I restarted my online business journey in 2021.

It slowly reached that point.

It started in 2020, during the pandemic.

I lost my job as an office administrator at a Taekwondo gym.

And I needed money.

So I decided to learn about forex trading again.

This time from a legit mentor.

He taught everything for free on YouTube.

He didn’t need the money because he was already successful from trading.

I find those make the best mentors.

Anyway, I learned his strategy, I learned his trading psychology...

And I wasn’t learning it on live trading accounts.

I wanted to do this right, so I opened up demo accounts and tried to compound it up until I knew I had everything right.

I guess it was taking too long, and I don’t remember why, but I let forex trading go.

Looking back, I don’t think I quit because the strategy was bad.

I think I quietly decided that slow progress meant I was on the wrong path.

I found another interest in crypto.

Bitcoin, like everything else in the market, took a big fall in March of 2020...

But the rise afterward was crazy.

It just kept going up!

So I learned about crypto, and bought myself some.

I would’ve kept buying crypto, but something happened that changed all that.

I had my phone connected to my laptop at the time.

So whenever I got a phone notification, I would see it on my laptop.

One night, I was on my laptop, and I saw a notification from Gmail, from Coinbase, saying my crypto transfer was successful.

I was like, “WHAT?!”

My laptop got hacked!

And these assholes stole almost all my crypto.

These guys were smart too...

They flooded my Gmail with subscriptions to hundreds of different companies, so I was receiving emails from hundreds of companies, flooding my inbox...

All to try to hide the Coinbase emails showing my crypto was being transferred.

Now, Coinbase was still relatively new at the time.

And I’m sure their security has beefed up since then.

At least, I would hope so.

But back then, their security was shit.

There was also no way to reach anyone to explain what happened, no way to stop the transfers...

When I found out what happened, I managed to save about $100 worth of Bitcoin in the end.

This made me lose all my interest in crypto.

It wasn’t just that I lost money.

Somehow, my brain started treating the entire opportunity as unsafe.

I fell into a depression.

I’m a diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic with ADD, and I’ve been taking meds to help manage all that.

But losing all that money...

Getting hacked...

Made me feel like shit.

My now wife decided to buy me a new phone to help cheer me up.

I already had a perfectly working phone.

She thought I deserved it.

I was so grateful, and it definitely cheered me up.

But all I could think about was how much it cost.

TikTok was relatively new at the time as well.

And she also got me into social media.

Before then, I didn’t even know about the home page, or recommendations, especially the For You page.

I was on TikTok one night and saw someone’s video.

They were saying how they were making money online and were promoting a challenge in their bio.

I checked it out...

I saw that I had to pay...

And like most people, I skipped over it.

A few weeks later, a few days before my 31st birthday, I saw another person promoting the same thing.

Something about that exact moment made me decide to check it out even further.

I mean, it was only $7 USD.

So I invested in the challenge.

Next thing you know, a few days later, I was being promoted their more advanced program.

At the time, it just made sense for me to invest in it.

And it cost a pretty penny.

It was $2,500 USD.

Convert that into Canadian dollars, and that came up to just over $3,200.

I talked with my now wife about it because that was a significant portion of my savings.

She believed in me.

So I took the chance and invested in the program.

The program’s main thing was teaching affiliate marketing using TikTok (then eventually short-form videos).

Affiliate marketing is basically promoting someone else’s product, and when someone buys it, you get paid a commission by the product owner.

But of course, this involved me having to be on camera.

Every day.

It was getting pretty daunting.

I eventually started to feel like a dancing monkey.

Funny enough, the business itself wasn’t bothering me anymore.

It was who I felt I had to become to keep doing it.

You know how in Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve was hired to be the Star-Spangled Man With A Plan?

Performing every day, over and over again in order to sell stuff?

That’s how I felt.

But I was a content creator.

I guess that’s what I was supposed to do?

It didn’t even matter that within three weeks of joining the program, I made my first commission.

At the time, I was just excited that I made my first commission.

It never occurred to me that getting results like that in three weeks was actually amazing.

My attention was completely somewhere else.

I wasn’t measuring whether I was making progress.

I was measuring whether I looked like everyone succeeding faster than me.

But I was getting the $20 commissions.

The $3 commissions.

I wasn’t getting the $1,000 commissions I saw so many people in the program getting.

And I took all that for granted.

Instead of building my way up...

I decided to do something else.

At the time, changing direction felt logical.

Looking back, I can see I kept solving the wrong problem.

A very minor part of the program was affiliate marketing using Facebook Ads.

And it caught my interest.

I wouldn’t have to “perform” on camera.

That sold it for me.

So I tried it out.

Being so inexperienced with Facebook Ads ruined my account forever because now my account isn’t just suspended...

It’s permanently disabled.

But that didn’t stop me.

I still wanted ads to work.

After all, I was a digital media buyer now.

So then I heard about Microsoft Ads, formerly Bing Ads.

I researched.

Learned.

Made mistakes...

Costly mistakes.

And after a few weeks to a couple of months, I managed to find a way to make money from it.

I was earning a little under $1,000 in revenue — about $500 in profit — every month for a couple of months.

At the same time, I decided to start another TikTok account.

But this time, it was faceless.

Much easier to create videos.

Much easier to stick with.

And I managed to build it up to about $100 a week.

Now, if it were me today...

I’d continue building that account.

But at the time, I was impatient.

I wanted so much more than $100 a week.

And I guess I should’ve been keeping track of the money coming in and going out.

Because roughly $400 a month from TikTok plus around $500 in profit from Microsoft Ads...

That’s quite a lot of money.

And building it up could only increase my earnings.

Again, I decided to stop posting on that TikTok account.

I can’t remember why.

And honestly, what reason could possibly be a good reason to stop an income stream?

That’s the part that bothers me the most.

I can remember learning new systems.

I can remember changing directions.

But I can’t remember questioning why changing directions kept feeling like the right move.

I’m so mad at myself for that.

I guess because I was earning from Microsoft Ads, I thought I didn’t need the TikTok account.

But again, something happened.

My laptop got hacked...

Again.

It wasn’t as serious as the last one because I had a password manager this time and I wasn’t using the same password for everything.

Nothing major happened to any of my accounts.

Except this jackass managed to find his way into my ad accounts.

He got into my Microsoft Ads account and...

I guess he was promoting malware or something.

Microsoft decided to ban my ads account.

I kept trying to explain that I got hacked...

But you’d think a major computer company would understand that.

They didn’t.

And I never recovered my account.

Something kept happening for me to keep switching from one thing to another.

For years, I genuinely believed life kept forcing me to pivot.

I never stopped to consider that something inside me might have been doing the steering too.

After that, I attempted something else.

Researched it.

Learned about it.

Made mistakes with it...

Then another thing.

And another.

I just kept bouncing from one thing to the next.

It wasn’t until almost five years later that I learned...

...to stick to one thing until it works.

And when it does work...

Keep building it.

Because it will start small.

The lesson wasn’t really about commitment.

It was realizing I’d been redesigning my strategy every time my mind became uncomfortable.

Small wasn’t the problem.

My response to small was.

For the longest time, I thought I had an execution problem.

I thought I kept choosing the wrong business model.

The wrong platform.

The wrong opportunity.

The wrong timing.

Looking back...

None of those were the real problem.

Every new opportunity felt like a fresh start because I believed changing the strategy would finally produce the consistency I wanted.

But I kept bringing the same mind into every new opportunity.

The business changed.

The operating system running the business didn’t.

That’s why the pattern kept repeating.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that our brains only change when we intentionally learn something.

They don’t.

Your brain is constantly reinforcing whatever you repeatedly think, feel, and do.

Even if those patterns work against you.

It’s kinda like when I abandoned forex because progress felt too slow.

I thought I was changing strategies.

What I was actually practicing was this:

“When progress feels uncomfortable, find something new.”

That became the lesson my brain rehearsed.

Not once.

Over and over.

The brain strengthens the pathways it uses most often. Repeated responses gradually become the default response.

Experiences carrying frustration, excitement, or disappointment leave stronger mental impressions than emotionally neutral ones.

Every time we escape discomfort instead of working through it, we become slightly better at escaping discomfort.

Without realizing it, I wasn’t building businesses.

I was building a habit of restarting.

People often hear “be adaptable” and assume it means pivoting whenever something feels off.

That’s not what adaptability actually is.

Real cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your thinking without abandoning your direction.

Kinda like when I moved from affiliate marketing...

...to Facebook Ads...

...to Microsoft Ads...

...to another TikTok account...

Every decision felt logical by itself.

But taken together, they formed a pattern.

I kept changing vehicles instead of changing how I interpreted the road.

Flexible thinkers revise assumptions when evidence changes — not simply when emotions change.

The goal isn’t finding fewer problems.

It’s recognizing which problems deserve solving instead of escaping.

The builders who compound aren’t necessarily the smartest.

They’re often the ones who stay with an opportunity long enough for their understanding to mature.

Changing direction isn’t always growth.

Sometimes it’s just discomfort wearing the mask of intelligence.

This one hit me the hardest.

I thought my decisions were based on facts.

Most of them were based on interpretations.

Slow growth became...

“This isn’t working.”

A hacked laptop became...

“This opportunity isn’t safe anymore.”

Small commissions became...

“Everyone else is succeeding except me.”

None of those events automatically meant those things.

I gave them those meanings.

It’s kinda like when I made my first commission in only three weeks.

Objectively, that was evidence I was moving in the right direction.

But I wasn’t paying attention to that.

My attention was locked onto people making $1,000 commissions.

Same reality.

Completely different interpretation.

Completely different behavior afterward.

Your mind decides what deserves attention long before you’re consciously aware of it.

Events don’t create behavior by themselves.

The meaning attached to those events does.

Once an interpretation feels true, your actions naturally begin supporting that interpretation.

That’s why two people can experience the same setback...

...and build completely different futures from it.

If you don’t intentionally train what deserves your attention, your environment will happily decide for you.

Repeated actions don’t just build businesses.

They build evidence for the kind of builder you believe you are.

The question stops being...

“What’s the next opportunity?”

It becomes...

“What kind of operating system would naturally keep building this one?”

Because digital builders rarely fail because the internet is chaotic.

They struggle because they unknowingly inherit an operating system that’s optimized for reacting...

...instead of building.

And until that operating system changes...

Every new strategy eventually starts producing the same old behavior.

What story do I automatically tell myself?

Two builders can experience the exact same event...

...and walk away with completely different futures.

One gets ten views and thinks:

Another gets ten views and thinks:

Same numbers.

Different interpretation.

Different behavior.

It’s kinda like when I stopped forex because progress felt slow.

Nothing actually told me it couldn’t work.

I told myself it wasn’t working.

That interpretation quietly made changing direction feel logical.

Ask yourself:

Because your interpretation becomes the instruction manual your behavior follows.

What kind of builder does that story reinforce?

This layer surprised me the most.

Every interpretation slowly becomes evidence for who you think you are.

If your interpretation is:

Eventually...

You’ll start behaving like someone who’s inconsistent.

Not because it’s true.

Because your operating system now expects it.

It’s kinda like when I kept bouncing between business models.

Every restart quietly became evidence that I was someone who never stuck with anything long enough.

I didn’t consciously choose that identity.

I reinforced it.

Ask yourself:

Because digital builders don’t just create content.

They create evidence for the kind of builder they believe they are.

What actions naturally follow?

This is where most people begin.

Ironically...

This is where the least leverage exists.

Behavior is the output.

Not the source.

It’s kinda like when I stopped posting on that TikTok account even though it was already making money.

Looking back...

Stopping didn’t begin with my behavior.

It began with everything upstream.

My attention.

My interpretation.

My identity.

The behavior was simply the final expression of all three.

Ask yourself:

Because consistent publishing is rarely created by willpower.

It’s produced by architecture.

What future builder am I strengthening?

Every repeated action teaches your operating system something.

Not someday.

Today.

Every draft you finish...

Every article you publish...

Every project you abandon...

Every excuse you repeat...

Your brain records all of it.

It’s kinda like how every time I switched to another opportunity, I wasn’t only starting over externally.

I was strengthening the internal expectation that changing direction was simply what I do.

No wonder it kept happening.

I’d been practicing it for years.

Ask yourself:

Because your operating system compounds long before your audience does.

Most people try to improve their behavior.

Digital builders have a bigger opportunity.

They can redesign the system producing that behavior.

That’s the difference between reacting to the internet...

...and intentionally building something that outlasts it.

The internet will always offer another strategy.

Another platform.

Another AI tool.

Another opportunity.

The builders who create meaningful assets aren’t the ones who chase every improvement.

They’re the ones who repeatedly improve the mind that’s doing the building.

And once that starts changing...

Everything downstream becomes easier to trust, publish, and compound.

The biggest lesson I took away from all of this wasn’t about affiliate marketing.

Or crypto.

Or forex.

Or Microsoft Ads.

It was realizing that every decision I made was quietly teaching my mind what to expect next.

Every time I switched directions because progress felt slow...

I reinforced that slow progress meant something was wrong.

Every time I abandoned something that was already working...

I reinforced that small wins weren’t worth protecting.

Every time I chased another opportunity...

I strengthened the belief that success was always somewhere else.

I wasn’t just building businesses.

I was building an operating system.

The scary part is...

You’re doing the same thing.

So am I.

Every day.

Whether we realize it or not.

The question isn’t whether you’re programming your operating system.

The question is:

Who’s writing the code?

Is it you?

Or is it your environment?

The algorithm.

Comparison.

Discomfort.

Fear.

Novelty.

Other creators’ definitions of success.

Because if you don’t intentionally decide what deserves your attention...

Something else will.

If you don’t decide what slow progress means...

Your emotions will.

If you don’t decide what kind of builder you want to become...

Your repeated behavior will decide for you.

And that’s why this matters far beyond consistency.

Digital builders don’t create leverage through isolated moments of motivation.

They create leverage through thousands of small interpretations that eventually become automatic.

Those interpretations decide whether another article gets published.

Whether another product gets finished.

Whether another idea becomes an asset...

...or another abandoned draft.

You don’t need another strategy every time your progress feels uncomfortable.

You need an operating system that knows discomfort is part of building.

Because every article you publish...

Every newsletter you send...

Every project you finish...

Every time you choose to continue instead of restart...

You’re doing more than creating digital assets.

You’re creating the person capable of creating the next one.

And eventually...

That’s the asset everything else is built on.

If this helped you see your own attention a little differently, I think you’ll enjoy The Psychology of Digital Builders.

Every week, I break down the hidden psychological patterns that determine whether creators, knowledge workers, and digital builders turn what they know into newsletters, frameworks, products, and other online assets...

...or quietly spend years consuming instead of building.

I’d love to have you building alongside us.