Stop Learning the Wrong Lesson

Stop Learning the Wrong Lesson

Over the average decade, most business owners I know do not live ten different years. 

They live one year ten times. 

Every quarter they hit a wall, restart from a new angle, and hit the same wall again. “LinkedIn doesn’t work.” “Cold email doesn’t work.” “Ads don’t work.” 

The most dangerous thing in business is drawing the wrong lesson from failure. When something flops, the hasty conclusion is, this thing does not work. The accurate conclusion is, I have not figured out how to make it work yet. 

The same reflex shows up with AI. “AI can’t write good content.” Usually that means 20 minutes of trying and a permanent (misguided) verdict.

Your mind is a model of how the world works. Every wrong conclusion corrupts this model. 

You start drawing crooked maps of cause and effect, which means you will navigate the next business experiment with the wrong directions.

Alex Hormozi tells a story that nails this. A mentor told him to use flyers to promote his gym. He put out 300, got nothing, and declared failure. The mentor asked how many he printed. When Alex shared that he only did 300, the mentor laughed him out of the room, explaining that he does 5,000 a day. 

Same tactic, different dosage. Different outcomes. 

The issue was not flyers. It was the rep count and the expectation.

So my plea to you, before throwing in the towel, is to answer these questions honestly. 

• How many cold emails did you actually send? 
• How many prompts did you try before you gave up on AI helping with a task? 

Often, beginners mistakenly think their effort level was off by 50%, meaning that if they worked twice as hard or tried twice as long, they’d have had a successful outcome. 

But the actual amount of effort required was 20-200x more than they tried.

You attempted a task for 20 minutes, when it required 2,000. 

You tried 3 prompts when you should’ve tried 170. 

This is called a failure of imagination. A beginner’s mind doesn’t even come close to arriving at the right number. These poor expectations set them up for failure. So how do you fix this?

Bring an expert into your corner to recalibrate your expectations. And if you can’t afford a human expert, use AI as the next best option.

Ask something like “You are an expert at (topic), highly experienced at (thing), what’s a reasonable level of effort to expect (outcome) from (activity)?” 

Be humble and patient enough to actually listen.

Don’t spend the next decade learning 1 lesson 10 times. 

World class athletes use coaches. World class executives hire consultants. 

Stop repeating the same silly patterns. Fix the way you interpret outcomes, change your inputs, and finally break the endless plateau. 

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