Gratitude, Agency, and building the life you're grateful to have with Aaron Hendon

Gratitude, Agency, and building the life you're grateful to have with Aaron Hendon

* Listen on the app of your choice [https://pod.link/1821370603] Aaron Henden — author, speaker, meditation teacher, and managing broker of a real estate team based on a small island in Puget Sound — joins Russell for a conversation that moves from the philosophy of gratitude all the way to frameworks for coaching, selling, and building a business that earns trust before it asks for anything. 1. Why Gratitude Journals Don’t Work (And What Does) Both Russell and Aaron share a bone-deep allergy to the gratitude journal. Aaron’s argument: writing down “my dog, my car, my wife” over and over isn’t accessing gratitude — it’s putting icing on dog shit and pretending it tastes like cake. It treats gratitude as a performance rather than an experience. His alternative is what he calls “agency of attention”, which is the practice of intentionally directing your focus rather than letting an increasingly engineered world do it for you. Most people walk through life like a cafeteria, taking what gets slopped on the plate. The work is learning to choose what goes on it. 2. The Problem With Toxic Positivity This episode takes a harder line on forced positivity than most wellness conversations are willing to. Aaron’s framework — Awareness, Allowance, Acceptance — is built on the premise that you can’t change your behavior until you go through this process. Telling yourself “I’m safe” during a panic attack doesn’t produce safety; it produces a nervous system that associates safety with panic attacks. Telling yourself everything is fine when it clearly isn’t doesn’t make it fine. Instead, it gaslights your own body. 3. “I Think That” vs. “I Had That Thought” The shift from “I am angry” to “I am a person who has anger” — or from “I think this” to “I had that thought” — creates the sliver of space between you and the thought where agency lives. You can never control the first thought. You can always control the second. That’s the Buddhist second arrow: all suffering happens there, in the moment you begin to believe the story rather than recognize it as a story. 4. The Language You Use Is Programming Your Reality The words you use aren’t just descriptions of reality, they’re instructions to your brain. Telling a story full of “I can’t,” “they won’t,” “it never works” — even when the story is about someone else — trains your nervous system to find evidence for all of it. The body doesn’t distinguish between your story and their story. It only knows one experience. 5. Best Practices Are a Way That’s Worked, Not the Right Way A long riff on coaching and willingness, grounded in Aaron’s work training real estate agents. His core diagnostic: most people who say something isn’t working haven’t actually tried the thing. They posted one TikTok. They worked 10 hours a week and expected startup results. The conversation is about honesty instead of blame. If you’re doing nothing, you’re not a failure yet. You just have a very large menu of options in front of you. From there, the two key questions: what have you actually done, and are you willing to do what it takes? If you’re not willing to stop eating the french fries, that’s completely fine, but then you have no reasonable expectation of losing the weight. Get right with the way things are and stop suffering over the gap between your actions and your outcomes. 6. The Magic Trick: Know Your Audience Better Than They Know Themselves Articulate the win condition (the future your audience actually wants to live in, vividly and specifically), name the three to five blocks standing between where they are now and that future, and show how you are the only, inevitable, and logical choice to lead them there. The magic trick is that you can predict every word they’re going to say before they say it. That level of audience knowledge is what makes the “I’m your guide” position land. Anyone can describe a destination. Only you can say: I already know everything you’ve been through up to this minute, and I’m sitting on the other side of it. 7. You Can Opt Out of Any Future You Don’t Want Every company is selling a future, not just a product. When you use their stuff, you tacitly buy into their vision of how the world works…but you can always opt out. You can build a business on entirely different axis or using different technology. After all, businesses existed when they only had on stone tablets, or in a 150-person town, so there has to be a way to exist that somebody like Amazon doesn’t want you to consider. Amazon only knows how to run Amazon. You get to define your own axis. Find Aaron: aaronhendon.com [https://www.aaronhendon.com/] — his book How to Live a Grateful Life in a Fcked Up World* is available there, along with his Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.hapitalist.com [https://podcast.hapitalist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Websites, Niches, and the Joy of Showing Up

* Listen on the app of your choice [https://pod.link/1821370603] Wes Towers, founder of Uplift 360, a digital agency based in Australia that’s been building and optimizing websites for trades, construction, and industrial brands for over 20 years, joins Russell for a wide-ranging conversation about why your website is the only real estate you actually own online, why confusion kills conversions, and what good business actually looks like when you strip away the hype. 1. Your Website Is the One Territory You Control Social media is rented land and everyone knows it. The algorithm changes, the platform shifts, and whatever attention you’ve built can evaporate overnight. Your website is different. When someone lands there, they came on purpose, they’re closer to buying, and you control the entire message. Wes’s argument for 20 years of website-centrism isn’t nostalgia; it’s that everything else is noise and your website is the one place where you get to speak without interruption. 2. A Confused Mind Can’t Make a Decision Most business websites are overgrown. They have product after product added as the company evolved, but nothing ever removed. Wes applies a design principle that maps directly to marketing: the work is finished when you’ve removed everything that doesn’t need to be there. The goal isn’t to say everything, it’s to make your core message sing the loudest. The simplest opt-in forms convert best, not because of some clever psychological trick, but because they load faster and create zero resistance. Any friction at all costs you someone. 3. Counter-Intuitive Is Where the Opportunity Lives For Uplift 360, doing SEO and PPC is table stakes, but since all their competitors are equally good at it, which makes it an expensive knife fight. What actually works is showing up where the clients are physically: networking groups for the startups popping up during boom times, industry trade events for the bigger construction players when the economy cools. It sounds old-fashioned for a digital agency, but that’s exactly the point. When everyone is going one direction online, the smart move is often to go the other way in person. 4. Sustainable Business Is Repeatable Business (and That’s a Feature, Not a Bug) There’s a version of entrepreneurship obsessed with the exciting, the new, the pitch-worthy. And then there’s what actually works: doing the same good thing over and over for clients who tell other clients about it. The recurring, rinse-and-repeat work is the most profitable. The creative leader’s job isn’t to be doing everything. It’s to build the team and systems so the repeatable stuff runs without them, freeing up the actual creative thinking for the 5 or 15% where it counts. 5. Selling Smiles Is a Legitimate Business Strategy When Russell noticed that Wes always seems genuinely happy in interviews, Wes explained that it wasn’t an accident. It was something he leaned into deliberately once he realized that happiness is contagious in a boardroom. He calls it “selling smiles.” The observation ties directly into Hapitalist territory: your vibe is your positioning, people buy into who you are before they buy what you sell, and authenticity in business means showing up as the person you actually are, not a polished-down corporate version of yourself. Where to Find Wes Uplift 360 focuses on construction, trades, and industrial brands. You can find them at uplift360.com.au and book a strategy call if there’s a fit. Wes is also happy to talk shop with entrepreneurs and creative people. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.hapitalist.com [https://podcast.hapitalist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ads, Discovery, and the Author’s Digital Future with Mal Cooper

* Listen on the app of your choice [https://pod.link/1821370603] Mal Cooper — sci-fi author (M.D. Cooper), Facebook ads expert, and co-founder of The Writing Wives — joins Russell to talk about what it actually takes to run ads, why indie authors keep handing money to corporations, and what the web got right the first time around. Here are some favorite insights from this episode. 1. Facebook Ads Have No Silver Bullet — And Never Will Every course promises a system. The answer is always the same: make good creative, test a lot of options, and see what sticks. That’s not a cop-out — it’s the reality of a platform with hundreds of variables per ad, most of them unknowable. You’re simultaneously trying to satisfy Facebook’s AI, get it in front of the right humans, and then convert on your product page. The person running the ads is also a variable. Two different ad managers can run campaigns on the same book and get completely different results — not because one has the secret formula, but because creativity is personal and Facebook is a black box even to Facebook. 2. Do the Creative Work First, the Admin Work Second Don’t follow Facebook’s flow, which buries creative at the end of a long form-filling process. By the time you get there, you’re burned out and you’ll post anything just to be done. Do your images, copy, and headlines on one day. Build the actual campaign structure on another. Splitting those two modes — creative and administrative — is the difference between launching something you’re proud of and rage-quitting the ads manager. 3. Authorring Is the Webring, Rebuilt for Direct Sales The core problem with every indie author running their own store: discoverability disappears. Buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Authorring (authorring.net, two R’s) solves this with a genre-based discovery network — a widget that sits on author websites and lets readers hop between stores the way early internet users hopped between webrings. Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings, and pay a dollar a month. It’s not another middleman. It’s collective discoverability without ceding control to a retailer. 4. Your Email Open Rates Are Lying to You Half of all email opens are now bots — up from about 5% in 2019. The people your platform says aren’t opening are often your real readers (iPhone users, privacy-conscious subscribers who block tracking pixels). The people flagged as active openers are frequently bots that fire every tracking code without hesitation. The counterintuitive takeaway: don’t prune your list based on open rate data. Mal’s been saying this for six or seven years. Russell proved it himself — he moved 10,000 “inactive” subscribers to a separate Substack, started sending old content, and 30% of them opened within a month. 5. AI Didn’t Replace the Open Source Foundation — It Depends on It The tools that let authors build things like Authorring exist because of 20 years of developers releasing free code into the world. Claude can’t write a secure connection from scratch — it’s standing on OpenSSL and thousands of other libraries built by people who just put their work out there. That’s also, Mal points out, probably why developers didn’t anticipate authors being upset about training data: in their world, sharing your work freely is the default. The cultural disconnect between open source and intellectual property isn’t hypocrisy — it’s two completely different relationships with creative output colliding in real time. What Is Authorring? The problem with every indie author running their own direct store: you’ve traded Amazon’s 30% cut for complete invisibility. At least Amazon had traffic. Your store has you — and whatever you can afford to spend on Facebook ads to drag people there one by one. Mal’s framing is blunt: buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Nobody’s doing that. Readers go where the books are, and right now that’s still Amazon, because Amazon solved discovery even while extracting a premium for it. Authorring (authorring.net) is the answer that doesn’t require building another Amazon. It’s a genre-based discovery network — a widget that lives at the top of author websites and lets readers hop between direct stores the way early internet users hopped between sites on a webring. Click “next author” in the romantic fantasy ring and you land on another romantic fantasy author’s store. Keep clicking. Keep buying. No algorithm deciding what you see. No retailer taking a cut. * Direct stores without discoverability are just expensive islands. Running your own store is only half the job. If readers can’t find you without an ad budget, you’ve traded one problem for another. * Collective infrastructure beats going it alone. You don’t need Amazon’s traffic if authors are sending each other readers. Authorring is a bet that a rising tide can be built by the people in the water. * A dollar a month to not feed the algorithm machine. The math isn’t complicated. Get approved, embed the widget, and let readers wander their way to you. Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings (the approval exists specifically to avoid the Amazon categories problem — no thriller authors sneaking into romance), and pay a dollar a month. They can be in multiple rings as long as their store actually has books in those categories. The goal is to train readers that the bar at the top of these sites is worth clicking — that there’s a whole world of direct-selling authors worth exploring, if you just know where to look. Mal built it because she kept lamenting the same problem on podcasts: she wanted to help authors, but not by becoming a publisher or creating another middleman. The real power of direct sales is owning the reader relationship — email addresses, upsell opportunities, the ability to tell someone about your next book. Authorring gives you discoverability without surrendering that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.hapitalist.com [https://podcast.hapitalist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Vibe coding your way to indie success with Chelle Honiker

* Listen on the app of your choice [https://pod.link/1821370603] Russell sits down with Chelle Honiker — publisher, vibe coder, and what Russell calls “the queen of vibe coding in the author industry” — fresh off a three-week international event sprint through Savannah, London, and Ireland. What starts as a state-of-the-industry conversation pivots into a live tech problem-solving session, a breakdown of how Chelle built a full author operating system from scratch with no traditional programming background, and a broader argument for why right now is the best time in history to be an independent creative. What Chelle Saw at Three Events The industry is splitting. On one side: authors paralyzed by AI anxiety, frustrated by discoverability problems, convinced the gold rush is over. On the other: authors using AI to do translations they never had bandwidth for, launch new pen names, and run lean solo operations that outperform teams of ten. At the Ireland Publishing Show, one author demonstrated a new pen name launched in January — no email list, no existing audience — that cleared €7,000. He wrote the book with AI, edited it himself, and wasn’t shy about it. Russell’s take: the gold rush has always been “behind us.” That story is as old as the industry. The real variable isn’t the market. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about what’s possible. The Mindset Argument Both Russell and Chelle spent time on this, and it’s core Hapitalist territory: the brain is not that smart. It processes whatever you feed it and starts looking for evidence to confirm it. Tell it the gold rush is over and it will find proof everywhere. Tell it there’s opportunity and it starts finding that instead. The practical upshot: refusing to engage with AI entirely doesn’t just cost you one tool — it costs you the curiosity that leads to the next unexpected thing. Chelle’s frame: “Let the bots do the boring so you can do the brilliance.” On AI ethics — both acknowledged the minefield is real. But Russell pushed on the double standard: if AI is your hard line, are you also auditing your payment processor? Your book retailer? Barnes & Noble wiped out indie bookstores. Amazon was once the scrappy underdog. No company stays the good guy forever. The move is to make clear-eyed business decisions for yourself, not to pick a villain and stop thinking. What Is Storyteller OS? Chelle vibe-coded a full author business platform in roughly four months of intensive work — somewhere around 600 hours of development, built with Claude Code, with an assist from one other programmer on bug reports. The result is an all-in-one system that replaces the scattered tool stack most authors live with: * Writing studio — write, edit, export, push directly to BookFunnel or Lulu * Social media — create posts, manage a content calendar, connect up to 13 platforms * Email — replaces MailerLite and similar tools; authors control their own sending through Amazon SES keys, which cuts costs significantly * Direct sales — built-in storefront, or it manages existing WooCommerce/Shopify setups * Business intelligence — review tracking, reader database, analytics The original vision was a central command center that integrated with existing tools. Reality from beta users pushed it further: at the price point she’s charging, it needs to replace those tools, not just organize them. She pivoted. That’s the advantage of building your own software — you can. Her big audacious goal: 1,000 indie authors running million-dollar businesses from one platform. find it at: https://storytelleros.com/ [https://storytelleros.com/] The Live Problem-Solving Session This is where the episode got genuinely useful. Russell mentioned he’s been trying to connect Substack (where paid subscribers live) to a separate community hub — and has been told repeatedly by developers that it’s impossible because of how Stripe handles financial data. Chelle’s answer: it’s not impossible. It’s a webhook. When someone subscribes through Stripe, Stripe fires a webhook. You build your hub to catch that webhook, create an account, and trigger whatever automation you want. No Zapier. No Make.com. No N8N. No additional payment processor. The Stripe transaction has everything you need to power the rest of it. Russell’s reaction was essentially a live “I hate everything” moment — because he’d just been about to pay for a platform to solve the exact problem that a webhook solves. Chelle’s note: with agentic AI, the era of no-code automation tools being the answer is largely over. She spent two years evangelizing Make.com workflows. Three months ago she stopped using them entirely. The Closing Argument The episode ends where it started: unlimited choice is the new constraint. For most of publishing history, your options were basically hamburger, hot dog, or sausage — work within the platform or don’t work at all. That’s gone. The problem now isn’t that there aren’t enough options. It’s that people don’t know what they want, and that uncertainty reads to their brain as impossibility. Russell’s wife’s line closes it out neatly: almost everything always works out for almost everyone, almost all the time. Stop optimizing for the five worst minutes of your day. The creative person who decided to make things independently already did the hardest part. The rest is figuring out what you actually want and building toward it — which is a much better problem to have. 3 Takeaways * The gold rush was never behind you. It’s a story your brain tells when it’s scared. 7 billion people, unlimited money, renewable resource. Feed your brain differently. * Vibe coding changed the math. Non-technical founders can now build their own tools, own their own stack, and pivot in real time based on what actual users need. That’s an asymmetric advantage over anyone still waiting for the right platform to exist. * The webhook is the answer. If you’ve been told you can’t connect two platforms because of payment data — you probably can. Ask about webhooks before you pay for another integration tool. Find Chelle and everything she does at chellehoniker.com [https://chellehoniker.com/]. AI Summit: April 21–22. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.hapitalist.com [https://podcast.hapitalist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

You have nothing to lose. So why are you playing it safe?

* Listen on the app of your choice [https://pod.link/1821370603] Honestly, you’ll probably want to just skip to about minute 27 or so of this one when it goes straight into a coaching call and you see in real time how Russell’s brain works, and how it all clicks into place in 30 minutes. In this one, Russell sits down with Jermaine, a serial founder whose current passion project, Heirlight, an AI-powered estate planning app, grew out of a deeply personal place: trying to understand his mother before she passed. What starts as a conversation about death, legacy, and memory transforms in the second half into a candid coaching session where Russell holds up a mirror to Jermaine’s product, messaging, and the gap between what he says he’s building and what his website actually says. Jermaine built the first version of Heirlight as a Mandarin-language chatbot so his mom — who was anxious about retirement and unclear on her own finances — could tell her life story in her own language. Four months of conversations later, he realized he had the raw material to build her an estate plan. She passed away three months after he started building the app. The conversation opens into something broader: both Russell and Jermaine have lost parents, and both had the experience of either trying — and failing — to capture those stories before it was too late, or just barely succeeding. The throughline is that understanding someone’s past unlocks empathy for who they became. Russell connects this to his own father, his stepmother, his grandmother with dementia at 92. Jermaine connects it to a recording he made of his grandmother in 2017 that reshaped his understanding of his entire family. The emotional core of Heirlight, as Jermaine describes it in the first half, isn’t estate planning at all — it’s connection and remembrance. At around the midpoint, Jermaine invites Russell to just look at his website and give it to him straight. What follows is one of the more honest product critiques you’ll hear on a podcast. 🔍 What Russell Saw on the Site Russell pulled up Heirlight.com live and flagged the disconnect immediately: * The hero headline: “Make your will in 27 minutes” * Supporting copy: state-specific, bank-level encryption, unlimited updates, free lawyer referral His reaction: “27 minutes is a long time. Bank-level encryption — I don’t care about this at all. Free lawyer referral confuses me because I thought you were making my will.” More pointedly: “We’ve talked for roughly an hour across two calls, and you never once talked about making a will or the fact that it’s quick.” 💡 The Core Tension Jermaine’s product is mission-driven. His messaging is pain-point-driven. Those are two different apps, and right now the website is selling the wrong one. Russell’s framework: every product is really about the transformation it delivers. “Make a will in 27 minutes” is a task completion. That’s not a powerful transformation. The real transformation Jermaine kept describing — feeling grounded, feeling like a responsible adult, preserving stories your grandchildren will hear after you’re gone — that’s nowhere on the page. “The thing you said for the first 25 minutes of this talk is not this site.” 🧭 Key Coaching Insights * Your referral users aren’t your ideal customer. Most of Heirlight’s growth comes from word-of-mouth, and those users come because it’s “easy.” But Russell pushed back: it’s not easy because it’s fast — it’s easy because it’s natural language. People are telling stories. That’s the thing. And yet the app currently buries the conversational part behind the rigid will-building flow. * You’re playing a game you can’t win. Competing on speed and task-completion puts Heirlight in the same lane as every other will-maker. Russell was blunt: “You are going to lose that game because they are already winning it.” But shifting the axis — making Heirlight the app that helps you tell the story behind the will — puts it in a category of one. * There’s almost no risk to going all in on the thing when you have good cashflow. Because Jermaine has a profitable freight forwarding business funding his life, he has rare runway to take asymmetric creative risk. Russell’s challenge: “You are constraining yourself from taking the actual risks you want to take because your brain says businesses do business things.” * The order of operations matters. Currently: rigid legal questions first → natural language/storytelling after. Russell’s suggestion: flip it. Let people tell stories first, then surface the will questions gradually — one per day over four weeks if needed. Let the will be the thing that emerges from the conversation rather than the thing that gates it. * Make it shareable and collaborative. Wills are hard partly because people don’t have all the answers alone. What if you could “phone a friend” — loop in a sibling to help answer two questions? What if a story got cleaned up by AI and you could share it with family? What if your niece could comment and say “that’s not what happened”? That’s a product people talk about. * The face problem. Jermaine revealed he’s been reluctant to put his own story front and center because two teammates quit their jobs to build this with him — and it feels narcissistic to make it about himself. Russell reframed it: “They didn’t follow you because this was the best idea ever. They followed you because of you.” The story doesn’t have to be Jermaine’s exclusively — but someone’s story has to be there. If not his, find a customer whose story can stand in. 🎯 Russell’s Parting Challenge “What I would love to see next time is what you talked about in the first half of this call to be on this page.” The episode ends with Russell going full pitch mode — framing wills not as legal documents but as storytelling apparatuses. Every item in a will has a story behind it. 70% of Americans don’t have a will not because they’re lazy, but because wills feel cold, impersonal, and bureaucratic. Heirlight’s bet — if it leans into what Jermaine actually built — is that wills can be the most personal thing you ever make. “Wills are about how we take bits of our identity and give them to other people and hope they can carry little pieces of us around with them forever.” 3 Takeaways for Founders * Your messaging should sound like you on your best day — not like a product spec sheet. If you’d never describe your company the way your homepage does, something’s off. * The transformation > the feature. “Make a will in 27 minutes” is a feature. “Feel grounded enough to stop avoiding the hardest conversation” is a transformation. Sell the second thing. * Asymmetric risk requires asymmetric positioning. If you’re not going to win by playing it safe, you might as well play it weird and true. Heirlight is currently live in California. You can try a draft for free at https://heirlight.com/en/podcast/hapitalist [https://heirlight.com/en/podcast/hapitalist] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.hapitalist.com [https://podcast.hapitalist.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]