Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s “I’m not technical”
Ruby is a content strategist with a free course on writing for LinkedIn on the side.
She decides to add a paid version, where students also get every lesson as audio.
She has no idea how to make sure only the paying students get the audio.
🧩 Her struggle:
She thinks not knowing how means she can’t do it, so she stops trying.
At a friend’s house, she picks up a book
with the true story of a woman who also started out with no experience,
and still built a business that made $11.9 million in one year.
Her most useful idea came from her mom.
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📻 The radio that led her to the roof
Marie Forleo, who would later build an online business school, was walking home from school in New Jersey.
Somewhere above her, she heard her mother’s radio playing.
The radio was a free giveaway from Tropicana orange juice.
It was the size and color of an orange, with a striped antenna sticking out like a straw.
Her mother carried it everywhere, so a young Marie could always find her by following the sound.
This time the sound was coming from the roof of their two-story house.
Her mother was up there with a bucket of asphalt she had found in the garage, patching a leak.
A roofer had asked for at least five hundred dollars, and they did not have it.
So she went up there herself.
Then one fall day Marie came home and the house was silent.
She found her mother at the kitchen table, with screwdrivers and electrical tape laid out in a row on a towel.
The orange radio was in dozens of tiny pieces.
The antenna had broken and the tuner dial had drifted, so she was fixing it.
Marie asked how she knew how to do so many things nobody had ever shown her.
Her mother put down the screwdriver.
Ree was what her mother called her.
“Don’t be silly, Ree. Nothing in life is that complicated. You can do whatever you set your mind to if you just roll up your sleeves, get in there, and do it. Everything is figureoutable.”
Marie never forgot the phrase.
She started out at twenty-three as a life coach, with no experience, no investors, and no connections.
Coaching paid her almost nothing at first, so she worked bar shifts to pay for her first website.
She kept taking side jobs for years, until the business could finally support her.
That business grew into B-School, an online course she sells once a year, teaching marketing, sales, and how to set up a website.
In 2014 her company made the Inc. 500, a list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
That year its revenue was $11.9 million.
In 2019 she made her mother’s phrase the title of a book.
It went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
The business and the book both started with her mother, fixing a radio at the kitchen table.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Everything Is Figureoutable
Marie’s mother fixed a radio nobody had taught her to fix, because nothing in life is that complicated.
Marie kept that idea, and built a business that made $11.9 million in one year.
Marie’s hack is called Everything Is Figureoutable, and it was her mother’s phrase before it was her book title.
When something stops you, her three rules ask three questions about it.
First, has somebody out there already worked this out?
That’s box one, solvable.
Second, is it a law of nature, like wanting more hours than a day has?
That’s box two.
Third, is it a dream you don’t actually want enough?
That’s box three.
Say you want to add a paid tier to your newsletter.
You can’t work out the payments setup.
That’s box one, solvable, because thousands of people have already set one up.
You want it live by Friday, and you have four free hours.
That’s box two, a law of nature, because the hours aren’t there.
You keep meaning to start a podcast, and you never open the mic.
That’s box three, a dream you don’t want enough.
Only box one is worth your time.
Boxes two and three both mean you drop the thing and move on.
That’s the part people skip, because stopping never feels like progress.
Nobody ever taught Marie’s mother how to fix a radio.
She got stuck, and she didn’t wait for somebody who knew how.
Marie’s mother laid the radio out in pieces on the kitchen table until it played again.
So you hit something in your business you can’t do.
That isn’t proof you’re not good enough.
It’s just something you haven’t put in a box yet.
Sort it, and your week goes only to the problems that turn out to be solvable.
Today, the first box usually takes one question to your AI sidekick.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
Remember Ruby, who gave up because she couldn’t work out how to send audio lessons only to the students who paid?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it exactly where she got stuck.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Your audio problem is solvable,
because thousands of people who sell courses already send lessons only to students who paid.
She opens the help pages of the site that runs her course.
The answer is on the second page, a setting that shows a lesson only to paying students.
She turns it on, and uploads the first audio lesson before bed.
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🌅 One month later
Every lesson in Ruby’s course comes with audio now, and only paying students can play it.
Three students have written to say they listen to the lessons on their way to work.
Next she wants a short quiz at the end of each lesson,
and she’s already looking up how other people who sell courses set theirs up.
You probably have one thing on your list that you’ve decided you can’t do.
Before you decide you can’t do something, check whether somebody has already figured it out.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below sorts whatever is stopping you into one of three boxes, and only one of them gets your week.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’ve decided you can’t do, and what exactly happens when you try
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. send the audio only to students who paid, because I am not technical. I open the platform docs, get to the section on who sees what, and close the tabHow long this has been stopping you, and what you’ve already tried
- e.g. since January, and I watched two tutorials and asked a friend who was busyOther things on your list you say you want
- e.g. a podcast, a book, and to speak at a big marketing conference
🚀 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 course, my lesson notes, or my student list, 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 who want to write better posts on LinkedIn.
- 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.
- Everything I name must be placed in exactly one box: solvable, law of nature, or not-wanted-enough. Do not encourage me. Two of the three boxes mean stop, and saying so is the useful part.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I have decided I cannot do, and what exactly happens when I try:
{e.g. send the audio only to students who paid, because I am not technical. I open the platform docs, get to the section on who sees what, and close the tab}
How long this has been stopping me, and what I have already tried:
{e.g. since January, and I watched two tutorials and asked a friend who was busy}
Other things on my list I say I want:
{e.g. a podcast, a book, and to speak at a big marketing conference}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The box — which of the three this belongs in, and the evidence for putting it there.
2. If it is solvable — who has already solved it, and the smallest first step I could take this week.
3. If it is a law of nature — what the real constraint is, and what I build instead given it.
4. If I do not want it enough — say so plainly, and name what I would rather have that time back for.
5. My other list — the same three boxes applied to everything else I claim to want.
Then tell me which item on my list I have been carrying out of guilt rather than desire.