Own your path

Stop doing what everyone else does

I’ve been sold a lie. And look, if you’ve spent any time online trying to build a business, you’ve probably been sold the same one.

Building a real business is hard. Not the inspirational poster kind of hard where you’re forced to “embrace the grind” and everything works out eventually. Actually hard. You send 200 emails and get 3 replies. You spend three months on an offer and nobody buys. You show up every day and still feel like you’re standing still.

But nobody posts that. They post: “I’m making $10k a month working 3 hours a week.”

Yeah. Whatever.

I spent about a year doing exactly what I was told. Five sales courses. One coaching program. Every guru with a clean Stripe dashboard and a thumbnail that made it look effortless. I even sat down one evening and reverse-engineered a stranger’s payment numbers just to figure out what they were doing differently.

Looking back it was a pretty strange thing to do.

I kept thinking there was some sort of hidden truth I was missing. A system. The right email script. The right niche. The right funnel. The thing that would finally make it all click.

Nothing changed. Not because the tactics were wrong. Because I was pointed in the wrong direction.

Every few weeks I’d try something new. DMs. Cold emails. LinkedIn content. I’d give it a few weeks, see nothing happen, and convince myself I just needed a different approach. So I’d go find another course, another framework, another expert telling me they had the answer.

This went on for almost a year.

The Numbers Nobody Posts

Here’s what the “$0 to $10k/month” transformation story usually skips.

The 14 months before the $10k month. There’s the $2k month. The lucky $5k month. The $800 month when everything was silent. The -$350 month. The 3,000 cold emails before anyone replied. The 5 offers that flopped. The two clients who churned in the same week.

That content doesn’t get clicks. So it doesn’t get posted very often.

What gets posted instead and gets ton of engagement is usually: “I built one AI workflow and now it generates $120k/year replacing my entire marketing team.” Sure. But behind it there’s a business built over years, a pile of failed experiments they forgot to mention, and clients lost along the way. You’re watching the final cut. Not the footage left on the floor.

And here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

I knew this. I logically understood it. But I kept going back anyway. Because when you’re stuck and frustrated and nothing is working, the highlight reel feels like proof that someone figured out something you haven’t. And maybe, if you just find the right thing to copy, you will too.

That’s the trap. I started to figure out that:

You can copy the what, but you can’t copy the why.

Let me explain. You can try copying what another successful entrepreneur or professional is doing on the internet, you might get that initial result in, but you’re not learning practically anything. You’re not understanding why X is working and Y isn’t. You’re just copying what another person told you without questioning why it works.

Tactics change, while the strategy behind them usually doesn’t. So instead of copying what someone does, I started studying why it works - the actual mechanics behind what’s driving results.

The Moment Things Started to Shift

Several weeks passed. I cleaned up my Instagram and YouTube feeds - cut out most of the success story accounts, the highlight reels, the “I scaled to X” posts.

And things suddenly got quieter.

I started reflecting on life more, paying more attention to what I actually cared about. I embraced critical thinking instead of just passively consuming hypey content. And the more I sat with it, the more something obvious started to surface - something I’d been ignoring for all these months.

Everything works. Like almost all strategies can give you measurable results. Cold email works. DM works. Content works. Paid ad works. Cold calling works. Every single one of these strategies has produced results for someone.

So why wasn’t any of it working for me?

It wasn’t the strategy. It was the direction. I was pointing all that effort somewhere that wasn’t mine - and no amount of effort fixes a wrong direction.

I tried cold calling for a while. I genuinely sucked at it. At first I told myself it was just uncomfortable, that I needed to push through. But I stopped kidding myself. Cold calling just wasn’t me. The way I communicate, the way I build trust, the kind of relationships I want with clients - cold calling didn’t fit any of that. It was like wearing someone else’s shoes and wondering why you kept tripping.

I was pointing all that energy in a direction that wasn’t mine. That was the whole problem.

The Direction Problem

Here’s how I started thinking about it.

Most people approach building a business like: put in more time, add more effort, get more results. That math checks out. Until the direction is off.

What I noticed working is actually this:

If your direction is off - if you’re copying someone else’s approach, using their voice, running their playbook inside your business - you can multiply that by all the time and effort you want, but ultimately you’ll end up very far down the wrong road, very fast. The compounding works, but it works against you.

And when you find your actual direction, your vector, the one that fits how you think and communicate and work - then time and effort start to compound the right way. Things start building on each other. And that’s when it begins to actually move.

Your vector isn’t something you find by watching more content. It comes from actually trying things, noticing what fits and what doesn’t, and being honest with yourself about the difference. It’s built from your specific experience, your personality, the way you naturally talk to people, the problems you understand from the inside.

Nobody else has that exact combination. That’s kind of the whole point.

That combination is also what AI can’t replace. Everyone keeps panicking about being automated away. But the thing at the core of your vector - your specific experience, your instincts, how you naturally build trust with people - that’s not something you can prompt your way to.

I’m Not There Yet

Am I where I want to be? Yes and no. I’m grateful for where I am, but nowhere near satisfied. I’m still figuring things out, still iterating, still getting things wrong more often than I’d like.

But something is different now.

I used to grind because I was uncomfortable. Because I felt behind. All the results came from a sort of pain I had because somewhere out there, someone was posting their $10k month and I wasn’t. That kind of fuel burns, sure. But it burns you with it.

Now I grind because I actually enjoy it. I enjoy the process. I enjoy diving into the work, even though it’s not satisfying at its fullest all the time and it doesn’t have to be. Because the work I’m doing is the work I chose - not the work some guy on YouTube told me to do, not the playbook someone sold me for $997, not the strategy everyone else is copying. Mine. Built around how I think, how I communicate, what I’m actually good at.

And that’s a completely different feeling. The same hours, the same effort, but it doesn’t feel like punishment anymore. It feels like building something that’s actually yours.

Chat soon,

Ilya