The Curiosity Click: Issue 41 - The Fire Escape Problem

People treat business advice like a fire escape map.

Not "a general map." A very specific one.

Like, "Here's how I got out of a burning building."

Cool. Honestly. I'm glad you didn't die.

But then someone else grabs that same map three years later and tries to sprint through the exact same hallway... in a building that's already rubble. And they're surprised they're covered in soot, coughing, and not actually getting anywhere.

That's most business advice.

The pitch is always the same: this is permanent, universal, reusable, evergreen, put-it-in-a-frame.

And yeah, sometimes it is. But a lot of the time? It's got an expiration date nobody printed on the box.

Most advice is situational. Half of it's just timing. And the real lie isn't "this will work."

The real lie is: "This will keep working for you forever."

That's the push-button fantasy dressed up nice so it can sit at the grown-up table.

It Works Once. Then It Doesn't.

The annoying thing is it usually does work the first time. Or at least it works enough to mess with you.

Because the first time you try something new, you're actually paying attention. You do the steps. You're motivated. The market hasn't seen your angle yet. The algorithm hasn't buried you. Nobody's rolling their eyes at your hook because it's not the 400th version they've seen this week.

So you get a few sales. A little run. Just enough proof to make you think you finally figured it out.

And your brain quietly goes, "This is it."

That's when the trap closes.

The Second Run Is Where It Gets Ugly

You're tired. You're emotionally drained from the first run. You're copying instead of thinking. The market's moved on. Competition shows up with their Canva templates. And now the thing that felt smooth starts feeling like dragging a dead couch up stairs.

So you get worse results. More friction. More silence.

And instead of questioning the strategy, you start questioning yourself.

And that's how you end up buying five more courses to fix a problem that was never yours to begin with.

The Restart Loop

There's this restart loop nobody warns you about. And it quietly eats years.

Something works. You build your identity around it. You keep running it past its shelf life. Results fade. You assume you're broken. You buy something new. Repeat.

The system never tells you when it expires. That's the whole trick.

And this is why gurus keep selling the same playbook forever. It worked for them once. It's easy to package. It doesn't require thinking. And they never have to admit that timing mattered.

They don't say, "This worked in 2019 when clicks were cheap and nobody was doing this."

They say, "Here's the blueprint."

And then you're left holding a map to a place that doesn't exist anymore.

So What Now?

If this feels brutal, good.

You're just trying to use yesterday's answer to solve today's problem.

The strategy expired. You didn't.

And if you've been beating yourself up because the thing that worked before doesn't work now... maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe it's just that nobody told you when the map went bad.

The market moved. The shelf life ran out. That's it.

Until Next Time,

P.S. If you want to download the PDF on the 20 traps that kept me stuck, grab it here.