Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,
Follow these instructions to the letter.
Here’s my request:
I want to know why you read this blog.
Tell me in the comments.
I can only speculate.
But there isn’t much time.
We were at 88,000 subscribers to my new mystery list.
We’re now closing in on 100,000.
But that may not be good enough.
There’s basically no time left.
There’s no manual for how to manage a list of this size.
I’m figuring things out as I go.
I’ve made big, dumb mistakes.
I’m taking risks that may not pan out.
But…
As I was saying before…
I retired from freelancing after Tony Robbins fired me.
That was the last straw.
Every single client is always the same.
I’m done placing my faith in other people.
I’m done waiting for people to do what’s right.
What’s fair.
What’s respectful.
I’m not waiting for these hooligans to give me recognition for the hard work I’ve contributed to my field.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.
I’m not saying fuck freelancing for everybody.
Just me.
Freelancing is a GREAT starter business:
You’re broke.
You have no network.
You have no experience.
Freelancing will give you connections and experience very quickly.
The problem is that it’s a shitty business model.
There’s no leverage.
Some freelancers seem to be eating well.
But the weaknesses of the model are unjustifiable after a point.
In other words:
Pay your dues.
Then get the fuck out and build a smarter business.
If you can survive among crooks and thieves as long as I have…
You’ll learn.
I got very good with people.
I learned how to wine and dine.
How to get into a client’s head.
How to make them feel important.
Like my number one priority.
Juggling Tony Robbins with other clients
felt like multiple girlfriends competing for attention.
My biggest mistake was letting it slip that I had other clients.
Sounds weird.
But every client wants to be your number one.
Nobody likes sloppy seconds.
These people put me through it.
In short:
I went through hell…
Until I became the Devil.
I became the mythic copywriter they whisper about.
The one who could massage a headline just right.
Spin a new angle out of thin air.
Spot the hidden weaknesses in ads and sales pages that were quietly costing clients a fortune.
It’s sick.
I started on Elance in 2011.
I was so hungry that year, I weighed 169 pounds.
I’m 198 today.
I rotated three food banks to keep myself fed.
I rationed food.
I worked around the clock out of my bedroom.
In the afternoons, I went to a beat-to-shit public library.
Broken chairs.
Fluorescent lights.
Wi-Fi that dropped every ten minutes.
One day, a woman at the public computer next to me couldn’t figure out how to log in.
She had a full-on nervous breakdown.
Crying. Shaking. Talking to herself.
The librarians had to come over and calm her down.
I’m sitting in the corner trying to write a sales page that might decide whether I eat that week…
This is what my office looked like:
I had five roommates.
I slept in my closet and used my bedroom as my office.
I furnished it with junk the local college kids left on the street.
That’s the environment I learned to perform in.
Three years in, when I finally landed Ramit Sethi,
it was the first time in my adult life I could actually:
Rent a decent apartment.
Feed myself.
Have enough left over to eat at a restaurant once a week.
I still didn’t have a car.
I was still taking the bus as a college graduate.
When Ramit fired me, I blamed myself.
I locked myself in a room for three days.
Didn’t leave.
I wanted to die.
I thought it was over.
I thought I’d never get another real client again.
I thought I was going back to Elance hell for good.
Back to the people who nickel-and-dimed me.
I worked with so many lunatics during those years.
Those were some dark times.
I didn’t even realize how many of them were scammers.
I was hungry.
I was trying to keep the lights on.
One food bank in particular sticks with me.
Every other Wednesday.
Noon.
Grocery bags in my hands.
Standing in line for an hour or two.
Waiting for:
Tuna.
Six eggs.
Cereal.
Milk.
Produce that was a day from being thrown out.
That whole afternoon gone just to get food.
Because I couldn’t yet figure out how to charge enough to live.
That’s what it took just to stay in the game.
But I’m also the most tenacious motherfucker on earth.
I had a third-world disadvantage.
It became my secret weapon.
Most of these people wouldn’t last a day in St. Lucia.
This is nothing compared to the poverty I grew up in.
But I also crossed paths with remarkable people.
New York Times bestsellers.
Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs.
Brilliant minds.
Experts in their fields.
Charlatans alike.
My first big client was Ramit Sethi in 2015.
I beat out 200 other copywriters for that gig.
It was a big deal at the time.
People was talking about me on forums.
I couldn’t even legally work in the U.S. back then.
Unbeatable will got me there.
Here’s the part that only hit me recently:
Ramit paid me five thousand dollars a month.
Ten years ago.
When I was still relatively new.
Fast forward to Tony Robbins.
After everything.
After Agora.
After Neil.
After going toe-to-toe with the best.
After thousands of hours and battle scars.
After proving I could generate millions.
I was still working for the same damn five thousand per month.
Let that sink in.
Yes. I had several clients. But symbolically, I think that matters.
I was still grinding for the same amount ten years later.
I asked for a raise.
And I was fired.
Sight unseen.
Blackballed.
Publicly humiliated.
After I had just finished making them millions of dollars.
Apparently, you can work for the best in the world…
And still be told you haven’t paid enough dues.
That you’re “ungrateful”…
“Entitled”...
For DARING to have any aspirations above poverty.
Everyone else had already taken credit for my work.
Everyone else had gotten their Christmas bonus.
I was still hungry.
No benefits.
No vacation pay.
No 401k.
Definitely no training.
Nothing.
Ramit introduced me to Neil Patel.
Neil was the first real genius I apprenticed under.
Three years.
They gave me every job nobody else wanted.
I had terrible boundaries.
I was hopelessly codependent with my clients.
They ran my life.
The one and only time Neil ever acknowledged that he knew I existed…
It was over a Zoom call that I agreed to take at three am.
Three am.
That’s how eager I was to get close to power.
I sold myself just like a cheap prostitute.
But I learned a fuck-ton.
After Neil, I was a true professional.
Neil didn’t last either.
His crooked business partner picked a fight with me.
I was happy to move on.
Bittersweet.
Being around these people makes you feel larger than life.
They’re grandiose.
Self-made entrepreneurs make you believe anything is possible.
Sometimes they’re right.
But the ethics of these organizations was another story.
Unlucky for them, I have the moral clarity of a phoenix.
I always hated saying, “I’m a copywriter.”
Because copywriters are damn liars.
Most of them.
I’m many things.
But I don’t lie.
I hate lying.
My father is a pathological liar.
I chose the opposite.
The other part came in my early 20s when I read Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton.
I didn’t just like the book.
I read all of his work.
Even his ridiculous autobiography.
That man has lived a life.
An unconscionable amount of sex.
I remember thinking:
I don’t know if it’s all the sex…
But this was a hell of a sales pitch, for what it’s worth.
More importantly, it changed how I lived.
In college, I cheated on my girlfriend.
I sat on that lie for a year.
The guilt ate me alive.
Eventually, I came clean.
From that point on, I made a commitment to myself to be honest.
Then I became a copywriter.
Oh, the irony.
Here’s a quirk of capitalism I discovered:
Almost every internet marketer I’ve met
Conflates making money with being moral.
See how much money I made?
I must be good.
I must be right.
At Agora, the legal department is as big as the copy team.
Why do you need an army of lawyers to cover copy?
Because they’re lying.
Agora produces some of the best copywriters in the business.
They were my Moby Dick.
I hunted them.
They laughed me out of the room more than once.
In 2018, I flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, to apprentice under another well-known A-list copywriter.
I had to borrow money from a friend for the plane ticket.
Copywriters talk about writing out old controls by hand.
I put more hours in than anyone I know.
I had boxes and boxes of legal pads filled from end to end.
That’s why my writing slaps.
After Agora, I was dangerous.
But Agora was evil.
Like…
Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, evil.
I wrote about that before.
Actually, before I get to Tony, I have to talk about Dylan.
The only truly good client I’ve ever had.
He deserves his own post.
He’s one interesting motherfucker.
“That was the first time I saw a man get killed.”
Those were real words that came out of Dylan’s mouth when he flew me down to Delray Beach, Florida to work out of his office.
That man is the only one who ever treated me with real respect.
Here’s something I learned about Delray, Florida.
It’s like the scam capital of America.
Call centers.
Automated bullshit.
1-800 lies.
There are people in this world who will say anything to get you to part with your money.
Some of them have studied this craft so deeply that if you really understood how advanced their tactics are, you’d get instant diarrhea.
I was already great when I left Agora.
Certifiably.
I worked with Satan.
But Satan taught me well.
It was the best education money could never buy.
Dylan gave me the tools to become a true master.
If I’m Mike Tyson…
He was my Cus D’Amato.
One interesting thing about Cus was…
He saw Mike when he was still just a boy…
And they planned to make Mike number one from the very beginning.
There was no “wait and see” period.
This is happening.
“I’m going to make you the heavyweight champ.”
And he did.
Agora fired me while I was going through a divorce.
Classy.
Dylan found me burned out.
He put me on retainer.
My only job:
Write one 8-line email per day.
I was usually done well before noon every day.
Spent most of the day at the park.
And at night, I explored Rochester.
Usually that looked like salsa dancing and women.
Those were the days.
The catch?
Those eight lines had to be strong enough to slap the demons out of you.
That’s where my voice sharpened.
That’s where I became a true master of my craft.
In an industry full of predators, Dylan was decent to me.
He invested in me.
He kept his promises.
And he mentored me way better than anyone ever did at Agora.
Then came Tony Robbins.
I can’t tell you how massive it was to work for Tony.
I idolized the man.
I listened to Tony everyday when I was a starving freelancer.
And then here I was stepping into his shoes…
And giving him MY voice.
Tony was orders of magnitude bigger than any client I’d ever written for.
Simply wrapping my mind around the size of the this man’s organization took months.
One day my copy chief slipped…
“By the way, we used that headline you wrote for us on a billboard in Times Square.”
I would be talking strategy with the team one minute.
Telling them how to fix their messaging.
And then I’d see Tony on CNN that night pushing our promotion to millions.
It was like this…
I spent my whole career struggling in one dark dungeon after another…
And then one day, someone finally let me outside…
And it was fucking Wimbledon outside.
I wrote the words that printed millions in cash.
And now…
I just cleaned out my last account.
It won’t cover my credit card.
It buys me a few more months.
That’s the truth.
I have a gigantic email list.
Taming this beast is harder than you might think.
Here’s a dirty industry secret:
Most people think that influencers with big followings are lucky.
They’re somehow special, that’s why millions of people listen to them.
That’s almost never how it happens.
In marketing, we call it, “Customer Acquisition for a reason.”
How did I grow the list?
Only paid members will ever know.
But, I couldn’t do it the traditional way.
Too expensive.
And Facebook ads make me want to gouge my eyes out every time I log into the business manager.
I’m figuring out the ropes that always kept me beholden to my clients.
I’m finally cutting out the middle man.
But in order for me to make the transition…
After Tony Robbins fired me, I knew I would have to use every lesson I learned over the past 15 years to pull this off.
I turned away all of my clients.
I lived off my royalties and savings until both dried up.
I lasted a year and a half.
I went back to food banks like the old days to save money.
To put every penny I had into my new venture.
And, it’s WORKING.
This list is responsive.
But it’s also like wrangling down a bucking bronco
like I’m some kind of rodeo cowboy.
I spent so long around the gurus…
I figured out everything the gatekeepers always tried to keep hidden from my view.
It’s the infrastructure I always thought I needed clients for.
But, like I said…
All of that may not matter.
Because I’m almost out of money, out of runway, out of time.
Either way, I’m not going back.
And now, I think you’re finally starting to understand why.
So, now, it’s your turn to keep your promise.
Write me a comment explaining why you like reading Permission to Be Powerful.
It would help me understand you much more.
And, if you feel so compelled, please consider supporting my work as a paid subscriber.
Thank you.
Until next time,
Tony.
Editor in Chief.
Permission to be Powerful
