loyalty
A question.
Who are you loyal to?
Take a second. Actually answer.
If you said me — or any other operator, teacher, author, mentor, anyone you read or follow — I’d disagree. Even if you said me. Especially if you said me.
And I want to explain why.
Your loyalty belongs to your own objective. To your life, your family, what you’re actually building. Your resources should go to whatever is the best option for getting you there. The minute that stops being a particular person, you should move on to whatever does.
This isn’t a fashionable thing to say if you’re in the business of building an audience. The business model that surrounds most operators in this space depends on the opposite being true. Make people loyal to you. Build the community. Run the calls. Become the figure they orient around. There’s nothing wrong with the model on its face — it’s just not the model I’ve chosen, and here’s why.
I just posted something about the R3 Program — the direct mail product I’m building — that names this principle in operational terms. I’ll quote it here because it’s the cleanest example I have of what loyalty-to-self looks like when applied to actually buying something:
There’s a reason I’m not giving you access to me, and a reason I don’t want to sell access to me. It’s the easy thing, sure. Build a community. Run the calls. Make people loyal to me.
But your loyalty shouldn’t be to me. Or any other person. It should be to your own objective. To your life, your family, what you’re actually building. Your resources should go to whatever is the best option for you to reach that — not to a person.
It’s not important to me that you’re loyal to me. It’s important that I do everything I can to be the best option for you and your objective. If I’m not, you should move on to something else that is.
That’s why I’m putting this much time and effort into the tools, the resources, the content. To give you what you need to reach your objective. Not mine.
And while I’m being honest about all of this — don’t believe, for a second, that hearing from me is somehow productive. It’s not. It might be entertaining. It might be soothing. It might scratch some itch. But it’s not moving you forward. It’s taking up time, often in avoidance of the uncomfortable feeling of not moving fast enough, or the desire to stay occupied with something that feels like progress.
The work moves you forward. Not the access to the person who made the work.
That’s the operational version of the principle. The R3 Program is built around it — no calls, no community, no coaching, just the materials, doing the work. The product itself is the principle made physical.
But the principle is bigger than the product.
The trap that the principle is meant to defend against is real and worth naming directly.
When you’re doing actual work — building, operating, applying — proximity to the operator who taught you the work becomes the most seductive form of distraction available. Because it doesn’t look like distraction. It looks like learning. It looks like investing in yourself. It looks like getting closer to the source.
But the source isn’t the person. The source is the work, done well, by you, on your own terms, against your own objective. The person who taught you can’t do that for you. They can give you tools, frameworks, materials, examples — and if they’re honest, they’ll give you those and then get out of your way. They can’t give you the doing. The doing is yours.
When you spend time on the access — calls, communities, content, all of it — and call it work, you’ve made a category error. The access feels productive because it scratches an itch the actual work doesn’t scratch. The actual work is uncomfortable. The actual work is alone. The actual work is now is the time you sit down and do it, which is a feeling most people will pay to avoid. Access is one of the things they’ll pay to avoid it with.
I want to be precise about this because I don’t want to be misread.
There is a level where exposure, proximity, and access genuinely produce exponential results. That level exists. It’s real.
But it’s not because of loyalty to the person. It’s not because of celebrity, or charisma, or attachment to the operator at the center. It’s because of your loyalty to your own objective — the receptivity that comes with it, and the ability to stay focused on what you’re building even inside someone else’s room. That’s what creates outsized results.
The exposure works when you stay loyal to yourself inside it. The exposure traps you when you transfer your loyalty to the person providing it.
That’s the line. Same activity, opposite outcomes, depending entirely on where the loyalty sits.
The Transmission is where that kind of proximity lives in my architecture. It’s not built for everyone, and the waitlist exists for a reason — the room is small by design. If proximity to my ongoing work would compound your own, and you’ve done the work you know you need to do to make that proximity productive, you can sit on the waitlist for when a seat opens. If you haven’t done that work yet — if the access would be filling a gap that the actual work would fill better — wait. Do the work first. The Transmission isn’t going anywhere.
When there’s work to be done, anything other than the work is a distraction. Including access to the person who taught the work. Especially access, because that distraction comes dressed as productivity.
The reason I’m putting this down clearly is that I’m reorganizing what I publish, what I sell, and how I show up. Some of what I’ve made along the way encouraged the wrong version of loyalty — to me, to the brand, to the relationship. That was a mistake I’m correcting now, partly through the choices I’m making about what to build and partly through writing things like this.
The work I’m making is meant to belong to whoever can use it. The relationship you have with that work should be a relationship with the work itself, not with me. If I disappear tomorrow, the work should still serve you. If I keep showing up, your loyalty still belongs to your objective, not to my showing up.
I’ll keep writing here for as long as it’s useful to write. When it stops being useful — to you or to me — it should stop. That’s the principle applied to this surface too.
— Nic
100% I started doubting the loyalty myth years ago when I realised it was a gateway to being manipulated. And I never demanded it from others. It’s a tricky thing, a precious thing.
I hadn’t considered “loyalty to oneself” as a thing. Good insight. Cheers Nic