Learning the Wrong Lesson

Every Friday, we share strategies to help you grow your business and generate more leads with content marketing.

This week, I share a lesson learned (and relearned) the hard way. Hopefully it saves you some pain and suffering in your business journey.

Enjoy 👇

Over the average year, most marketers I know do not live 12 different months. 

They repeat the same one month 12 times. 

Every few weeks, 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 marketing 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.” Wrong. 20 minutes of trying does not mean “AI can’t write good content.” It means that you have not figured out how to get AI to write good content.

Do not draw a permanent (misguided) verdict from such a tiny experiment.

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

Now you’ve created a crooked map of cause and effect, which means you will navigate the next 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. 

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

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. 

You sent one measly newsletter and expect a packed calendar.

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.

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:

Be humble and patient enough to actually listen.

Don’t spend the next year learning 1 lesson 12 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. 

I assure you every channel CAN work. But only if you stick with it.

~ Happy Friday,

Louis

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(this originally appeared as a guest post for The AI Report on October 14th, 2025)