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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Ethan’s half-written issue
Ethan is a product manager who writes a newsletter on the side.
This week’s issue is still half-written.
He sat down to finish it three times, and each time he was checking email inside ten minutes.
By evening he decided he lacks discipline, and he should try harder tomorrow.
Tomorrow went the same way.
His struggle:
He can’t figure out what’s really keeping him from finishing one issue.
That evening, a friend at dinner tells him the real story of a woman
who also had something stopping her from starting.
She sold fax machines door to door, kept an idea secret for a year,
and turned it into a $1.2 billion company.
Wanna guess why she told nobody?
🤫 The idea she told nobody
Sara Blakely had an idea for a piece of underwear that would make pants look better, and she told nobody for a year.
Not her friends.
Not her family.
The year was 1998, and she had $5,000 saved from selling fax machines door to door.
That sounds like shyness.
Turns out it was deliberate, and she knew exactly what telling people would do.
In her own words, she kept the idea from them “knowing that out of love, they might prevent me from taking a risk.”
Sara knew exactly what would happen if she described it over dinner.
Someone who cared about her would ask a sensible question.
She’d go home and think about it, and she’d talk herself out of the idea.
So she only spoke to the people who could help her make it: patent lawyers and manufacturers.
That product became Spanx.
Get this — she’d never taken a cent of outside investment when she sold most of it to Blackstone in 2021.
The deal valued the company at $1.2 billion.
She did not become braver.
She removed the conversations that would have talked her out of it.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Three Blockers
Sara told nobody for a year.
She didn’t try harder.
She removed the specific thing that was stopping her from moving forward.
Ali Abdaal left medicine to make videos, and now has more than six million subscribers on YouTube.
He wrote Feel-Good Productivity, and he says stalling on your idea is not one problem.
It’s three, and from the outside they look identical.
Ali’s tactic is called The Three Blockers.
Uncertainty is not knowing what the next step actually is.
Fear is knowing the step but not wanting to move forward.
Inertia is knowing the step, not being scared of it, and still not managing to sit down and begin.
Sara’s was fear: her friends and relatives might tell her it was too risky, and feed her own fears.
So she decided not to tell them.
Her fix worked because it matched her blocker.
So if you are not moving forward on any task,
the first move is to find out which blocker is stopping you: uncertainty, fear, or inertia.
Not to push harder.
Name the blocker right and the fix takes minutes instead of months.
🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Back to Ethan and the issue he couldn’t finish, no matter how hard he tried.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what happens every time he sits down to write.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
This isn’t laziness, it’s fear that this issue won’t be as good as the last one,
so write the rest badly on purpose, and fix it tomorrow.
He writes the rest that night, without looking back.
On Sunday, it goes out.
🌅 Two months later
Ethan hasn’t missed a Sunday.
When he stalls now, he asks which blocker it is before he tries harder.
Most weeks it’s fear, and he knows the fix.
Your stalled project probably isn’t laziness either.
Name the blocker, then remove it.
That’s it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours ‘helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the thing you have been avoiding and tells you which of the three blockers
is actually stopping you — then gives you the fix for that one only.
🧰 What you’ll need
The thing you haven’t finished, and what you actually do when you sit down to it
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. this week’s newsletter issue, half-written. I sit down, write one line, and I’m checking email inside ten minutesWhat you tell yourself about why, and what you’re secretly worried about
- e.g. that I lack discipline, and that this issue won’t be as good as the last oneThe very next physical action, if you had to name one
- e.g. write the second half, the part after the story
🚀 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 first-time 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 give me general motivation advice. Diagnose first, then prescribe for that one only.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The thing I have not finished, and what I actually do when I sit down to it:
{e.g. this week's newsletter issue, half-written. I sit down, write one line, and I'm checking email inside ten minutes}
What I tell myself about why, and what I am secretly worried about:
{e.g. that I lack discipline, and that this issue won't be as good as the last one}
The very next physical action, if I had to name one:
{e.g. write the second half, the part after the story}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The diagnosis — which of uncertainty, fear or inertia this is, and the line in my input that gives it away.
2. Why it is not the other two — say plainly what would look different if it were.
3. The fix for that one — three concrete moves for the diagnosed blocker only, nothing generic.
4. The two-minute version — the least impressive possible first action, small enough that refusing it would be strange.
5. What to stop doing — the thing I have been trying that treats a different blocker than the one I have.
Then tell me the ONE sentence I should write on a sticky note before I open the file tomorrow.