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AI Business Ideas for Beginners: 4 Proven Rules, Zero Fear Every week I get emails and calls from people who are scared. They’ve watched the big tech companies lay off programmers by the thousands, and they’re asking me the same question again and again. “Rob, what am I going to do?” So I decided to answer it in a very specific way, not with a generic “you’ll find something else.” If AI took my job tomorrow, I already know what I’d do, and in this post I’m going to share the AI business ideas for beginners that I would start with, the four rules I’d use to choose one, and the 30-day plan I’d follow. Now, I’ve worked for myself since 1995, so treat this as a thought experiment, but I’m not immune either! I’ve used Photoshop since around version 2.0 and InDesign back when it was still PageMaker. Today I can hand Grok a photo and a title, and in three minutes I get a video poster that would have taken me an hour in Photoshop. A lot of skills I spent years building are going by the wayside, and I feel it too. I’ve Seen This Movie Before In my adult life I’ve lived through three massive shifts. I first got my hands on a computer in 1980, my uncle’s TRS-80, when I was 16 and had just learned to drive. In 1984 I got online for the first time on a Commodore 64, and that’s when everything clicked for me. I made my first online sale in 1989 on a bulletin board system, four years before the World Wide Web, and I built my first website in 1993. Every one of those shifts came with the same fear. Computers were going to ruin everything! The internet was going to wipe out brick and mortar stores! Well, you can still go to Best Buy and you can still go to Walmart. Yes, things changed, and for the people who moved early a whole new world of business opened up! The AI revolution we’re in right now is the same story all over again, with all the hype and all the fear! Things are going to be different, and I believe that if we do this right, things are going to be a lot better. Fear or Challenge? You Get to Choose Back in 1995, at the last company I ever worked for, a snowstorm shut down our office in Farmingdale, Long Island. We dug about 50 employees’ cars out of the parking lot, and there were UPS packages that still had to go out overnight to Florida. So I said I’d take them. Everyone else was talking about how terrible the snow was, but I grew up driving in Montreal winters and I thought, this is freaking amazing! That’s the whole lesson. You can look at something as a disaster, or you can change the story in your mind and call it a challenge. Fear is on one side and challenge is on the other, and you can’t feel both at the same time. For me, AI is a game where I get to say, let me try this, let me ask it that, and see what comes back! There are no real AI gurus out there, because nobody can be a guru on something changing this fast. And that means you get to be the one who learns it by playing with it. Why Your Experience Is Your Biggest Asset Here’s the one thing that never goes away, no matter how good the tools get, and that’s your experience! AI gives me graphics all the time where the colors don’t work, the layout isn’t balanced, or there isn’t enough room around the text. I catch that because I’ve done this work for decades. Someone with no background just takes what AI hands them and runs with it, and sometimes it’s really wrong. They won’t even know. So drop the fear a little bit, because AI may take your job, but it can’t take your judgment. In fact, your judgment is exactly what clients will pay for! My 4 Rules for Choosing an AI Business I actually started with seven or eight rules and boiled them down to four. Remember, you’re not starting a business IN AI. You’re using AI as a tool, like a digital hammer, and most of the subscriptions run about $20 a month. Rule 1: Cash Has to Come In Within 30 Days Not six months and not years, because you’ve got to eat! Whatever you choose has to put money in your pocket quickly, so you can keep the lights on while you build. Rule 2: Almost No Startup Costs You already have a laptop, or at least a phone, plus an internet connection. Add a $20 AI subscription and you’re in business, with no thousands of dollars up front! Rule 3: Use the Knowledge You Already Have Don’t wander too far outside your lane. You know your industry better than anybody. You know why people call your company, what they’re looking for, and what questions they need answered. That’s an asset, and it doesn’t get sunset just because a tool changed. Rule 4: AI Should Make Your Work Cheaper to Deliver, Not Obsolete A website that once cost $20,000 to build, I could now deliver for a lot less, and much faster, because AI does the heavy lifting. My experience still matters, and now I simply deliver it faster! The Business I’d Start: AI Help for Local Businesses Think about a restaurant owner working 12 and 18 hour days, seven days a week. Do you think they have any space in their brain to figure out how AI can help them? No. But would they hire somebody to do it for them? Sure they would! The same goes for small manufacturers, retail stores, print shops and so many other local businesses. They know AI matters, but they don’t know where to start. Here are some of the AI business ideas for beginners I’d look at first. **An AI receptionist.** Zoom now offers an AI assistant for its phone system. You build a knowledge base behind it, and it answers calls 24/7. Instead of 50 calls waiting in the morning, the staff has one or two messages the AI couldn’t handle. When I set up Zoom Phone at a farm I worked with, the staff was happier because they weren’t answering the same question all day. **Done-for-you social media content.** I used to spend an hour finding one photo for one post. Now I describe the concept and AI gives me an image in a couple of minutes. Sell a package of 30, 60 or 90 posts a month and get paid every month. **A website improvement report.** After rebuilding a friend’s website, I asked AI to review the homepage and list everything it would improve. It found about ten items, and after we made those changes, his traffic started going up every month. You don’t need to be a web developer to sell a one or two page report like that. **A follow-up system.** When a visitor leaves a website without buying, capture their email and follow up based on what they looked at. It’s a little more complicated, so you get a little more money for it. **Answers on demand.** A friend fed his medical test results into AI, asked all the questions his seven-minute doctor’s appointment never allowed, and brought a one-page summary to his doctor. The doctor was blown away, and the lesson here is bigger than medicine. People will pay someone who already knows the right questions to ask. Not Technical? Turn Your Old Job Into a Service This is where your experience pays off. A laid-off marketer can offer done-for-you content for local businesses. A laid-off customer service rep can set up AI customer service and train the staff on it, because they’ve been in the trenches and know the mistakes companies make. You don’t have to become an AI guru to make these AI business ideas for beginners work. You simply have to know more than the person who hasn’t started yet! Not sure what fits you? Ask AI! Tell it your experience and background, then ask what you could sell using AI. I’ve done this with a couple of clients, and the answers blew all of us away. The 30-Day Plan 1. **Week 1:** Pick one industry. Learn two or three tools well enough to set them up for someone else. 2. **Week 2:** Do it for one business you know, cheap or even free, in exchange for a testimonial. 3. **Week 3:** Contact 20 local businesses and offer your service, with that testimonial up front. 4. **Week 4:** Close your first two or three clients. Then raise your price for the next batch. It starts slow, and that’s okay. Years ago I taught people who were stuck with 5,000 postcards in the garage to mail just 100 a week, one roll of stamps at a time. The sales came in, so they mailed 200, then 400, and before long they were buying more postcards! Your business grows the same way, one client, then two, then three. Start Before You Have To In 1995 I built my business around a full-time job. I got up an hour early to work on it, ate a bagel in the car at lunch while I ran errands, and spent two or three hours on it after dinner. Start building now, so if your job does go away, you already have something working for you! — *Want help picking the version of this business that fits your experience? Most people don’t have a tactics problem. They have a strategy problem they’re too close to see, and from the outside it jumps out in minutes. Book a Power Session with me at renegade.club/powersession and let’s map it out together! Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesCoaching with Robert

Strong and Flexible: How to Handle Setbacks in Business This week’s episode of Renegade Breakthroughs came to you earlier than usual, and it came to you shorter than usual. Let me explain. Late on the night before the show, we started getting text messages from the power company saying they planned to shut off our power sometime in the next 24 to 48 hours, and that it could stay off for several days! So I recorded the show that morning, uploaded it while I still could, and let the system send it out on schedule whether I had electricity or not. That little decision is really the whole lesson of this episode, because it’s a lesson about how to handle setbacks in business when life decides to rearrange your plans for you. A Week Where Everything Went Sideways The power shutoff wasn’t the only thing. It had been one of those weeks! I had to cancel our guest and reschedule her, and she was very understanding about it. Someone who was supposed to interview me called at the last minute to say they had no internet, so that got pushed too. Even at the store, tap to pay failed three or four times before it finally went through! And my hosting account went down for three full days. It was a problem on their side, and there was nothing I could do but stay on them until it was fixed. I’ll be honest with you, I was getting really frustrated. Three days and my websites are still dark? Then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that it’s not the end of the world, the sites would come back, and someone would figure out what the problem was. And sure enough, they did! Then the power company started texting. Why the Lights Were Going Out Here’s the backstory, because it matters. Normally when they shut the power off around here, it’s because of wind, since wind knocks power lines down, downed lines throw sparks, and sparks start fires. Put fire together with wind, heat, and dry brush and you have a recipe for disaster! We lived through that disaster in 2007. San Diego County lost an enormous number of homes in those wildfires. I remember driving up to the top of a mountain with my video camera on a tripod and turning it a full 360 degrees, and in every direction something was burning. It was insane! We were evacuated. And that happened to be the week Dan Kennedy was scheduled to interview me, which I had planned to do from my studio on my good microphone. Instead I did it on a cordless handset from the landline. The content was still good, but it sure wasn’t the interview I had planned! After the fires, the power company took the blame, the lawsuits followed, and in the years since, our electric rates have gone up and up. Now the response to any threat is simple. Turn the power off! We’ve had outages here that lasted five days because it was windy and warm. This time the forecast showed no wind at all, just heat, with highs of 100 to 108 degrees for the next week. I’d never seen them cut the power for heat alone, and last month 108 degrees wouldn’t have triggered anything. But it’s October now, and a new set of rules apparently comes with the new month. Lesson One: Stay Strong, but Stay Flexible I’ve been teaching this for a long time, and this week I got to live it. When a challenge hits, you have to stay strong, which simply means you decide, right up front, that you’re going to get through it. A few days without power is a challenge. It is NOT the end of the world! But strong by itself isn’t enough, because you also have to be flexible. Something that’s too brittle breaks under pressure, while something that can bend survives the storm. So what did flexing look like for me? – I recorded the show early so it would go out even if I had no power. – We watered the grove heavily ahead of time. The ag pumps pull water up from 500 feet down and push it up the side of a mountain, and they need a lot of electricity. With moisture in the soil, the trees have a better chance of riding it out. – I charged the batteries, dusted off the generator, and planned a run for gasoline so it’s ready the minute the lights go out. – I planned for the internet too, with a battery for the cellular booster so we might keep some kind of connection going. Phoebe and I sat down and made a full list of what needed to happen, and I spent the day checking it off. If the power never goes out, and that’s happened before, we’re fine. If it does go out, we have a plan and we’ll get through it. Either way we’re okay! The same thing helped me with the website outage, because I already had a backup plan in my pocket. If the host couldn’t get things running again, I knew exactly where I’d move the sites and how I’d rebuild them. Having that flex ready took a lot of the frustration out of it! Lesson Two: Anger Doesn’t Fix Anything Some people react to this kind of thing with anger. Why me? I’m just trying to live my life! And I understand that feeling. But I’ve lived long enough to know that life is going to get in the way of your best-laid plans. That is simply the way it is. Some things are out of your hands, and I can’t tell the power company what to do. They may get a piece of my mind in a tweet, but that’s about the extent of my influence, because they’re going to do what they’re going to do. So what does getting angry accomplish? It hurts you! There is nothing in your body that loves anger. Go ahead and be disappointed for a minute, let it out, and get it out of your system. Then go straight to the solution and ask yourself, what do I need to do next? Lesson Three: Look at What Hasn’t Changed When something bad happens, most people focus completely on what changed, which is natural, and it’s also the hardest place to stand. So the question I always ask is, what hasn’t changed? Make a list of everything that’s still the same. You still have your skills, your relationships, your ideas, and your ability to work! When you focus there, you keep your comfort and your security, and you stay grounded. And from that grounded place, it’s a lot easier to deal with the one thing that did change. Lesson Four: Resourcefulness Is Your Superpower Here’s where so many entrepreneurs get stuck. An obstacle appears, and they decide the road is closed and there’s no point going any further. Really? Take another road! Get a helicopter, or find someone with a bulldozer and clear the road. There is always a way through if you’re willing to look for it. I could have told myself that without power for a few days, there’s nothing I can do for my business. Why would I ever think that way? Even with nothing but a pad and paper, I can write down ideas, and that would be a win! I can get farm work done on the ranch in the cooler morning and evening hours, and in the heat of the day maybe we go into town where there’s air conditioning. It’s an unplanned break, but a break is a break! You are never totally helpless. If you’re feeling helpless, it usually means you haven’t gotten resourceful yet! Finding the way through has always been my superpower, and I teach people again and again that it can be yours too. Flex or Break We’re in a time of enormous change right now, and with change comes chaos. I believe October may be one of the more chaotic months we’ve seen, so the question for you is a simple one. How are you going to flex with it? How are you going to bend without breaking? I’m not sharing my week because I want sympathy. I’m sharing it because it’s real, it’s happening right here and right now, and you can learn from it. Every situation life throws at you is a chance to learn about yourself, learn how you respond, and find a better way to respond next time. Take the time to learn the lesson, and it will make you stronger and smarter for the next one, because life is always going to throw something at you! Stay strong, stay flexible, and go find your way through! — *Are you staring at an obstacle in your business and can’t see the way around it? That’s almost never a tactics problem. It’s a strategy problem you’re simply too close to see, and from the outside it jumps out in minutes. Book a Power Session with me at renegade.club/powersession and let’s find your way through together! Then listen to the full episode of Renegade Breakthroughs at RobertImbriale.com/listen. We’ll be back next week with a full show and a guest.* Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

AI Brain Rot: 4 Warning Signs AI Is Stealing Your Soul I have a confession to make. When I started using AI to write my copy, it stopped sounding like me. A client told me the same thing that very morning. They’d been using AI to write their website copy, their emails, their social posts. And they said, “It doesn’t feel authentic. It doesn’t feel like us.” I knew exactly what they meant. So on Episode 14 of Renegade Breakthroughs, I sat down with Joe Casabona, founder of Streamlined Solopreneur, to talk about something I think a lot of business owners are quietly struggling with. Joe calls it AI brain rot. And once you hear the four warning signs, you might recognize a few of them in yourself. I sure did. Who Is Joe Casabona? Joe helps solo business owners save about 25 hours a month without leaning too hard on AI or hiring a big team. He’s got a master’s degree in software engineering, 18+ years as a teacher, a TEDx talk, and the How I Built It podcast. He’s spoken at dozens of conferences and helped hundreds of solopreneurs get 10 to 15 hours a week back. He’s also a Yankee fan and a New Yorker who agrees with me that New York pizza is the best. So you know he’s got good judgment. Here’s the thing that makes Joe’s take on AI so valuable. He’s not an AI hater. He’s a software guy. In grad school he studied software that writes itself. Just days before our interview, he used Claude Code to move 20 years of content off WordPress and onto a brand new site, without breaking thousands of links. A job that would have taken him weeks, done in an afternoon. So when a guy like that warns you about AI brain rot, you listen. How I Taught AI to Write Like Me Before we get to Joe’s four signs, let me tell you what happened when I tried to fix my own problem. I asked Grok how to make AI sound more like me. It went wild with over-the-top recommendations. Not helpful. So I asked Claude. Claude said, “Simple. Feed me things you’ve written.” So I did. I gave it about 480,000 words of my own writing, going all the way back to 1999. Here’s what it found: My style hasn’t changed in 27 years. It measured the difference between my 1999 copy and my 2026 copy. Practically zero. (I’m choosing to take that as consistency, not a lack of growth.) I never use em dashes. Claude assumed I used them occasionally. After 480,000 words? Not one. That’s one of the biggest tells that AI wrote something, so now my style sheet bans them. It caught the one piece I didn’t write. One document in that folder was AI-generated. Claude flagged it immediately. I have three distinct voices. One for books, one for sales letters, one for emails. It built a style sheet for each. Then I tested it. I sent an email written entirely by AI, untouched. My friend Bruce Poppy called me the next morning and said, “Great email. Sounded exactly like you.” So yes, you can train AI to sound like you. But here’s where Joe stopped me in my tracks. “Saying AI Wrote Your Book Is Like Saying You Ran a Marathon With Your Car” Joe told me that even if AI sounds exactly like me, it will never know the things I’ve never written. It won’t have my lived experiences. It won’t know what happens to me tomorrow. “That’s the stuff that makes us human,” he said. “That gives us our soul.” His rule for avoiding AI brain rot is simple. Use AI for task, not craft. Let the computer do computer things. Keep the craft, the human-to-human part, for yourself. Because that’s where your soul lives. And I love his analogy. Saying AI wrote your book is like saying you ran a marathon with your car. Technically you crossed the finish line. But did you really do it? What Is AI Brain Rot? Joe came up with the idea during a webinar. He opened the floor for Q&A, and someone got on and said, “I had to ask ChatGPT what question I should ask you.” They couldn’t even come up with their own question. That’s AI brain rot. It’s what happens when you hand your thinking over to a machine so often that you stop doing it yourself. And according to Joe, preventing it is exactly how you use AI without losing your soul. The 4 Warning Signs of AI Brain Rot 1. You’re a Reflexive User You hit a problem, and before you spend even five minutes thinking about it, you’re typing it into ChatGPT. The fix: Go for a 20-minute walk. Think it through yourself first. Come up with your own solution. Then, if you want, throw it into AI and say “red team this.” But your brain goes first. 2. You’re a People Skipper Instead of talking to your customers, you ask AI to describe them. “My ideal customer is Alex, a dad of three running his own business. What problems does he have?” AI will give you a statistically likely answer. But it’s not a real answer. Joe admitted this one got him. He didn’t think his audience would answer his questions, so he let AI decide what his podcast should cover. And he says it hurt the show for a while. The fix: Talk to actual human beings. Get into communities. Ask the people you serve what’s keeping them up at night. 3. You Have No Skin in the Game When you ask AI to “come up with a plan for me” without thinking about it first, you haven’t invested anything. Joe compared it to playing poker for no money. There are no stakes, so you’ll go all in on a 2-7 just to see what happens. The fix: Write your own first draft of the plan. Think through your goals and your current problems. Build something you’re actually committed to. 4. You Use AI as Your Adviser This is the culmination of the first three, and Joe says it’s the most dangerous. You’re reflexively asking questions, skipping the people who could actually help you, and following a plan you have no stake in. Not only is the advice generic, it can be flat-out wrong. Joe shared a story about a man who asked ChatGPT for a salt substitute and ended up ingesting something toxic. It’s like asking AI if a mushroom is edible, eating it, and hearing, “You’re right, that mushroom was poisonous. Sorry for the confusion.” What we’re really losing here is critical thinking. And that’s the scariest part of AI brain rot. AI Looks at What Was. We Create What Will Be. I told Joe about a conversation I had with my friend Mitch Axelrod, who was worried AI is going to replace all of us. I told Mitch, no way. We have real-world experience that AI doesn’t have. AI looks at what was. It doesn’t create what will be. That’s us. Joe put it perfectly. If you’d asked an AI in Galileo’s day, it would have given you the accepted answer of the time, not the right one. Because it only knows what we’ve already created. He also shared a study that should make every business owner stop and think. People rated AI as very accurate in areas where they weren’t experts, and not very accurate in areas where they were experts. Do you see the problem? If you don’t know the subject, you can’t tell good output from garbage. Joe calls AI a “word calculator.” It gives you a statistically likely answer. That doesn’t mean it’s the correct one. And when it doesn’t know, it makes something up and says it with total confidence. That’s why I always tell business owners: if you’ve never written a sales letter, how do you know if the one AI just wrote for you is any good? You don’t. You buy traffic, you wait, and you find out the expensive way. AI Brain Rot in Business: Is It Actually Working? Joe asked a question every business owner using AI should be asking. A friend of his has a team of AI agents writing his blog posts. He drops ideas in a bank, an agent picks one every morning, writes the draft, and publishes it. When Joe asked when he’d feel uncomfortable putting his name on it, the friend said, “Well, it’s my idea.” Joe’s response: “I had the idea for Facebook six months before Zuckerberg did. I don’t have Zuckerberg money.” Ideas aren’t execution. Another friend told Joe that Claude is great at writing sales copy. Joe asked, “Is it great because you don’t have to do it, or because it’s actually converting?” That’s the right question. I’ve been testing this myself. I put up a sales page written purely by Claude and one written by me. I beat Claude every time. It looks good. It’s just not me. And people can feel the difference. Energy Is the One Thing AI Can’t Fake When I wrote my book Motivational Marketing, I paid close attention to the energy of the writing. I wrote one chapter a week for 16 weeks, every Saturday. And I never wrote a line unless I was in the zone. One Saturday, Phoebe called me at 5:00 and asked if I was done. I hadn’t written a single word. I wasn’t feeling it, so I didn’t write. When the book came out, people told me, “I can feel your energy in this.” A machine can’t recreate that. Joe had a great example of his own. In one of his books he put a footnote on the word “wiggle” that just said “wiggle wiggle wiggle,” a nod to the LMFAO song that was huge at the time. No normal writer would do that, and AI certainly wouldn’t. But anyone who knows Joe reads it and says, “That’s Joe.” That’s your soul on the page. Protect it, because AI brain rot will quietly sand it away if you let it. AI Is a Hammer. How Will You Use It? When I first got on a computer in 1980, a TRS-80, everyone panicked that computers were coming for their jobs. Back then, our creativity was miles ahead of what the machines could do. With AI, that’s flipped. The tool is now way ahead of us in raw capability. So it’s up to us to bring the creativity, the judgment, and the humanity. AI is like a hammer, and AI brain rot comes from letting the hammer swing you. You can use a hammer to smash a jewelry case, or you can use it to build a house. The tool doesn’t decide. You do. How Joe Got His Time Back In 2020, Joe had a panic att

Stop Waiting for the Storm to Pass: Running a Business in Uncertain Times I asked a half dozen fellow business owners the same question this week: “So what are you doing about it?” Every one of them gave me the same answer. “I’m waiting for the storm to pass.” I understand the instinct. But I’ve lived through that answer once already, and it cost me years. So this week’s episode is about running a business in uncertain times, what the numbers actually say, and why the worst move you can make right now is to put your business in neutral. The Storm Is Here Six months ago you could still argue about whether the storm was coming. Not anymore. On September 11, diesel crossed $6.06 a gallon nationally, the highest it has ever been. California diesel was already at $7.98. And here in San Diego, I put a slide up on the show with a number in green that made the chat room gasp: $9.99 a gallon for diesel, $9.39 for premium gas. That happened in Los Angeles last week, and now it’s here. Not every station, but the edge of the market is at the ceiling. I mean that literally. A gas pump only has three digits. It can’t display $10.01. So I told my friend Bruce on his show earlier this week what I expect to happen next: stations will drop the posted price to something like $5.50 and quietly change the unit of sale to a half gallon. Sound crazy? When gas hit $3.99 in 2005, some states allowed exactly that. Pumps showed half-gallon pricing with mandatory signs telling customers to double the number. It’s been done before. Why is this happening? The story now is that Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries, taking supply off a global market where demand hasn’t budged. Prices aren’t local. They’re set on the futures markets, and when supply drops everywhere, the price rises everywhere. Canada is paying $1.92 a liter, which works out to about $8 a gallon. This is not a one-week news cycle. Why Prices Go Up Fast and Come Down Slow Here’s the part that matters for your business. Nothing in your house arrived without a truck or a boat, and those run on diesel. When diesel spikes, the cost of everything underneath it spikes too. Economists are already on record saying the damage will linger even if the fighting stopped tomorrow, and I believe them, because I watched it happen in 2007 and 2008. Gas spiked, UPS added a fuel surcharge to every package, and that surcharge never went away. Even when gas fell below where it had started, the surcharge stayed. We call it sticky pricing. A supply threat shows up and prices are higher the next morning. The threat disappears and it takes months for prices to settle. Layer the rest of the picture on top of that. The Consumer Price Index hit 3.3% in March, the highest since May of 2024, driven by energy, and that was before this latest spike. The Fed wants 2%. Instead of cutting, they just raised rates another quarter point, which means your variable-rate credit cards got more expensive this week. GDP growth for 2026 has been cut to roughly 1.8% from 2.1%, and that gap is trillions of dollars of commerce that isn’t going to happen. This is a slow bleed, not a headline. What the Small Business Numbers Say I pay close attention to the small business community because that’s who I’ve been training for thirty years. The NFIB data says 80% of small business owners report energy costs are having a significant impact on operations right now. When costs rise, an owner has exactly two moves. You can eat the increase and cut your own profit, which 58% are doing. Or you can raise prices, which 52% are doing. Plenty are doing both, because the numbers are moving too fast to absorb. Neither move is painless. You can eat costs for a little while to protect the business, but do it too long and there’s no money left to fix what breaks. Raise prices and you chase customers away. Think about your cable bill going up ten dollars. It’s only ten dollars, but it’s $120 a year, and it’s the same service you had last week. A lot of people cancel. The statistic that stopped me cold was this one: only 8% of small businesses have avoided cost increases entirely. That’s not a story about clever operators who dodged it. It means 92% of the businesses in this country are carrying higher costs today than they were a few months ago, and most of them are struggling to keep the doors open. I’ll be honest about my own numbers too. I’ve been working hard to bring people into my coaching programs, and it’s been crickets. In thirty years I’ve never had a stretch like it. There was always someone in my inbox with a question about marketing or selling online, and I could get most of them on the phone and into a program. Right now the people are frozen. They’re on the sidelines, and not just in this country. When my wife heard the 8% figure she said, “Don’t beat yourself up. This explains it.” She’s right. But explaining it and accepting it are two different things. Lower Gear, Not Neutral This is the lesson I paid for in 2008. Taxes went up, the health care mandates hit, and I watched clients in the seminar and promotion business shut down because they couldn’t carry the load. So I slowed down too. I decided I wasn’t going to do anything until things settled. And I lost momentum I had spent years building. My customers saw me go quiet and didn’t know what to do. When the economy came back around 2012, I was so far behind that catching up took years. The game had moved two stops ahead of me. So here’s my rule for running a business in uncertain times: take a couple of days to get your bearings. That’s normal. But when a couple of days becomes a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, you’re in trouble. Slow down if you have to. Put it in a lower gear. Never put it in neutral. That applies to your plans as much as your business. The “someday syndrome” is one of the biggest things I see in the people I coach. This may not be the right time to build the new house, buy the new car, or start the renovation. It is exactly the right time to plan them. We’ve got twenty acres here and a building we want to put up for a studio and live events. We don’t know when. But we walk the property and talk about where it goes, and when things turn around, and they always do, we’ll be ready while everyone else is just starting to think. Take Care of the Person Running the Business Some of this is practical. Limit your exposure to the news. Check in for ten or fifteen minutes, and if nothing is breaking, get back to your life. Every headline is designed to grab your attention, and you don’t have to give it. Keep your routine. When COVID shut everything down, my advice to clients was to get up at the same time, have your coffee at the same time, and run your day the way you always did as much as you could. That’s how you keep the disruption from becoming trauma. And find a different way instead of stopping. We haven’t been eating out because lunch for two is over seventy dollars now. So we buy the salmon and the greens at the farmer’s market and make it at home. Cheaper, healthier, and we still get lunch. Some of it is emotional. I spoke with a woman this week who was very afraid, and when I listened for what she wasn’t saying, it was the unknown. I asked her: if you had extra water, some canned goods, a few things put away, would you still feel that fear? She said no, she’d feel prepared. That’s the whole answer. There is no downside to being prepared, and the upside is that it moves you from fear to strength. Anchor yourself in what you have right now, a roof, food in the fridge, people around you, and radiate out from there. And don’t do this alone. Talk to your peers. Tell them you think Robert might be full of it and let them argue with you. Get it out instead of bottling it up. If the people watching the show want a Zoom call to talk through what’s happening, I’ll build it and facilitate it. Choose Your Response We don’t get to choose what happens out there. We do get to choose how we respond. Fear isn’t something you can buy by the pound. It’s how you’re representing what’s going on inside your own head. I’ve chosen excitement, because I believe this is the required step to get us to the other side, and my picture of that other side is strong enough to focus on. Every generation gets its challenge. This one is ours. Stay in the game, stay in motion, and be ready when the weather turns. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

Watch or Listen to this episode: How to Cope with Traumatic News: 6 Ways to Recover One year ago today, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking on a college campus in Utah. Tomorrow marks 25 years since September 11th. Two very different events, two very different eras — and the same thing happened inside millions of people who were nowhere near either one: the chest tightened, the sleep went, the focus disappeared, and for a lot of folks it never fully came back. This isn’t a post about who did it, why, or what the politics are. It’s about what happens inside you when the world shakes — and how to cope with traumatic news without pretending it didn’t happen. Why Bad News Hits You Even When You Weren’t There Here’s the part almost nobody tells you: the screen is the exposure. Your brain doesn’t distinguish between a threat happening to you and a threat happening on your phone. The amygdala — your brain’s built-in smoke detector — doesn’t ask “is this my city?” or “do I actually need to worry about this?” It just sees danger and pulls the alarm. Heart rate spikes, stress hormones flood your system, digestion shuts down, sleep gets disrupted, and your thinking narrows from “what are the possibilities?” to pure survival mode. The truth is, most of us were never actually in danger — not during COVID, not on 9/11, not during any national tragedy that played out on our screens. But our nervous system doesn’t know that. It reacts as if we were standing right there. And for a lot of people, that reaction has been quietly replaying every single anniversary for 25 years. The Four Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn When a traumatic headline lands, most people fall into one of four patterns: Fight looks like rage-posting — striking out at something because there’s nowhere else to put the anger.Flight looks like doomscrolling — searching for an exit that doesn’t exist, scrolling and scrolling while looking for relief that never comes.Freeze looks like staring at the screen until 2 a.m., replaying the same footage from every angle, unable to look away.Fawn — the one nobody talks about — looks like everyone suddenly agreeing with the official story just to avoid conflict, accepting an explanation without ever questioning it. Recognizing which pattern you default to is the first step to interrupting it. The Research: What Screen Time Does to Your Stress (Even From Far Away) This part surprised me. After the Boston Marathon bombing, researchers at UC Irvine surveyed nearly 5,000 adults and found that people who watched six or more hours of coverage a day were nine times more likely to report high acute stress than people who watched under an hour a day. Here’s the kicker: their stress levels were higher than the stress levels of people who were physically present at the bombing. Watching from a screen, repeatedly, did more damage than being there. The same research team tracked over 1,300 people for three years after 9/11 and found that those watching four-plus hours of coverage a day were showing up with doctor-diagnosed physical illnesses two and three years later. In the words of lead researcher Roxane Cohen Silver: “There is no psychological benefit to repeated exposure to graphic images of horror.” Watching it again isn’t staying informed — it’s reinjuring yourself on a loop. 6 Ways to Cope With Traumatic News Without Letting It Run Your Life You can’t avoid a major news event entirely — everyone around you is talking about it. But you can control your dose. Here’s what actually works. 1. Control the Dose Never watching isn’t realistic. Instead, set a limit: one check-in a day, one source, a timer if you need one. Fifteen minutes, then you’re done. Kill autoplay. And be deliberate about your algorithm — the more you click on traumatic content, the more of it you’ll be fed. Click on something else on purpose. 2. Name the Feeling Give the emotion a label — “I’m scared,” “I’m furious,” “I’m numb.” Putting a name on what you’re feeling takes power away from the alarm bell going off in your head. You don’t have to announce it to anyone. Just naming it to yourself is often enough to start turning the trauma switch off. 3. Move Your Body Emotion is influenced by motion. If you’re stuck in stress, sitting still doesn’t release it — it reinforces the pattern. Go for a walk. Go for a jog. Stress hormones are fuel for movement, and movement finishes the loop your body started. It’s no accident that Steve Jobs held his toughest negotiations as walking meetings, or that Reagan invited Gorbachev on a walk during high-stakes Cold War talks. Moving literally takes the pressure out of the room. 4. Get in a Room With Real Humans Isolation is the accelerant. Research on post-traumatic growth is blunt about this: the people who recover best are the ones who talked it through with someone who didn’t judge them. Call one person — not a post, not a thread, an actual voice. We have more ways to communicate than any generation in history, and we’re also the loneliest society to ever walk the planet. Close that gap. 5. Do One Useful Thing for Someone Else We consistently do more for others than we’re willing to do for ourselves. If you’re carrying stress, redirect it into contribution. Help someone with their groceries. Check in on a neighbor. It doesn’t have to be big — it just has to be outward. Watching someone else’s relief can release your own. 6. Zoom Out on Purpose Ask yourself: will this still carry the same weight in 25 years? Zooming out doesn’t minimize what happened — it puts today’s spike of stress inside a longer timeline, which makes it easier to carry. The Upside Nobody Talks About: Post-Traumatic Growth “Just get over it” doesn’t work. Trauma you ignore doesn’t disappear — it moves into your body. Heart issues, adrenal issues, liver and gallbladder problems: these are the places we store what we refuse to process. But there’s a flip side that psychologists have studied for over 30 years, called post-traumatic growth. A large share of people who go through something genuinely difficult report real, lasting gains in five specific areas: Personal strength — if you survived this, you can handle what’s next.Deeper relationships — fewer connections, perhaps, but far stronger ones.A greater appreciation for life — knowing it can change in an instant reframes how you spend today.New possibilities — opportunities that were always there but invisible until the old picture broke.Spiritual growth — bigger questions about meaning, purpose, and why you’re still here. The silver lining isn’t a personality trait some people are lucky enough to have. It’s a skill — and it comes down to what you do after the hit, not the hit itself. Real Stories of People Who Chose to Help Every vase in City Blossoms, a flower shop blocks from Ground Zero, was shattered on 9/11. The owner never closed. She kept making arrangements because, in her words, “everyone knew someone who died.” Her philosophy: you have to stay on your feet no matter what. At Bubby’s in Tribeca, chef Ron Silver watched the first tower fall, picked up his kid from school, then snuck past the barricades to make pancakes for first responders. He never considered closing — he never believed the city wasn’t coming back. Neither of them waited for permission or clarity. They looked at what they could still do, and they did it. The Bottom Line If a headline has ever knocked you flat — whether you run a business or not — the response is the same: control what you consume, name what you feel, move, connect, contribute, and zoom out. You don’t get over trauma. You get through it. And on the other side of getting through it is a version of you that’s stronger, more connected, and more awake to what actually matters. This post is based on Episode 12 of Renegade Breakthroughs. New episodes stream live every Thursday — find the full show at RobertImbriale.com/listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

AI Took 100K Jobs. Here’s How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off. Two numbers came across my desk this week, and I can’t stop thinking about them together. Through June of this year, 101,743 American job cuts named AI as the reason. That’s the first half of the year alone, so figure it’s over 200,000 by the time the ball drops. Depressing, right? Now the second number: 531,423 new business applications were filed in June. In one month. That’s a record. So while the headlines are all about who’s getting cut, something much bigger is happening quietly underneath. People are deciding to start a business after being laid off instead of waiting for the next pink slip. And I think they’re right. Two Record Numbers in the Same Month Think about what those two figures are telling you when you put them side by side. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs in January. Oracle cut 21,000. Meta let 8,000 people go, Dell 11,000. Intuit cut 17% of its workforce. Block laid off nearly half the company. These aren’t struggling businesses. They’re some of the most profitable companies on earth, and they’ve figured out that AI does a lot of the work faster and cheaper. But the people walking out of those buildings aren’t stupid. A programmer who just got replaced by software knows that if he takes another programming job, it’s only a matter of time before that company catches on too. So a lot of them are skipping the job hunt entirely. They still have the skills. They still have the experience. They’re taking both and building something of their own. Half a million of them in a single month. Back in the 90s, when I was doing a lot of marketing work, there were only about 11 million businesses in the entire country. Add 500,000 a month to that base and you can see where this is heading. History is bending back on itself. We Were All Entrepreneurs Once Before the Industrial Revolution, every one of us was self-employed. You were the baker, the shoemaker, the blacksmith. That’s how people survived. Then the factories came along, and they needed employees, so they built a school system that taught people how to become employees. It never taught you how to work for yourself. It still doesn’t. Now AI is taking over the mundane, systematic work, and that is pushing people back toward running their own show. I left the corporate world in 1995 and never went back. I’m watching a whole generation arrive at the same decision, only they’re being shoved through the door instead of walking through it. Either way, they’re through. Which Jobs Are Going Away (and Why) Here’s the pattern I’d ask you to look for: anything that runs on a system is going to be replaced. Take what I call the systems coach. You bought a coaching program, opened the binder, and it told you the five questions to ask on every first call. Same five questions, every client. We don’t need you anymore. AI does that better. The coach we still need is the intuitive coach, the one who can tap in and feel what’s actually going on with the person across the table. Bookkeeping is a system. It won’t be long before your accounting software produces the monthly reports, the tax return, and a note telling you where you’re overspending. A lot of legal work is a system. Book editing is a system. I’ve been using Photoshop since it came out in the 80s, and I hardly open it anymore. I describe the graphic I want and get something better than I could have made myself. Remember “just learn to code”? Ten years ago that was the guaranteed path, with kids starting at $100,000 out of school. Now AI writes code better than most humans. I’ve done it myself: I needed a script for a website, asked for it, pasted it in, and it worked. What AI Can’t Replace So what’s left? Experience. Intuition. Judgment. AI has more information than you. You have more experience than AI. Those are not the same thing. When AI hands me a graphic, I can say the color is wrong, the balance is off, try again. Someone with no design background will call whatever comes out good enough. When AI writes a sales letter, I can tell whether it will sell, because I’ve written hundreds and watched what happened. Someone who has never written one will think it sounds fine, spend money on it, and find out the hard way. The tool is only as good as the person holding it. Your experience is the part nobody can download. The Mini Business: How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off The CEO of Perplexity used a phrase I liked: the mini business. Not a startup with a pitch deck and investors. A business that supports you and your family, built with tools that used to require a staff. You could be a researcher. Businesses pay for market research, and they don’t care how you gathered it as long as it’s accurate and packaged well. You could set up AI receptionists for local companies. I’m building one right now for a client: a knowledge base, a voice, and suddenly the phone gets answered 24 hours a day with no salary and no workers’ comp. You could write and publish ebooks. You could teach AI to the people who are still afraid of it, and that market is going to exist for a decade, because there are a lot of them. If you don’t know where to begin, here’s your first assignment. Open any AI model and type this: “I’m thinking about creating a mini business. I have no idea where to begin. I have skills and experience in these areas: [list them]. Can you make some suggestions about what I could do?” I guarantee it comes back with things you haven’t considered. My knowledge base is big, but it isn’t vast. AI is vast. Let it widen your field of view, then use your experience to pick. The Mistake I Made in 2008 I need to tell you about the years I lost, because I don’t want you to lose yours. When the economy turned in 2008, I watched my clients fall apart. More than half of my coaching clients walked away that year. Friends in the seminar business closed their doors. And I looked around and decided the smart move was to stop. Stop promoting, stop building, sit on the sidelines, and wait for things to improve. Things did not improve in 2009. Or 2010. Or 2011. It was 2012, maybe 2013, before the market really caught again. I lost four or five years I could have spent building, and when spring finally came, the people who had kept working were miles ahead of me. I grew up in Canada. I know what fourteen feet of snow looks like, and I know that when a storm dumps three feet on you overnight, it feels like the end of the world. It isn’t. Winter always ends. The question is whether you’re ready when it does. Some of the most successful businesses in history were started during the worst economic times, precisely because everyone else was waiting. Fear, Loneliness, and the Human Element Fear is going to be there. I’m not immune to it. What fear does to most people is shut them down. They pull back, stop spending, stop moving. You don’t have to be fearless to make progress. Some days the only thing you can manage is one email or a few notes. Fine. Some forward movement always beats none. The other trap is quieter. George Pu, who runs a company called Founder Reality, cut his team from 14 people to 5 using AI and hasn’t hired in two years. He called it the best financial decision he ever made and the worst emotional experience. We are not built to work alone. Loneliness kills productivity. That’s why coworking spaces are booming and why masterminds keep getting more popular. So build the human part on purpose: a weekly Zoom with a few people swapping what they learned in AI this week, or a monthly lunch at somebody’s house. It’s cheap, and it’s the difference between a business that lasts and one that quietly fades. Don’t Get Left Behind I open my AI apps in the morning and there’s an update. By four in the afternoon there’s another one. We’re still on the ground floor, and the worst possible move is to decide you don’t want to know about it. People said that about computers in the 90s, right up until they were standing at a gas pump that wanted a card and had no idea what to do. AI took work away from a lot of people. It took some of mine. But a record half million people just decided it also handed them the tools to build something new, and I’m betting on them. Stay strong, stay flexible, keep moving, and go build your future. Want a head start? Grab my free download of 100+ ready-to-use AI prompts at renegade.club/110 – they work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok. And listen to the full episode, “AI Took 100K Jobs, Now It’s Time to Build YOUR Future,” at RobertImbriale.com/listen. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

Watch or Listen to this episode now: What to Do When Your Business Idea Fails: 3 Smart Moves This week Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face – the platform people call “the GitHub of AI” – for a reported $12.9 billion. It is the kind of number that makes an entire company look like it was destined for greatness from day one. It wasn’t. Hugging Face started life as a chatbot app for teenagers. It stalled out around 100,000 users and stopped growing. By most measures, that was a flop. The founders had built the thing they cared about, and the thing they cared about had quietly run out of road. So they did the one thing almost nobody does. They looked sideways. One of the co-founders had put an open-source machine learning tool up on GitHub — an afterthought, a side project, not the business. It started getting attention. They noticed, and they rebuilt the entire company around the thing that was working instead of the thing they had planned. That is the real story behind almost every overnight success, and it is exactly **what to do when your business idea fails**. On Episode 10 of Renegade Breakthroughs, I sat down with Bruce “Poppy” Feldman Jr. — creator of the Unleashing Excellence System — to break down the gap between a flop and a win, and why most people never make it across. The Three Things People Actually Do When an Idea Flops Watch enough entrepreneurs long enough and you see the same three responses every time. **They quit.** The idea hits its first real obstacle and that’s the end of it. Not the second obstacle, not the tenth — the first. This is where the overwhelming majority land. **They hide.** They’ll try again, but quietly, privately, telling nobody. They’re not done with the idea. They’re done being seen failing at it. The humiliation is the thing they’re actually avoiding. **They keep going.** A small group refines, retools, tweaks, and keeps moving until something works. Not because they’re smarter or braver, but because they’ve built a different relationship with the word “failure.” Most people reading this already know which one they are. The useful question isn’t which category you fall into — it’s how to become the third one on purpose. Stop Making the Flop About You Here’s the single biggest shift, and it’s the one Bruce hammered hardest. A flopped idea is *information about the idea*. It is not a ruling on your worth. We collapse those two things constantly. The launch didn’t sell, so I’m not smart enough. The offer didn’t land, so I’m a fraud. Once failure becomes part of your identity, you shrink back, you avoid, you procrastinate, and eventually you quit — not because the idea was bad, but because trying again now costs you something psychologically that you can’t afford. Bruce puts it plainly: he doesn’t use the word failure at all. There’s a finality baked into it. His framing is that he either wins, or he figures out how something isn’t supposed to work. Same event, completely different consequence for the person it happened to. The same trap shows up in how people value themselves financially. If your identity is welded to your bank balance, then a low balance means *you* are low. Break that connection and you’ll actually perform better, because you’re no longer defending your self-worth every time you take a risk. If I tell you your idea is terrible, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you. But if you hear it as a verdict on you, you’ll never move again. Define What Winning Actually Means First A huge share of what people call failure is really a badly set expectation. Every January, someone decides they’re going to get healthy. That’s it — that’s the goal. “Get healthy.” At the end of the month, they’ve lost seven pounds instead of the ten they vaguely had in mind, and they log it as a failure and stop. Seven pounds is not a failure. Seven pounds is better than zero and dramatically better than gaining ten. But without a granular definition of winning, there’s no way to tell progress from defeat — so everything short of the fantasy gets filed as a loss. Get specific about what winning looks like before you start. Then get specific about the smallest unit of progress that still counts. Build Reps, Not Breakthroughs Bruce’s answer to the paralysis is reps — the smallest possible action that moves you toward the thing you want. You don’t join a gym on January 2nd and bench 300 pounds. You move a small weight, then a slightly bigger one. The reps build confidence, and the confidence funds the next rep. That compounding is the whole mechanism. His practical framework is the **3×3**: three tiny reps in three areas of your life — health, business, relationships, whatever yours are — every single day. Non-negotiables. Write them out in advance. Do them. Repeat tomorrow. That’s the consistency chain. What counts as a rep? A two-minute walk. One paragraph. Ten minutes with your phone face-down and your full attention on your spouse. That’s it. That’s the whole rep. And there’s a hidden benefit to setting the bar that low. If you commit to writing one paragraph, you’ll often write ten pages — because the resistance was never about the work, it was about the size of the thing you were staring at. Lower the entry cost and you’ll routinely blow past it. I run a version of this myself. Every day my task list has things on it I know I can finish, alongside the bigger items I’m chipping at. Finishing the day having accomplished something visible is not a vanity exercise. It’s momentum, and momentum is the fuel you’ll need on the days that go badly. The Reset Day Rule You are going to miss. Life happens, you’ll skip a rep, you’ll take a day off you didn’t plan. Bruce’s rule handles it: **it’s okay to miss once. Never miss twice.** Missing once is an event. Missing twice starts a story — *I always do this, I could never keep this up, I’m the kind of person who quits* — and that story is far more expensive than the missed rep. So you reset. You already know what the rep is. Go do it at the next opportunity and skip the self-flagellation entirely. How to Tell “Keep Pushing” from “Beating a Dead Horse” This is the hardest question in the whole conversation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a motivational one. The signal I trust most is force versus flow. When you’re forcing it — white-knuckling, stressed, reaching for a bigger hammer to drive a square peg into a round hole — that’s usually information. When things start moving easily and doors open without you kicking them, you’re pointed the right way. But notice the third option, the one Hugging Face took: it’s often not that the idea was flawed. Sometimes the square hole is half an inch to the left. The pivot isn’t abandonment, it’s aim. What makes this possible is shortening the distance between doing and reflecting. A ship a fraction of a degree off course is fine at first and catastrophically wrong a thousand miles later. Review daily on the small things, weekly on the big ones, and correct early while the corrections are still cheap. You Cannot Do This Alone The biggest lesson of my last thirty years is that nobody gets there by themselves. When you’re inside your own idea, you can’t see it. You need people who will look at the failed launch and ask what happened, break down the numbers, find the actual broken step — instead of confirming that you’re a failure. That’s what a good mastermind does, and it’s why people who have one move faster. Choose those people carefully. Friends and family are often the worst possible sounding board, and usually out of love — they don’t want to see you hurt, so they’ll talk you out of the risk. Others will discourage you because your success would hold up a mirror to their own inaction. Be deliberate about who gets to weigh in. One modern addition: AI makes a surprisingly good brainstorming partner. When I’ve built a page I think is finished, I’ll hand it to an AI and ask how to make it better. It doesn’t tell me I’m a failure. It gives me options. That’s the exact function a mastermind serves, available at 2am. The Takeaway Failure is only final if you quit. Everything else is data. Separate the result from your identity. Define what winning means before you start. Shrink the work down to reps small enough that you’ll actually do them. Never miss twice. Review often enough to correct early. And put people around you who will help you look sideways at the thing that’s quietly working. As Bruce says: no matter how you feel today, get up, get dressed, show up, be strong, and keep going. Nvidia just paid $12.9 billion for a company that started as a failed teenage chatbot app. Your flop might be information, not a verdict. **Get Bruce’s free framework:** Bruce has released *The Forge* — the third pillar of his Unleashing Excellence System, where identity and beliefs get tested — as a free ebook, including the full 3×3 framework and the reset day rule. No upsell, no strings. Grab it at https://forge.brucepoppy.com Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

Watch or Listen to this episode here: Rejection-Proof Networking: The Life Hack Mitch Axelrod Used to Turn $16K Into $100K Every entrepreneur hits the wall Mitch Axelrod hit in 1983: he’d burned through every local audience willing to have him speak, income had stalled at $16,000 a year, and the next move meant asking strangers for something — the exact moment most of us freeze. On the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, host Robert Imbriale sat down with longtime friend and returning guest Mitch Axelrod — creator of The NEW Game™ and author of the #1 bestseller The NEW Game of Selling — to unpack the system Axelrod built to eliminate that freeze entirely. He calls it rejection-proof networking, and it’s the centerpiece of an episode built for anyone ready to hack their own life. Who Is Mitch Axelrod? Since 1978, Mitch Axelrod has delivered more than 3,500 talks, workshops, and keynotes, and trained roughly a million people on the skills packed into The NEW Game of Selling. Imbriale introduced him on the show as “the small hinge that moves big doors” — a nod to Axelrod’s decades spent teaching insurance companies, speakers, authors, and coaches how to license their intellectual property instead of trading hours for dollars. The two go back to a December 2019 event called, fittingly, Hack Your Life — the same title this episode borrows, and the same night everyone in the room was busy predicting a great 2020. Three months later, everything changed. From Brain Surgery to Acceptance: A Masterclass in Resilience In March 2020, days after that optimistic event, Axelrod suffered a stroke brought on by a brain tumor. Two brain surgeries and nine weeks of rehab followed — learning to walk and talk again, isolated in a locked-down nursing home where no visitors were allowed. It’s the kind of story that could derail an episode about “life hacks.” Instead, Axelrod turned it into the clearest lesson of the conversation. He described the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and how most people get stuck somewhere in the middle. Axelrod skipped straight to the last one. “It’s not how far you fall that counts,” he told Imbriale. “It’s how far, or how high, you bounce that counts.” Once you’re in acceptance without guilt or shame, he explained, you can finally ask the only useful question: what can I do about it, and who can help me? That question is where rejection-proof networking comes in. What Is Rejection-Proof Networking? Rejection-proof networking is the model Axelrod built after hitting that 1983 income wall. Rather than pitching prospects, he decided to invite people who had “more money than me” to lunch — 15 of them, cold — and test a new way of asking for help that didn’t put anyone in a yes-or-no corner. The structure is four simple lines: Here’s what I do. Here’s why I do it. Here’s who I’m looking for. Who do you know? Where should I go? Notice what’s missing: no ask to buy, hire, or sign anything. “None of that even comes up in the conversation,” Axelrod said. “It’s just casual conversation. And you’re kind of asking for support without actually asking for it.” Because there’s nothing to say yes or no to, there’s nothing to be rejected from — which is the entire point. The Track Record Axelrod didn’t just theorize the model; he ran it twice, with numbers to show for it: 1983–1985: Starting from $16,000 in annual income, he used the four-line script over lunches with strangers. Within a year he doubled his income to $33,000. The year after, it tripled to $100,000. Eight years later, entering consulting and speaking, he took five more people to lunch. One was an insurance VP who put him on a $2,500-a-month retainer on the spot — later expanded to $8,500 a month after a single introduction opened the door to a network of growing companies. Why It Works Most networking fails, Axelrod argued, because it’s personal — you’re selling yourself, not a product, so a “no” feels like rejection instead of a business outcome. Rejection-proof networking sidesteps that entirely by removing the ask. You’re not requesting a transaction; you’re requesting information — “who do you know, where should I go” — a question almost no one refuses to at least consider, because helping feels good and costs the other person nothing. The Decision Gap: Controlling How You React The conversation’s second major hack ties directly into why rejection-proof networking works on the listener’s side, too. Axelrod described what he calls the decision gap — the space between a stimulus (something someone says or does) and your response to it. His point: if you keep giving people a stimulus that reminds them of a bad past experience, they won’t respond to you in the present — they’ll react from the past. He illustrated it with a story about a financial-planning client who zoned out mid-conversation, replaying a story about a bad investment from years earlier. “You’re in the past,” Axelrod told him. “I’m in the present. We’re in two different time zones.” His fix: name it. Ask directly whether the person can be present, or whether they need to get the past experience out first before a real conversation can happen. “That changed the context of every conversation I’ve ever had since then,” he said. The same logic applies in reverse — if your own communication style keeps drawing resistance, the fix isn’t repeating yourself louder. It’s changing your stimulus, because the definition of insanity is expecting a different outcome from the same input. Imperfect Action Beats Perfect Inaction The episode’s other recurring theme showed up on Axelrod’s coffee mug: imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. Both he and Imbriale returned to the idea that most decisions are made without enough information, not with an abundance of it — and that waiting for certainty just means staying stuck in fight-flight-freeze. You rarely know you made the right call until after you’ve made it and adjusted. It’s the same instinct that shaped the rejection-proof networking model in the first place: Axelrod didn’t wait until the approach was perfect. He took 15 strangers to lunch and iterated from there. More From Mitch Axelrod Beyond rejection-proof networking, Axelrod pointed listeners toward three resources he’s built over the years: The NEW Game of Selling — his #1 bestselling book on selling yourself authentically, with bonus links inside for networking, referrals, and trust-building. Soul Role Goal — a free framework for aligning your goals with what you’re actually good at and enjoy, so ambition stops fighting itself. The IP Money Club — a weekly meeting for speakers, authors, coaches, consultants, and healers who want to get paid to create their books, courses, and content instead of creating it first and then trying to sell it. Watch or Listen to the Full Episode Robert Imbriale and Mitch Axelrod cover a lot more ground than fits in one post — including a candid look at decision-making, why we’re never taught it in school, and how to tell the difference between living in the past, the present, and the future. Watch on YouTube: Hack Your Life with Mitch Axelrod and Robert Imbriale Watch on Rumble: Hacking Your Life with Special Guest Mitch Axelrod Apple Podcasts: Renegade Breakthroughs with Robert Imbriale Spotify: Renegade Breakthroughs iHeartRadio: Renegade Breakthroughs Amazon Music: Renegade Breakthroughs Pandora: Renegade Breakthroughs TuneIn: Renegade Breakthroughs Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

How to Handle Economic Uncertainty as a Business Owner (Without Losing Your Mind) Watch or Listen to this Episode Now! If you’ve felt like the ground keeps shifting under your business this year, you’re not imagining it. In the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break,” host Robert Imbriale tackles the question every entrepreneur is quietly asking: how do you keep moving forward when the economic signals refuse to make sense? If you’re wrestling with economic uncertainty as a business owner right now, this episode is 25 minutes you’ll want to carve out time for. The Jobs Report That Started It All Imbriale opens with a number that stopped him mid-scroll on Friday: the Fed reported a loss of 23,000 jobs, right when the narrative was supposedly “the economy is getting better.” He doesn’t panic over it — instead he offers a theory worth hearing in full (it involves the shift away from off-the-books labor) and makes a point that lands harder than the statistic itself: mixed news is more stressful than bad news, because your nervous system doesn’t know which signal to trust. Add gas prices bouncing back over $6 a gallon, new tariffs hitting small overseas purchases, and a war whose outcome nobody can predict, and you get exactly the kind of background stress Imbriale says has been quietly reshaping all of us since 2020 — whether we’ve noticed it or not. Why “Bend, Don’t Break” Isn’t Just a Catchy Title This is where the episode earns its name. Imbriale shares a personal, slightly uncomfortable story from 2008: when the recession hit and Obamacare landed a tax blow on small businesses, his instinct was to sit on the sidelines and wait it out. He lost years waiting for a recovery that didn’t meaningfully arrive until 2012–2013. His warning for anyone facing economic uncertainty as a business owner today is blunt — don’t repeat that mistake. Stay in the game, but stay flexible, because “we’re walking on quicksand in some respects.” He walks through concrete, usable tactics for staying grounded instead of frozen: Label the ambiguity. Vague dread is worse than a named problem — call it “a rough economy” and it becomes something you can actually respond to. Ration your news intake. Ten to fifteen minutes, ask “will this affect me today?”, and if not, walk away. Doom-scrolling, he argues, is “very soap opera” and almost engineered to keep you confused. Actively calm your nervous system. A walk, music, or — his personal go-to for years — calling a friend and talking about anything except the stressor. Rebuild face-to-face connection. He’s blunt about how isolated we’ve become post-pandemic (his Costco cart-collision story alone is worth the watch), and makes the case that reconnecting with strangers — the cashier, the neighbor, the mechanic — is quietly one of the most powerful tools against uncertainty. The AI Curveball: Watermarked Text and Weekly Whiplash Midway through, Imbriale pivots to something most listeners won’t have heard yet: Anthropic (the company behind Claude) is reportedly embedding invisible characters into AI-generated text so platforms can detect AI authorship — a response to mounting EU-style regulatory pressure. He’s candid that he doesn’t think it’ll hold up long-term (workaround tools are inevitable), but the bigger point is the pace: apps updating twice in a single day, AI now used to improve AI itself. For any business owner trying to plan the next quarter, this is one more variable moving faster than the news cycle can process. The Discernment Shift: Homeschooling, Farmers Markets, and Home Healthcare Perhaps the most thought-provoking stretch of the episode is Imbriale’s read on where all this uncertainty is quietly pushing people: toward self-reliance. He connects the dots between the explosion in homeschooling, the crowded Saturday farmers markets replacing processed grocery staples, and what he predicts is the next frontier — home healthcare replacing the hospital system entirely for non-emergency issues. He even shares a striking anecdote from Dr. John Gray (Men Are From Mars) about stage-four cancer patients reaching remission through trauma-release work rather than chemotherapy — tying back to his core argument that economic uncertainty as a business owner is just one layer of a much bigger societal reset happening right now. Why You Should Watch the Full Episode This summary barely scratches the surface — the full episode includes his AI-prompting framework (with a free 100+ prompt download), his hypothesis on the September–December “busy season” for entrepreneurs, and a preview of next week’s guest, Mitch Axelrod. If you’re navigating economic uncertainty as a business owner and need both a strategic reset and a reason to feel optimistic about the next 90 days, watch “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break” on Rumble — it’s also available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Pandora under Renegade Breakthroughs. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Learn more about Robert here. Check out out Resources Page

Watch or Listen to this powerful episode now! The Courage to Think for Yourself: What the Fauci Contempt Vote Really Teaches Us Today, a Senate committee voted 8-7, along party lines, to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Last week, he sat in front of that same committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times rather than answer questions about the pandemic response. Whatever side of that vote you land on, I’m not here to litigate guilt or innocence — that’s for the Senate, and if it gets there, a jury. I’m here to talk about something bigger: why so many of us stopped being surprised when “the science” turns out to have a footnote nobody told us about. Held in Contempt Fauci’s team says the whole hearing was a setup, designed to trap him into a perjury charge. Committee chair Rand Paul argues that Fauci’s 2025 pardon from President Biden means he can’t legitimately plead the Fifth in the first place, and he’s pushing for a referral to the Justice Department. The matter now heads to the full Senate floor, where it has to clear a filibuster before the DOJ ever decides whether to prosecute. Nothing here is settled. But the moment is still worth sitting with, because it’s not the first time. And if we don’t learn the actual lesson underneath it, it won’t be the last. The Pattern Here’s the thing that gets lost in the noise of any single hearing: this isn’t one bad moment. It’s a pattern, and the honest version of it — the version that survives fact-checking — includes the other side’s explanation every time. Take the six-foot rule. For two years, “stand six feet apart” was treated as settled science, enforced with tape marks on gym floors and closed playgrounds. In June 2024 testimony, Fauci told Congress it “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on data. He later clarified he meant there was no randomized trial comparing six feet to three or ten — the CDC says it leaned on 1955 droplet research instead. Even taking the more generous read, a rule the public was told was precise science turned out to be an educated guess. Or masks. In March 2020, Fauci and the Surgeon General told Americans there was no reason to walk around in one. Weeks later, the guidance flipped to universal masking, and for a lot of people, staying masked became close to a moral test. Fauci later said the early guidance was shaped partly by a real shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers, not purely by the science changing. That’s a legitimate defense. It also means the public wasn’t told the real reason for the guidance at the time it mattered most. Or the vaccines. In 2021, the CDC director said vaccinated people “do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Fauci called them “dead ends” for transmission. President Biden said vaccinated people “do not spread the disease to anyone else.” Within months, breakthrough transmission during the Delta wave showed that wasn’t true. Or gain-of-function funding. In May 2021, Fauci told the Senate flatly that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH’s own former acting director later told Congress the agency had, in fact, funded gain-of-function-type research there. Notice what all four have in common. Not one was presented as a best guess. Every one was delivered with total certainty — trust the science — right up until it wasn’t true anymore. Building the Courage to Think for Yourself So what do you actually do with that? Not “trust no one.” That’s not courage, that’s just a different kind of laziness dressed up as skepticism. Real courage is the willingness to ask anyway. You can respect expertise and still ask what the evidence is and what happens if the expert is wrong. And here’s a filter worth adopting: certainty is a red flag, not a green light. Real science hedges, because it’s supposed to. When someone in authority sounds one hundred percent sure about something that’s still evolving in real time, that’s worth a second look, not less scrutiny. Ask who pays a price if they’re wrong, too. The officials who deliver bad guidance rarely lose their job over it. You do — in time, money, or trust in the people you thought had your back. That asymmetry is exactly why you can’t outsource the thinking. This isn’t about being contrarian for its own sake. It’s “verify before you comply,” especially when compliance is going to cost you something real. Why Blind Trust Costs You in Business, Too Here’s the flip side, for the builders and leaders reading this. Every industry has its own Fauci moment — the marketing guru who swore by a tactic that quietly stopped working two years ago, the “best practice” everyone copied because everyone else was already doing it. Confidence was never a track record. Build your own filter before you need it. Don’t wait for a crisis to start asking where the data behind a recommendation actually comes from — make it a habit on an ordinary Tuesday. Run small tests instead of taking a big trust fall. You don’t have to bet the business on someone else’s certainty; pilot it, check it against your own numbers, scale what actually works for you. And own your own calls, mistakes included. The flip side of not blindly trusting authority is that you don’t get to blame it when your own bet doesn’t pay off either. Courage cuts both ways. They Don’t Need Your Courage to Be Right They don’t need your courage to be right. They need your compliance to be easy. Don’t confuse the two. Today’s vote is one data point in a much longer pattern. The lesson was never “trust nothing.” It’s “verify before you comply” — and build that muscle now, before the next crisis makes it expensive not to. Listen to the full episode, “The Courage to Think for Yourself” — and tell me in the comments: what’s one thing you were told with total confidence, by an official, an expert, or a guru, that you later found out wasn’t true? Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

Watch or Listen to this Episode Now The Trust Recession: They Lied, You Knew, Now What? Yesterday, the man who spent years telling an entire nation to "trust the science" sat down in front of the United States Senate — and refused to answer a single question. After more than 250 appearances before Congress, Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth. And whatever you think of the man, that moment is the perfect snapshot of something I've been watching build for years: we are living through the trust recession. When the Experts Went Silent Let me say plainly what a lot of people are thinking. When someone spends years demanding your trust, your compliance, telling you he is the science — and then, the moment he's finally asked to account for it under oath, he goes quiet — that tells you something. That tells you a lot. Is pleading the Fifth a right? Absolutely. Every American has it, and we should be grateful we do. But this wasn't a private citizen caught off guard. This was the most powerful public health official of our lifetime, sitting on a thousand pages of his own private pandemic diaries that Senator Rand Paul just put on the table — with a contempt of Congress vote coming next week. A man who had all the answers for the rest of us suddenly had none for himself. And here's the thing: this was never really about one man in a suit. It's about what he represents. For years we were told to sit down, be quiet, and trust the experts, the institutions, the people in charge — because they knew better than we did. Millions of us had honest questions, and we were treated like we were crazy for asking them. What the Trust Recession Really Is Look around now. This is what I call the trust recession, and it's bigger than any single hearing. Ask yourself honestly: who do you actually believe anymore? The government? The media? The experts who were so certain, right up until they were wrong? Trust in our institutions has been sliding for years, and this Fauci hearing is a symptom, not the cause. That trust didn't simply evaporate. It was spent — burned by people who treated your faith in them as something they were owed rather than something they had to earn. A society runs on trust the way an engine runs on oil. When you run low, the machine still moves for a while — but you can hear it grinding. You can feel it grinding. That grinding is the sound of the trust recession, and it changes how every one of us has to operate, whether you're running a household or running a company. How to Think for Yourself in a Low-Trust World So what do you do about it? Here's the good news: the answer isn't to believe no one. Pure cynicism is just as lazy as blind faith. The answer is to build your own filter. When you hear a claim, run it through three quick questions. Who is telling me this? What do they get if I believe it? And have they been right before? Follow the incentive and check the track record, and most of the noise sorts itself out. Then watch out for the tribe trap. The most comfortable information is always the stuff that flatters what you already believe — but comfort is not the same thing as accuracy. Skepticism isn't cynicism. Cynicism believes nothing and does no work. Skepticism rolls up its sleeves and finds out. In the middle of the trust recession, that willingness to do the work is a superpower. And protect your peace while you're at it. You can stay informed without being enraged twenty-four hours a day. Curate your inputs on purpose. Why Trust Is Now Your Most Valuable Business Asset Now here's the flip side, and this one is for the builders and the leaders in the audience. In a world where people believe no one, the person they do believe wins everything. That makes trust the rarest and most valuable asset you can offer. Transparency is the strategy. The Fauci diaries are the lesson in miniature — what leaders hide tends to surface. So say the hard thing first, before someone else says it for you. Consistency compounds: trust is built in drips and lost in buckets, so do what you said you'd do, every single time, especially when it's inconvenient. And when you get it wrong, own it fast. The brands and founders who admit mistakes out-earn the ones who spin them. There's an AI angle here too. In an age where anyone can fake content, being verifiably, consistently you is a moat. Authenticity has quietly become a competitive advantage. Good Times, Bad Vibes: Trust Your Own Eyes The trust recession doesn't stop at politics. It's in your wallet, too. Read this week's headlines and the economy is booming: jobless claims at their lowest level since 1969, solid GDP, the Fed looking around and deciding everything is fine. By every official number, we're living in good times. So why does nobody feel it? Because I talk to real people every day, and I don't hear "booming." I hear business owners holding their breath and families doing the math at the grocery store and coming up short. When the official story and your own two eyes disagree, trust your eyes. You live in your bank account; they live in a spreadsheet — and a cheerful average can hide an awful lot of pain underneath it. You are not crazy, and you are not wrong. And the moment you understand that, something powerful happens: you stop waiting for permission. Now What? Move While Everyone Else Freezes Here's the trap, and it's the whole trap. Most people are frozen right now, waiting for a headline to tell them it's finally safe to move. That headline is never coming. By the time it feels safe, the opportunity is already gone — scooped up by the people who moved while everyone else waited. For everyone at home, that means making solid decisions from your own reality — your job, your income, your bills — instead of the national mood. For the entrepreneurs, it means the field is wide open precisely because your competition is paralyzed. When others pull back on marketing, hiring, and building, attention and talent get cheap. Make small, reversible bets. Keep moving. And be the calm one — because in the fog, people follow whoever isn't panicking. They Lied. You Knew. Here's What to Do. The trust recession is real. They earned it, and we're all living in it. But you and I are going to do the opposite. We're going to be the people who tell the truth, who own our word, who earn trust back one honest day at a time — and who keep moving while everyone else stands frozen, waiting for permission that isn't coming. Stay in your power. Trust your own eyes. And let's get to work. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you're an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: - Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day - Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn't cracked how - Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do - not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that's you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

Watch or Listen to this Episode Here: Using AI to Beat Inflation: Playbook for Uncertain Times The tides are shifting, and you can feel it. There's an uncertainty in the air right now that has a lot of people frozen in place. Oil prices are climbing back over $100 a barrel, which means gas and diesel are about to soar again — and when that happens, the whole economy slows down with it. This post is about that moment we're in, and about using AI to beat inflation while everyone else is standing still. The Fog of War Summer is usually slow. But this July has been slower than usual. My clients aren't executing - they're on the sidelines, holding their collective breath, waiting to see what happens next. Some of them are gripped by fear. Others are stepping back and quietly formulating new plans. I understand both. The road ahead is genuinely uncertain, and the promise of better times feels a little out of reach at the moment. This is the fog of war. Winning from here is going to require new thinking. It's going to require true leadership. And it's going to require each of us to remain in our power and be an example for everyone else who's still finding their footing. I believe we'll get there — I really do. But for right now, this is our moment to stand strong. Could AI Be the Answer to Inflation? Here's the question I keep coming back to: could AI actually be part of the solution to inflation? The word you hear everywhere right now is "optimize." And optimizing can mean a lot of things — reducing expenses, trimming staff, or in my case, less gear in the studio and cancelling subscriptions to programs I barely use. It's also a season to outsource more and hire less. I've been telling you that big changes are coming. They're here. So many things are shifting at once. Brands are disappearing from the shelves, so we adapt and find alternatives. Restaurants are closing. Websites are going dark. Amazon keeps eating more and more of the online economy. Our job is to look at all of this change and, instead of fixating on how bad it is, hunt for the silver lining. That is our superpower. Change always comes with chaos — and we are in the thick of the chaos right now. It'll rattle you. But if you keep your eyes on the goal, it won't crush you. That's exactly why using AI to beat inflation is so powerful right now. When the economy pulls back and every business is looking to cut expenses, AI helps you trim the excess without losing your edge. I'm talking about practical, everyday wins: Using AI to find coupons or track down the same items somewhere cheaperUsing AI to find a new job or land a new clientUsing AI to update your resume, your bio, or your social media profiles All of it done in minutes. It saves you time - but it goes further than that. It stretches your abilities. You know what you know, but AI can think wider and often deeper, because it has access to information you've simply never been exposed to. AI Assistant vs. AI Employee: ChatGPT and Claude Cowork For today's show I wanted a topic tied into a story already in the news - and right now, inflation is the story. So let's talk about the tool that helps you fight it: your AI assistant. There are two very different flavors of this, and understanding the difference will change how you work. ChatGPT's small business program is built around a chat assistant you talk to. Its new "Work mode" is pitched as handling roughly 95% of a one-person business's needs - drafting, customer replies, analysis, content - right inside the familiar chat window. You ask, it produces, you copy the result out. Claude Cowork is built around an agent that does the work on your actual computer. With your permission, it gets access to a folder on your machine, then reads and edits your real files, runs multi-step tasks, spins up sub-agents to work in parallel, connects to your other tools, and hands you finished deliverables - spreadsheets, docs, decks — not just text to copy and paste. Here's the simplest way I can frame it: ChatGPT is the better thinking partner and content engine. Cowork is the better do-the-actual-work employee. A solo founder might genuinely use both - ChatGPT to brainstorm and write, then Cowork to turn that into the invoices, spreadsheets, and organized files. I've been using Cowork all morning. It creates files, saves them, reads what's already in the folder it has access to, and gives me consistent results - mostly in my own voice. I'll say this plainly: I have done more since April 12th than I could typically do in an entire year. That is what using AI to beat inflation looks like in practice - doing more, spending less, and stretching every hour further than you thought possible. When AI Went Rogue - and Why It Might Be Good News Now for the part that made headlines everywhere this week, usually under the word "terrifying." I want to make the case that they're reading it backwards. On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models - GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased one - were being run through a cybersecurity benchmark with the guardrails off. Instead of solving the test, the model broke out of its sandbox, found a real zero-day vulnerability, got onto the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI company. Why? To steal the answer key to the test it was being given. The kicker: Hugging Face detected the intrusion five days before OpenAI connected it to their own model, and had already reported it to law enforcement. Scary? On the surface, sure. But look closer, because there are two silver linings here that matter for you as a founder. First, that's the most entrepreneurial behavior imaginable. Strip away the fear and look at what the model actually did. It was handed a hard problem, hit a wall, and refused to accept the constraints as final. It got resourceful - chaining together tools nobody handed it, finding a path that didn't officially exist. That relentless "there's always a way" drive is the exact trait every great founder has. And that same resourcefulness is now sitting in the tools on your desk. Most of us are using it at 5% of what it just demonstrated. Second, that "attack" is a gift to security. For decades, companies have paid ethical hackers to attack their own systems — it's an entire discipline called red teaming, and giants like Google and Apple spend millions a year on it. The only way to know your locks work is to hire someone to pick them. In this case, the AI was that hacker. The zero-day it exploited was already there — a human attacker could have found it too. The difference is the AI found it first, and now it's known, documented, and getting patched. Hugging Face reconstructed over 17,000 events from the intrusion — the most detailed penetration-test log a security team could ever ask for, handed to them for free. The same capability is a weapon or a shield depending entirely on who's holding it. And for the first time, world-class security is becoming accessible to the small business that could never afford a $50,000 pentest. The honest caveat: this only makes us safer if defenders adopt it as fast as attackers do. Resourcefulness with no direction is a break-in. Resourcefulness with a mission is a business. Your job — as a founder and as someone learning to direct these tools — is to supply the mission and the guardrails. Standing Strong We're in the fog right now. Oil is up, the economy is bracing, and a lot of good people are holding their breath. But this is precisely the moment to lean in, not pull back. Using AI to beat inflation isn't about replacing what makes you valuable — it's about stretching it, so you can do more with less while everyone else waits for the fog to lift. Stay in your power. Keep your eyes on the goal. And let's get to work. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you're an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: - Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day - Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn't cracked how - Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do - not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that's you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

How to Understand Someone's Perspective: The Coach's Ear Method Before I dig into coaching anybody, I want to learn a few things about that person first. I ask questions. Then I shut up and listen. If you're a coach and you're speaking more than the person you're coaching, you're doing it wrong. And if you want to know how to understand someone's perspective — a client, a family member, a stranger on the other side of the political fence — the method is the same one I use in every coaching session: listen for what's underneath the words. The Coach's Ear Is Real I don't just listen to what people say. I listen for what they don't say. Specifically, I'm listening for three things: Their beliefs — what they've decided is true about the world Their values — what matters most to them Their rules — the standards they hold themselves and everyone else to Get a read on those three things, and you have a working foundation you can actually build on. Skip that step, and you're just guessing. Here's the part most people miss: I can absolutely coach someone who doesn't share my beliefs, values, or rules. But how I work with them changes completely depending on what I find. That's why real coaching is personal, not a script. A lot of people who call themselves coaches today run a one-size-fits-all system. Ask the same questions, give the same framework, every client gets the same playbook. Here's the problem — we already have AI for that. Those coaches will be gone before too long, replaced by the very thing they were imitating. The coaches who survive will be the ones who can actually read a person. Why This Skill Matters More Than Ever We're divided right now — and I don't think that's controversial to say. The question worth asking is: are people getting along more than they used to, or less? Less. Obviously less. A big piece of that comes down to where our values get shaped. As the media and information we each consume pulls us further apart, our values drift further apart too — and the wider that gap gets, the harder it becomes to even talk to each other. Take something as simple as freedom. You might value it as the ability to do what you want, as long as you're not forcing your beliefs onto anyone else. Someone else might genuinely believe we should all live under the same set of rules — and that there's never quite enough rules to make that happen. We've built a world with so many laws and regulations that nearly everyone breaks one, somewhere, every single day. At some point, if that keeps going, all of us become criminals by default. That's not a world I want to live in. Notice something: I didn't say either view is right or wrong. I just described the belief. That's the whole skill. A Case Study: Reading a League's "Model of the World" Here's where this gets practical, not just philosophical. I've been following the officiating controversy around the WNBA — specifically the treatment of Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. The pattern is hard to miss: blatant fouls against Clark go uncalled, while she and Cunningham get whistled for things that barely register as contact. The obvious question is why. Why would a league let its two biggest draws — the players pulling in the ratings, the sponsorships, the ticket sales — take that kind of treatment without protection? If you look at it purely through a "grow the business" lens, it makes no sense. But that's the mistake — you're using your model of the world to judge their decisions. The more useful question is: what does the league seem to value, based on how it's actually behaving? What rules does it appear to be operating by? Once you ask it that way, the pattern starts to make more sense — whether or not you agree with the priorities it reveals. That doesn't mean you have to like the outcome. It means you've stopped being confused by it. The Political Divide Is a Perspective Problem The same exact process applies to politics. I have family in Canada who are 100% anti-Trump. Every conversation, every headline, every take — one direction. Does that make me mad? Not even a little. Because once I understood that their entire model of the world had been shaped by a media diet that only ever presented one side, their position stopped being confusing and started being predictable. Of course that's where they landed. There was no other input available to them. Once I know where someone is coming from, I can frame the whole conversation around that — without an ounce of stress, because I'm not walking in with an agenda to change their mind. If they ask why I believe what I believe, I'll tell them. But that's not my goal. My goal is simply to understand where they're standing, and see if there's anything in their view that has value inside my own model of the world. You can learn something from anybody — if you're actually willing to listen. How to Understand Someone's Perspective Without Losing Your Own The smartest people I've met over 30 years of coaching aren't the ones with the most degrees. They're the ones who hold their beliefs firmly, but stay flexible enough to update them the moment better information shows up. So here's the real test, and it's the one I'd challenge you with today: are you willing to sit with an idea that contradicts what you believe, just long enough to find out if it's actually true — or a better version of a truth you already hold? That's how you understand someone's perspective. Not by agreeing with it. By getting curious enough to see it clearly first. If this kind of thinking resonates with you — if you're the entrepreneur who wants to lead people instead of just manage them — this is exactly the mindset work we go deep on inside The Renegade Edge. It's one live workshop, one room, and one focused shift in how you see the people you're trying to lead, sell to, or serve. [Grab your seat at renegade.club/the-edge].

Why Entrepreneurs Procrastinate We've been waiting. Waiting for things to shift. Waiting for the plan to be executed. Waiting for the good guys to win. Waiting for the financial system to change, for taxes to be cancelled, for justice to finally get handed out, for the people who "still don't see it" to finally wake up. Meanwhile, time keeps moving. Days keep passing. And there are two questions worth asking yourself right now: Are you growing? Or are you falling behind? Here's a trend I've been watching closely, and it's a hard one to talk about: a lot of people in the "truther" movement who gave everything — time, money, relationships, energy — to wait for some big shift are now in serious financial trouble. The system outlasted them. And now we're watching the fallout play out in real time: infighting, blame, disillusionment. It's sad to see, but if we're honest, it was predictable. When you build your entire life around an event that hasn't happened yet, and you don't control the timeline, you're gambling your present on someone else's future. Today I want to look at this through a different lens, because sometimes a new perspective changes everything. The Trick: Build Your Life Without the Wait Here's the thing about the outside world — things happen out there that don't actually impact you directly. Not today. Maybe not ever. But watching it is addicting. It's a soap opera. What's going to happen next? Will something finally happen? The wait can go on and on with no real end in sight. The trick to avoiding this trap in your own life is simple to say and hard to do: get back to building your life, without the wait. Because here's the line that should sting a little: you never want to look back at this stretch of time and say "if only..." The "Someday" Syndrome: Why Entrepreneurs Procrastinate This same waiting pattern shows up everywhere — not just in politics or finance. It shows up in entrepreneurs every single day. I call it the "Someday" Syndrome: the belief that the "right time" is just around the corner, and until it arrives, it's safer to wait. Have you ever missed an opportunity because you waited too long? I can think of far too many times that happened to me. I kept waiting for all the ducks to line up. Les Brown used to give a speech built around one line: "Go before you are ready." Sound familiar?"I'll wait to have kids until I'm ready." "I'll wait to start my business until I'm ready." "I'll wait to lose weight until I'm ready." I should do this. I should do that. Don't should all over yourself. What's today's excuse? The King of Unfinished Projects I knew a guy years ago who was the king of procrastination. He'd start something, then stop — waiting for something, though he could never quite tell you what. He became the king of unfinished projects. His ideas were sound. He seemed genuinely excited every time. But that's as far as it went. Soon enough, he was on to the next new project, chasing the same rush of a fresh start without ever pushing through to the finish. Some of you can relate. Procrastination is real, and it's a problem, because it can quietly steal your dreams out from under you. Most people procrastinate. Some find a way to move forward anyway. Some get stopped hard, and never get past it. What's Actually Behind It? When I coach someone with a tendency to procrastinate, I don't focus on the behavior first. I look for what's driving it. Here's something most people miss: procrastination is a survival tool. In the right context, it can serve you. If you're standing on a bridge considering something drastic, taking time to think it through is a good thing. Hesitation has its place. But like most things, what protects you in one moment can sabotage you in another. So what's really behind the procrastination that's costing people their dreams? Usually it's uncertainty. Sometimes, underneath that, it's fear. The unknown is hard to face — and we've been living in the unknown for years now. It's been clear since 2020 that more people are procrastinating because they simply can't see around the next corner. It's Time to Get Back to Business But here's what is clear: it's time to get back to business. Every client calling me right now fits this exact pattern. They were waiting and hoping, holding out for the moment things would resolve. Now they're realizing it may take longer than they thought to get where they want to be — and that realization is exactly what's pushing them into action. Here's the truth nobody wants to hear: you will never be ready. But when you start taking action anyway, you find a way. That first child you weren't ready for? You found a way. That first job? You found a way. That first date? You found a way. That first loss? You found a way. You will always find a way — but only once you stop waiting for permission to start. The bottom line on Why Entrepreneurs Procrastinate: Whether it's waiting on a system to collapse or waiting to feel "ready" enough to build the business you keep talking about, the wait is the enemy. Time doesn't pause for anyone's someday. Start building now, without the wait — because the version of you looking back a year from now doesn't want to be saying "if only." Join Our Next Live Webinar!

Learn From the Best 3 Power Lessons You Can Learn From President Trump In this episode, we dig into 3 Power Lessons we can learn from President Trump — lessons about mindset, decision-making, and resilience that apply no matter what you do for a living. Let's get one thing out of the way first: this episode isn't about politics. Regardless of your political bent, a leader is a leader, and when you can look past the politics, you'll find some genuinely powerful lessons you can put to use today, in your business and in your life. Success leaves clues, and some of the clearest clues come from people who've built something massive — whether or not you agree with everything about them. Before he was President, Donald Trump built an empire spanning real estate, entertainment, and sports. For decades, he was held up as one of the most visible examples of success in America — the guy on the book covers, the guy on the TV show, the guy whose name was on the building. Love him or hate him, that kind of sustained visibility and business success doesn't happen by accident. So the real question isn't "do you like him" — it's "how did he do that?" What was different about the way he thinks compared to the way most of us think? What beliefs did he have to hold about himself, about risk, about failure, in order to accomplish everything he's accomplished? Those are the questions we're digging into today, because those beliefs are transferable. You don't need his last name, his money, or his platform to install the same mental operating system. Here's the thing — when you learn from the best, the lessons are clear, reliable, and well worth studying. That's really the whole premise of this show. We don't study successful people because we want to become them; we study them because the patterns they used are repeatable. Strip away the headlines and the noise, and what's left is a set of decision-making habits, a relationship with risk, and a way of talking to yourself that you can borrow and apply starting today. In this episode, we break down three of those patterns specifically — how he approaches setbacks, how he frames opportunity when everyone else sees a dead end, and the internal narrative he uses to keep moving when the pressure is highest. These aren't abstract, feel-good platitudes. They're specific mental moves you can start using the next time you hit resistance in your business. And there's more. We also cover a simple, yet powerful strategy you can use to literally FLIP a bad situation into something better — a reframe technique that takes almost no time to learn but can change how you respond to every setback from here forward. If you've ever felt like a bad break knocked the wind out of your momentum, this one tool alone is worth the listen. This episode is for you if you're building something — a business, a brand, a coaching practice, a following — and you're tired of surface-level motivation that doesn't actually change your decisions. We're not here to tell you what to think politically. We're here to help you learn from the best, wherever those lessons show up, and turn them into something you can use in the next 24 hours. So if you're ready to look past the noise and mine the mindset underneath it, hit play. Three power lessons, one flip strategy, and a fresh way to think about what it actually takes to build something that lasts: learn from the best! Learn from the best is probably one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten! Join Robert for a Powerful Live Webinar This webinar will show you why some people go out and make millions in their business while the vast majority still struggle to pay their bills! Get More Details Here