It's been pure struggles.

Or "Why I haven't put out a dang book yet... and why it ain't coming anytime soon."🙃

Dear reader of my stuff,

No new Reddit article to announce today. Nothing to pitch.

I’ve just… I’ve just been thinking.

It’s time for me open up to you a little; let you in on my situation. Give you a glance at what I’m up to, what’s going on in my brain, and what, as the subject line teased, I’ve been struggling with lately.

This will be new to me. I’ve always assumed you wouldn’t particularly care about me. If you open these emails it’s ‘cause you’re looking to gain some useful insights; not because you’re hoping for an update on how my dog is doing.

He’s great, btw. Thanks for asking.

No. I’m just realizing you could seriously benefit from knowing a little about me. Bits of my story could have a positive impact on you, especially if you’ve been struggling with a creative or entrepreneurial pursuit as I have.

Honestly, if all it does is knock me off the pedestal you may have placed me on—the one reserved for the perfect productivity guru… the guy who was once in your shoes, but who figured everything out —that would be perfectly fine.

Because, as you’ll see, I haven’t figured it all out. I’m still walking in your shoes. Yes, I’ve figured out a lot over the years, but “a lot” is damn nothing compared to the infinite horizon of everything. So I continue to slip and falter and fail and let myself down. And that’s ok.

…

Alright. Where to start?

Well, I’m not about to give you my life story (everything in due time I suppose), so for now let’s just pop the seal of my personal stuff. Let’s go with what I’ve been up to.

At the end of 2021—so a bit more than a year ago—I decided to leave my day job as a civil engineer.

By then, I had this email list already going and I had been posting pretty regularly to Reddit during my spare time. I had enough nudges from readers to validate the notion that, if I decided to focus on this endeavor full-time, it might actually bare fruit (i.e. earn me a decent living). So, with the blessings and firm nudge (or was it a push?) of my then-girlfriend now-wife, I decided to take the leap.

It felt great. It felt right.

First order of business: write the damn book! Take the Habit Reframe Method and pad it out until, when printed into a hardcover and stacked a dozen or so high, would find it’s place next to the other stacks of bestselling self-help books at the entrance of my local bookstore.

You gotta dream in specifics.

I managed to squeezed out a rough draft by April of 2022. I proceeded, for the remainder of the year, to scrap, rework, and fuss over this draft and several others. I couldn’t land on anything I was happy with; with what I knew in my gut needed to be out there in the world, ready for mass consumption.

Everyone was insisting it was just perfectionism. That I had that this understandable aversion towards putting myself out there; of being vulnerable to criticism—or worst, crickets.

But that wasn’t it. Not entirely anyway.

The truth was, and I was concealing my book to everyone because, well, the “method”, the core offering of the book, it just wasn’t done. It wasn’t sellable yet. It just a prototype, still unable to solve the one problem is was designed to solved.

The method had yet to “fix” me. It had yet to solve my problems with vices; with procrastination, consistency and a crushing lack of motivation. It hadn’t improved the way I lived; not to the level I desperately wanted for myself.

Truth was, 2022 was a tough. Yes, there were times where I was applying the prescribed processes of the method and where all was well, but it was never all that long before I’d get triggered, and I’d fall back to my old coping mechanisms. It wasn’t long until failed.

By the fall, I began to feel like I should give up. That was the only ethical thing to do. If my “method” couldn’t even help me, how the heck would it help others?

It wouldn’t. I’d be selling an empty promise. A defective product. I’d be fraud. A scammer.

There was just no way I could release it to the world. So I never did.

…

Turns out, I needed to struggle.

I put myself in arguably the most difficult of circumstances of our modern times in terms of motivation and taking action.

I was a tech addict… with a fully blanked out schedule… sitting, day after day, in a quiet room with high-speed internet… with just a vague desire to reach success by creating a thing and selling it online.

I was doomed to fail. There was ZERO chance I’d be perfect. So I slipped and failed again and again.

But you know what? I needed to go through these cycles because I needed to figure out how someone in this specific circumstance could, against all odds, gain a semblance of discipline, self-control, focus and consistency.

I needed a solid year of set-backs, struggles and frustrations. I needed a year of wrestling it out with my vices, day after day, jab after jab after right hook after upper cut.

I needed, at end of it all, to come away with a way, a dang method, to come out on top.

I finally have it.

Yep, I still have the remnants of a fat lip and a black eye, but for real, I have it now.

The method, which at the start of 2022 was all theoretical, full of holes and all over the place, has now congealed into something solid. Something ready to be shared.

It’s frigging crazy what’s actually required to be able to be productive and consistent when you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck, but let me tell you, it is possible. The fact that I’m writing these words is proof.

…

Where do I go from here?

Well, I was quite hesitant to go down the book path again. I didn’t want to get bogued down again with the minutia of sentence structure and syntax. I want to avoid going through round after round of edits and rewrites. Writing a decent book is 10x harder and 100x more time and resource consuming than I originally anticipated, and I honestly don’t feel ready for it.

More importantly though, the method isn’t ready for it. It first needs to be put out into the wild; to be battle tested and battled hardened with real people and their real problems, ambitions, and limitations. Not just mine.

To that end, I’m now working hard on a video course. You might cringe at that given the vibe of the countless click-baity, scammy courses you see advertised on social media, but I’m determined to be different. I’m committed to ensuring that the background theory is clear and concise. That the steps are focused and easy to implement. That the promised transformations will actually stick.

In a year or so, once all the creases of the method are ironed out, once I have series of case studies to point to, then, yeah, I’ll boot up the old word processor and rewrite the book. For now, I just need to get the method out and into your hands as fast as possible, and to do all I can to support you applying it.

To that effect, video is king.

…

So that’s where I’m at now. I’m still in the early-ish phase of things, but things should be developing in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be keeping you in the loop as I progress.

Until then, stay well.

Simon ㋛

PS. I don’t know how many of you will read this ‘til the end, but if you made it this far, please let me know! I sincerely want to connect and know your thoughts. Just hit reply.

I’ll also be doing a pre-launch soon with limited seats since I’ll be pairing it with free 1 on 1 support, so let me know if you want me to add you to my list. ✌️

---