The Guardian Academy FAQ **START HERE**
Level 1 - ...And That's Okay
Welcome Future Guardian! You’re probably here because you heard someone talking about or saw someone linking to the Guardian Academy. That’s where most of our traffic comes from, which is explained below. We realize that by writing under “The Guardian Academy” instead of our real names, you may not be immediately familiar with our “overnight**” successes. That’s by design. **Read: decades of work
So, below is a version of an FAQ for this publication. It will be updated frequently and linked in the “About” section - which is where all the sexy “why you should subscribe” stuff is.
In an increasingly digital, distracted and disconnected world we do our best to answer three questions, right up front.
Why am I here?
Am I in the right place?
What should I do next?
So let’s get to it.
Why are you here? Honestly, we have no idea. We have a ton blogs, websites, and other companies linking back to us - so our best guess is you’re here because you followed one of those rabbits holes.
Am I in the right place? If you’ve made it this far, probably. We at least know what you have the attention span to read for more than 30 seconds, which is a positive sign. If you expect this - or any - publication to do something for you without you doing something for yourself this is not the place for you. No judgement from us, you just won’t get what you’re looking for so it’s best to manage expectations accordingly.
If you find our content intellectually stimulating or interesting, or you just like our excessive use of Meme’s on Friday’s - great. Join in on the fun! Just don’t expect this publication to magically come to life and do any of the work for you. It’s not gonna.
What should I do next? “You are your own guide, you are your own guard” If you’re the fact finder type, keep reading. Click around, use the search bar aggressively and do your fact finder thing. If you’re the quick start type, go ahead and subscribe and follow the rabbit hole that is the welcome email. If neither of those options appeals to you, I’m surprised you made it this far! Just exit out of this window and go about your day. Time is limited, spend it doing shit you want to do.
Who We Are, In One Sentence: A small group of purpose-driven entrepreneurs, investors, parents and leaders hoping to become a larger group of purpose-driven entrepreneurs, investors and leaders.
Why are we here? We don’t chase opportunity, but we do answer calls. At the timing of writing this, this publication is the lowest dollar per hour activity any of us do. However, we believe it’s important to show up. Our motto is: Live to Learn. Give to Earn. Our team, partners and contributors are living to learn every day - working to become better version of themselves. The Guardian Academy is a place we can all come together and “give to earn”.
This publication is not our primary income source, so we are not going to hard sell you or try to convince you of anything. If you want to just consume all our free stuff, that’s okay!
Some people value their time more than money because they have more money than they do time. Others value their money more than their time because they extra time with little extra money. We respect both ends of the spectrum.
If you aren’t springing for a paid subscription, that’s fine with us. All we ask is that you take action on the free stuff. Improve your situation - when you suffer less, you cause less suffering for the people around you. That’s a net positive for the world, and t’s good enough for us.
If you value your time more than you money, there are plenty of ways to shortcut the process by upgrading. If you’re brand new here, don’t upgrade right now. Make sure this is a place you wanna hang around, first.
Writing Style/Tone/Format: This publication is not written for soft people that walk the “entitled path”. In other words, we’re never going to try to be nice. If you carry someone that is capable of learning how to walk on their own, you are effectively crippling them for life. You might think you’re being “nice” - we think it’s the cruelest thing you could possible to do someone. We will always be kind, but if you’re expecting us to be nice, you won’t like it.
We have two different writing styles. The foundational posts are written in the first style; designed to be referenced often. They often have video and/or audio and a lot of bullet points. The second style is long form perspective posts. The second style posts tend to be longer, more entertaining and have significantly more memes. We like memes.
As an additional note, many of you will have different preferences or styles than us. Many of you will (or already have) drastically improve our stuff by putting your unique spin or stamp on it. We think that’s awesome. If we can help you in any way, we will.
The posts are ranked by difficulty:
Level 7: Avant Garde-ian; Innovator (Paid)
Level 6: Grand Master Player (Paid)
Level 5: Master Player (Paid)
Level 4: Serious Player (Paid)
Level 3: Master of Mundane (Paid and Free)
Level 2: DIYer (Free)
Level 1: …And that’s okay (Free)
The Master Plan: We often refer to the Master Plan as “The Journey To Gray Wolf Mountain” The black wolf and the white wolf represent the yin and the yang. The Gray Wolf stands with one foot in each - capable of adapting to both abundance and to difficult times. This isn’t some wacko spiritual journey, you have to be able to make money and be in control of your income, but that’s not step one. The journey is as follows:
Step 1: You have to be able to see yourself clearly. If you can’t be honest about who you are and what you are not, you will never be able to control your own income or your schedule. There is no right or wrong answer - but you do have to be honest about your skills and personality to figure out the rest.
Step 2: Develop at least one income stream that you have control over. Investing is cool. We do it and we talk about it a lot, but if you do not control your income stream, we wouldn’t even start thinking about it yet.
Step 3: Once your have control of your income stream, you must focus on getting the income you control to be “on track”. That means it covers your basic living expenses and is on a trajectory to fund your top priorities. Don’t get distracted by anything else. There is a ton of opportunity to do this in proven, effective ways.
Step 4: Once you’re on track you can look at ways to “collapse time” or create redundancy through investing (or gambling, if that’s your jam. This is covered further in our basic financial framework.
Of course, it’s your life and you can play the game however you want to play it. We’re just saying that if you don’t follow the steps above, you’re not on our master plan, so our ability to help or support you will be limited.
In case you’re wondering why we get referenced so often & why so many links point back to this publication. (It’s the same reason). The Guardian Academy is like an academy of first-principles. Principles, concepts and frameworks that are designed to be reinvented by people like you to to better service people like you. We don’t only allow our readers to take our stuff, we encourage it. As long as you take it and make it fit your situation better. Why? Because if you tweak it to better fit your situation, it will probably be more helpful to your readers, clients or constituents.
We’re here to help as many as possible - and we don’t care who gets credit (which is one of the reasons we don’t do this business under our name or personal brand). What most people do is reference our stuff as the base material, and then present it to their audience in a way that’s more applicable. Most of the time, we think their stuff is great and offer to integrate them into our network.
When fitness legend Dan John started referencing our articles on “Raising the Floor” and “Enough” we started featuring his stuff heavily and asked him to collaborate. The Guardian Fitness publication was born.
When advertising superstar Laurel Portie started referencing our stuff, we did the same and the Guardian Marketing publication was born.
You get it. Use our stuff. You don’t have to ask permission. Just don’t copy and paste it, be a useful human and make it better for your people. If we like it, we will want to highlight you.
Paid Q&A: This section is called QnA so you could understand quickly. We don’t actually say Q&A or AMA. In the Guardian Academy we say “Engage The Field” If you’re a paid sub, you can engage the field directly in the comments section. It must be directly related to the post you are commenting on. This makes the entire post more valuable for all other paid subs. It also contains the conversation in a way that you can use it as a reference guide - the article itself and the dialogue in the comments.
If your questions is a version of “what should I do?”…then it must also explain what you have done. If you haven’t made an attempt to solve the problem on your own, start there. If the community sees that you have tried something, we will all jump in to help you - but we do not and cannot encourage learned helplessness. Again, it would be too cruel of a thing to do.
Partners, Collaborators and Structure: Our structure is as follows (oversimplified): The absolute pinnacle for any humans is reaching their full potential, being clear on their purpose and having the ability to collapse time (get where they want to go faster). So our structure, our partners and collaborators are built around those three things: Full Potential, Purpose and Collapsing Time. All three of those outcomes are emergent properties - they cannot be found by looking for them.
Full potential is when your known potential meets your unknown potential. Known potential can be reach through hard work and diligence. Unknown potential is dormant within you and can only awakened by exposure, proximity and access to the right people places and things.
Known Potential x Unknown potential = Full Potential
Purpose emerges from intensity. Intensity is the unique stamp you put on your work - there are ways that you can break the rules that only you could get away with because of your unique skills and personality. That’s your intensity. You can only break the rules in unique ways if you have mastered them, so frequency precedes intensity.
Frequency —> Intensity —> Purpose.
In the order.
Collapsing Time is the ability to get to where you want to be faster and with more reliably. In order to get somewhere faster, you have to have certainty on the direction you need to go. In order to have certainty on the direction to go, you need to have clarity about where you’re at and where you want to be.
Clarity —> Certainty —> Collapsing Time
In that order.
Our entire world is built around those three fundamental beliefs. The base levels, known potential, frequency and clarity can all be achieved easily with our free stuff (or any free stuff on the internet). And probably should be. Meaning, in the frequency stage the thing to do is: more of the same. You don’t have to pay us or anyone else to tell you to just do more of the same shit.
A deeper dive on:
Guardian Academy Structure Can Be Found Here
Clarity, Certainty, Collapsing Time Here
Microstep. Always microstep. There is no reason - or benefit - to take huge leaps. Whoever told you to “burn the boats if you want to take the island” is an idiot… and doesn’t know their history well. Take a small step, get the data, adjust course and then take another small step. You will build confidence and make better decisions.
Each step you take, you will learn something. If you cover the same amount of ground in less steps, you have covered the same amount of ground and learned less.
Our Simple Financial Framework. To make our biases explicit…We’re investors and builders. We are biased toward crypto and real estate. Do not blindly follow anything you see anyone else at the Guardian Academy doing. We have a framework we recommend, the tactics, tools and details will be different for each person based on their preferences and individual situation. The simple financial framework is three steps.
**Note: Our Framework is not designed to be “more, faster” it’s designed to create the highest probability of getting what you want out of life**
Clarity: Know your solvable problem number. You need to know how much you need and by when. This gives us something to solve for. It also informs how much risk to take and when to take risk off the table.
Certainty: Get on track to reaching that number through income that you have at least some control over.
Collapsing Time: Once you are on track, then you can collapse time. The higher risk/higher upside investments might make sense using only the overage.*
*You can also choose to take overage off the table entirely, decreasing total risk. This would not collapse time, but it would increase certainty. This is entirely up to you and your tolerance for risk. A deeper dive on Our basic financial methodology and framework can be found here.
It also breaks down our version of “financial independence”. It’s different for everyone. You need to know yours.
We get deep into crypto, investing, and buying companies. Building business and increasing income that you can scale with leverage comes first. Why?
So that we aren’t leaving funding your priorities to chance.
On increasing income. This is not a one size fits all, it’s a very broad stroke. And it’s not tactical, it’s skill development. The world is changing rapidly, developing the skills that increase income is far more beneficial than knowing the tactics that work right now.
The fastest skill to learn is sales. You can become good-enough at sales over a dedicated weekend and some contacts with reality (doing the thing). If you can sell you will always have the ability to earn and increase your own income - you can sell your own stuff or someone else’s stuff. There will always be a market for people that can sell. Getting good at sales often represents an income increase, but has a ceiling - you can’t sell in your sleep.
Unless you learn how to sell one to many through copy, webinars, etc. Those take longer to learn/master, we put them under the next category. There are many great sales trainers inside the Guardian Academy. We will add them to this directory as they contribute to the community. Start with reading: “Never Split The Difference” by our friend Chris Voss. We have an entire section dedicated to sales here.
The second skill to learn is marketing. Marketing takes longer to learn, but it has a much higher ceiling. Most people should learn copywriting, first. Don’t worry about AI or any of that jazz, learning to write copy is learning to communicate to an audience effectively. If you can write copy you can market or sell on any medium using the same frameworks. We have an entire publication dedicated to marketing and advertising here.
The hardest skill to learn with the most earning potential is product. Good product takes time and many iterations. If it’s good enough, your customers become both your marketing and your sales department. Product encompasses how the buyer feels before, during and after the purchase, the ease of use, and the degree to which expectations are met. Generally, we recommend learning them in that order; sales, marketing, then product.
The general principles of great product are covered in R3: Retention, Referrals and Raving Fans
Remember, The Guardian Academy is not designed to help you make “as much money as possible, as fast possible” - it’s designed to help you reach your goals and fulfill your mission - whatever that is.
We also realize sometimes finances are a limit - especially if your mission is an expensive one.
If you do the work, you will make it.
We’re here to help.
live to learn. give to earn.
Guardian Academy.
Most Popular Posts can be seen by clicking here.
Social Media: Check our our new Instagram for aesthetically pleasing stuff and exclusive video clips. Twitter (Or X) for more frequent updates and insights.
Forthcoming Event and Experience Dates can be found by clicking here. Nothing compares to being in the right room with the right people. It doesn’t have to be our room with us - just get yourself in proximity to the right people, places and things for you.
Our “Out Of Print” Business Development Books and Letters are available by clicking here for paid subs. A lot of marketers try and resell this stuff, just get it here.
The pre-req or “Starter/Self Stay Guide” to understand marketing and sales through the lens of TGA principles can be found right here.
Great intro way better than me trying to explain it to my grown kids so I sent it to them! Thanks
I think their ignore Dad button may work all too well.