actual assistant.

And that’s when the bigger insight hit me.

Generic AI advice is worth almost nothing now

Everyone has access to AI. You, me, your boss, your competitors, every 19-year-old with a laptop.

Which means that when you and a million other people ask ChatGPT the same question, you all get the same answer. There’s no edge in an answer anyone can pull up in four seconds.

And it’s getting worse. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge found that when AI models train on AI-generated content, the output degrades fast.

They call it model collapse. Feed the machine its own output, and everything drifts toward the same gray average.

That’s where generic content is headed. More sameness, faster.

So ask the better question: What does AI not have?

Your experience. Your judgment. Your taste. Your way of thinking. The years of mistakes behind every strong opinion you hold.

Your private knowledge. That’s the edge.

The biggest opportunity right now

Here’s the part most people miss.

My AI clone doesn’t sound like me because the technology is magic. It sounds like me because I spent a decade building a body of work to train it on.

Hundreds of articles. Premium courses. Frameworks with names. Answers to thousands of student questions.

If I had trained it on nothing, I would have gotten nothing back.

First the substance. Then the presentation.

AI is the best presentation tool ever invented. It formats, polishes, repurposes, and scales. What it can’t do is generate the substance.

That part is you.

This is why I keep saying your personal brand is your most valuable asset right now. AI is flooding the internet with content that all sounds the same.

The people who stand out are the ones with a recognizable voice and a body of work that’s actually theirs.

When you have that, AI stops being a threat and becomes leverage. You can train it on your knowledge. Scale yourself. Serve more people without working more hours.

But it only works if you’ve built something worth cloning first.

This is why I’m reopening Launch in 48

Launch in 48 is my course on building your personal brand from scratch in one weekend. It only opens once a year, and today is that day.

This year’s version is the biggest update since I created it. The course went from 8 to 14 lessons.

The six new lessons cover what happens after you launch: Turning your story into an advantage, using AI without sounding like AI, growing on Substack, creating your first offer, and building your monetization ladder.

And there’s one more thing.

The AI assistant I described above? I call it Darius 2. It’s trained on the complete course, my frameworks, and material I’ve never published.

Every student gets free access inside the course. Whenever you’re stuck, you ask, and you get an answer based on my actual thinking instead of generic AI advice.

We kick off with a live workshop on July 1 at 12 pm EST, on the business model behind monetizing a personal brand. There’s a replay if you can’t make it live.

Registration closes June 30. After that, the doors stay shut until next year.

Join Launch in 48 here: members.dariusforoux.com/launch-in-48

If you have any questions, just reply.

-Darius

Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.

He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”

I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.

For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.

The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.

From cool-obsessed to money-obsessed

When I was at university, a friend of my father, a very successful businessman, asked me what I wanted to do after graduation.

“Work at a bank,” I said, “and eventually become CEO.”

I wasn’t joking. I was always obsessed with finance and had been reading about CEO compensation at major banks. The numbers were insane, and I thought: That’s the goal!

I had no idea what that actually required. Decades of grinding. Office politics, luck, compromise.

I just saw the number and decided that was what success looked like. Looking back, I find that pretty embarrassing. But that’s where my head was.

So I did everything I thought would make me rich. I started a business with my dad.

When that didn’t generate the money I wanted, I tried the corporate route. I moved to London. I worked hard. I chased the career.

And I was miserable.

Why do we narrow in on money like that?

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, spent a lot of time thinking about why people lose their sense of purpose.

In his book The Will to Meaning, he described exactly what happens when money takes over:

“Once the will to money takes over, the pursuit of meaning is replaced by the pursuit of means. Money, instead of remaining a means, becomes an end. It ceases to serve a purpose.”

That’s it. That’s the trap. Money was always supposed to be a tool. But at some point, most people flip it.

The tool becomes the goal.

Frankl also noticed something about the kind of person this creates. He wrote:

“To those people who are anxious to have money as though it were an end in itself, “time is money.” They exhibit a need for speed.

To them, driving a fast car becomes an end in itself. This is a defense mechanism, an attempt to escape the confrontation with an existential vacuum.”

They rush through everything. Not because they need to, but because slowing down means confronting an emptiness they’ve been running from.

I recognized myself in that description.

It takes real work to become a person with depth. And I say that as someone who had to do that work myself. I wasn’t a reader. I didn’t journal. I didn’t reflect. I was, to be honest, a bit of a meathead.

In high school I wanted to be cool. At university I wanted to be rich. I was chasing external things my entire life without ever asking why.

Subscribe now

Becoming aware of my money obsession

When the corporate career fell apart and I moved back in with my parents, I hit a wall. I didn’t know what to do. So I turned to books.

Not self-help books, but real philosophy. Books that challenge your ideas and not necessarily tell you what to do.

The Stoics. Schopenhauer. Viktor Frankl. Will Durant. Then Eastern philosophy. Krishnamurti. Anthony de Mello.

Bhante Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, written by a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who has been meditating since he was twelve years old.

I read everything I could get my hands on, and something shifted in me. I became aware. That’s the only word for it.

I woke up to what I had been doing, and why, and where it was leading.

I gave up chasing money.

I started writing without any expectations, just because I loved ideas and wanted to think more clearly.

That decision changed the entire direction of my life.

What I actually learned

The Stoics didn’t tell me to want money less. They told me to look at where my wanting came from. And once you look at that honestly, the obsession loses its grip.

It stops feeling like ambition and starts feeling like fear wearing a suit.

One of the most profound and deepest ideas I’ve read comes from Epictetus. The following quote is from A Manual for Living:

Let me break that down, because there’s a lot in it.

1. Open your eyes: Most of us go through life following others without questioning it. We absorb the values of the culture around us and call them our own.

2. See things for what they really are: Look underneath the surface. What actually drives people. What they want underneath what they say they want. What you find, if you look honestly, is that a lot of what we chase is performance. We want to look successful more than we want to be successful.

3. Thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation: Once you see human nature clearly, you stop attaching yourself to things that can’t give you what you’re actually looking for. And you avoid a lot of pain that was completely avoidable.

What’s the biggest false attachment? That money will make you happy.

It won’t. Not on its own. Not above a certain point. And definitely not if it becomes the only thing you care about.

Money is not the enemy

I want to be clear about something. Wealth and money are not the same thing, and I’m not saying either one doesn’t matter.

Money buys freedom, options, and security. Pretending otherwise is just another way to lie to yourself.

What changed for me is the relationship.

Seneca, one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome, described it better than anyone I’ve read. He wrote:

Seneca was honest. He preferred wealth, because who doesn’t? Anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

We'd rather have a lot of money than not at all. But Seneca keeps it outside the part of him that actually matters.

The money lives in the house. Not in the heart.

That’s the whole shift.

You don’t have to hate money to stop being controlled by it. You just have to put it in the right room.

I don’t care about appearances anymore. What I care about now is depth, good work, and the people in my life.

And the money?

It follows. Not always immediately, and also not always in the way you expected. But it follows.

Philosophy didn’t make me poorer. It made me free. And that turned out to be worth more than any number I ever chased.

It’s now 11 years since I seriously started applying Stoicism and Eastern Philosophy to deal with overthinking.

You see, the reason I got obsessed with philosophy is because I had a NEED for it. I’ve always been an overthinker.

Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now, wrote about a story in one of his books. It goes something like this:

A guy is walking down the street and he sees an acquaintance walking on the other side. He waives at him but the other person ignores him.

The guy starts thinking, “Why did he ignore me? Did I say something bad to him last time? Maybe he has a problem with me? Should I text him? No.”

And he goes on and on like that until he sees him again a few weeks later. Turns out the other guy was in such a hurry that he didn’t even see him. All that thinking was just a waste of energy.

To be honest, I’m not sure if Tolle wrote all of that but I remember reading a story like that once and thinking, “How does this guy know something so personal about me?”

Because I’m that guy. I had an experience like that.

At some point I knew I had to get a handle on my thoughts. And it all starts with realizing that you are not your thoughts:

The Voice You Mistake for Yourself

There is a voice in your head.

It comments on everything. Your work, your face in the mirror, the way that last conversation went, the thing you said five years ago that you still remember. It compares you to other people. It tells you what kind of person you are.

Most people treat that voice as the truth. They hear it say “I’m bad at this” and conclude, “I’m bad at this.”

They hear it say “they don’t like me” and conclude, “they don’t like me.” Then they spend their days making decisions based on the verdicts of a narrator that is wrong most of the time.

The voice is not you.

It is a stream of thoughts. Some of them are useful. Most are recycled. A large percentage are wrong.

A 2010 Harvard study tracked the mental wandering of 2,250 people in real time and found that the human mind drifts away from what it is doing about 47% of the time.

And it doesn’t drift to happy places. It drifts to old arguments, future worries, social comparison, and self-criticism.

Half of your waking life is spent listening to a narrator that wasn’t asked for an opinion.

Why Thoughts Are Not Facts

Read more

They ask it questions. They rewrite emails. They summarize articles.

That’s useful.

But it’s not the real opportunity anymore.

The real opportunity is using AI agents to run recurring work for you.

I recorded a practical workshop for Academy members where I show you my full AI agent setup. This is the system I use to automate the annoying work in my business, from content planning to visuals to project management.

You’ll see how I use agents to:

• Write polished article drafts from my sloppy drafts

• Repurpose articles into Medium headlines, Substack notes, and Academy posts

• Create blog visuals in my own style

• Check finance exports for missed or unbooked transactions

• Build reusable AI skills so Claude and ChatGPT understand how I work

• Connect AI to apps like Notion

This is a practical screen-share. And it’s built around one simple idea:

If you do the same task every week, why not automate it?

That way you have more time and energy to focus on important work.

Check out the workshop!

If you’re not a member yet, consider upgrading to a paid membership.

You’ll also get access to the full archive of members-only content, plus new lessons, podcasts, and articles every week.

All the best!

-Darius

P.S. There’s a written version of this workshop below.

Read more

Before my son was born, so many people around me shared stuff like:

• “Say goodbye to sleep.”

• “Forget about your mornings.”

• “You’ll never have time for yourself again.”

I nodded along. What else do you say? They’d been through it, I thought.

But here’s what nobody told me.

Having a child didn’t take time away from me.

It showed me how badly I was already wasting it.

The warnings were right about the wrong thing

Yes, my time got cut. I no longer control my own schedule the way I used to. My son sets the rhythm now. My wife and I adapt around him, support each other, and find pockets of time wherever they appear.

And that’s when something strange happened.

I started getting more done.

You might expect something like, “I started waking up at 5 AM got important work done!”

But that’s not me. I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do something out of character.

I’m not a morning person.

I simply let go of all my expectations and routines.

My goal is to adapt and seize whatever time window opens up. If I see an opportunity to do work for 30 minutes, I go for it HARD!

Before, I had more time and less pressure to use it wisely. I’d start work, drift, come back, sort of focus, sort of not. Hours would pass and I’d have maybe one real hour of output buried inside them.

Now? I sit down and I work. Because I don’t know how long the window is.

That’s it. That’s the whole system.

The poet and philosopher Goethe saw this clearly. Constraints don’t hold you back. They force you to rise to them. As he wrote:

Responsibility is the most underrated productivity tool

We’ve been sold the idea that the key to getting more done is having more time, better tools, or the right morning routine.

Read enough productivity content and you’d think the secret is a specific type of notebook and waking up before the sun.

It’s not.

The real lever is stakes.

When something depends on you, you show up differently. You focus differently. You make decisions faster and stop fussing over things that don’t matter.

The Stoics understood this long before productivity culture made it a buzzword.

Seneca spent his life writing about time, and his conclusion was blunt: Most people don’t lose time because they have too little of it. They lose it because they don’t feel its weight:

A child makes the weight real.

We’ve all heard of memento mori, the reminder that life is finite.

Most people know it intellectually. A new baby makes you feel it. When you’re holding something that small and fragile, you understand that we all started like that.

And especially once you start edging closer to 40, you start seeing the effects of aging.

“I’m getting older,” is something you start saying. But do you truly feel it? Do you use it to maximize what you get out of life?

If you do, the trivial things that used to eat your hours suddenly look exactly like what they are… trivial.

Subscribe now

What actually changed

1. I found a new way to work.

In the first weeks after birth, I figured out a system that’s been working well. I put my son in a baby carrier on my chest, walk slowly around, and when he falls asleep, I move to my treadmill desk. Walking at the slowest pace, one eye on him, the other eye on writing.

That’s how I got most of my articles done in March and April.

Now he’s a bit older; he sleeps better, so I’m not doing the treadmill technique anymore.

When I’m at my desk without him, I know exactly what I’m doing before I sit down. Write new articles. Post the weekly Academy training for my paid Substack. Answer emails. Work on a new course.

I’ve simplified my work drastically. Just a short list of things that matter, and I do them.

2. Workouts got shorter and more consistent.

I used to do longer sessions, less frequently. Now I aim for every day, which realistically lands at four or five times a week.

Twenty to thirty minutes. Push, pull, or legs, three exercises, done. Short enough that there’s no excuse to skip. Frequent enough that the habit sticks.

I actually feel better than I did with longer sessions I kept postponing.

3. Some things shifted back.

I’m reading less than I want to. Right now most of my reading is about the stock market, the companies I invest in, and geopolitical developments. Books have taken a back seat. I want to fix that. I just haven’t found the right system yet with the new schedule.

My wife and I used to watch a show or movie every evening. Now it’s no longer every night.

We’ll get that back slowly. Same with time together as a couple. A strong relationship is good for us and good for him.

Nothing is gone. It’s just reorganized.

4. Social time looks different, not smaller.

Family visits us almost daily. I see my best friend every week. I talk to other friends on the phone. I take my son out in the stroller and we walk.

The low-value stuff, the obligatory hangouts where you don’t really connect and wonder why you went, that’s what disappeared. Not because I decided to cut it.

Just because there’s no room for it and I don’t miss it.

The real takeaway: Don’t be afraid to change your life

I’ve had stretches like this before.

When I started my writing career. When I moved to Spain. When I came back to the Netherlands.

Big events that disrupted everything and forced a reset. Each time, I came out more focused, more clear on what mattered, more productive than before.

The pattern is obvious in retrospect.

Big life changes make you better.

New responsibilities. A new environment. A different routine.

Things that force you to stop running on autopilot and actually decide how you want to live.

The things we’re most afraid of are usually the ones that push us furthest.

I’ll be honest. I was afraid of all of it. Especially having a child. The loss of freedom, the pressure, the unknown. Every single warning people gave me tapped into a real fear I had.

But every move like that brings you higher. It pushes you to become a more complete version of yourself.

If you’re sitting on something you’re afraid of, a commitment, a change, a responsibility you keep postponing, consider that the fear might be pointing at exactly the thing you need.

Seneca said it best:

You don't need more time. You need higher stakes.

Let me ask you something.

Have you ever bought a stock or an asset because you saw someone talk about it online?

I bet the answer is yes. Because I’ve done it. Almost everyone I know has done it.

Here’s the follow-up question: Do you still own it?

Probably not.

A few years ago I got caught up in the meme stock craze. GameStop. BlackBerry. Nokia. Everyone was talking about them. The energy was electric. People were making life-changing money in days. I got in on that too.

You know how that ended.

More recently, I bought Hims and Hers stock. A lot of people were talking about it, the numbers looked decent on the surface, and I thought, why not take a stab at it?

Years ago I read that the great Stanley Druckenmiller often buys a stock that looks interesting and then researches it after his purchase, not before it. So he avoids analysis paralysis.

If he doesn’t like it or the stock moves against him, he sells. I’ve been doing that too occasionally with my trades. I like that strategy because it increases the stakes. But it’s risky.

Pretty soon after I bought , I realized it wasn’t my kind of company at all.

No strong competitive advantage. Not a business I actually understood or believed in. But by the time I figured that out, I was already down.

That’s the comparison trap. And it’s one of the biggest threats to your long-term investing success.

I talk about how I handle it in this video:

Why It Happens to Everyone

The comparison trap isn’t a sign of stupidity. It’s a sign of being human.

Read more

You sit down somewhere quiet. Maybe in a coffee shop. Maybe on your couch after a long day. And out of nowhere, a thought hits you.

Why am I not more successful?

Maybe you thought you’d have kids by now. Or a business that prints money. Or a name people actually recognize. Maybe you thought you’d own a house. And that you’d have it all figured out.

But none of that has happened.

So you start comparing.

• This guy was a millionaire by 30.

• She had a bestseller by 26.

• He became a CEO at 40.

• She retired at 48.

So what?

They are not you. But it still stings, right?

“Why not me?”

I’ve been there more times than I can count. And every time, I noticed the same thing. The comparison never came from inside me. It came from looking outside.

That’s the trap most of us walk into. We’ve gotten more materialistic and more externally focused every year. It’s not new. We’ve been doing this for a long time. But it’s getting worse.

You might think it matters what your friends think of you. Or that strangers look at you and think, “Wow, that’s a successful person.”

But here’s the truth. Those people will not be there for you in ten or twenty years.

They care about themselves.

That’s just normal human behavior.

So why are you organizing your life around their applause?

Impact was never about size

Here’s what most people get wrong. We think impact only counts when it’s big and public.

But that’s not how impact works.

Think about the people who shaped you most. A parent, teacher, or friend who said the right thing at the right time.

None of them were famous. None of them had an audience. They mattered because they were close to you, not because they were known to everyone.

That’s the rule. Impact moves through proximity, not popularity.

I think about this with my own life now. I have a young son. He doesn’t know how many people read my articles, and he won’t care. To him, I’m not a writer with an audience.

I’m just his dad. That relationship will shape him more than anything I ever publish. And almost none of it will happen in public.

Psychologists have spent decades studying what they call mattering, the basic human need to feel significant to other people. Their work keeps landing on the same point.

Feeling like you matter has almost nothing to do with fame or status. It comes down to whether you make a real difference to the people actually in your life.

The most famous Stoic understood this long before the research existed. Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman empire. He could have had any monument, any legacy, any amount of glory he wanted.

Instead, in his private journal, he reminded himself of the opposite:

Think about who said that. Not a struggling writer with twelve views. The most powerful man alive. He looked at fame, the thing everyone chases, and called it empty.

Because he knew your life doesn’t turn meaningful the moment the world claps.

It’s meaningful when you do good work and treat people well, whether anyone is watching or not.

Subscribe now

You can’t force your life into a particular shape

Most of our unhappiness comes from believing no one cares. You wake up, work, come home, watch TV, sleep. You forget what your real job is. To be useful to the people in front of you.

But instead of doing the work in front of us, we try to force outcomes.

A higher income, better job title, or house in the right neighborhood.

We act like we’re some kind of magician who can wave a wand and make life arrive on schedule.

You’re not. I’m not either. Nobody is.

Sometimes it takes a while to get where you want to be. That doesn’t mean the journey is wasted.

Because we’re obsessed with outcomes, we measure life in milestones. But life isn’t only about outcomes. It’s about whether the work you’re doing today is work you’d respect.

William James said it best.

That’s the whole game.

How to measure your life correctly

So how do you put down the famous-or-failure ruler? Here’s what worked for me.

1. Name your real audience. List the people your life genuinely touches. Family. Close friends. The people you work with. The handful of readers, clients, or customers you actually serve. That short list is your real audience. The faceless crowd you imagine watching and judging you doesn’t exist.

2. Measure contribution, not attention. At the end of the day, don’t ask who noticed you. Ask one question instead. Did I help anyone today, even in a small way? A good conversation counts. Honest work counts. Showing up for someone counts.

3. Do the work nobody claps for. The boring, invisible work is usually the work that matters most. Raising a kid well. Doing your job properly. Being the friend who picks up the phone. Nobody hands you applause for it, but your work matters more than anything you do for show.

4. Get off the comparison feed. Social media is a machine for making your real life feel small next to other people’s highlights. When the scrolling starts whispering that you don’t matter, that’s not insight. That’s the machine working. Use it less.

Your life already counts

Your life doesn’t need an audience to count. It never did.

The point was never to be seen. The point is to be useful to the people in front of you, and to do work you’d respect even if nobody ever knew your name.

Do that, and your life matters. Quietly, but completely.

You don’t need the world to agree.