There's only one thing you can predict

Matthew and I started our coaching business, (QX, which helps coaches build online businesses that leverage community and make $12-25k/mo or more) exactly 178 days ago.

In that time, we built out 2 Skool communities with a combined 11 courses and over 12 hours of video content. We've collected $102,808.88 after transaction fees (not counting side gigs), hired two new core team members (one of which was a client who made $18,000 in his own first ever month of coaching), built our free community to over 600 members, and have helped dozens of people make their first $2,500-10k sale, $30k month, and even more significantly, the first stretch of time where they've been consistent and confident with their content, sales, and business as a whole.

While building all of that, we also spent 5 days on the planes of Oblivion going absolutely raucous at a music festival, spent several nights out in the back-country of BC on a soul-crushingly difficult men's trip, had multiple side quests to different cities and events, attended retreats, took intensive self development programs, played music, went out to Matthew's family's land and chopped inordinate amounts of firewood for them, and have been training hard calisthenics workouts for 42 days.

While out for breakfast this morning, Matthew's mom asked us "did you expect things to take off as much as they did when you guys got this thing started?" Matthew and I glanced over at each other, with one eyebrow raised each, and in synchrony, blurted out "No!"

Sure, we had a plan, we had goals, we had a combined 25 years of studying, practicing, and applying the various skills of coaching, sales, and marketing, but nothing we'd ever built ever worked this well.

We didn't have any idea if any of it would work as well as we wanted it to. There are too many variables - near infinite amounts from the personal to the macroeconomic and cultural - to ever accurately predict precise outcomes, especially when it comes to something as deep as an entrepreneurial endeavor.

The only thing that we could predict?

That no matter what happened, we would count whatever happened, whether success or failure, as data to keep running experiments until we got to where we were aiming at.

We could predict that no matter what happened, we would keep trying shit until it worked.

The reality is, despite our apparent initial success, we were bombarded by a gazillion setbacks. Committed clients pulling out last minute, huge unexpected bills, Stripe holding our payments because of a technical error, family members dying, complicated personal challenges disrupting our flow, running into technical/skill based challenges we'd never confronted before and grinding up a steep learning curve on the fly...

We didn't just "cruise" our way into where we are now (even though we were having so much fun that it felt that way sometimes). We ran a lot of experiments and took a lot of action. We collected a LOT of data. And we would pivot quick when something started to spin out or we hit a roadblock.

Even more than the business systems and entrepreneurial skills that we teach in QX, I think the real reason our clients are getting the results that they are is the mental OS that we're equipping them with. Today's newsletter is going to attempt to distill the two most important factors that have been most influential in our sheer output, and outcomes.

1- TATDMI (The Experiment Mindset)

Aside from a good handful of prayer-fueled miracles, the way that we've been able to blast through building our business at the pace that we have been is a core philosophy of not only how we approach entrepreneurship, but how we live our lives as a whole. It can be summarized in these steps:

1. Set the vision, and make a hypothesis on how to get there
2. Take Action (Run the Experiment)
3. Take Data
4. Make Iterations
5. Repeat step 2-4 until goal is accomplished (and then repeat all the steps again for the next goal)

Or, in a simpler slogan that we repeat a bazillion times in our coaching calls,

"Take Action, Take Data, Make Iterations" (TADMI)

Set the Goal/Make a Hypothesis

First, figure out what you actually want. This can be trickier than one imagines, because either A) We don't know ourselves enough to figure out what an authentic and fulfilled life actually looks like, or B) we're conditioned with a bunch of BS about what we should want instead of letting our soul do the talking.

My goal was to build coaching + retreat business that made both Matthew and I $50,000/month and helping 1,000,000 coaches make a 6-figure income.

The vision will grow and evolve as you do, but you should have a general sense of what you want, and why you want it. When asking yourself why you want it, allow yourself to explore different levels of motivation; for me, building my business was driven by multiple noble, and less-than-noble desires, none of which I held myself back from looking at and accepting:

Personal material:

• Make enough money to provide for my future wife/family, buy land, and have a homestead
• Pay off debts from the harder seasons of my life
• Have freedom to travel and do cool things
• Lead epic retreats so I could spend more time in person rather than just doing all my work from a computer
• Have enough flexibility and freedom of time that I can invest in great production equipment and make banger music that my friends dance to, and write at least 3 books I have cooking in the background

Existential/Spiritual:

• Seed a renaissance by cultivating an army of coaches who become powerful community leaders that reshape society
• Start a ripple effect of healing by equipping capable coaches to create thriving businesses where they help a LOT of people
• Invest 90% of my personal income back into regenerative agriculture initiatives and foster food security for future generations
• Honor the calling that God put on my life, glorifying Him with my success - being able to credit Christ with the things I've accomplished and inspiring others to seek Him

Shadow/Petty:

• Be so successful and prominent in my impact, that the people who hurt and betrayed me felt the sting of regret watching me crush
• Achieve a sufficient level of fame that I can "get away with saying anything", namely my controversial and spicy opinions that I otherwise hold back out of social fear and perception management for my brand
• Make sure than not a single one of my exes is upgrading when they switched over to the next model

I let myself accept the shadow/petty motivations, because if I didn't, they would still linger in my unconscious and leak out in unintegrated ways. They're embarrassing, absurd, come from parts of myself that I absolutely don't let in the driver's seat, but they're a part of my humanity, and get a seat at the table (for more on why I do this, look into Jungian psychology and Internal Family Systems parts work).

Once you've set a vision for yourself, you have to take a crack at figuring out how you're going to get there - and this is where most people get stuck or paralyzed entirely.

Hint: You'll never figure it out entirely. You just need to take enough of a guess to start taking action, and figure it out as you go.

There are better/more efficient ways to figure out the path to your goal; the fastest way, unequivocally, is to hire a mentor who has walked the path before you, helped other people achieve the same result, and get them to show you the way.

But sometimes that's not accessible. Sometimes, you gotta do a little digging on your own, read books, watch videos, and then say "fuck it" and start winging it.

Be aggressive with not letting yourself get stuck here; simultaneously commit to learning everything you can about the topic that you want to learn, while giving yourself a sharp, short deadline (like 3-7 days) of learning just enough to start taking action, trusting that you can learn more as you go.

It's not perfect. It never will be. That's the point - it's iterative, ever-evolving, and emergent over time.

Take Action (Run the Experiment)

Get your hands dirty. Watch a Youtube tutorial, then actually go do it. Try some stuff. Let yourself look stupid. Do it bad, do it awkward, do it scared, do it uncertain, do it insecure, do it with blind confidence, do it tired, do it stoked, do it curiously, do it with no guarantee that anything will come of it -

Just do it.

The spirit behind all the action I take, in every area of my life, is as a curious experiment. I have a guess of how it might go, but the whole point is to find out what happens when I actually do. "FAFO", if you will (Google it if you don't know what it stands for).

The Bhagavad Gita has a quote that I love that goes "you aren't entitled to the fruits of your actions - only the actions themselves".

Start taking action. A lot of it. And then, see what happens.

Take Data

Now, start telling yourself the truth. Don't fudge it or soften the blow for your tender little ego - be as objective as possible about the outcomes and results of your actions.

"You shall know them by their fruits" - even if we're not entitled to the fruits of our actions according to the Gita, Biblically, we're told that everything we do will yield fruits that we can correctly judge the quality of our actions by.

Treat everything like data. The less personal you make this, the more objective you can make it, and the better you can try the next time. If you fail at something, don't turn it into a story about how you're a failure - view it as a successful experiment.

Thomas Alva Edison was not a man who stumbled into genius. He was the kind who bled for it. Born in 1847, half-deaf from a childhood illness, he grew up poor, curious, and stubborn. He sold newspapers on trains and built his first lab in the baggage car. By the time he was an adult, he’d already made and lost several fortunes, and he treated failure like oxygen - not pleasant, but essential for life.

In the 1870s, the world was lit by gas lamps and whale oil. The electric arc lights that did exist were so bright and loud they were used mostly for streets and factories - too harsh for homes. Edison wanted to make a “domesticated sun” - a small, steady flame trapped in glass that any family could afford.

He wasn’t the first to try. Dozens before him had made bulbs that worked - for a few minutes. The filaments burned up. The vacuum wasn’t strong enough. The glass blackened. Electricity wasn’t yet tamed.

Edison, obsessed, built an army of researchers at Menlo Park, New Jersey — what he called his “invention factory.” They tested thousands of materials for filaments: cotton, linen, wood, even the beard hair of one of his assistants.

When a journalist asked him if he was discouraged after so many failures, he famously replied:

It's not failure unless you stop collecting data. And... it's all data.

Make Iterations

With enough new data, you can form new hypotheses. Make tweaks to your approach, try a new angle, see if you can identify the bottleneck, and then keep. Taking. Action.

When we launched our first ad campaign, I had no idea what would resonate. I put up 10 different ads to test. 3 of them crushed, and 7 of them bled money. I took that data, and made more in the same style as the ones that did great.

When you're doing direct reach out to people to see if you can find clients, you'll run into one of four bottlenecks, typically:

1- People don't answer your icebreaker message

2- People don't convert to booked calls when you're having conversations

3- People don't actually show up to the calls that they booked

4- People aren't buying from you on your calls that they do show up to

Any of these "problems" are great data points to make iterations on. You might need a better intro message that inspires getting a conversation going. You might need to learn how to steer the direction of the conversation so that people share their challenges and desires more, so you can find opportunities to help them, and invite them to a call. You might need to set up follow-up systems to remind people that your call is scheduled (because somehow, people survive without using their Google Calendar, lol.) You might need to get a better presentation script so that people see the value of what you're doing, and be more emotionally invested in their own transformation.

But the thing is - you don't know any of what you need to improve if you don't start taking action in the first place. Relentlessly running experiments and pivoting HARD and FAST when you collect data is essential if you want to keep your momentum up.

This doesn't just apply to business - you can run experiments in every area of your life. How do you feel when you eat certain foods? How does journaling at the start of the day versus the end of the day affect your mood? (I found myself overly emotional and introspective when I would journal in the mornings, and it would negatively affect my work). How much more energy do you have when you don't let those uncomfortable conversations you know you have to have linger in the background of your mind all week? How does different music affect your mood?

What's cool about continually making iterations based on data you collect isn't just that you have better results in your endeavors- it's that you start to learn more about your own tastes, preferences, and desires. You become more of yourself as you continually ask "how is this working for me?"

2- Commit to Cultivating Focus

I've written a gazillion words and talked for hours about the importance of cultivating the skill of sustained attention towards your desired aim. The average time it takes a person to drop into a "deep work focused state" is about 20 minutes, and the average person task switches (usually to mindlessly pick up their phone and get that sweet hit of blue light dopamine) every 3-5 minutes. After task switching, it takes about 23 minutes to get back to the original task you'd intended to do.

That means that almost nobody is ever doing real, deep, focused work. The smallest percentage of people ever get into a flow state aside from having sex, which is known to not only be the most productive, but the most euphoric, pleasurable state.

Our modern world is designed for convenience and accessibility of fast entertainment - which over time, conditions our brain to have shorter and shorter attention spans (because it recognizes that there are low-effort ways to get dopamine, and our brains, being wired for survival and energy efficiency, will start to gear us towards fragmented, goldfish-grade attention spans).

The two books that rocked my world when it came down to confronting how decimated my capacity to focus was were James Clear's Atomic Habits, and Cal Newport's Deep Work. Both inspired me to audit my unconscious habits, and start to cultivate the conditions and environment where I could practice the skill of focusing for longer periods of time.

It started with committing to 3 hours of writing every morning, where I would set up 90 minute "monotasking blocks" with a short 15 minute break in between. Years later, when I was exposed to the work of Erick Godsey (who also was deeply impacted by those books), I adopted his monotasking framework of what he calls "Dharma Sprints". This is how you do them:

Default Sprint Length:90 minutes

1. Choose the Next Right Action​
   One tangible task only.*
2. Set the Duration​
   Standard = 90 minutes. Adjust down only if necessary. Increase only as capacity to focus increases (the typical amount a human brain can handle is 3-4 hours before needing a nap and some glycogen)
3. Define Constraints​
   What’s allowed / forbidden? Make it explicit.
4. Sprint​
   Do the task, or meditate. No third option. No task switching.
5. Review​
   Write 2–5 sentences on how it went. Make iterations to improve your next effort.

*Note: Sometimes a sprint can be knocking off things on a to-do list, or you'll have multiple tasks that won't take the entire 90 minute block. What works best for me is to define the exact order you're doing each task in, and play a game to see how quickly you can switch from finishing one task into starting the next.

Examples of Constraints:

• Environment: Phone in another room; water ready; only relevant tabs open.
• Tools: Timer visible; lyric-free music only; paper notebook for notes.
• Behavior: No notifications; no multitasking; breaks only when timer ends.
• Fallback: If urge spikes → breathe for 60 seconds, then return to task.

It's not an understatement that if you commit to cultivating the capacity to do focused, undistracted work every day, you'll have an advantage over 99% of people in the developed world. If you actually think about what a person accomplishes in a standard "8 hour work day", you can probably accomplish as much in an hour of focused effort.

This practice is meditation in motion - it rewires your brain, gives you access to euphoric flow states and lateral thinking, and helps you tap into inordinate amounts of latent potential that you're simply not accessing due to your fragmented, distracted, tech-addicted

This is so important, that I included entire courses in both our paid and free communities in QX. It's the single most important practice that I've ever implemented into my life, bar none.

It also integrates the "TADMI" philosophy by having a review at the end every time. Did something distract you in the middle of your sprint? Did you have to get up and get a glass of water? Did you check your phone and get sucked into a doomscroll portal when you got up to use the bathroom? This is all data to make iterations and improve your next sprint.

Again, I can't understate the importance of this. It's life or death - and if you don't believe me, open up your screentime app, see how many hours you're looking at your phone per day, do the math over a year, and see how much of your life you're squandering to the dopamine circus that is social media.

The Next Experiment

Matthew and I set out a goal to help 3,000 coaches make $10,000 or more in their coaching practice by the end of the year. The next experiment that we're running is by launching a free 3-week group program on November 15th in our Free QX Skool community (which already gives away our whole coaching system for free) that will put people through a 21 day challenge that leads them to getting their next (or first) real high ticket sale.

To get people registered for the event, we're testing the following things:

• Running 10 new ads to promote the program at $200+/day
• Blasting our social media presence WAY harder (we still have to define what that means to test it properly)
• Starting up our podcast again and inviting awesome guests on
• Offering over $61,000 in prizes for the people who complete the entire process

People will be able to register from withing our free community when we make the announcement in a couple of days. It's one of the spiciest, high risk experiments we've run, but we've collected enough data to be confident enough that... we'll get great data from however it goes (LOL)

Wherever you are now, you can start taking action. You can start collecting data. You can make iterations. And you can run the next experiment.

Life is an infinite game - you don't fail unless you stop.

With love and whole lotta stoke,

A