Knowledge is what’s going to save you, not excessive avoidance.

If you do not learn anything new from your past failures, you are bound to repeat them again in the future. I’m against failure in general, but if you do not learn anything from your past failures, you will fail more. And so the best way to avoid excessive failing, is to learn from your past failures.

The problem here is that if you hated failing but you did nothing about it, avoiding trying to do anything unusual, hard, or complex, will not make you fail less. It will actually not reduce your chances of failing again in the future. The only thing that is going to make a difference is understanding why you failed in the past, so that you don’t repeat that again in the future.

A brief introduction to myself.

I am Stephen Aaron Shepard.

Writer, Public Intellectual, Thought Leader, Business and Digital Marketing Expert, and Life Coach.

I’m here to help you succeed, become happier and better, reach a higher quality of life, improve yourself, and fulfill your dreams.

I will help you get results, improve the quality of your life, and increase your performance, productivity, well-being, happiness, creativity, and success. You can expect anything from me in the realm of Personal Development and Improvement, Self-help, Success, Happiness, Well-being, Business, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Motivation, and Inspiration. I am also an Entrepreneur, proudly living life on my own terms as my own boss and free spirit.

I am progressive, Center-Left, Social Liberal, and a Social Democrat. I’m not religious. I am an atheist. I know God does not exist, and I am unapologetic about it.

You can find me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Happy to help anytime. Whatever that you want to ask about except my personal life I will help you with to the best of my ability. Take your time. It’s my pleasure and passion to help you and make your life better. Ask me anything. How can I help?

Don’t divide your daily to-do lists amongst several paper notebooks.

Put them all in one paper notebook.

Do not split your next actions, or daily to-do lists or tasks between several notebooks.

This doesn’t mean that you will be only using one notebook for all planning and goal setting purposes.

You can use hundreds.

Just don’t use multiple ones for what you want to do today or right away.

I personally use 3 paper notebooks for currently being done stuff, and projects, and current goals.

And I don’t feel that they’re enough.

Also there could be this tiny notebook for the one thing that you should do right now, in your pocket for example, or within reach always, aside from what’s mentioned above.

But when it comes to gathering all what you should attack next, division is not a good idea.

Even Instagram recommends that you post about 7 reels videos per week, while only sharing a post to your feed one to three times per week only. And they keep telling us that Reels is an incredible opportunity and tool to market yourself and get discovered on Instagram that we should all make use of. This means that they expect you to not share almost any of your reels to the home feed of your followers, except rarely, like on Christmas or something. I highly agree with this. I will go as far as recommending to never share reels videos onto the home feed of your followers, at all. People are also fed up with every single post in their feed being another reels video with some chick pointing at random locations. It seems that Instagram is low key unhappy about that they created an entire tab for reels videos all for people whom you already do not follow, to make sure you utilize it in case you wanted more discoverability, because they are unhappy with the algorithm being overwhelmed, and people being unable to share good old static photos with captions in the home feed of their followers like they used to be, which is what makes Instagram a special place that you don’t want to leave for any other social media platform. If you are in alignment with their perspective here, they will be happy with you, and as a result, will consider you one of the few people who are keeping this platform alive to the best of their ability. Reels is a feature, like stories. It shouldn’t be all there is. Neither should you treat it this way, even with its exceptional marketing, growth, and discoverability potential. They don’t want Instagram to be just another TikTok. They want Instagram to be what it always was, but with the same potential of growth and discoverability that the for you page on TikTok provides you, because they figured that this is actually the only reason that TikTok exists.

This isn’t about removal of the reels video from your profile feed’s grid, which you should also definitely do anyway. This is about not sharing the reels video to the home feed of your followers in the first place.

Reels are named that way not because of what you think. It’s because they’re real estate.

That said, it would be so unwise to let that one go, without taking full advantage of that opportunity like there’s no tomorrow.

You see, we tend to be mindful of the consequences of our actions because we’re responsible adults, aren’t we?

If you share every reels video on your feed, so that it gets shown to your followers in their home feed as a normal full post, you will end up posting less reels videos, because even if you’re not afraid of losing followers, which you will definitely if you popped up in their feeds a lot, your engagement will drop significantly, because some of your followers will say: meh, I already commented on this person’s post today, I’m not gonna comment again. If they do not unfollow you, they’ll at least not comment as wholeheartedly and enthusiastically as they normally do, because you are the same person, and everybody hates repetition except popular content creators like Gary Vaynerchuk.

The algorithm is not smarter than you like you think it is. It has no long-term memory. Or at least it has no wisdom to determine that this is just a bored but still loyal fan. So the low IQ algorithm will then from now henceforth shall show your posts to these raving fans less. Just because these fans didn’t interact with your post once.

Believe me, you don’t want to spam even your most loving, loyal, and raving of fans ever, not even once.

DM them saying hey I’m so productive I’ve made 15 epic new blog posts today. Check them out.

But never under any circumstances show up in their feed more than once a day.

That is like a death sentence to your relationship with them. Don’t do it, even if you were a better writer than I am, which I doubt that this is mathematically possible.

In this case, how can you still utilize the epic feature of reels?

By making a ton of them a day, without sharing any of the reels you post to feed.

You are authorized by yours truly to spam people who are not already following you.

Tell them I said hi.

Every time you audit or assess your recent performance or progress, you attack yourself like there’s no tomorrow.

Stop hating yourself. Fix things. Make things better. Improve the conditions and circumstances. Find a solution. Take things seriously and start addressing your issues one after the other. Don’t chill all day long and wonder why you hate yourself. You’re wasting time here and not taking advantage of an opportunity to make a difference in your life so that it stops to suck. If you keep sweeping every problem you have under the rug, and act as if it doesn’t exist, it will keep being piled up and hiding until it’s the right time to attack you. Deal with every issue as fast as you can. This is key. The longer that the problem persists, the bigger the despair that you’re going to feel because of it. Why after all these years I am still dealing with this? Why didn’t it just go away on its own? Why is everything in my life so complex? Why do I have to solve countless complex issues just to get to normal? Why do I have to learn a ton of information to be able to survive? It’s not fair.

Eliminate those obstacles as fast as you can. No one can handle this indefinitely. Get a chance at a normal life and get out of the bad situation you’re stuck in as soon as possible. That is of utmost importance and of crucial urgency.

Negativity, no matter where it comes from, is always wrong.

It doesn’t mean don’t focus on the negative in your life. In your case, it’s everywhere around you, trying to force itself upon you no matter how hard you try. It means that you shouldn’t put up with or expose yourself to external sources of negativity, no matter what these sources are. No exceptions or excuses. Get a better environment. Now. This is an emergency. Make it so that you don’t get bombarded by negativity from all directions all day long with no escape.

My version of staying positive isn’t smiling despite having every reason to feel bad. It’s about having no reason to feel bad at all because the environment that you’ve put yourself in is so positive and uplifting, with no problems at all.

You don’t need guidance Anakin. In time you’ll learn to trust your feelings.

You know when a narcissist tells you I love you, they don’t mean it. They really hate you. You can sense the contempt. You can feel their energy. They are focused on destroying you.

This is exactly what you do to yourself every time you try to assess how well you’ve been performing recently.

Even though you’re telling yourself all the right and helpful advice, recommendations, and ideas out there, you do it with full hatred, contempt, and vengeance toward yourself, and with a spirit of being fed up with yourself, and also with a twist of lack of patience, and insane ridicule and belittling of yourself.

Yaaay, I made an awesome reels video. I’m finally comfortable speaking in front of the camera.

Yeah, but it sucked, is totally embarrassing, it didn’t perform well, and you ended up not getting any new followers because of it.

Try hard, noob.

But I did my best?

Who cares, you sucked. And failed.

What should I do now?

Nothing. There’s just no way out. I hate you. You’re just bad.

Whatever the narcissist does or used to do to you, now you’re doing it to yourself. Like a pro.

You don’t need any further training. You are fully ready to continue the abuse upon yourself even in the absence of the narcissist.

At least you’ve become good at something, huh?

Honey this is all there is. It’s a house of cards.

A problem with all people trying to help entrepreneurs who want to start a business online and make money with that is that the experts trying to help them out with monetizing their passion assume their clients have something that could fit into a system and needs strategy to be taken advantage of or presented better to the world in order for them to start monetizing their coaching business. Most likely people starting out businesses have nothing new to offer. They really don’t lack strategy. They lack content. Knowledge. Experience. In other words, they lack everything. They are selling you thin air. They are just selling you belief. If it didn’t work for you then it’s your fault. You didn’t put in the work, or you didn’t work hard enough. They are bad clients. That’s why you need to niche down too much and pick your ideal clients or target audience. The point isn’t turning bad clients into amazing people who can be successful. You know, awakening them, solving their problems, shaking them so hard until they raise their standards and stop being okay with being victimized by narcissists or abused by religion. No. We love nature so much to the extent that we wouldn’t even dare to alter its natural course of ruining people’s lives. Let them rot. Why should we care. The point is to get some hesitant and reluctant to go all in already successful and rich people who almost have it all to donate to your cause because you look beautiful. Welcome to the self-help world of unfalsifiable claims.

It’s the chicken or the egg dilemma.

Which came first? Your business, or monetizing your business that revolves around how to make other people make money online like you did?

Were you ever able to make money before you started making money through teaching people how to make money just like you did by modeling your success story of making money?

Have you ever managed to make money at all in your life through something other than telling people how you made money online easily and you can do it too? Even through a job? Did you ever try to get a job and succeeded? Are you an entrepreneur because you will never be hired by anyone because you can’t qualify for any job in the world, or are you an entrepreneur because you’re really so hard to be contained you can only be your own boss or bust? Is it because your country is so poor and getting a hundred dollars a month is a fortune for you so you pretend to be a passionate freelancer better than nothing or being destitute, or you really can’t fit into the category of being an employee, even if it pays you millions of dollars a month? If it’s so easy to spot, why aren’t people pointing that out? Oh, you call that hate comments, because Gary Vaynerchuck says so, and you keep scamming other kids and desperate house wives who fall for your Lamborghini photo shoots because they don’t know any better, or because they’re so desperate, or they are just kids who hate school and used to cry in order to skip going to school when they were young? And then you resort to using fancy words like those are your perfect ideal clients or target audience. You are out there to help them, you kind little deceptive newbie.

It’s like it’s not a huge colossal red flag when you notice they all resort to and use the same patterns, tactics, tricks, or strategies to lure you in.

Yeah I’ve suffered through this and that, and I’ve somehow miraculously made it out through discovering the general relativity theory all on my own, and I’m going to charge you 17 or 25 thousand dollars for it all because you can never find the same stuff in a 17 bucks book ever from a hundred years ago, like think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill for example, because my program includes breathing techniques, meditation, and stretching techniques, stuff that wasn’t around or as trendy by the time Napoleon Hill crafted his masterpiece. And remember, you cannot learn any of this or discover the way out of the mess you’re stuck in on your own, no matter how hard you try. It’s a signature program after all, because I’ve managed to say the same shit that’s all over the place in the market right now like love yourself first and shit, but I have put my awesome signature under it.

I’m totally trying to help you here. I’m really concerned for all those who were like me someday and had no food left in their fridge and that’s how I’m trying to give back to society and contribute to its well-being. A fuckload of money per person. And if they refused, don’t fret. Just stay cool and move on to the next target.

“I’m back with new victims in mind.” – Mortred, DOTA 2

Imagine all that shit taking place post the information age. Where everything there is is just a few clicks away from the grasp of every person on earth.

Now college is bad, the free internet is bad, and you gotta learn from the pros first hand, one on one, or bust. There’s no alternative. Save yourself. 9 to 5 sucks bro. Lambo. Mansion. What are you waiting for!

So sad to get out of the military only to find that this is the state of the world that we currently live in.

I made money on Instagram, and from nothing else in the world, only by telling you how I made money on Instagram, or how can you scam people too like I did by teaching them how they can make tons of money on Instagram teaching people basic and elementary stuff about crushing it on Instagram that almost never works, while supporting my false claims through fake or curated testimonials.

So sad.

I know you need to put food on the table, but where’s morality, principles, dignity, decency, compassion, authenticity, and integrity?

Don’t build your own gulag. Don’t become a prisoner of your own rules. The point isn’t to appease the masses or the market. The point is to liberate yourself and unleash your creativity.

Brand identity that revolves around consistent fonts, colors, themes, pictures, appearance, …etc. is a myth. (The myth is in the belief that it is not entirely useless). People get bored too fast. Way more than you think. Imagine watching the same great movie over and over again. Who doesn’t have a brand identity? All fell into this trap. No one have tried the alternative.

It’s like people love working so hard to restrict themselves and build their own prisons.

The same could be said about niching down against what you’d really love to do in order to grow faster. You will trap yourself in the future because your current audience will always be expecting something from you that meets the criteria of what you decided to niche yourself down into from the start only. Anything else you’d try to expand into later on will be met with idiotic resistance from the audience even if it is beyond epic.

Put everything there is in your books. Leave nothing behind.

Anything you have in mind that you leave behind because people might not find it awesome will haunt you later on for the rest of your life. Why you didn’t put me in, why didn’t you put me in. What am I missing. Was I not good enough for you? It says. I learnt that the hard way. Liberate yourself by putting everything there is in your books. Leave nothing behind.

That’s why it’s better to self-publish all your books.

The hardest thing about building a personal brand is not ending up building a business brand and thinking that it is a personal brand when in fact it’s not, it’s just a business brand with a cool, popular, and friendly CEO. It’s just business, nothing personal.

The only way you’re going to be able to make something that doesn’t suck is when you don’t care whether or not it’s going to make you any money or sell at all.

I have been preaching this for years.

If you’re after the money, you’d always make stuff that you don’t believe in but you know will sell more because this is what the helpless market is into right now.

You would always package bullshit in fancy containers and sell it for millions of dollars.

You would always sell stuff that doesn’t make a difference, and convince yourself that it does, just because a ton of idiots out there bought it from you.

You would even consider yourself doing the world a favor, by selling worthless stuff for a thousand dollars a piece.

There are people justifying putting their labor into the pricing, instead of aiming to make massive sales by making their product affordable.

It took me a lot of hours to make they say.

I can’t stand the hypocrisy.

I just had to speak out.

People don’t want what’s good for you.

They just want to sell. Make money. At the expense of you.

Not just the greedy big corporations anymore.

But the average person as well. The nobodies.