If you’re so smart, why can’t you make money on the internet

A hard conversation that'll wake you the hell up

Image credit-midjourney

I’ve never shared this. I was offered a job working directly for Tony Robbins.

I spent weeks thinking it over. Then I said no. Yes, I’d be on the road hanging out with my biggest hero alongside people like Jay Shetty and Gary Vaynerchuk – but the hard truth I knew deep down is I’d be living in his shadow.

Instead of using my skills to become a leader in my own right and make money on the internet, I’d become one of Tony’s many minions and never have a family. That’s right, I’d be on the road all year, flying from country to country.

It would have been glamorous as hell, but good luck finding a wife or having kids with a career like that.

I now see that life as a nightmare.

Making money on the internet gives you a better life. This is nothing new. You’ve heard it thousands of times already. So the question is, if everyone is so smart and already knows this, why can’t they make money on the internet?

The ego trap that screws people

Making money on the internet has different rules from the real world.

And it’s not even close to being like the traditional path of get a degree, get a good job, get into huge debt for a house, climb the corporate ladder, brag about “years of experience,” and retire at 65.

Years of experience mean jack sh*t on the internet.

I paid to get consulting from a 17 year old girl who made $50K a month with a business coaching offer. She'd never had a job. She wasn't certified in anything. Her entire business was built on a Google Doc, a simple email sequence, and showing up consistently on one platform.

Her clients — doctors, consultants, people with 20 years of experience — paid her $5,000 to learn what she figured out in a bedroom after doing homework while listening to BTS K-pop songs.

Her clients were in their 30s and 40s. That’s how much the internet doesn’t give a f*ck about age or experience.

I’ve observed big egos a lot with people I’ve met who want to make money on the internet. They’ll often flaunt their many degrees or say things like “I’m good friends with Richard Branson,” when if you dig deeper, you realize it was a dinner with him 4 years ago and Sir Richard has completely forgotten it by now.

If you challenge their “Branson friendship,” they’ll say, “Well, he said my idea was brilliant and I had potential.” Okay.

He says that to everyone because he’s a gentleman. Nice words aren’t proof of work or results. They’re just words. If Sir Richard really believed in you, he would have stayed in touch or invested his money in you.

But he didn’t. He’s kite surfing in his underwear not giving two sh*ts about you.

Your ego tells you that you’re brilliant. But the internet tells you the truth. And the internet is now the real world.

If you attempt to build anything online, you’ll be humbled real fast. It’s hard to get attention. People are skeptical and don’t trust anyone easily. Experience doesn’t mean you can solve a person’s problem. And how many degrees you have doesn’t fix the “I don’t trust you” and “I’m not sure you can help me.”

Smart, experienced people don’t make money online because their ego blocks them.

The most dangerous people in the world are intelligent people who are unsuccessful
– Thomas Sowell

The hardest idea you’ll ever ponder

This is one of the best ideas I’ve ever come across and it’s from Naval Ravikant: “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

To succeed, you must change your definition of success.

Most intelligent people don’t get what they want out of life. They’re NOT living the good life. They’re stuck in their head, angry at the world, chasing goals so they can desperately tell the world they’re a somebody while quietly being a nobody.

For me, I don’t care about wealth or any of that nonsense. I consider myself successful because I’m getting exactly what I want from life.

No boring job. I wear Nike clothes 24/7. I don’t follow anyone else’s rules. I have fun online. I write whatever I want. I get to decide who I work with. And I’m surrounded by the top 1% in my field who I look up to.

Life could not get better if I tried. I don’t say that to brag. I say it to smash your view of the world into a thousand pieces.

I’m not that smart. Average IQ. Zero degrees. High school dropout (went back later and barely passed). No rich family. No special privileges.

Success is less about how much money you make online, and more about what you do with the money you make to live your ideal lifestyle.

Smart people on paper are dumb people in lifestyle terms.

“The truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live”
– Graham Weaver (founder and investor)

The hidden downsides of being smart

People with high IQ are great at seeing downsides.

They’re often skeptical about everything because they think they know better. So when you present a simple idea to them like “Oh, you just take your skills, package them into a high ticket offer, and sell it via an email list” they look at you like you went to a billionaire’s naughty island to make out with seals.

Pessimism sounds smart and optimism looks like a sales pitch.. so they ignore the obvious opportunities. “That make-money-online stuff is all a pyramid scheme.” Tell that to the doctors, lawyers and accountants I’ve worked with who have built 6 and 7-figure online businesses. Are their businesses scams too?

Smart people spend all their time doing calculations and assessing risks because their intelligence forces their ego to believe they can tell the future, like some sort of drunken fortune-teller living in a gypsy van with her grandma.

Being intelligent means you likely overthink, overplan, and overanalyze, which leads to painful procrastination that guarantees you never make a dollar on the internet.

On the surface, they’re in motion, “doing stuff,” but in the eyes of the internet, they’re nobodies who’re helping no one.

An idiot in motion will always go further than a genius at rest – Kpaxs

If you break down what smart people are doing, you'll find a silent plea for permission hidden inside all that planning.

They needed permission to get a degree, and permission to climb the ladder in their job. And, deep down, they’re waiting for that kind of permission online as well.

Except it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, I failed here too.

I stayed stuck in a banking career for 10 years because I waited for the world to give me permission to quit. I wanted my boss to say, “Timbo, you’re making $70,000 a month outside of your job already. You’re too good. Quit, man.”

He never gave me permission. He needed me to sell stuff for him so he could take the credit for it. That’s because incentives drive behavior. So I never got the permission I was looking for. Thank god, I ended up signing my own permission slip.

Writer Sahil Bloom once said, “Permission isn’t granted. It’s taken.” Spot on.

The missing trait smart people don’t understand

What’s missing is courage.

You can think you know everything, but if you don’t have the courage to act on what you know and build something online, then you never will.

It’s not one-time courage that is needed either. It’s daily courage.

Like when a huge Twitter influencer took a swipe at me for using an AI-generated photo of a guy working on his laptop on the beach. Dude lost his mind. He put my face on a coffee cup and sold it in his merch store. He called me a course boi even though I don’t sell courses. He made fun of my nose and my ears.

I thought I was the bigger man, but honestly, it brought back high school trauma of people calling me dumbo ears or making fun of my witch nose. You think you’re past that until your face appears on a coffee mug for $19.95 plus shipping.

Turns out I wasn’t past it.

It took courage when an essay I wrote on Substack went viral and a group of angry women accused me of being a terrible man because I said having a family was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.

“What would you know about having a family?! You’re a man. Women raise kids, not you!”

Yep, I saw some version of that comment 100s of times. It took courage to ignore it and not react. Or not feel stupid. Because without courage, you stop the moment things get tough or your perfect little plan goes up in flames.

The leaders you follow and admire had the courage to act.

Unconsciously, you probably don’t realize that’s why you follow them. It’s why people say they follow me. I had the courage to quit a successful banking career, knowing I could never go back because of the potty mouth stuff I said online.

That type of courage does more to help you make money than an over-bloated business plan ever will (that’ll get blown up by AI anyway).

“Complexity makes you seem smart. Simplicity makes you money.”

(Codie Sanchez)

Some of you are going to hate me for saying this. Making money on the internet is stupidly simple. It’s not easy though, but it is simple.

Smart people love to make it complicated because they think the barrier to entry must be high, just like it was when they applied to get into debt to buy a PhD. It’s not.

I’ve spent 100s of hours in masterminds surrounded by people doing more than $1M online with their business. Here's the pattern I can never unsee — and it's the same every time.

One social media platform. One funnel. One offer. Daily action.

The tech stack they use is almost non-existent. They use a few basic tools like Gmail and Zoom and that’s about it. Yet smart people want to use Claude bots, hire big teams, build their own customer app, etc.

They’re literally trying to boil the ocean when all they need to do is take a few simple steps that a 17 year old girl I met did after doing her high school assignments.

Internet businesses are actually dumb. But you have to be willing to be dumb enough to make a million dollars or more from one. Intelligence and complexity will only take you further away from your goal.

A reader of mine said, “The smarter you are… the easier it is to talk yourself out of doing the simple things that actually pay.” I think about that a lot.

The mindset that robbed me of millions of dollars

I’ve made millions of dollars on the internet. But I could have made millions more if I realized my one big flaw: I was afraid to be salesy.

I thought selling stuff was beneath me. I wanted to have companies sponsor my work and to speak on stages for $50K a pop.

It never happened. My mindset was off.

Everything changed when I figured out the people who make the most money online aren’t the best at sales or marketing. Nope. They’re the most useful.

Selling stuff is just helping people.

The more people you help, the more money you make. The help starts as free, then as they enter your world some percentage of people will pay to get your help.

So the question I ask myself daily is “How many people have I helped today?” If the answer is “none,” then I know it’s been a bad day financially without even logging into Stripe.

Smart people think the internet will pay them for their ideas, IP, or brilliance.

But they won’t.

That’s selfishness. People pay you when you help them. And if they actually know you give a sh*t about them, they’ll pay you a lot more and more frequently too.

“Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”
– Richard Feynman

The simple path that actually helps you make money on the internet

Some of you probably hate me now. Good.

I’m not here to please you. I’m here to tell you the truth, or else you won’t change and you’ll become one of those nasty haters on Youtube that nitpicks at everyone else’s videos except their own (because they have no videos).

All that’s left is to tell you what does work from what I’ve observed helping more than 6000 people start online businesses. I’m warning you… it’s uns*xy. It’s so simplistic it almost sounds like a cliche or a 10 ways to be badass blog post from 2011.

Here we go…

• The start is hard. Only brute force will allow you to cut through the noise. It won’t be easy. Momentum will take longer than you think.

• Relentlessness gets you through. Ruthless levels of posting. Follow up that is better than the FBI investigating a murder. Stupid, tedious, hard work and painfully boring execution. Work like a horse instead of a magnificent lion that struts around looking for its next meal while everything in the jungle trembles at the sight of it.

• Sell things tied to your existing skills. People don’t spend good money with unskilled amateurs. True professionals make the most money.

• Build systems above all else. Simple ones too. Use them to run your business. Document everything.

• Insist on daily KPIs for yourself. Otherwise, you won’t know what inputs created the outputs. And you’ll lie to yourself about what you actually did on the hard days when your ego is bruised from NOT making as much money as you thought.

• Be yourself at all costs. Don’t become some caricature of yourself, where you act like somebody you’re not. The internet is smart. They sniff that sh*t out and come at you with pitchforks.

• Don’t sell to people. Offer them help.

If you’re not making money on the internet, it’s entirely your fault.

That’s not an insult. It’s empowerment. Because if you created the problem that means you have the power to fix it. And that’s cool as hell, man.

Being smart won’t make you money online. Intelligence just leads to overthinking.

What you must do is to focus on daily execution, that 99% of people are unprepared to do because they don’t understand the enormous rewards they could access if they did.

What's stopping you?

---

P.S. (Almost) everyone who makes a lot of money online has an audience.

Haven’t built one yet?

Start here:

If I Wanted to Grow 50K+ Follwers Fast, Here’s What I’d Do