Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Ethan’s goal with no plan under it
Ethan is a product manager with a newsletter for first-time product managers.
His goal is 5,000 subscribers.
By June the goal is still 5,000, and he is still at 800.
🧩 His struggle:
He never decides what he’ll do each week, so most evenings he does nothing.
At lunch, a coworker tells him the true story of a baseball player
who also wanted one big thing for years and got nowhere,
and later was named the top male athlete at his college.
He had about the worst start you can imagine.
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⚾ The bat, the coma, and the tidy room
On the last day of his second year of high school, James Clear was hit in the face with a baseball bat.
A classmate had taken a full swing, the bat slipped out of his hands, and it struck James right between the eyes.
Doctors put him into a medically induced coma, a deep sleep they kept him in on purpose.
He came out of it, and spent months learning to walk in a straight line again.
A year later he went back to baseball, the game he had played since he was four, but he got cut from the team.
When high school ended, he went to Denison University, in Ohio, and made the college baseball team.
He was at the bottom of the list, the last player the coach would ever put on the field.
He was not going to become a star that season, and he knew it.
So he did not work on becoming a star.
He worked on the things that happened every day.
He went to bed early while his roommates stayed up playing video games.
He kept his dorm room tidy.
He fixed the way he studied.
And for the first time in his life, he lifted weights several times a week.
None of it was the kind of thing anybody notices.
But every one of them happened on schedule, whether he felt like it or not.
He got straight A’s in his first year.
He was a starting pitcher in his second.
He was team captain in his third.
Get this — six years after the baseball bat injury, Denison named him its top male athlete.
But look at what changed, and what did not.
At four he wanted to be a great baseball player.
At sixteen, after the accident, he still wanted it.
At nineteen, at the bottom of the list, he still wanted it.
For fifteen years, wanting it changed nothing.
Then at Denison he stopped thinking about the goal, and started doing the same small things every day.
He went to bed early.
He kept his room tidy.
He lifted weights several times a week.
Those small things are what turned the injured sixteen-year-old into the top athlete at his college.
The goal never changed.
What he did every day changed.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Systems Floor
James kept his room tidy and lifted weights on a schedule, and went from the last name on the list to team captain.
James wrote it down years later, in Atomic Habits, a book that has since sold more than thirty million copies:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
This strategy is called The Systems Floor.
Your goal is the best week you can imagine.
Your system is what still happens in an ordinary week, including the bad ones.
For a newsletter, that means one issue sent every Tuesday, no matter what.
James didn’t have a bigger goal than the other players on his team.
He had something that told him what to do that day, whether he felt like it or not.
So the next time you write a subscriber number at the top of next year’s plan, write the system underneath it.
Write for twenty minutes every morning, and send one issue every Tuesday at seven.
By March, most people have forgotten the number.
The system is still running, and it is the thing that quietly gets you there anyway.
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🛠️ Ethan’s turn
So what about Ethan, who wants 5,000 subscribers but never decides what he’ll do each week?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what his ordinary Tuesday looks like.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Your 5,000 won’t tell you what to do tonight, so write for twenty minutes every morning and send one issue every Tuesday.
He writes that rule under the 5,000 at the top of his plan.
The next morning, he writes for twenty minutes before work.
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🌅 Four months later
Ethan hasn’t missed a Tuesday since.
He still writes for twenty minutes every morning, even in the bad weeks.
His newsletter has 1,100 subscribers now, and he doesn’t look at the 5,000 to decide what to do.
A goal can’t tell you what to do on an ordinary evening.
A small plan for every day can.
Decide the small things you’ll do every day, and do them whether you feel like it or not.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below turns your target into a repeatable action for an ordinary Tuesday.
🧰 What you’ll need
The goal you’ve been carrying, and how long you’ve had it
- e.g. 5,000 subscribers by the end of the year, since last January, and it was 5,000 then tooWhat you actually did toward it in the last two weeks, and what your ordinary Tuesday looks like
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. one issue, late, and a lot of reading about growth. Work until six, dinner, then either the newsletter or the sofa, mostly the sofaSomething you already do every day without having to decide
- e.g. I read two product management newsletters every morning with coffee
🚀 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 drafts, 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 people in their first year as product managers.
- 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 restate my goal in a more motivating way. Every output must be something that happens on a specific day, at a specific time, whether or not I feel like it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The target I have been carrying, and how long I have had it:
{e.g. 5,000 subscribers by the end of the year, since last January, and it was 5,000 then too}
What I actually did in the last two weeks toward it, and what my ordinary Tuesday looks like:
{e.g. one issue, late, and a lot of reading about growth. Work until six, dinner, then either the newsletter or the sofa, mostly the sofa}
What I already do reliably, without deciding to:
{e.g. I read two product management newsletters every morning with coffee}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What the goal explains — honestly, what having this target has caused in the last year, and what it has not.
2. The system — what happens on which days, at what time, described so specifically that no decision is needed.
3. Attached to what already works — choose an existing routine that should happen immediately before the newsletter action.
4. The floor, not the ceiling — the smallest version that still counts on a bad week, so the streak survives.
5. What I measure instead — name the repeated action I should track instead of subscriber growth.
Then tell me the one part of my current plan that only works if I am motivated.