you're smart enough

Every Friday, we share strategies to help you level up your sales, marketing, and lead gen.

Today… I rant.

Enjoy 👇

I’ve been using Readwise.io for 7 years.

The service automatically syncs all of the highlights from my Kindle onto an iPhone app where I review 10 quotes per day.

On the surface, it’s a great way to burn my favorite business wisdom into the deep trenches of my mind.

But going a layer deeper, it reinforces an important “meta-lesson” every day.

Every morning goes like this:

The quest for “more knowledge” is a cancerous excuse to delay taking action.

A comfortable lie to avoid the pain of trying (and maybe even failing - how terrible!)

Someone might even make fun of you (catastrophic!)

I don’t know each of you personally, but assuming you’re a business owner with a few customers and any degree of customer retention, let me remind you of a few things

But the question is, “are you bold enough?”

Robert Kiyosaki also famously popularized that “A students work for C students”

I think he’s almost right.

It’s not that “A students work for C students”

It’s that smart people work for bold people.

Starting a business, getting customers, creating content, etc.

None of this stuff is terribly complicated. But it is intimidating at first.

You might waste money.
You might get told no.
You might experience bouts of severe stress and anxiety.
You might embarrass yourself.

All of those things are super unpleasant.

But what’s your alternative?

Bitterness? Regret? Poverty?

Intelligence won’t help here. Boldness is the cure.

Another favorite quote in my morning Readwise rotation comes from Dan Martell.

“Winners lose more than losers.”

Losing isn’t losing.

Not trying is losing.

Reading Digital Gravity for months but never publishing any content of your own is losing.

Losing to fear is losing.

Trying (even unsuccessfully) is a step on the path towards winning.

Intelligence won’t help here. Boldness is the cure.

One (dare I say) life-changing secret of the entrepreneurial/marketing world is that only losers hate on you for looking dumb online.

I’ve only ever been made fun of by people behind me, never once by someone ahead.

Successful people rarely punch down.

The criticism you most fear will only come from insecure losers.

Anyone who makes fun of you for a LinkedIn post with 0 likes or a YouTube video with 7 views is a loser.

Anyone in the arena will respect you for being in the arena and likely offer some ideas to help you succeed.

You don’t need Readwise to recycle business-guru-isms at you 10x per day.

You need to carve out 30 seconds of silence to meditate on this question:

“Would I be further ahead if I was smarter or bolder?”

And don’t run away from the answer.

—

Take a damn risk 😉

Louis

P.S. All rants are best interpreted as a “note to self” that I felt compelled to share in the event it helps someone else too.

An email marketing agency owner friend of mine is hiring an Ops Lead:

He’s looking for a “sharp, systems-obsessed operator to run the business behind the founder. You'll take problems off the founder's plate and turn ambiguity into working systems — documenting how things run, building the processes, and making sure initiatives actually ship instead of dying half-built.”

Reply to this email if you’d like more info!

An accounting agency friend of mine needs help generating leads for his CFO and FP&A practice. Ideally on a pay-per-qualified-meeting basis.

Reply to this email if you’d like more info!

We’re in the process of rebranding from Orbit Marketing to Moat Newsletters.

Holy guacamole, there are a lot of details to sort out in a rebrand.

Logos, hyperlinks, old YouTube descriptions, CRM automations. Lots of fun chasing down the details.

We’ll have more to say about this soon, but I figured it was worth a “super soft rebrand teaser” to familiarize folks with the new name while our digital footprint is still in a hybrid cleanup state.