Anticodeguy

Most people spend years "learning" but never actually build anything. But there's a better way to learn any skill - backed by research showing 1.64x better mastery than traditional methods: --- The traditional education model is backwards. It says: study everything first, do later. Reality check: I took a programming course, learned theory, algorithms, and methods. Then faced a real task and had no idea what to do. --- Here's what actually works: Step 1 - Choose a project you'll actually build. Not a test project jus "for practice". A real thing you'll show to people. Something useful to someone. --- Why does it have to be real? Because you need feedback. Test projects keep you in a loop of self-admiration. No one gives feedback, and you lie to yourself. Your brain produces the desired result. --- My example: I'm building a personal brand from scratch. After months of creating content, I packaged everything into ANTIghostwriter - my content creation system. It forced me to master every tool, refine every process, document every step. --- Step 2 - Start building consistently. Aristotle said it 2,400 years ago:

"We learn by doing them."

One hour every day beats 16-hour weekend sprints. Consistency wins over intensity. This is a marathon, not a sprint. --- Studies show: the spacing effect shows distributed practice doubles long-term retention vs cramming. Surgical training study: residents with shorter, distributed sessions retained skills far better than one-time intensive training. --- Step 3 - Fill knowledge gaps as you encounter them. Don't look for information in advance. Start doing. Hit a wall. Then learn what you need. I used to search textbooks, but now there's ChatGPT. Ask it, get results, keep building. --- 80% of knowledge is free online. Creators publish most content for free, then package it into courses. You're paying for convenience, not the knowledge itself. Use this. Fill gaps just-in-time. --- Real-world proof this works: Medical residencies: "see one, do one, teach one" German dual education: classroom + paid apprenticeships École 42: no classes, no instructors, just project-based coding All project-driven. All highly effective. --- Why this framework destroys traditional learning: Traditional: study first, apply later This framework: do first, study only what you need, keep doing This way knowledge becomes part of your working understanding, not memorized facts for a test. --- Choose your project today. What skill do you want? What real thing could you build? Block one hour daily. And start building. Don't prepare more, don't plan anything. Just open it and create the first piece. --- These 3 steps will get you functional. They'll take you from zero to competent with real, applicable skills. There are 3 more multipliers: feedback loops, iterative improvement, and teaching others. Stay tuned. --- For now read the full article on learning by doing: https://anticodeguy.substack.com/p/the-only-learning-by-doing-framework?r=1m5hbt

You have a million-dollar product sitting in your head right now Read more how Your Experience Is Worth Million Dollars: How To Build A One-Person Knowledge Business Watch more videos like that on my YouTube @anticodeguy

Step 1: Choose a Project You’ll Actually Build First step. Choose a project that you’ll implement. A real project that you’ll show to people, not a test one, not for practice, but one that’s useful to someone. I don’t know another way to learn besides a real project. I learned programming from scratch by doing a task. I could have spent years reading books, theorizing, but without a real project, you won’t develop skills. The project must be real so you can get feedback. Otherwise you’re in a loop of self-admiration, showing the project to yourself, no one gives a fuckfeedback, and we know how to lie to ourselves. The brain produces the desired result. There’s no point doing a test project for yourself. It must be real, visible to people. The project doesn’t have to be as large-scale as my query system. Complex tasks accelerate learning – I learned the basics, and the rest of the tasks became simple, I cracked 80% of them like nuts. This helps. If you’re building a personal brand, the project could be an article, posts, a content creation system. Come up with a system you’ll use and share it. An article is also a project. Take advantage of the opportunity. Choose a project, the main thing is that it’s visible to people. Use the #BuildInPublic tag, share your findings.

... So there I am, sitting in front of the computer, surrounded by textbooks, looking at the task I need to complete, not understanding which side to approach it from. I start reading textbooks, doing some basics. But I run into the first problem: I need to install a software environment to access the database. I need to have access to the server to upload executable files. We wrote in PHP, JavaScript helped with queries. Remember, this was a time when the internet wasn’t developed enough to find an answer to every question. There was no Stack Overflow where you could copy-paste code. Everything had to be written almost from scratch, which is what we did. I had a more experienced colleague, and I wasn’t shy about asking him questions. He showed me what programs he uses, what to install. I followed his advice, copied his experience. He showed me the foundation for my product. In the admin panel with database access, there’s a query system, convenient and flexible, allowing any query. My task – make the same thing for our database, an analog of this system. I started doing it. I have a sample, tools, a colleague I can ask, books from which to draw information. Then everything moves forward in iterations. I need to understand where the code begins. First, make a page with a connection to the database. I go to the book, see how it’s done, from the very beginning – that’s how any program in PHP starts, I figure out what a connection is, how the database works, I read the SQL book, connect, study the structure, and so on step by step. The Final Release By the appointed deadline, in one and a half months, from under my hands comes a finished product – a query system that we publish for users. The boss is satisfied, users not so much, because it’s complicated for them. I had to train them: I came to users, showed them how to use it, wrote instructions, posted them. This is where the real learning happened. Not in the classroom where we discussed theory. Not in the textbooks I skimmed. But in the doing. In the building. In the struggling and figuring it out as I went.

... A One Task And a Pile of Books My task: create a query system for the database that would be convenient for a simple user, so they could compose a query and get results in the form of a dynamic table, generated from the database of students and applicants. I’m staring at the computer screen, having written down the task formulation in my notebook, not understanding what to do or how to solve it. I didn’t know what a query system was or what an ERP system was. We only started studying these two courses later. I wasn’t working alone – I had a colleague who had been writing this system for a long time. The logical question to him: where do I start? He understood that I had no experience and handed me a set of books: about PHP, a textbook on SQL, and a textbook on JavaScript. Three huge thick books, more voluminous than many literary works we read in school. Listening to my colleague, I started reading, quickly realizing that I wouldn’t finish the task today. I clarified the deadline. The manager understood that the task was new for me, but without a deadline, it would never get done. She set a deadline – one and a half months. Considering working time, this should be enough. I have a deadline, three huge textbooks, and zero understanding of what to do. To be continued.

Probably the most compact website I've ever done

The Zeigarnik effect is destroying your mental clarity and you don't even know it Read more about Mental Decluttering: 5 Proven Techniques to Reclaim Your Mental Bandwidth Watch more videos like that on my YouTube @anticodeguy

I learned programming in 6 weeks on a real job. University spent 2 years teaching me theory I never used. Here's how to learn any skill the way that actually works: --- School teaches you formulas and dates. But nobody explains why you're memorizing them. The system was built decades ago and can't keep up with how fast the world changes. By the time you graduate, you realize - none of this knowledge matters like you thought. --- Second year of university, my professor invited me to work as a programmer. My first task: build a database query system for users. I stared at the screen. Had no idea where to start. They handed me 3 massive textbooks and gave me 6 weeks. --- University taught me theory - how code works, algorithms, methods. But faced with a real task, I realized none of those methodologies helped. I didn't know what to do specifically. This is the problem with traditional education. It prepares you for tests, not actual work. --- So I started building. Read the books, installed the software, asked my coworker questions. He showed me an example - "Make something like this." I had a sample, tools, someone to ask, and books to reference. Then everything moved forward in iterations. --- Here's what the data shows: 77% of recent college graduates learned more in 6 months on the job than in 4 years of college. 68% felt their degree didn't provide the skills needed for their job. There's a massive gap between what schools teach and what work demands. --- And employers know it too. 75% of HR leaders say colleges aren't preparing people at all for workplace needs. Only 24% of recent grads felt they had all the skills needed for their current job. The system is broken. Everyone knows it - except the system refuses to change. --- By the deadline, I shipped a working product. Users started using it. I trained them, wrote instructions, refined the system based on feedback. This is how real learning happened. Not in classrooms discussing theory. But in building, struggling, and figuring it out as I went. --- 4 years later, when I graduated, I had real experience building information systems. I published my resume online and started receiving calls from companies with job offers. All I had to do was choose what I liked. Because I learned by doing, not just studying. --- The internet changed everything. For the first time in history, the barriers to learning almost completely disappeared. Tools, resources, information - it's all there. You have freedom to choose what skills to develop, learn at your own pace, and build real things that matter. --- So here's my question: Think back to your education - school, university, whatever you went through. What percentage of what you learned do you actually use in your daily work? If you're honest, the most valuable skills you have, you learned by doing. --- You don't need permission to start learning in a way that actually works. The traditional system had its time. That time has passed. In my next article, I'm sharing the exact framework I used - the specific steps that worked for me. There's a better way. --- Meanwhile, read the first article with the full origin story of mine about how I started my career in IT: https://anticodeguy.substack.com/p/why-learning-by-doing-beats-traditional?r=1m5hbt

I think I found my Ikigai

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

— Confucius (c. 5th century BC, Chinese philosopher) I can’t help but recall an example from my own life. I was invited to work when I was in my second year of university. Due to peculiarities in my thinking and the fact that I enjoyed computers, which I got early in life, I was interested in programming. In programming classes, I did well, which my teacher noticed. She invited me to work at the university’s information center, which she managed, as a programmer. Without thinking long, I agreed. In my student years, the alternative was working in the service industry, where they paid more, but programming work appealed to me more because it gave prospects and experience by the time I graduated from university – a critical factor for finding work. I agreed and came to work my first day as a programmer. The first task they gave me was very different from what I’d done before. At university, they explained how to solve a problem, gave methods and templates, and by applying them I got the expected answer. Here it was different. My boss gave me a task: write a system. We were writing an information system for the university to maintain a database of students and applicants – a custom ERP system where all information about students was stored. There were user screens for managing information that was filled in when entering the university. ...

Ever wonder why cleaning your room suddenly makes complex problems easier to solve? Read more about Mental Decluttering: 5 Proven Techniques to Reclaim Your Mental Bandwidth Watch more videos like that on my YouTube @anticodeguy

One-Time Sales If you’re selling something that doesn’t require ongoing updates or support – like a comprehensive ebook or a template pack – then charging once makes sense. You create it, sell it, and the customer owns it forever. It’s simpler to execute, especially when you’re just starting. You don’t have to maintain a service or constantly create new content to justify a subscription. Digital artist Beeple sold a single NFT artwork for $69 million at Christie’s auction in 2021. That’s an extreme outlier, obviously, but it proves that one-time sales can still generate massive numbers under the right circumstances.

Most solopreneurs think earning $1M requires 100K followers. Wrong. It's just math - and you're probably closer than you think. Here are some monetization models for one-person business: --- The subscription model compounds. One-time sales don't. Lenny's Newsletter: 18K paying subscribers × $150/year = $2M+ annually. One person. No employees. Just valuable content. --- Pieter Levels proved it with data: Subscription business hits $2M by year 5. Same user growth with one-time sales hits only $183K. The compounding effect of recurring revenue is powerful. --- But one-time sales still work for certain products. Beeple sold a single NFT for $69 million at Christie's. Templates, online courses: create once, sell infinite. You can update info when needed, but it's mostly "passive" income. --- Hybrid approach is the smartest move $50 ebook as entry point. $200/month membership for ongoing value. $2,000 high-ticket program for serious clients. This way you're not leaving money on the table. --- Service-based model: 10 clients × $5,000/month = $600K/year. When you get to 15-20 clients, you're past $1M. It's not easy. But achievable in specialized fields like design, development, or strategic consulting. --- Match your pricing to value delivery. If your product requires ongoing attention - subscription pricing makes sense. Create once, works forever - one-time pricing is better. --- The real value is hidden behind the repeatable sales process. You're not waking up with $1M in your bank. You're executing the same loop over and over: Someone discovers → sees value → purchases → tells others. --- Let's break down one million one more time: $100 product × 10,000 sales = 30 sales/day for a year. Or 200/week. Suddenly it's feasible. Sure, it fluctuates: some days it's zero, some weeks 50. Sales events like Black Friday may bring hundreds in one day (soon btw). --- You're building a machine, a system. Marketing, selling, delivering, supporting. Early on it's clunky and manual. But over time it will be automated, outsourced, and efficient. Focus your time on highest-leverage activities only. --- Start with what you can deliver value on today. Build your repeatable system. Use the internet's scale to your advantage. Break down one million to digestible chunks, pick your path, and start working the numbers. --- The full article on the topic: https://anticodeguy.substack.com/p/how-to-earn-my-first-million-dollars-2df?r=1m5hbt

Your brain isn't built for the modern world Read more about Mental Decluttering: 5 Proven Techniques to Reclaim Your Mental Bandwidth Watch more videos like that on my YouTube @anticodeguy

The Subscription Model If you offer a consultation service, someone might need your help today and then again in three months. Instead of selling single sessions, you could package it as a monthly retainer or a multi-session package with payment plans. This does two things: it makes the purchase easier for the client (spreading payments over time), and it makes your income more predictable. Once you have 20 clients on a monthly consulting retainer, you know exactly what’s coming in each month. The classic example is SaaS platforms – software where you pay monthly or annually for access. Carrd does this with its $19/year premium plan. It’s not a huge amount per person, but multiply it by tens of thousands of users, and you’ve got serious revenue. Lenny Rachitsky runs Lenny’s Newsletter, a Substack publication about product management. He has more than 1,000,000 free subscribers and roughly 18,000 paying members (maybe more) who each pay around $150 per year. That’s over $2 million in annual revenue from a newsletter. One person. No employees. Just valuable content delivered consistently. Pieter Levels shared data showing that a subscription business model can make around $2 million by year five, compared to only $183,000 for a one-off sales business with similar user growth. The compounding effect of recurring revenue is that powerful.

Now let’s talk about what I consider the most realistic path for most people building a One Person Business: the $100 product sold 10,000 times. When you first hear “10,000 customers,” it sounds massive, right? But here’s the perspective shift that changed how I think about this: the internet has over 5.6 billion users. Pick literally any niche, and there are almost certainly more than 10,000 people online who are interested in it and could benefit from a good product in that space. If you deliver something valuable – let’s say a course that helps someone earn an extra $1,000, and you charge only $100 for it – that’s a reasonable transaction. Why wouldn’t someone invest $100 to gain $1,000 in value or earning potential? Entrepreneur Pieter Levels (@levelsio), who built several one-person million-dollar businesses, was “shocked” at how feasible the math can be:

“With a $100 product, you only need 10,000 people for $1 million… you don’t need a lot of customers, just a small niche.”

Business consultant Ken Yarmosh suggests a “hybrid or laddered approach: a low-ticket ‘entry’ offer can feed into a high-ticket ‘premium’ offer.” You’re essentially building trust at a low cost, then giving your customers the option to go deeper with you. Think of a $10 or $50 product as an entry ticket for both you and your potential clients to get acquainted with the quality of what you deliver. If you pack that inexpensive product with value worth way more than its price tag, you create several opportunities: - People can leave good reviews without much financial risk - They’ll share it with others because it over-delivered - You can test your positioning and messaging - You gain confidence in what you’re building Let’s say you sell 100 units of your $10 product and notice the conversion rate is extremely high. That tells you the value exceeds the price. You’ve found product-market fit. At that point, you can raise the price to better match the value you’re delivering, which will naturally lower conversion somewhat but likely increase your overall revenue. A perfect example of the high-ticket subscription approach working at scale: Brett Williams runs DesignJoy, a one-person graphic design service. He charges clients between $3,000 and $5,000 per month for unlimited design work. With just 20-30 happy clients at any given time, he’s built a $1.2 million per year business. All by himself, with no employees. The evolutionary method I’m planning to follow: start with a smaller product, gather feedback, improve it, potentially raise the price, then create a more comprehensive version or complementary products. This builds both your product line and your reputation simultaneously.