Hey there...

So as you probably have hear...read me say a gazillion times...

In 2019, I had the best financial year of my life.

For the first time, we crossed ₦1 billion in revenue.

I was running four companies.

One of them had more than 4,000 paying subscribers.

I had built a community filled with some of the most recognised experts in the country.

People trusted me.

Business was good.

And I got cocky.

Within months, I was ₦1.5 billion in debt.

Think about that for a moment.

My biggest financial success and my biggest financial failure happened almost on top of each other.

For a long time, the easiest explanation would have been:

I made a bad investment.

I expanded too quickly.

Customers stopped renewing.

Cashflow collapsed.

All true.

But none of them is the most important part of the story.

Because if that were the whole explanation, another question becomes difficult to answer:

How did I get out of ₦1.5 billion in debt in less than nine months?

I didn't suddenly become smarter.

I didn't discover a secret source of money.

Nobody woke up one morning and decided to forgive the debt.

And the economy did not rearrange itself for my benefit.

Something else changed.

#pausingfordramaticeffect

Over the years since then, I've kept returning to that period of my life and asking myself:

What was actually producing the results?

I know for a fact it wasn't my circumstances.

Why did one set of actions produce the collapse?

Why did another set produce the recovery?

And what I've come to believe is this:

The results are rigged.

Not "rigged" in the sense that somebody somewhere has decided your fate.

Rigged in the sense that every outcome has an architecture.

There are a critical few things that make some results increasingly likely and others increasingly difficult.

Change those things and the result can change.

Ignore them and you can work extremely hard while continuing to reproduce the same outcome.

That was one of the biggest lessons of those nine months.

Before that experience, I was much more interested in hustle.

Do more.

Work harder.

Push.

Afterwards, I became fascinated by a different question:

What are the critical few things actually rigging this result?

That question eventually led me to five variables.

Five things I now look for whenever I want to understand why an outcome is happening...

and what might need to change to produce another one.

This week, I want to unpack those five things with you using my Bounce Back conversation as the case study.

Not because I want you to admire the comeback.

(though you've gotta admit it's pretty cool)

#sipscoffee 😎

That would be a waste of the story.

I want you to begin looking at your own results differently.

Your business.

Your sales.

Your clients.

Your health.

Your work.

Your relationships.

Your practice.

Whatever outcome matters to you.

Because perhaps the most useful question isn't:

Why is this happening to me?

It's...

What is currently rigging this result?

Till tomorrow...

Be dangerously useful

Get out of your own way

CTM

P.S. If you didn't watch the full Bounce Back conversation last week or you'd like to watch it again with this distinction in mind-here's the episode:

[WATCH THE BOUNCE BACK EPISODE]

P.P.S. Something else has been taking shape around this work.

This Saturday, October 3rd, from 4pm-7pm, I'm running a very small WayTools Workshop.

The idea is simple:

You already know things that help produce valuable outcomes.

What if some of that expertise could be turned into a tool other people could actually use?

We'll be working with the WayTool Factory™ (it's a waytool for creating waytools) to do exactly that.

I'm keeping the first room to 10 people.

Four places are already taken.

I'll tell you more about it this week.

But if you already know you want one of the remaining six seats, reply to this email with WAYTOOLS.