Three feet from gold

Lately I've been watching some of the people around me lose steam. Not everyone. Some are still full force. But a few started hot, hit the first real roadblock, and went quiet. And the quiet always starts in the same spot.

A friend of mine got into building games this year. Made his first two in a single week. He shipped the first one free and told me he'd monetize the next one. Then he decided monetization wasn't right for the second one either. That was over a month ago. Crickets since.

Another guy I know started a contracting company. Real skills, real work. Then came the lesson every contractor learns: the big jobs arrive in waves, and the small ones cost money to run. It got hard, so he sold the whole company to a friend for about the value of the tools and said he'd rather work for somebody else anyway. Here's the twist. The friend who bought it is now so busy he hires him on weekends.

And at least three people in my personal life started our curriculum this summer and never got out of the idea phase. The AI interviewed them and handed them more ideas than any founder in history has had access to. None ever felt right. They didn't quit loud. The summer just slipped away.

There's an old story I think about every time I see this. Napoleon Hill tells it in Think and Grow Rich. A man named Darby and his uncle caught gold fever, staked a claim in Colorado, and hit a real vein. They borrowed money for machinery. Then the vein disappeared. They drilled and drilled, finally gave up, sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and went home.

The junk man did one thing differently. He asked. He brought in an engineer who understood fault lines, and the engineer's math said the vein was sitting three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling. Three feet. The junk man took millions out of that mine.

Here's what reframed my week. Friday I was listening to TBPN, and Samir Kaul was on, a founding partner at Khosla Ventures, the first venture firm to put money into OpenAI. He argued that if a venture firm isn't losing 60 to 70 percent of the time, it isn't taking enough risk. Sit with that. The best investors alive build losing into the plan. Most bets miss. One hits. The one that hits changes everything.

So the pros expect to lose most of the time and keep drilling anyway. Meanwhile most regular people treat the first cold stretch as a verdict. Ship a game and nobody claps? Verdict. One hard season? Verdict. Tenth idea in a row that doesn't feel perfect? Verdict.

And the three feet moved. It used to be money, time, and skill that stopped people. Now my friend builds two games in a week and the idea folks generate a year of ideas in an afternoon. AI made the building cheap. The last three feet aren't in the ground anymore. They're in your head.

I'll tell you about mine. Years ago I was leaving the heating and air company where I work. My own company was ready: licenses in hand, truck bought, name picked, end date set with my employer, real work lined up for day one. Then a serious brain injury stopped everything, and leaving was off the table. I'd love to tell you I stayed because I was wise. I stayed because I couldn't go. So I made staying count. I outworked everyone around me, because effort was the one thing I still controlled. Years later the owners gifted me a third of the company and made me an equal partner. It changed my family's life. The roadblock I thought had buried me is the only reason I was still standing at the drill when the gold showed up.

And then there's the 18-year-old in my house, my daughter Cheyla, from the bank account story. Here's the part I've never told you. I built our summer curriculum for her, and it was never really about business. Visiting the college she's heading to, I got excited about how modern the place was, then it hit me what she'd be walking in with. Her whole education had happened on a Chromebook and a phone, with a little ChatGPT for homework near the end. She'd never really had to drive an actual computer. The company was the icing, my excuse to make the learning stick.

That was the start of summer. This week, two weeks before move-in, she came to her weekly check-in running an LLC with its own bank account, carrying a logo she designed and a brand voice to match. A genuinely good logo, and the graphic design classes she took in high school are suddenly paying off. Nothing you learn is ever wasted. It just waits. She drives that MacBook and the AI like a pro now, and she's seen more of how a business really works than most 18-year-olds ever do. Nobody handed her a head start. She just never missed a week. That's the whole skill.

Your steal this week is the junk man's move. Before you let a roadblock decide for you, ask someone who can read the ground. Bring it to the group: the launch nobody noticed, the season that got hard, the idea that doesn't feel right yet. Let people who've stood in that spot read your ground. Quitting three feet short only happens when nobody's told you where you're standing.

One last thing about Darby. He never got the gold, but he kept the lesson, and it made him one of the top insurance salesmen of his day. Every time a prospect told him no, he remembered the three feet and stayed. Say the same thing to yourself this week. Stay.

Danny

P.S. The news I've been waiting all summer to share: the AI Actually Foundation is officially a 501(c)(3). The IRS letter is in hand, effective June 25. This newsletter, the group, the curriculum, all of it now runs under a federally recognized public charity, and donations are tax deductible. We started this to give the whole roadmap away for free. Now it's official.

P.P.S. Saucergo's ad update cleared Google Play this week. Apple is still thinking. The little game keeps collecting downloads while it waits, which feels about right for this issue.