Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
⠀
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♂️ Nate’s podcast that fell apart
Nate is a software engineer who runs a podcast for people learning to code after thirty.
This month, the co-host quit, the sponsor pulled out, and the last three episodes got almost no downloads.
He stops, and he tells himself the year he spent was wasted.
🧩 His struggle:
He counts the co-host and the sponsor as everything he had, so he forgets the skill that built the show is still his.
That weekend, he’s watching a video his brother sent him,
which tells the real story of a man who also lost what he’d built, all in one day,
and went on to build one of the best-known companies in the world.
And you’ve definitely heard of what he made next.
⠀
🐰 The rabbit that belonged to somebody else
Walt Disney, a young animator running his own small studio, walked into a meeting in New York to ask for more money.
He walked out having lost almost everything.
What happened?
He had built a cartoon character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
By 1927 it was a big hit.
In 1928 he went to see Charles Mintz, the businessman who paid him for each Oswald cartoon.
Charles offered him less.
When Walt refused, Charles told him the truth.
By contract, Oswald belonged to Universal, the studio backing Charles, not to Walt.
In that same meeting, Charles told him something else.
He’d already secretly signed most of Walt’s own animators to work for him instead.
So Walt went home having lost his character and most of his animators in a single meeting.
What he had left was one loyal animator and the ability to make a cartoon people wanted to watch.
So Walt and his team got to work on a new character straight away.
Working fast, they finished the first cartoon short.
The character was Mickey Mouse.
Nobody could take the mouse from him, because this time he owned it.
Get this — the Walt Disney Company, which grew from it, is now worth more than $160 billion.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Setback Pivot
Walt lost the rabbit and most of his animators,
and still knew how to make a cartoon people watched,
so he made Mickey Mouse, and this time he owned it.
This move is called The Setback Pivot.
He didn’t have to relearn his skill from zero.
A setback can take the specific thing you built: the job title, the character on the page.
It can’t take the skill that let you build it, and that skill is what makes the next big thing.
So when your one project falls apart, count what you actually lost.
You lost that one project, not your ability to write, or code, or sell.
The failed project was never proof you should quit.
⠀
🛠️ Nate’s turn
Back to Nate and the podcast he stopped after one bad month.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what he actually got good at this year.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
You lost a co-host and a sponsor, not your way of turning a hard coding topic into a twenty-minute story,
and about nine hundred people have already heard you do it.
The next evening, he records an episode on his own.
He posts it that Saturday.
⠀
🌅 Three months later
Nate still runs the show on his own, and he hasn’t missed a week.
More people listen now than before the co-host quit.
Two listeners wrote in to say the solo episodes are their favorite.
If something you built fell apart this year, the skill that built it is still yours.
Count what you actually lost, then build your next project with the skill you kept.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below separates what you actually lost from what you still have, and names the next thing to build with it.
🧰 What you’ll need
What went wrong, and what you lost
- Say it plainly. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. the co-host quit, the sponsor pulled out and downloads collapsed, so I lost the income and the guests he used to bring inWhat you actually built while doing it, and who saw you do it
- e.g. a way of turning a hard coding topic into a twenty-minute story, and about nine hundred people heard itWhat you’ve been telling yourself it means
- e.g. that I am not cut out to run this on my own
🚀 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 episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, 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 learning to code after thirty.
- 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 and do not tell me it happened for a reason. Separate what is gone from what is not, and be accurate about both.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What went wrong, plainly, and what I lost, specifically:
{e.g. the co-host quit, the sponsor pulled out and downloads collapsed, so I lost the income and the guests he used to bring in}
What I actually built while doing it, and who saw me do it:
{e.g. a way of turning a hard coding topic into a twenty-minute story, and about nine hundred people heard it}
What I have been telling myself it means:
{e.g. that I am not cut out to run this on my own}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What is genuinely gone — the real losses, named without softening.
2. What is still mine — the skill, the method, the relationships and the proof that left with me, listed specifically.
3. The wrong conclusion — the story I am telling myself, written out, and the part of it that does not follow.
4. The next thing — what I can build this month using only what is still mine.
5. Who to tell — the specific people who already saw the work, and what to say to them.
Then tell me the one thing to do tomorrow morning, before I think about it any more.