Just so you know, last week, I was outside with my son driving his remote control car.

Or we were driving remote control cars, as it were.

My RC car is broken, so I was just watching him drive his.

He wants me to buy him Atraxus X-Max, which is a serious machine.

If you know anything about RC cars, it's huge, it's fast, and it's a lot of fun.

I want one, too.

And out of nowhere, he looks at me and says,

Dad, you spend so much time working in your office.

You should have enough money to buy me an X-Max by now.

So I paused because I don't want to give him a knee-jerk response, right?

But these are a lot of money. And he wasn't being like brady or like a kid. He was, he was being logical. He was being serious, normal.

A seven-year-old. And he had made a simple direct observation. If dad, me, works a lot, then the results should follow. And for him,

those results meant, well, he gets this big old nice shiny X-Max because more time in the

office equals more money. That's the math, right? Except we know that's not how it works. We

know that time spent working does not automatically equal growth,

not even close. And so there I am as his father trying to think about, do I not just go buy him an X-Max right now?

That comment stuck with me for the rest of the day and obviously until now, because I keep thinking about

course creators, the course creators that I talk to

every week. A lot of them are working all the time and their businesses are not growing the way they

want and the reason, more often than not, is the same problem I needed to explain to my son. So there's

a stage in every course business where it's just you. Like you wear every hat.

I've worn every hat back in my course creation days when I taught Chinese to expats living in China.

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