After 5 months of being in this community, I finally caught the ICM flu... I didn't catch it the first month--we were just having a good time back then. I didn't catch it the second month, either. Those were the "lego" days, and still long before it would really click. I didn't even catch it when I started a second company 6 weeks ago, that I built after being inspired right here in this community. For 5 months, I was vibe coding. Up late, up early, like a middle schooler with a new video game, like the internet just became a thing for the first time... I thought that was the thick of it. No. Oh no.. No, no, no, no, no, no. There are levels, boys, there are levels... I caught the ICM flu once I made a widget that an actual client used. And then it finally clicked. Software. Agents. Human. You can just build a whole foundation for any company using this method. Which, sure, yes, we know that. But, realizing that once you got it... once you've built that first widget, that first workflow tied to a piece of software you coded and an agent you made, you realize... that's the whole thing. Do it once, do it a thousand times. Recycle, reuse. We're all software developers now, baby! About 2 weeks after it finally clicked, I joined the Lyceum because I understood the value of this finally. It does not matter what you plan to do--these skills transfer to ALL SORTS of things. Software, Agents, Human... just apply it to.... anything! As a side note, I have already received value after the first Lyceum session. I finally can see how I can transform my little house cleaning company into a mega machine and create the dream vision I have for this company. FOR ANYONE THAT SAW MY ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT STARTING A COMPANY... This is going to sound nuts, I know, but Im shutting down the company I just made despite the fact that it's working. I can now see that the greatest play, and most value I can create, is going to come from the company that I have so much experience in already, and not the one that I have limited experience with. My judgements and tastes are strong where I've spent a ton of time already. Really, I have 3 lanes I've spent the majority of my life in, and I've decided I need to see those through at this point because I have way too much specialized knowledge to not do something with it. *And that's the secret sauce.*

I was creating a second version of a pricing engine I built. Claude decided to deploy onto my live site, and then overwrote the local file where the latest updates for that code lived, apparently. The last commit to git was two weeks ago. So, I think I just lost 2 weeks of de-bugging code cause I didn't commit the latest version to git. Is this real? Did I just skip the most important step -- saving my work? This is a real thing, right?

Everything about this video and their use of AI is pure genius for marketing purposes. As a small business owner looking to scale into oblivion, my goal is to have a marketing team this clever. How do I make that happen 😆 ? https://www.threads.com/share/BAC1zWXfOJ/

This is actually about the theory constraints and how to build things that matter. We invest in business education, not because we can't find info online, but because we find it beneficial to walk the path with other people. If I am a catalyst to your business, and you are a catalyst to mine, we both win, and we both made a friend while we walked the path together. Besides community, we join programs so that the instructors can help pull the "aha" moments out of us that unlock our potential. In other words, we invest in education to make us better at seeing the world through a lens of constraints. Let me explain. As per the theory of constraints, a business will grow until it reaches a constraint, and it will only grow again once the constraint has been removed. So if you are an incredible CEO or operator, that's just to say that you are really good at identifying and removing constraints. It's easy to feel like there are 1,000 important things to build and fix in a business at any given time, which is why businesses can become bottlenecked for years or fold. It's pretty darn shocking once you realize how common it is for people to work really hard on many things that don't matter. As an employee, I could never see it, but as an owner, it's a paradigm shift when you're paying people to work on projects alongside you, only to find that the business does not grow despite all of your efforts. Working on the *right* things matters. A lot. Focus and discernment are super powers. If you want to be the best, if you want to win, then you find the constraint and you stick to solving it until it's gone *without getting distracted*. To do this, you have to embrace first-principles thinking, which is just "what is the smallest basic truth about this thing, that could be explained from an evolutionary standpoint" and then building on that small truth. When you think this way, it unlocks the ability to see beyond conventional wisdom and find the cracks in the system (hint: that's where the money is).

I don't want a progress percentage today. I want to know what's actually changing. If you've been working through Building Your Stack, what is one decision you've made because of it? - Maybe you added something. - Maybe you removed something. - Maybe you realized part of your current stack makes absolutely no sense. 😂 Whatever it is, post it below. What did Building Your Stack make you rethink? And if you've been flying through the lessons but skipping the quizzes or accountability posts... Go back. Those are there to make sure you can actually explain and apply what you're learning rather than just consuming it. Drop your biggest realization below. 👇 And keep going. New roadmap next Friday, September 25th.