![Should You Stop Teaching to Get Clients? [Friday Wrap-Up]](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/streamlined/should-you-stop-teaching-to-EGi-rVvwI3l-uEkWGYXfogc.1400x1400.jpg "Should You Stop Teaching to Get Clients? [Friday Wrap-Up]")
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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur,
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I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for September 4th, 2026.
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Number one is teaching versus shifting beliefs.
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The thing that's been dominating my thoughts this week is a video from Steve Thompson
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called Don't Teach on YouTube. Do this instead to make your first a hundred thousand
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dollars.
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If I'm being honest, it's been a rough summer for the business. I've heard a chorus
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of, yeah, me too. And it sounds like it's the whole industry and
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it's nice that it's
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not just me or, or so it seems. But that doesn't solve my problem, and it kind of
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just makes me feel bad for everybody else as well.
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If you've been on my mailing list during the summer, you may have noticed that I've
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been experimenting more with content and with offers and with the format of the newsletter.
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But at the core of that has always been my belief
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that if I teach people how to do something,
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the ones who don't want to do it themselves will hire me.
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That belief has been greatly challenged this year, and Thompson basically says, why
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in this video that I'm sharing
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that if you give people the solution,
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they'll think they can do it themselves,
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But when they get stuck,
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they're not gonna get stuck during your business hours and you're not going to be
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there to help them.
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It's true that I've largely and often attracted a DIY crowd, but I've always hoped
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that
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in attracting the DIY crowd, I would also get people who didn't want to DIY.
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So I can't stop thinking about this
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for a couple of reasons, right? I, first of all, I
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love teaching.
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I've taught in the classroom,
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I've spoken many times, I've given workshops. I love teaching people,
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but teaching has not yielded new business this year.
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And that's been tough. And in fact, if I think back
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over
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the clients I got over the last year,
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they aren't people who came to me
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and found me via my teaching.
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They are people who googled the need for a podcast coach or a systems coach,
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or were referred to me by somebody.
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So not only has teaching not gotten me clients, but all of the clients I have gotten
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were not
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people who found, who saw me teaching and were like, yes, do it for me.
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So this really, I know anecdotal, but it really reinforces what Thompson is saying
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in this video
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that teaching is not the thing that actually gets you the clients.
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What, and what he says is, you need to shift someone's beliefs,
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and once you shift their beliefs, you become their guide.
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And I don't know if he, I forget if he uses the actual term guide, but that's the
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term I'm using.
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So that's a b
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is it seems
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completely counterintuitive to me to not make content that teaches something like,
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I, like when I watched slash listened to this video on my walk,
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I
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was confused. I was like, I, what would I,
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what
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content would I make
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that doesn't teach something? And I think I took this a little too literally.
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'cause he's not saying don't teach it all. Obviously, you need to teach the belief
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system.
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What he's saying is don't teach the tactics,
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right? Don't do a straight up tutorial on how to do something.
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And I'll talk more about this in the something to help your systems, but I've decided
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to make September an experimental month.
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I want to publish a few videos a weekly. I wanna keep up my weekly cadence
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in the format that Thompson recommends,
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where I stop teaching as much
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and I try to get more paid clients.
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Now, this also means big changes will be coming to my mailing list. If you're on
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my mailing list, you'll know that
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I had a short sale sequence this week.
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No one bought from that sale sequence.
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I've always been scared of selling too much.
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And halfway through this sequence,
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I decided I'm going to get rid of that fear.
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And I'm not really going, I wouldn't call it scorched earth, because there still
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needs to be value in the newsletter.
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but I have not been selling,
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and I need to get over that fear. My friend Kat,
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shout out, Kat, if you're listening,
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shared a response someone else had when they were getting complaints about selling
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to their list.
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And that response is, sorry that I'm trying to do my job.
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I like helping people. I really do. And I've always believed that if I just help
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people enough, they'll hire me. And that's not, that has not been true this year.
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It may not have been true for most of my career,
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and I've just been getting false positives because I've been helping people and getting
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clients.
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But that doesn't mean that one caused the other.
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And I'm realizing thanks to this video and some other things I've been thinking about
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this week, that the best way for me to help people is by getting paid to do it.
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And so I need to do everything I can to get paid to do it,
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at least for now. Maybe one day I'll become absurdly wealthy and I'll just teach
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for free.
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I would love that.
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But right now, I, I need to do what's best for my business and my family.
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Let me know what you think about this. Do you have something on your mind? Let me
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know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. You can write in or leave a voice note. I might
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even play it on the show.
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Alright, let's move on to recommended reading. This week. That recommended reading
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is
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three Mount Shasta Climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb. This is from
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K ctv.com, and I would file this under strong contestants for the Darwin Awards.
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I usually focus on the more cerebral dangers of ai. The idea that letting AI do the
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work for you will lead to brain rot. You'll lose the ability to think critically
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or articulate thoughts without first running to a large language model to tell you
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how you feel. And that is extremely problematic. It's the root of everything I talk
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about with conscientious AI usage.
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But this story shows that there is also a straight up
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physical danger.
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These people
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asked
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some large language model,
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how to plan their climb.
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And instead of,
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taking the recommendations and validating them
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against some expert,
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or
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maybe just talking
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to an expert,
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they decided to just take
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what it said verbatim.
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the best part of it is the quotes at the bottom. So here's exactly from the article.
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I'm gonna quote.
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the group said it packed supplies for an eight hour climb, not its roughly 16 hour
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ascent.
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The climber said, AI recommended simple carbohydrates instead of fats because fats
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take too long to digest.
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And then they said, we relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.
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The group told rangers,
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the article, just so you know, the article
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says, official said climbers should use reliable sources, carry paper maps and other
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backup navigation tools, set a turnaround time and follow it.
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They also urged climbers to bring enough food, water, warm clothes, and emergency
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supplies for a long day. And an unexpected night
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on the mountain. I can only imagine what the prompt was like,
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Hey, we're,
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you know, we're gonna do a hike. We expect it to be eight hours. What should we bring?
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and so like, I, I know nothing about hiking.
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And so what I would do in this situation is ask my brother,
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or my brother-in-law, both of whom
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hike regularly,
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my brother would probably be a little more mean about it, or maybe a little more
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direct and be like, I don't know if you could do an eight hour hike.
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so we rely too much on AI rather than our own. Critical thinking is, I think, an
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incredible understatement.
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It's an even stronger argument that AI is a word calculator that doesn't quote unquote
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know
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anything.
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And,
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possibly because of this story this week, I also came across the AI mushroom meme.
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I, this is, I think this was going around in July, but it's basically a person holding
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up a mushroom,
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to an AI avatar and saying like, Hey, can I eat this? And it's like, yes, absolutely
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you can.
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Uh, and then the next panel is, uh,
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a gravestone and it says, you're absolutely right, that mushroom was poisonous. Would
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you like to learn more about poisonous mushrooms?
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So,
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I came across that meme this week and an article arguing that the meme is propaganda
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stating that AI must never be wrong.
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Uh, I think the article felt a little ramly at times, like it mentioned, like childhood
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vaccines at some point.
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and this author who I am going to bestow the dubious honor of being AI blue pilled
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on,
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uh, misses the point of the meme. The meme is not that AI must always be wrong.
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The point of the meme is that we shouldn't blindly trust ai.
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So what should these people have done? Well, I kind of mentioned it already, use
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actual trustworthy sources and people with experience would be number one.
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But if you are going to turn to ai,
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use it to surface trustworthy sources,
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You say, I am thinking about doing this.
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Can you
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surface
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advice and cite primary sources
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for the, for what I should do? Right?
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And then you can go and vet and, you know, maybe something from,
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you know, the, the National Park Service is going to be better than some rando on
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Reddit.
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So AI is a fast moving field. We, we need AI literacy.
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It's going to be hard to figure out,
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you know, what, what AI literacy today is versus a year from now. But using AI is
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axiomatic of using or reading pretty much anything on the internet. It's the same
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lesson that we learned from blogs and social media that just because it's printed
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on the screen does not make it true.
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we need better, we need to do better,
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uh, because these people very well could have died
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because they took advice from AI
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instead of some trustworthy source.
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Man, what a, what a weird way to go
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to go from this to something fun.
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but that's, that's the format I'm sticking with.
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this something fun is DJ Earworm mashups.
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I've been listening to their mashups for over 15 years now, and this week I rediscovered
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some of my favorites, including the one,
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uh, I'm linking in the show notes party on the floor from summer 2011.
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they have such a unique approach to creating mashups and accompanying and, and the
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accompanying videos,
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which are really good, and I love them,
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as someone in his forties, the newer mashups also let me know what songs are popular
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these days. So recommend DJ Earworm. Have a, listen. There's a lot of really good
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stuff on their channel.
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Okay, let's round out with something to help your systems.
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I'm calling this the video outliner. So,
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related to,
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the on my Mind segment, I decided if I was gonna try Steve Thompson's approach to
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YouTube, I needed something that would keep me honest using Claude code. I built
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a video outliner in H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript.
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So if you wanna see a screenshot of this, I do include it in my newsletter.
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I, I can also show it on screen on the YouTube video or the video, I guess, depending
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on where you're listening slash watching.
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so I took several of Thompson's videos, videos that I watched, not just videos I
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blindly agreed with,
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uh, or blindly agreed with the analysis of.
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Uh, and I fed them into Claude asking it to review the common themes and format.
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It identified an arc with clearly labeled sections, and then Thompson's common answers
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to those sections. So like, who's the enemy and what is the advice of the enemy once
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the symptom, that sort of thing. So I took that, I made a table and I filled in my
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equivalent, which also live on a sticky post-it note on my wall.
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but I, I filled in this table and then I gave all of that analysis my table and the,
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format I like for creating videos, which is story, problem, solution, call to action.
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and I had Claude build a Mad Libs style page for me, which again, you can see as
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a screenshot in the show notes,
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or up on the screen in, in the video if you decide to watch the video.
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Uh, but again, I'll include a screenshot in the, in the show notes as well.
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The very crucial part here
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is that this gives me the beats, but never the words. I write the entire outline
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slash script using this format. And the reason that I decided to do it this way
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is because as I mentioned earlier, this is so different from my normal approach to
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creating videos that I wanted to make sure I was actually sticking to this format.
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And I think like
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using a large language model to build something
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around these guardrails is, is a very good use of it, right? It's doing the task
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and not the craft. I am still doing the craft, and I'm just following the requirements
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I've set forth for myself.
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An important part of
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this experiment
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is consistency,
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and this little application will help me stay consistent.
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So that's it for this episode. These episodes are about taking more time off, especially
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on the weekends. And the best way you can do that is by having a good system in place
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to stop you from doing everything yourself. Now, if you are not sure where to start,
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I am offering free 25 minute coaching calls to listeners. This will be one place
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where I actually do teach a little bit.
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You can book yours over at streamlined FM slash clarity, streamlined FM slash clarity.
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Thanks so much for listening to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. And
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until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.
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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur,
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I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for September 4th, 2026.
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Number one is teaching versus shifting beliefs.
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The thing that's been dominating my thoughts this week is a video from Steve Thompson
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called Don't Teach on YouTube. Do this instead to make your first a hundred thousand
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dollars.
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If I'm being honest, it's been a rough summer for the business. I've heard a chorus
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of, yeah, me too. And it sounds like it's the whole industry and
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it's nice that it's
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not just me or, or so it seems. But that doesn't solve my problem, and it kind of
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just makes me feel bad for everybody else as well.
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If you've been on my mailing list during the summer, you may have noticed that I've
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been experimenting more with content and with offers and with the format of the newsletter.
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But at the core of that has always been my belief
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that if I teach people how to do something,
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the ones who don't want to do it themselves will hire me.
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That belief has been greatly challenged this year, and Thompson basically says, why
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in this video that I'm sharing
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that if you give people the solution,
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they'll think they can do it themselves,
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But when they get stuck,
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they're not gonna get stuck during your business hours and you're not going to be
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there to help them.
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It's true that I've largely and often attracted a DIY crowd, but I've always hoped
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that
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in attracting the DIY crowd, I would also get people who didn't want to DIY.
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So I can't stop thinking about this
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for a couple of reasons, right? I, first of all, I
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love teaching.
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I've taught in the classroom,
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I've spoken many times, I've given workshops. I love teaching people,
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but teaching has not yielded new business this year.
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And that's been tough. And in fact, if I think back
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over
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the clients I got over the last year,
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they aren't people who came to me
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and found me via my teaching.
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They are people who googled the need for a podcast coach or a systems coach,
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or were referred to me by somebody.
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So not only has teaching not gotten me clients, but all of the clients I have gotten
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were not
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people who found, who saw me teaching and were like, yes, do it for me.
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So this really, I know anecdotal, but it really reinforces what Thompson is saying
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in this video
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that teaching is not the thing that actually gets you the clients.
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What, and what he says is, you need to shift someone's beliefs,
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and once you shift their beliefs, you become their guide.
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And I don't know if he, I forget if he uses the actual term guide, but that's the
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term I'm using.
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So that's a b
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is it seems
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completely counterintuitive to me to not make content that teaches something like,
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I, like when I watched slash listened to this video on my walk,
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I
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was confused. I was like, I, what would I,
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what
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content would I make
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that doesn't teach something? And I think I took this a little too literally.
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'cause he's not saying don't teach it all. Obviously, you need to teach the belief
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system.
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What he's saying is don't teach the tactics,
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right? Don't do a straight up tutorial on how to do something.
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And I'll talk more about this in the something to help your systems, but I've decided
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to make September an experimental month.
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I want to publish a few videos a weekly. I wanna keep up my weekly cadence
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in the format that Thompson recommends,
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where I stop teaching as much
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and I try to get more paid clients.
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Now, this also means big changes will be coming to my mailing list. If you're on
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my mailing list, you'll know that
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I had a short sale sequence this week.
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No one bought from that sale sequence.
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I've always been scared of selling too much.
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And halfway through this sequence,
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I decided I'm going to get rid of that fear.
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And I'm not really going, I wouldn't call it scorched earth, because there still
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needs to be value in the newsletter.
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but I have not been selling,
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and I need to get over that fear. My friend Kat,
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shout out, Kat, if you're listening,
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shared a response someone else had when they were getting complaints about selling
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to their list.
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And that response is, sorry that I'm trying to do my job.
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I like helping people. I really do. And I've always believed that if I just help
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people enough, they'll hire me. And that's not, that has not been true this year.
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It may not have been true for most of my career,
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and I've just been getting false positives because I've been helping people and getting
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clients.
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But that doesn't mean that one caused the other.
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And I'm realizing thanks to this video and some other things I've been thinking about
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this week, that the best way for me to help people is by getting paid to do it.
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And so I need to do everything I can to get paid to do it,
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at least for now. Maybe one day I'll become absurdly wealthy and I'll just teach
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for free.
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I would love that.
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But right now, I, I need to do what's best for my business and my family.
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Let me know what you think about this. Do you have something on your mind? Let me
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know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. You can write in or leave a voice note. I might
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even play it on the show.
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Alright, let's move on to recommended reading. This week. That recommended reading
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is
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three Mount Shasta Climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb. This is from
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K ctv.com, and I would file this under strong contestants for the Darwin Awards.
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I usually focus on the more cerebral dangers of ai. The idea that letting AI do the
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work for you will lead to brain rot. You'll lose the ability to think critically
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or articulate thoughts without first running to a large language model to tell you
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how you feel. And that is extremely problematic. It's the root of everything I talk
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about with conscientious AI usage.
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But this story shows that there is also a straight up
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physical danger.
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These people
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asked
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some large language model,
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how to plan their climb.
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And instead of,
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taking the recommendations and validating them
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against some expert,
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or
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maybe just talking
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to an expert,
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they decided to just take
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what it said verbatim.
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the best part of it is the quotes at the bottom. So here's exactly from the article.
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I'm gonna quote.
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the group said it packed supplies for an eight hour climb, not its roughly 16 hour
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ascent.
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The climber said, AI recommended simple carbohydrates instead of fats because fats
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take too long to digest.
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And then they said, we relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.
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The group told rangers,
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the article, just so you know, the article
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says, official said climbers should use reliable sources, carry paper maps and other
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backup navigation tools, set a turnaround time and follow it.
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They also urged climbers to bring enough food, water, warm clothes, and emergency
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supplies for a long day. And an unexpected night
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on the mountain. I can only imagine what the prompt was like,
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Hey, we're,
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you know, we're gonna do a hike. We expect it to be eight hours. What should we bring?
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and so like, I, I know nothing about hiking.
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And so what I would do in this situation is ask my brother,
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or my brother-in-law, both of whom
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hike regularly,
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my brother would probably be a little more mean about it, or maybe a little more
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direct and be like, I don't know if you could do an eight hour hike.
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so we rely too much on AI rather than our own. Critical thinking is, I think, an
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incredible understatement.
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It's an even stronger argument that AI is a word calculator that doesn't quote unquote
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know
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anything.
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And,
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possibly because of this story this week, I also came across the AI mushroom meme.
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I, this is, I think this was going around in July, but it's basically a person holding
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up a mushroom,
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to an AI avatar and saying like, Hey, can I eat this? And it's like, yes, absolutely
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you can.
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Uh, and then the next panel is, uh,
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a gravestone and it says, you're absolutely right, that mushroom was poisonous. Would
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you like to learn more about poisonous mushrooms?
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So,
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I came across that meme this week and an article arguing that the meme is propaganda
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stating that AI must never be wrong.
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Uh, I think the article felt a little ramly at times, like it mentioned, like childhood
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vaccines at some point.
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and this author who I am going to bestow the dubious honor of being AI blue pilled
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on,
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uh, misses the point of the meme. The meme is not that AI must always be wrong.
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The point of the meme is that we shouldn't blindly trust ai.
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So what should these people have done? Well, I kind of mentioned it already, use
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actual trustworthy sources and people with experience would be number one.
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But if you are going to turn to ai,
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use it to surface trustworthy sources,
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You say, I am thinking about doing this.
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Can you
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surface
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advice and cite primary sources
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for the, for what I should do? Right?
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And then you can go and vet and, you know, maybe something from,
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you know, the, the National Park Service is going to be better than some rando on
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Reddit.
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So AI is a fast moving field. We, we need AI literacy.
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It's going to be hard to figure out,
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you know, what, what AI literacy today is versus a year from now. But using AI is
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axiomatic of using or reading pretty much anything on the internet. It's the same
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lesson that we learned from blogs and social media that just because it's printed
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on the screen does not make it true.
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we need better, we need to do better,
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uh, because these people very well could have died
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because they took advice from AI
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instead of some trustworthy source.
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Man, what a, what a weird way to go
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to go from this to something fun.
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but that's, that's the format I'm sticking with.
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this something fun is DJ Earworm mashups.
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I've been listening to their mashups for over 15 years now, and this week I rediscovered
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some of my favorites, including the one,
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uh, I'm linking in the show notes party on the floor from summer 2011.
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they have such a unique approach to creating mashups and accompanying and, and the
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accompanying videos,
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which are really good, and I love them,
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as someone in his forties, the newer mashups also let me know what songs are popular
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these days. So recommend DJ Earworm. Have a, listen. There's a lot of really good
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stuff on their channel.
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Okay, let's round out with something to help your systems.
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I'm calling this the video outliner. So,
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related to,
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the on my Mind segment, I decided if I was gonna try Steve Thompson's approach to
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YouTube, I needed something that would keep me honest using Claude code. I built
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a video outliner in H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript.
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So if you wanna see a screenshot of this, I do include it in my newsletter.
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I, I can also show it on screen on the YouTube video or the video, I guess, depending
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on where you're listening slash watching.
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so I took several of Thompson's videos, videos that I watched, not just videos I
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blindly agreed with,
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uh, or blindly agreed with the analysis of.
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Uh, and I fed them into Claude asking it to review the common themes and format.
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It identified an arc with clearly labeled sections, and then Thompson's common answers
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to those sections. So like, who's the enemy and what is the advice of the enemy once
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the symptom, that sort of thing. So I took that, I made a table and I filled in my
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equivalent, which also live on a sticky post-it note on my wall.
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but I, I filled in this table and then I gave all of that analysis my table and the,
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format I like for creating videos, which is story, problem, solution, call to action.
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and I had Claude build a Mad Libs style page for me, which again, you can see as
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a screenshot in the show notes,
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or up on the screen in, in the video if you decide to watch the video.
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Uh, but again, I'll include a screenshot in the, in the show notes as well.
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The very crucial part here
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is that this gives me the beats, but never the words. I write the entire outline
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slash script using this format. And the reason that I decided to do it this way
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is because as I mentioned earlier, this is so different from my normal approach to
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creating videos that I wanted to make sure I was actually sticking to this format.
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And I think like
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using a large language model to build something
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around these guardrails is, is a very good use of it, right? It's doing the task
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and not the craft. I am still doing the craft, and I'm just following the requirements
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I've set forth for myself.
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An important part of
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this experiment
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is consistency,
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and this little application will help me stay consistent.
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So that's it for this episode. These episodes are about taking more time off, especially
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on the weekends. And the best way you can do that is by having a good system in place
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to stop you from doing everything yourself. Now, if you are not sure where to start,
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I am offering free 25 minute coaching calls to listeners. This will be one place
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where I actually do teach a little bit.
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You can book yours over at streamlined FM slash clarity, streamlined FM slash clarity.
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Thanks so much for listening to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. And
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until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.
