Perception Is Reality

Consider human evolution. What was that moment like? The moment when a typical person could notice that lifestyles were changing. It was during their lifetime. When you realize that you’re living a different life than your parents. And they lived a different life compared to their grandparents. That is a novel event for the human species. For most of hundreds of thousands of years, that didn’t happen. People were incapable of the conception of the idea. It was normal not to improve.

The rate of progress had been gradual. Now it’s rapid and exponential. It used to be that archaeologists identified pottery from the Bronze Age. Today, you can identify an iPhone from 2022. And you can learn anything. Of course, it helps to have a natural inclination to do the thing. Especially if you find college boring. The information you’re interested in isn’t available there. So, you find books that have it. Here again, we discover what Naval calls Specific Knowledge. You go down the rabbit hole, chasing your own obsession.

Methods of Prosperity newsletter is intended to share ideas and build relationships. To become a billionaire, one must first be conditioned to think like a billionaire. To that agenda, this newsletter studies remarkable people in history who demonstrated what to do (and what not to do). Let me know how I can help you out. For more information about the author, please visit seanallenfenn.com/faq.

Last week on Methods of Prosperity

Andrew Wilkinson ran a successful blog called MacTeens. Which garnered significant attention for its authoritative tech reviews. At 15, Andrew requested an interview with Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference in New York. He was only granted a tour of the new Apple Store. His persistence led to a brief interview with Jobs. After that, his life went back to normal. His family continued to have financial difficulty. His successful blog inspired him to become a journalist. Leaving to Toronto for college, he gave away his part of the business to his partners. After a few months he dropped out of journalism school. He realized its impending obsolescence. He took a barista job. There he met regular customers who ran a profitable design agency. His life was about to change.

Do you know about my livestream podcast? It’s called Hidden Secrets Revealed Live (HSRL), and I record it live on 𝕏 every Wednesday. 

Part 89. Andrew Wilkinson (continued).

You can find this week’s TL;DR here.

Key Lessons:

• Fake it until you make it (when applicable).

• Understand your motivation.

• Acquire specific knowledge.

• You can learn anything.

• Perception is reality.

• Quit your day job.

• Labor is leverage.

Now there’s a collectible version of this newsletter! Methods of Prosperity newsletter number 52 is available to collect as of February 22, 2025. If you’re so inclined you can permanently own it!

The Google Story is a bestselling book by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. It chronicles the remarkable rise of Google from its founding by two Stanford Ph.D. students. Their names are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It’s the story of how they built a global technology giant. You can find details about them in Methods of Prosperity newsletter no. 43. This book led Andrew back into tech after giving up on journalism. He’d already decided that working at the coffee shop for $6 per hour wasn’t it.

Two web designers, Jeff and Chris, were regular customers at the coffee shop where he worked. They earned around $40,000 per month. Andrew was up early mopping floors and serving coffee for a low hourly wage. He recognized that it was possible for him to do what Jeff and Chris were doing. He knew basic HTML and Photoshop. He learned the basics at MacTeens. All he needed was to learn more about web design. He discovered a book titled, Bullet Proof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. That led him to take online courses and immerse himself in the work.

Andrew was able to reverse engineer Dan’s websites down to the tiniest details. He learned a design concept called Skeuomorphism. That’s where digital interface elements mimic their real-world counterparts. Digital objects appear or function similar to recognizable physical objects within digital environments. This design approach creates familiarity for users. 

He learned all about it and sharpened his web design skills, immersing himself in the work. Often late into the night. In the morning he would show up for work at Two Percent Jazz. Jeff and Chris shared their knowledge with him. But wait. They shared their knowledge with Andrew, unafraid of competition? Yes. He was serving them coffee. What was he going to do, steal their clients? Of course not. That only happens when someone on your team betrays you. That won’t happen until later in the story.

Andrew searched and applied for hundreds of design jobs. It was through a job board called Authentic Jobs For Contract Web Design. He had no experience and no formal training. What he did have was ability to sell himself, determination, and enough skill to fake it until you make it. Until one person gave him a chance. Kavin Stewart worked as a Product Manager at Offermatica in 2006. Offermatica was a company that developed website content testing and performance optimization platforms. Kavin hired Andrew to produce 2 pages for payment of $2,500. It was perfect for him. Even though he didn’t have all the skills, he was proficient enough. That’s what gave Andrew the confidence to go all-in on web design. When he received payment, it totaled $3,250 Canadian dollars due to the exchange rate. That was a pleasant surprise. Why not quit his day job and sign a lease for an apartment of his own?

He moved out of his parent’s house and into a constant state of panic. With no consistent income, the pressure of his lease motivated him into a frantic search for work. It was back to the job board. He had to find another client. His newfound skills were now in high demand. The internet 1.0 bubble burst, but web 2.0 was rising from its ashes like a phoenix. New startups needed websites. Which presented a problem. Andrew only had one project under his belt. He needed an angle to differentiate his web design business from his competition. That’s when he had an epiphany: perception is reality. The way to stand out from your competition is to create the illusion that you have no competition.

Fake it until you make it doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s indistinguishable from magic. The first step is to find the right name for your business. Andrew took the name Meta, which refers to the HTML tag. It defines the information for that page. Keep in mind that this was before Facebook appropriated that name. MetaLab had a ring to it. It sounded sophisticated. Andrew created a slick looking website. It featured his team of designers and developers. In real life they were his friends who agreed to pose as his team online. When he landed his next client, they agreed to do the work. We help people make cool stuff. That was the clever tagline.

Once MetaLab’s website and “team” was set up, all he had to do was send out some cold emails. It didn’t take long to find the next customer who offered to pay $5,000 for something “modern and polished”. It required coding skills which he didn’t have. At this point, Andrew discovered the power of delegating work out to freelancers. His developer friend would do it for 50% less than what the client would pay. It turns out that this is the basic rule of any business. Meeting demand, having systems and processes, then hiring labor to do the work for you. All you have to do is charge enough to make it profitable.

Andrew started charging $60 per hour for his employee’s time. If you sell your own time, the limit is 8–12 hours in a day. But if you sell other people’s time, or a service with a mark up on your cost? There’s almost no limit to your income, and someone else provides the labor. That’s a kind of leverage. The limit on your income depends on the total addressable market (TAM). That’s the maximum revenue opportunity available for a specific product or service. And within a particular market.

At that time, Andrew had no clue what he was doing, except that money was coming in. A lot of money. MetaLab was expanding, he was hiring more people. Taking on personal recourse loans. Signing big contracts without reading the fine print. Indiscriminate spending on friends and expensive nights out. It was on the verge of all crashing down.

To be continued…

I like you,

– Sean Allen Fenn