Story time! I grew up in a fairly small desert town in central California called Ridgecrest, CA. About 20,000 people. And if you were a kid growing up there your main goal in life was to escape it! 115°F in the summer. High winds. And nothing to do in town except go to the bowling alley and hangout at Denny’s. As you approach the town on the main highway there is a giant billboard welcoming you to the town. One of the big draws to the town is that it’s on the way to Death Valley, a beautiful national park. So the capitalize on this, the giant billboard read: RIDGECREST “Gateway to Death Valley” So of course some clever kid drove out to the sign. Climbed it and crossed out “Valley”, so it had more accurate slogan: I’ll never forget driving home being welcome by: “Gateway to Death” 😆 Got a hometown story to share?

(Asking for a friend)

Yeah, for most beginners, the ʻukulele is the easier on-ramp compared to guitar: it’s smaller, it’s only four soft nylon strings (way nicer on your fingers), and the chord shapes are usually simpler, so you can start playing real songs faster. But, once you get into advanced stuff, that “easy” advantage shrinks, it can get just as technical as anything else. We learn this easy to learn, hard to master instrument in my community, Ukulele Nerds. VIP AD approved by @Jack Robinson aka Charlie West

I'm going to start brain dumping my biggest mistakes every Sunday so that you guys can avoid them and make faster progress on your Skools. This week, these were my 7 biggest mistakes: 1. Fake focus I tell myself that I want to build 1000 top 1% communities in 2026, but this week I was still everywhere instead of focusing on the one thing that matters: testing systems and formulas that create top 1% communities. Definition of distraction: anything that does not solve the #1 constraint. I was distracted. 2. Badly timed YouTube videos I came out with two YouTube videos this week because I want to increase my marketing efforts. This was the wrong choice. When it comes to marketing, you need to follow the formula of More, Better, New. My best marketing is responding to DMs because that gets me on the most discovery calls. It is my highest leverage marketing. Therefore, I need to do more responding to DMs until I physically can’t do any more. Then and only then can I focus on responding to DMs better. Only after I have exhausted both More and Better can I move onto New, aka YouTube videos. Symptom of distraction. 3. No sales script I run a business. I sell my services/offers to make money. No shit. Somehow, because I’m charismatic and good at asking questions, I convinced myself that I don’t need a sales script. That is beyond stupid. You need to be able to breathe your script so that you can actively listen during a conversation. I found multiple points this week where I was on a call with someone and thinking about something else instead of what they were saying. I 100% lost sales because of this. Such is life. We move on. 4. No sleep Working until 1 to 2 AM seems heroic/awesome. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re super cool and you’re outworking everybody so you must deserve success more than anybody else. Bullshit. There were multiple days this week where I was a literal zombie. That is because I didn’t sleep enough. The ROI on 90 minutes of extra sleep beats three hours of extra work every. single. time.

From an outsider perspective, is your life healthier now that you are always on Skool? Or less healthy?