Dear Permission to be Powerful reader,
I’m swimming across the ocean.
The Atlantic AND the Pacific...
The whole thing.
Nonstop.
It’s fucking nuts.
I could drop dead of exhaustion.
I caught myself a case of depression.
It’s really bad.
But I won’t stop.
Morning.
Noon.
Night.
Because I must learn how to endure.
For two years.
It’s the biggest project of my career.
By far.
WAY bigger than anything I did for Tony Robbins.
Working 7 days per week for more than one year.
I’m so fucking tired, y’all.
I don’t have time for drama.
If you aren’t a good part of my life.
If I don’t benefit from having you around.
I am absolutely not interested.
Because there’s no time to waste.
You don’t drag your feet when you’re swimming around the world.
You become as streamlined as possible.
Down to the cellular level.
Coming to the Rochester Zen Center is crucial to my plan.
No more wasting my time thinking about bills...
Or anything else at all...
I’ve been stuck in solitary confinement for two years.
Y’all.
After Tony Robbins fired me, I was MAD.
BIG MAD.
I’m STILL mad.
You HAVE to be.
How mad?
Mad enough to plot your revenge in an actual monastery.
Mad enough to go broke.
Say goodbye to all your friends…
To burn down your entire life.
And that old life was fun as hell.
This one SUCKS.
It flipped an irreversible switch in my head.
I’d rather starve.
Go hungry…
Back to square one.
Rethink everything.
Because the cost would be death...
And surprise—there’s a deadline.
You have to make peace with your own demise.
It’s the only way to make it through nonstop torture.
I’ve been eating shit, y’all.
I’d rather suffer than tolerate this shit.
Never again.
Not one more client.
I’m the boss.
Fuck getting fired…
I willingly liquidated my whole life.
Moved out of my apartment.
Became a janitor.
A Buddhist monk…
Dishwasher…
Groundskeeper…
I gave up running.
Dancing.
Dating.
Because I’m going for it.
I went to food banks to save money.
When you’re this mad…
This insane…
You’ll swim around the fucking world.
It will be horrible.
Miserable.
Exhausting.
You’re NEVER going to get salt out of your mouth.
Yet, you must learn how to keep going when you’re cooked.
You must stay in the crucible until rock turns into diamond.
Put your full psyche into one thing.
It’ll drive you mad…
I can’t tell you how many times I thought…
This is it…
I’m finished.
How many times I cried in my car while listening to my Bachata playlist.
Because I was building a recession-proof business.
I had to take control of EVERY aspect of this thing.
Make it as durable as possible.
I had to figure out how to stay protected from every strange creature that might eat me.
Outsmart every one of them.
Scare the sharks away… with just vibes…
I have developed a ridiculous center of gravity around this project.
Like a black hole.
I dropped off the map.
My friends are doing welfare checks.
I’ve been in hell so long…
I’m the fucking Devil.
But I’ve done something remarkable.
I built this AI machine.
It commands an army of 107,000 soldiers.
And growing.
It runs itself…
It programs itself.
It’s almost free.
I had to grow gills.
Do you know how hard it is to grow gills?
And that was just the beginning.
If you figure out how to slow your metabolism to bare minimum…
You’ll need less food to survive.
Calories in, calories out.
I applied every trick I learned over 20 years.
No matter how far back I learned it.
Like when I learned how to upsell by asking my prospects…
“Would you like me to clean those eavestroughs along with your windows?”
Or when I learned about dropshipping in China as a college student.
That taught me that controlling your costs brings stability to the business.
Imagine a machine that’s only built from free open source software.
And every expense I can’t eliminate, I grind down to the bare minimum.
I wanted to optimize the shit out of this machine.
Eliminate as much friction as possible.
Which meant first and foremost, I would never abandon my core skillset, which is copywriting.
So I’m always leading with my super power.
I know how to excite.
To mesmerize…
To beautify…
I spent 15 years writing.
Don’t ever stray from that.
Now’s not the time to figure out how to be comfortable on camera.
Which is why I’ve put off starting a YouTube channel.
You don’t want to be learning your ABCs the night before the SATs.
You must prepare.
Work with everything you’ve got.
Rethink every point of failure.
Because if you don’t…
It’s lights out.
Belly up.
I was in a race against time.
I was so poor…
I felt like I had played a game of strip poker that went too far.
I was in my birthday suit.
You can’t care.
Because that would waste calories.
You must swim in your sleep.
Or rest by hitching a ride on the back of a humpback whale.
Develop skin that never burns...
Sungaze for food…
Or, eat plankton like the whales do…
These are the only abundant resources available.
And I don’t have time to stop to eat.
Some people will say this is fake.
It can’t be done.
But here I am, daring to be the first.
You will face countless odds…
And you will slay every serpent.
And, you can never stop
You must.
It’s the only way.
But, when you finally get to the finish...
Like Odysseus after 20 years at sea...
You’ll be stronger than every obstacle.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
Permission to be Powerful
