Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s “not a writer” problem
Miles is a customer success manager who runs an online community for new dads who work from home.
He wants to start a newsletter for them too.
This week, he decided again that he’s “not a writer,” so the newsletter can wait.
He has never sent a single issue, so he has never tested that.
🧩 His struggle:
He believes a sentence he made up about himself years ago, so the first issue never gets written.
On a phone call that evening, his brother tells him the real story of a YouTuber
who also believed something about himself that he had never checked,
and has since grown past 6 million subscribers.
Six million subscribers, and he nearly kept his channel small on purpose.
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🩺 The belief a doctor carried past 4.5 million subscribers
Ali Abdaal is a doctor who left medicine to make YouTube videos.
By August 2023 he had millions of subscribers, and he was still quietly telling himself one thing:
If I grow the business any further, I’ll end up busy and stressed and miserable, so I should keep it small on purpose.
At a business seminar in Florida that month, he wrote the belief down and ran it through four questions.
1. The Evidence. Is it really true? Do you have evidence you couldn’t argue with?
2. The Cost. How does this belief make you feel, and what do you actually do because of it?
3. Without It. Imagine you’d never had the thought at all. What would you do instead?
4. The Reverse. Consider the opposite, and find three reasons it’s true.
Ali got as far as question one, and his own answer showed the belief was wrong.
The busy-and-stressed feeling had come from running every part of the business himself, back when it was small.
A bigger business didn’t have to mean he kept doing everything himself.
The belief didn’t survive question one.
So he kept growing the channel.
Today his channel has more than 6 million.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Four Questions
Ali ran the belief that was keeping his channel small through four questions, and it didn’t survive the first one.
Then he kept growing the channel, past 6 million subscribers.
This tactic is called The Four Questions.
He didn’t just decide the belief was wrong and move on.
He tested it by asking whether it was actually true.
The belief failed the test.
That test is four questions.
Is it really true, what does it cost you, what would you do without it, and is the opposite just as true?
So the belief that’s kept you from starting your newsletter or publishing your idea isn’t automatically true just because it feels true to you.
Run it through the same four questions, and see whether it holds up, or falls apart the way Ali’s did.
Most of what’s stopping you was never actually proven true.
Nobody ever checked, including you.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
Let’s check in on Miles and the newsletter he keeps putting off, because he’s “not a writer.”
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it the belief in his own words: “I’m not a writer.”
His AI sidekick says:
There’s no evidence for that, because you’ve never sent a single issue,
and the long posts you write for your community every week say the opposite.
That night, he takes his best community post from last month and turns it into his first issue.
On Sunday morning, he sends it to the dads in his community.
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🌅 Three months later
Every Sunday since, Miles has sent an issue.
Two hundred dads read it now.
A few of them reply every week to say it helped.
You probably have a belief like that about yourself, and you’ve probably never checked it.
Ask whether the belief that’s stopping you is really true, before you let it stop you.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below runs the belief that is stopping you through the four questions.
🧰 What you’ll need
The belief that’s stopping you, in your own words, and what you think the evidence for it is
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. “I’m not a writer, so nobody will read a newsletter from me”, and every newsletter I admire is written by someone who writes for a livingWhat you do because of it, and how long you’ve believed it
- e.g. I have never sent a single issue, and I keep writing long posts in my community instead, for two years nowWhat the opposite would look like if it were true
- e.g. dads reading my newsletter because I am one of them, not a professional writer
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my unsent writing, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume new dads who work from home.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not reassure me. Ask for evidence and say plainly when there is none. If the belief turns out to be TRUE, say that too, and work out what to do given it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The belief that is stopping me, in my own words, and what I think the evidence for it is:
{e.g. "I'm not a writer, so nobody will read a newsletter from me", and every newsletter I admire is written by someone who writes for a living}
What I do because of it, and how long I have believed it:
{e.g. I have never sent a single issue, and I keep writing long posts in my community instead, for two years now}
What the opposite would look like if it were true:
{e.g. dads reading my newsletter because I am one of them, not a professional writer}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Is it really true — the evidence tested honestly, including whether the same facts read another way.
2. What it costs me — the behavior this belief produces, and what that has cost in the time I have held it.
3. Life without it — who I would be and what I would have done by now if the thought had never occurred to me.
4. The opposite — three genuine reasons the opposite is true, with evidence, not encouragement.
5. The verdict — untested, or actually true. If it is true, what I do given it.
Then tell me the one action to take this week that the belief has been preventing.