Burn It Before You Check If It Worked

Niche of One Creator Business Bundle — Eighteen of them, thirty-five bucks, under half what they run apart. The income tracker, the kill sheet for every subscription you forgot you’re paying for, the pacing books so you don’t cook yourself. Boring as hell, and boring is exactly what kills a one-person shop. Twenty people have bought it. I wrote every one of these because I needed it first.

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out — Zach Edwards built a free tool called DecryptAds. The paperwork’s already public: every site publishes a file naming who’s allowed to run ads and vacuum data on them, and nobody reads it, so he built the thing that reads it. Point it at ESPN and it comes back with 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains, about half of them pulling your location. Worth five minutes on your own most-visited sites before you decide the tracking talk is overblown.

THE TIP. Write the want as one plain sentence. Not a paragraph, not a vibe, an actual sentence. I have the rent this month. Strip every vowel. Strip every letter that repeats after its first showing. What’s left is a handful of consonants, maybe eight or nine. That’s your raw material. Now draw them into each other. Loop the tails, cross the bars, let one letter’s stem become the next letter’s spine, until it stops reading as language and starts reading as a shape. That’s the whole technique Spare wrote down a hundred years ago, and half the chaos magick corner of the internet still argues the finer points like it’s tax law. Spare spent his last years selling pictures out of South London pubs for two or three guineas apiece. Make of that what you want.

Everybody gets that far. Then they keep the thing. Once you’ve got the shape you charge it, any way that gets you out of your own head for a second: stare at it till your eyes go soft, or do whatever knocks the thinking out of you and look at it right at the peak. Spare wasn’t picky about the method and neither am I. Then you destroy it. Burn the paper, delete the file, don’t matter which, long as it’s gone and you’re not carrying it around checking on it like a damn lottery ticket.

I do this for money more than for anything else, and it works more than it doesn’t, which is a sentence I know sounds insane written down in a business newsletter. Best I can tell, watching yourself want something out loud kills half your own follow-through. Forgetting the sigil is how you stop watching. Sounds like horseshit written down like that. Run your own count for a couple months.

Ever had one come true crooked? Hit reply, ya’ll. Everybody posts the wins. Nobody posts the one that landed sideways, and that’s the one I want. ~ J.D.