4th Edition: Paying the Learning Debt Fast
WELCOME BACK!
Personal story: Before breakthroughs
It was one week before Christmas.
I opened an email and found out I’d just lost my last client.
I sat there, staring at the screen, completely defeated.
I had lost all my clients in a month.
One day, LinkedIn rolled out an update—and just like that, I couldn’t run my lead generation service anymore.
All the network, the positive reviews, the leads... gone.
My best client was still there at the time. He always signed off for three months at a time - PUIF (paid upfront in full).
That one client was covering all my bills… until that afternoon, around 4 p.m., when I got the bad news.
It was one week before Christmas.
And the road ahead looked darker than ever.
No one wanted to start anything in the last two or three weeks of the year.
I had already planned a road trip with friends.
And I was paying thousands for the most expensive business coaching program I had ever joined.
I was going to have to look my partner in the eyes and say:
“This business isn’t working. And all these plans we made… I probably can’t do them.”
Not the kind of news she wanted to hear after seeing me locked in a room for hours on end, month after month.
Despite everything, we went on the trip with our friends anyway, .
And thank God we did.
It was a relief to get on the road.
Still a tightness in my chest—but it made me appreciate the simple things more.
The air on my face, the shifting scents we get when on a motorbike.
The roar of trucks, roadside coffee stops.
I kept working in every pocket of time I had.
And slowly, new ideas started to rise.
I realized that if I wanted to be serious about business, I couldn’t be just “the marketing guy.”
I had to offer more than a clever internet hack.
That’s when it clicked: I could combine my expertise in teaching with my marketing skills.
Obvious in hindsight. But back then, many people advised against it.
It's not the I didn't have the idea before. But I didn't have the courage.
Still on the road, I launched a new service in a different niche—and I started getting bites.
Two days before Christmas, someone signed up for a small offer.
It was $70.
But it meant much more than that.
In the second week of January, I signed a few serious clients in education.
At the same time, my best client from the old niche came back.
And the ball started rolling again.
That season taught me a few important lessons:
#1 I’m so glad I went on the road trip, even though everything was going south. It gave me fresh energy and appreciation for everything.
#2 Don’t be a hack. Build irreplaceable skills. Build an audience. That's when I started looking at content.
#3 In the darkest moments, we often find the courage to finally do what you actually want to do.
That wasn’t the last time things didn’t look great. But I always remember:
Darkness is just what happens before breakthroughs
Sometimes it needs to get really bad…
before it gets really good.
Strategic Note 4:
Paying the Learning Debt Fast
This is something I use every week to grow my business.
Let’s say you want to do a webinar. But you’ve never done one before, and you don’t know the details.
Here’s how to tackle it:
Post about it.
Officially announce it.
Figure out how you’re going to pull it off after.
Don’t worry about making it a massive success.
You’ll get paid in experience.
Right now, you owe a learning debt—you don’t know how to run a webinar.
When you run your first imperfect one, you’re paying off that debt.
By the second one, you’re already profiting.
It’s the same with:
A simple post
A newsletter
A membership
A course
A podcast
Get into action.
Do it before you’re ready.
That’s how you’ll learn the most—fast.
Perfectionism is just a person trying to get away without paying their ignorance debt/learning debt.
Your first time at anything is gonna suck.
Because there's abyss between theory and reality.
Be humble and pay your debt with grace.
This ties into another strategy I use:
The Point of No Return
Want to be unstoppable?
Wanna be a Porsche with no brakes? 🤪
(yes we do—it’s written on every gym wall)
Don't worry, this is not motivational speech.
It's a tactical thing I want to share with you.
People say: be consistent, have grit, have courage, don't be a perfectionist...
Sure, but these are just words. Tell me how to operationalize that.
This is how I do it. Maybe it works for you too.
To be unstoppable, as much s possible, I put myself in a position where you can’t stop.
Where stopping has a very high price.
Here's what that looks like for me.
I announce I'll do one workshop every week with my clients.
Now I basically have to do it, if I don't want to ruin my reputation.
I launch a newsletter, such as this one, now I'm committing to it biweekly.
I use responsibility, shame, and social pressure as tools against my own human proclivity to leave it for later.
Once you are in the water you have to swim.
Entrench yourself in your projects—daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly.
I sell yearly memberships and tools. Guess who's committing the year ahead to doing good work?
It's not about grit or running uphill towards a total collapse.
But it’s more like a domino effect or a slide.
Once you start, momentum does the rest.
Push yourself into a situation where you have to deliver.
Find the point of no return. Commit or go home.
Business is downstream from managing yourself.
If you manage yourself well, you have a chance at business.
The early stages of any entrepreneur is about figuring out the tools to do that well. We don't manage perfectionism and procrastination with feelings and affirmation. That would be like trying to dry up the floor with water.
We manage those with managing tools. Like the 'learning debt' and 'point of no return' ideas.
I hope you like that.
Gydion
