This Week at a Glance:

• 💡 Mental Model: Inversion Thinking– What happens when you start with what not to do

• 📚 Book Rec: How to Fail Your Way to the Top – Lessons from setbacks that led to success

• 🛠 Builder’s Log: Testing What Sells – My $20 workshop experiment and what I’m learning

Inversion Thinking

Think less about winning. More about not losing.

What is it?

A mental model where you solve problems by thinking in reverse.

Why is it important?

• Reveals blind spots

• Reduces risk

• Easier to avoid failure than chase perfection

How to use it?

1. State your goal

2. Invert it

3. List activities to achieve your inverted goal

4. Avoid those activities

Example:

Goal: I want to be rich.

Inverted Goal: I want to be poor.

Activities to achieve my inverted goal:

• Spend recklessly

• Take on high-interest debt

• Quit working

• Never improve

Avoid these actions, and you’ll be on the right track.

How to Fail Your Way to the Top

Why Scott Adams’ unorthodox playbook might be the most practical guide to winning in real life — even if you suck at first.

When I was a kid, I thought the only way to win at life was to be the best at everything.

Eventually, I learned two things:

1. I would probably never be the best at anything.

2. (Luckily) I didn’t need to be.

That’s why this book hit me so hard. It’s a cheat code for people who want to win without being a genius. Adams flips conventional advice on its head:

• Forget goals — build systems. Goals are for losers. Systems create momentum.

• Skill stacking beats specialization. Be decent at a few valuable things, and you become dangerous.

• Energy > passion. Manage your energy, not your motivation. Passion follows results.

It’s half productivity, half philosophy, all practical. If you want a playbook for turning losses into long-term wins, read this. It’s not sexy — it’s true.

Testing What Sells

Speaking of failing your way to success: Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

I’ve wanted to start a business for a long time—but honestly, I had no idea what I was doing.

Understanding what sells was a mystery to me.

I’ve spent the last year creating content and building an audience—trying to find the overlap between what I care about and what resonates with others.

I thought if I just found the right message, the right content, the right delivery…things would click.

As my content skills developed, I realized: I’m not testing anything people could actually buy.

That’s changing.

I’ve always loved teaching, and investing felt like the most natural thing to build around.

So I tried preselling a course.

Big flop.

Lots of lessons. Most of them obvious…in hindsight.

Now I’m taking a different approach:

✅ Smaller offer
✅ Faster to build
✅ Easier to buy
✅ Better aligned with where people are at

I’m testing a short, high-value investing workshop for $20.

Not trying to build a perfect product—just trying to answer one question:

“Will someone pay for this?”

This is the shift from creator to entrepreneur.

Let’s see what happens.

Wish me luck,

—Dakota