Everyone wants to take. Nobody wants to build.

May 23rd 2026

FA house of cards takes five minutes to build and half a second to destroy. The market works exactly the same way. It rewards builders, because builders are rare.

Most people are “takers”, they’re just looking for something to take. To gain maximally and to give minimally. It’s human nature and a tenant of trade and business. But the thing is, takers rarely win long term.

I learned this the hard way a few years ago. I was cold-closing website buildouts and Google PPC lead gen for local service businesses here in Columbus. Not over the phone. In person.

I'd look up a business, drive out, and try to pitch them face to face over the weekends. I’d spend hours on my only rest days driving all over the city on top of being a full time university student. I told myself this was hustle. That showing up physically was a differentiator.

One winter morning, ice on the ground, sludge in my boots, I waited nearly an hour outside a guy's storefront for him to open. I was in my car, cold, looking stupid, rehearsing a pitch in my head for someone who agreed to meet me over the phone.

Sitting there, I finally got honest with myself. I wasn't building anything. I was trying to take.

I wanted to extract a deal from someone who didn't know me, didn't trust me, and had no real reason to care about what I was selling. I had zero leverage and what I was doing had no longevity.

Even though I closed a few clients, this was not a sustainable or smart business model.

See the thing is, most businesses, most people, will never buy something worthwhile unless that something will genuinely change their lives. And that's because most business owners aren't flush with cash. They're head above water every month.

That $500 you want for the deal could be their electric bill, their food, whatever emergency hits that week. So you're offer needs to justify the risk of the loss of safety nets. But even the ones making real money aren't safe.

60% of six-figure earners live paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle creep. Keeping up with people they don't even like. A bad relationship with money that started somewhere in childhood they've never dealt with. Whatever.

The number sounds insane until you realize that income and financial discipline are two completely separate skills. Most people develop one and never touch the other.

A quick sale off a cold approach, to a stranger, who didn't come to you, is pulling water from a stone. So I eventually killed that old business model and switched to email.

Email has no shortcut. No algorithm to game, no loophole, no guru playbook. Email lists don't grow on their own. In fact they hemorrhage after every send. It's nearly sisyphean. You're looking at 12 months of hemorrhaging subscribers, minimum before you're above water.

But thats precisely why email has existed as long as it has and why it's consistently been top 5 as a driver of online revenue since it's inception.

Almost every other model being sold right now is built on the taking framework. Drop shipping. Amazon FBA. SMMA. IPGA. Affiliate plays.

Luck and timing based systems that are hard to replicate.

And the pitch is always the same: low effort, fast returns, somebody else's infrastructure where you’re just the middle man.

The landlord is Amazon, or Google, or whatever platform holds the keys. They change the rules, raise the fees, kill the loophole, and you find out on a random Tuesday morning when the revenue stops.

You're not building anything doing this. You're renting someone else's house and calling it an asset.

UCL research clocks the average habit at 66 days to become automatic, up to 254 for complex ones. This came out of a study tracking 96 people trying to build simple daily behaviors.

Furthermore: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were two psychologists who spent decades studying how humans actually make decisions, as opposed to how we think we make them. Kahneman eventually won the Nobel Prize for the work. What they found was uncomfortable: we are loss-averse by design.

Losses hit twice as hard psychologically as equivalent gains feel good. Not a little harder. Twice.

So when you're 8 months into building something with nothing to show, your brain isn't processing that as a neutral waiting period before a big win. It's processing it as sustained, compounding loss. Every day in the red feels like a hit.

The eventual payoff, uncertain, far away, requiring you to believe in something you can't see yet. This is why most people don't build. It’s not out of laziness. It’s Biology.

The guru industry figured this out a long time ago. Every "low risk, fast returns" pitch speaks directly to the part of your brain that cannot tolerate sitting in the loss column. They've reverse-engineered your psychology and built a sales pitch around it.

That's why smart people buy courses they never finish and business models they abandon in three months. The pitch isn't stupid. The timing is just wrong for anyone who actually wants to build something.

The guys and gals who build through it anyway have made peace with a specific trade. The 2-years of being in the red is the price of the forever asset.

That decision has to be made once and then held every single day against a brain that keeps bringing the receipt and asking if it's still worth it. Most people renegotiate. The answer starts as "not yet" and eventually, quietly becomes "no."

And here's what it actually costs to not renegotiate.

​
​

​
​

​
​

​
But when you do eventually win, what you get back is harder to explain and worth more than any of it.

You become someone who is patient, who no longer needs external validation to motivate them.

It’s a level of confidence and prudence that is almost similar to prescience.

Eventually, the money will show up and it won’t have a ceiling. No salary, no billable hours, no boss signing off on a raise. The list pays you whether you're in Columbus or on a beach somewhere you decided to be that month.

The lifestyle follows. You book the trip without stressing over an itinerary. You move cities because you feel like it. You wake up without an alarm because there's nobody to answer to at 9am except yourself.

You could even lose the business, lose the list, lose the income, but you’ll still have the person. That person builds again. Already knowing they survive the red.

But If you want the outcome, you must be comfortable with the cost of the outcome. That means elbow grease, toil, getting your hands dirty, a loss of income.

It's about fundamentally changing who are, and changing your relationship with money. It's about becoming a builder, not a taker. Builders get paid twice, once in money, once in the thing that can't be taken from them.

Fathi