I Know the Formula. I Can’t Make Myself Use It.

The lifestyle-bro playbook works. Here’s why I’m not using it anyway.

I woke up at 9:47 this morning. No alarm. No panic. Just sunlight through the blinds and nowhere I had to be.

Checked my phone. $11,347 in sales overnight. While I slept, a launch sequence I wrote six months ago was still doing its job. I don’t check the dashboard much anymore. The money just... appears.

I made pour-over coffee. Single-origin Colombian from a small sustainable roaster I found on Instagram. Carried it out to my balcony and watched the ocean turn colors for a while. No meetings. No Slack pings. No boss asking if I’d “seen the email.”

Around noon I wrote for maybe two hours. That’s the work. The whole job. Just me, my thoughts, and an email list I built from zero to six figures.

Then I closed my laptop.

Walked to my favorite lunch spot. The one where they know my order. Ate slow. Read a novel the whole afternoon. On a Tuesday.

This is my life now. Not someday. Not retirement. Now.

And it can be yours too. Inside my free masterclass...

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Okay. I need to stop. I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I don’t have a balcony. I don’t have an ocean view. I’ve never made $11,347 in my sleep.

I wrote that while sitting on the crapper. It’s not hard once you know the formula.

The aspirational morning. The passive income flex. The “Tuesday afternoon” freedom porn. The pivot to “and you can have this too” right before the course pitch lands.

I used to write this stuff professionally. I was good at it. I could find your deepest insecurity, poke it with a stick, then sell you the stick just to make the poking stop.

The campaigns converted. The clients were happy. The money was decent.

And I hated myself for it.

Not dramatically. Just a slow erosion. The growing distance between who I was at work and who I wanted to be. The feeling that I was getting very skilled at something I didn’t respect.

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Notice how the money comes out the bottom but the people leave out the sides.

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The nauseating part? It actually works.

But it’s a churn machine. Convert strangers into buyers before they have time to figure out if they actually trust you. Speed. Urgency. “Only 47 spots left.” Buy now before their thinking kicks in.

And then what?

Some percentage refund. Some percentage finish the course and realize it was 90% filler. Some percentage just... disappear. They got what they paid for in the emotional sense. The purchase was the product. The transformation they wanted was the feeling of taking action, not the actual result.

Ka-ching.

So you need fresh leads. Constantly. Your existing list is either exhausted or resentful. You’re not building an audience. You’re strip-mining one.

The lifestyle bros need the hype because they can’t afford to wait. Their whole model depends on converting people fast, before said people wise up.

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There’s another way to do this, though. It’s slower. Less sexy. Harder to screenshot for Twitter.

Instead of converting strangers fast, you let them stick around. You teach publicly. You give away the real stuff, not just the teaser. You let people see how you think before you ever ask for money.

The conversion rate looks worse on paper. Way worse, at first.

But the math changes over time.

Trust compounds. When you finally do sell something, you’re selling to people who already know you deliver. Refund rates drop. Testimonials are real. Word of mouth actually happens because people genuinely got value, not because they’re trying to justify their purchase to themselves.

You’re not racing to convert before they wise up. You’re giving them every reason to wise up, and betting that when they do, they’ll still want what you’re offering.

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Here’s my actual life right now:

I’m in Paraguay. I haven’t had steady income in almost a year. My diet is microwaved potatoes most days. Packet ramen on special occasions. I have a chihuahua named Butters who spends most of the day curled up next to me while I work. He doesn’t ask for much. Neither do I, lately.

I have things I want to sell. Trainings. Courses. Stuff that actually works. I’ve helped clients build systems that generate the kind of income I parodied in the opening. I know the methodology is solid.

I just can’t write the hype posts that would move it faster.

I’ve made the sausage. I can’t unknow how it’s made.

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This applies whether you’re the one selling or the one with your credit card in hand:

What game are you playing?

The churn game looks like this: Big promises. Manufactured urgency. Convert fast, replace faster. The goal is the transaction.

The slow burn looks like this: Teach first. Build trust in public. Let people self-select over time. The goal is the relationship.

Both work. One just requires you to keep finding new strangers forever. The other lets you build something that compounds.

If you’re buying: Notice which game someone is playing before you hand over money. The formula isn’t evil. But it’s designed to get you to act before you think. That should tell you something.

If you’re selling: Ask yourself what you’re optimizing for. Fast conversions or long relationships. There’s no wrong answer. But there’s definitely a wrong answer for you, depending on what you can live with.

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I’m playing the slow game. Partly by principle. Partly because I literally cannot make myself write that drivel anymore.

Maybe that’s naive. Maybe I’ll look back at this post in a year, still eating unseasoned potatoes, and wish I’d just played the game everyone else is playing.

But I don’t think so.

The people I actually want to reach are tired of being manipulated. They can smell the formula. They’ve been burned by the $3,500 "intensive" that was really just Zoom calls and a Notion template.

They want something real. I’m trying to build something real.

Even if it takes longer. Even if I never get that balcony.

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🧉 I’m curious: Have you ever bought something because of a post like the parody above? (No judgment. I’ve fallen for it too.) What made you realize you’d been played? Or are you on the selling side, trying to figure out how to promote your stuff without feeling gross about it? Hit me in the comments.

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Crafted with love (and AI),

Nick “Playing the Long Game on Hard Mode” Quick

PS... If you read that opening and thought “wait, is this real?” for even a second... that’s the formula working. Three minutes to write. Years of pattern recognition to see through. Now you know what you’re looking at. Share this with someone who needs to see through it too.

PPS... Butters says hi. Walk time. He’s earned it. So have I.

PPPS... Not subscribed yet? Good. Take your time. Read a few more posts. Make sure you actually trust me first. That’s kind of the whole point. Subscribe when you’re ready.