Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Overwhelmed? Feel like your business can't run for a day without you? You're not alone.
When you're a solo business owner, everything ends up depending on you. You're the only one who can do the work, answer the email, keep the plates spinning. So you're on the hook every day: nights, weekends, even the vacations you do manage to take. The overwhelm never really lifts.
But being a solopreneur doesn't have to mean doing it all yourself. With the right systems, parts of your business can run without you. That's what gets you your time back, and gives you the freedom to take a real break. And the freedom to do the work you actually want instead of the work you feel stuck doing.
Joe Casabona learned this the hard way. He went from so overwhelmed he had a panic attack to taking 4–6 weeks off a year, worry-free, and he's helped hundreds of solopreneurs build systems that give them their time back.
Every week, one clear idea to help you get your time back without hiring a team...or selling your soul to AI. Start listening, then grab the free newsletter at https://streamlinedsolopreneur.com.
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur,
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for September 4th, 2026.
Number one is teaching versus shifting beliefs.
The thing that's been dominating my thoughts this week is a video from Steve Thompson
called Don't Teach on YouTube. Do this instead to make your first a hundred thousand
dollars.
If I'm being honest, it's been a rough summer for the business. I've heard a chorus
of, yeah, me too. And it sounds like it's the whole industry and
it's nice that it's
not just me or, or so it seems. But that doesn't solve my problem, and it kind of
just makes me feel bad for everybody else as well.
If you've been on my mailing list during the summer, you may have noticed that I've
been experimenting more with content and with offers and with the format of the newsletter.
But at the core of that has always been my belief
that if I teach people how to do something,
the ones who don't want to do it themselves will hire me.
That belief has been greatly challenged this year, and Thompson basically says, why
in this video that I'm sharing
that if you give people the solution,
they'll think they can do it themselves,
But when they get stuck,
they're not gonna get stuck during your business hours and you're not going to be
there to help them.
It's true that I've largely and often attracted a DIY crowd, but I've always hoped
that
in attracting the DIY crowd, I would also get people who didn't want to DIY.
So I can't stop thinking about this
for a couple of reasons, right? I, first of all, I
love teaching.
I've taught in the classroom,
I've spoken many times, I've given workshops. I love teaching people,
but teaching has not yielded new business this year.
And that's been tough. And in fact, if I think back
over
the clients I got over the last year,
they aren't people who came to me
and found me via my teaching.
They are people who googled the need for a podcast coach or a systems coach,
or were referred to me by somebody.
So not only has teaching not gotten me clients, but all of the clients I have gotten
were not
people who found, who saw me teaching and were like, yes, do it for me.
So this really, I know anecdotal, but it really reinforces what Thompson is saying
in this video
that teaching is not the thing that actually gets you the clients.
What, and what he says is, you need to shift someone's beliefs,
and once you shift their beliefs, you become their guide.
And I don't know if he, I forget if he uses the actual term guide, but that's the
term I'm using.
So that's a b
is it seems
completely counterintuitive to me to not make content that teaches something like,
I, like when I watched slash listened to this video on my walk,
I
was confused. I was like, I, what would I,
what
content would I make
that doesn't teach something? And I think I took this a little too literally.
'cause he's not saying don't teach it all. Obviously, you need to teach the belief
system.
What he's saying is don't teach the tactics,
right? Don't do a straight up tutorial on how to do something.
And I'll talk more about this in the something to help your systems, but I've decided
to make September an experimental month.
I want to publish a few videos a weekly. I wanna keep up my weekly cadence
in the format that Thompson recommends,
where I stop teaching as much
and I try to get more paid clients.
Now, this also means big changes will be coming to my mailing list. If you're on
my mailing list, you'll know that
I had a short sale sequence this week.
No one bought from that sale sequence.
I've always been scared of selling too much.
And halfway through this sequence,
I decided I'm going to get rid of that fear.
And I'm not really going, I wouldn't call it scorched earth, because there still
needs to be value in the newsletter.
but I have not been selling,
and I need to get over that fear. My friend Kat,
shout out, Kat, if you're listening,
shared a response someone else had when they were getting complaints about selling
to their list.
And that response is, sorry that I'm trying to do my job.
I like helping people. I really do. And I've always believed that if I just help
people enough, they'll hire me. And that's not, that has not been true this year.
It may not have been true for most of my career,
and I've just been getting false positives because I've been helping people and getting
clients.
But that doesn't mean that one caused the other.
And I'm realizing thanks to this video and some other things I've been thinking about
this week, that the best way for me to help people is by getting paid to do it.
And so I need to do everything I can to get paid to do it,
at least for now. Maybe one day I'll become absurdly wealthy and I'll just teach
for free.
I would love that.
But right now, I, I need to do what's best for my business and my family.
Let me know what you think about this. Do you have something on your mind? Let me
know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. You can write in or leave a voice note. I might
even play it on the show.
Alright, let's move on to recommended reading. This week. That recommended reading
is
three Mount Shasta Climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb. This is from
K ctv.com, and I would file this under strong contestants for the Darwin Awards.
I usually focus on the more cerebral dangers of ai. The idea that letting AI do the
work for you will lead to brain rot. You'll lose the ability to think critically
or articulate thoughts without first running to a large language model to tell you
how you feel. And that is extremely problematic. It's the root of everything I talk
about with conscientious AI usage.
But this story shows that there is also a straight up
physical danger.
These people
asked
some large language model,
how to plan their climb.
And instead of,
taking the recommendations and validating them
against some expert,
or
maybe just talking
to an expert,
they decided to just take
what it said verbatim.
the best part of it is the quotes at the bottom. So here's exactly from the article.
I'm gonna quote.
the group said it packed supplies for an eight hour climb, not its roughly 16 hour
ascent.
The climber said, AI recommended simple carbohydrates instead of fats because fats
take too long to digest.
And then they said, we relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.
The group told rangers,
the article, just so you know, the article
says, official said climbers should use reliable sources, carry paper maps and other
backup navigation tools, set a turnaround time and follow it.
They also urged climbers to bring enough food, water, warm clothes, and emergency
supplies for a long day. And an unexpected night
on the mountain. I can only imagine what the prompt was like,
Hey, we're,
you know, we're gonna do a hike. We expect it to be eight hours. What should we bring?
and so like, I, I know nothing about hiking.
And so what I would do in this situation is ask my brother,
or my brother-in-law, both of whom
hike regularly,
my brother would probably be a little more mean about it, or maybe a little more
direct and be like, I don't know if you could do an eight hour hike.
so we rely too much on AI rather than our own. Critical thinking is, I think, an
incredible understatement.
It's an even stronger argument that AI is a word calculator that doesn't quote unquote
know
anything.
And,
possibly because of this story this week, I also came across the AI mushroom meme.
I, this is, I think this was going around in July, but it's basically a person holding
up a mushroom,
to an AI avatar and saying like, Hey, can I eat this? And it's like, yes, absolutely
you can.
Uh, and then the next panel is, uh,
a gravestone and it says, you're absolutely right, that mushroom was poisonous. Would
you like to learn more about poisonous mushrooms?
So,
I came across that meme this week and an article arguing that the meme is propaganda
stating that AI must never be wrong.
Uh, I think the article felt a little ramly at times, like it mentioned, like childhood
vaccines at some point.
and this author who I am going to bestow the dubious honor of being AI blue pilled
on,
uh, misses the point of the meme. The meme is not that AI must always be wrong.
The point of the meme is that we shouldn't blindly trust ai.
So what should these people have done? Well, I kind of mentioned it already, use
actual trustworthy sources and people with experience would be number one.
But if you are going to turn to ai,
use it to surface trustworthy sources,
You say, I am thinking about doing this.
Can you
surface
advice and cite primary sources
for the, for what I should do? Right?
And then you can go and vet and, you know, maybe something from,
you know, the, the National Park Service is going to be better than some rando on
Reddit.
So AI is a fast moving field. We, we need AI literacy.
It's going to be hard to figure out,
you know, what, what AI literacy today is versus a year from now. But using AI is
axiomatic of using or reading pretty much anything on the internet. It's the same
lesson that we learned from blogs and social media that just because it's printed
on the screen does not make it true.
we need better, we need to do better,
uh, because these people very well could have died
because they took advice from AI
instead of some trustworthy source.
Man, what a, what a weird way to go
to go from this to something fun.
but that's, that's the format I'm sticking with.
this something fun is DJ Earworm mashups.
I've been listening to their mashups for over 15 years now, and this week I rediscovered
some of my favorites, including the one,
uh, I'm linking in the show notes party on the floor from summer 2011.
they have such a unique approach to creating mashups and accompanying and, and the
accompanying videos,
which are really good, and I love them,
as someone in his forties, the newer mashups also let me know what songs are popular
these days. So recommend DJ Earworm. Have a, listen. There's a lot of really good
stuff on their channel.
Okay, let's round out with something to help your systems.
I'm calling this the video outliner. So,
related to,
the on my Mind segment, I decided if I was gonna try Steve Thompson's approach to
YouTube, I needed something that would keep me honest using Claude code. I built
a video outliner in H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript.
So if you wanna see a screenshot of this, I do include it in my newsletter.
I, I can also show it on screen on the YouTube video or the video, I guess, depending
on where you're listening slash watching.
so I took several of Thompson's videos, videos that I watched, not just videos I
blindly agreed with,
uh, or blindly agreed with the analysis of.
Uh, and I fed them into Claude asking it to review the common themes and format.
It identified an arc with clearly labeled sections, and then Thompson's common answers
to those sections. So like, who's the enemy and what is the advice of the enemy once
the symptom, that sort of thing. So I took that, I made a table and I filled in my
equivalent, which also live on a sticky post-it note on my wall.
but I, I filled in this table and then I gave all of that analysis my table and the,
format I like for creating videos, which is story, problem, solution, call to action.
and I had Claude build a Mad Libs style page for me, which again, you can see as
a screenshot in the show notes,
or up on the screen in, in the video if you decide to watch the video.
Uh, but again, I'll include a screenshot in the, in the show notes as well.
The very crucial part here
is that this gives me the beats, but never the words. I write the entire outline
slash script using this format. And the reason that I decided to do it this way
is because as I mentioned earlier, this is so different from my normal approach to
creating videos that I wanted to make sure I was actually sticking to this format.
And I think like
using a large language model to build something
around these guardrails is, is a very good use of it, right? It's doing the task
and not the craft. I am still doing the craft, and I'm just following the requirements
I've set forth for myself.
An important part of
this experiment
is consistency,
and this little application will help me stay consistent.
So that's it for this episode. These episodes are about taking more time off, especially
on the weekends. And the best way you can do that is by having a good system in place
to stop you from doing everything yourself. Now, if you are not sure where to start,
I am offering free 25 minute coaching calls to listeners. This will be one place
where I actually do teach a little bit.
You can book yours over at streamlined FM slash clarity, streamlined FM slash clarity.
Thanks so much for listening to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. And
until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.