The 2026 Productivity Playbook
Why building systems beats chasing outcomes every single time
Earlier this year, I lost a significant income stream.
A friend I was working with on an info product, changed direction.
He didn’t need my services anymore.
Just like that, a solid monthly income vanished.
Money I’d earmarked for saving.
For a house.
For all the plans I’d convinced myself were finally within reach.
A few years ago, this would’ve destroyed me.
I would’ve spiraled.
Questioned every decision I’d made.
Wondered if I’d fucked up my entire career trajectory.
Laid awake at 3am doing mental math on how long it would now take me to replace that income.
But I didn’t panic.
I’d been here before.
I’d lost income streams, watched opportunities dissolve, had projects collapse under me enough times to recognize the pattern.
And the pattern was this.
Every single time something fell apart, something better appeared.
A new opportunity.
A door I hadn’t noticed before.
A project that needed exactly the time I’d just freed up.
Two weeks after losing that income, I was offered the chance to co-found AIAA.
We did $530,000 in revenue in our first month.
In November, we did nearly a million.
That’s not manifestation bullshit.
That’s not the universe rewarding positive vibes.
That’s what happens when you’ve built the right foundation.
When opportunities don’t have to find you scrambling and desperate.
They find you ready.
This isn’t about how everything always works out.
That’s toxic positivity garbage.
This is about building a machine that means you don’t need to scramble when things break.
And that’s what this entire year should be about for you.
Not goals.
Not vision boards.
Not waking up at 5am because some podcast bro said so.
Systems.
This is the playbook.
The actual framework I use.
The exact system that took me from losing a major income stream to co-founding an offer that did over a million in its first two months.
By the end of this, you’ll have a complete operating system for 2026.
Not theory.
Not motivation.
Not inspiration.
A machine you can build this week.
Part One: The Lies You’ve Been Sold
Before we build anything, we need to demolish the bullshit foundations most people are working from.
Because you can’t build a solid system on top of broken beliefs.
The Passion Trap
You’ve heard it a thousand times.
Find your passion.
Do what you love.
Follow your heart and the money will follow.
It’s complete horseshit.
Passion is a terrible filter for what to pursue.
You could be incredibly passionate about becoming the world’s best guitar player.
Maybe you’ve been practicing for years, buying all the equipment, investing every spare hour into it.
But if you’re still not very good, should you really double down?
The people telling you to find your passion have already found theirs.
And it usually happens to be selling you courses about finding your passion.
Pretty convenient.
Aptitude beats passion.
Skill beats passion.
What can you actually do that generates the outcome you want?
That’s the question.
Not what makes your heart sing, but what makes you valuable enough that people pay you for it.
I wasn’t passionate about journalism when I started.
I was passionate about not being broke.
So I got good at writing by doing five articles a day for six months.
I didn’t wait to feel called to it.
I didn’t journal about my purpose.
I just did the reps until I was undeniably good at something people would pay for.
When people tell you to find your passion first, they’re telling you to wait.
To delay action until you have perfect clarity about your life’s purpose.
That’s a recipe for spending years in analysis paralysis while the world moves on without you.
The truth is simpler and way less romantic.
Find something you can be good at.
Get good at it through volume.
Let the outcomes guide your next move.
Passion shows up after competence, not before.
What to do instead:
Look at the last three years of your life.
What have people actually paid you for?
What do people come to you for help with?
What tasks do you complete faster or better than most people around you?
Write those down.
That’s your starting point.
Not what you wish you were good at.
What you’re already demonstrating competence in.
Passion follows mastery.
Get good first.
The love for the work comes after.
The Morning Routine Myth
The obsession with morning routines is a distraction from the actual question.
Which is: do you have a system at all?
If you wake up at 6am because some productivity guru told you that’s when successful people wake up, but you spend the day wandering between tasks with no real structure, you’ve accomplished nothing except being tired earlier.
If 9am works better for your system, great.
If you do your best work at 11pm, fine.
The time you wake up doesn’t matter.
What matters is whether your day is systemized.
Whether you know exactly what you’re doing when you sit down to work.
Whether you’re measuring the inputs that compound over time.
Copying someone else’s morning routine is unlikely to work because their system is built for their life, their energy patterns, their obligations.
You need something specific to you.
I see this all the time with students at AIAA.
They come in asking what my morning looks like, what tools I use, what my workspace setup is.
They want to copy the surface-level shit because it feels like action.
But that’s not where the work happens.
The work happens in knowing what you’re optimizing for.
In tracking the daily inputs that move you toward that outcome.
In having clarity about what matters and what’s just noise.
What to do instead:
Forget what time you wake up.
Answer these questions:
What are the 2-3 activities that, if you did them every single day, would guarantee progress toward your goal?
When in your day do you have the most energy and focus for those activities?
What currently fills that time instead?
Your “morning routine” is just protecting the time for those 2-3 activities.
Whether that’s 6am or 2pm doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the time is blocked, protected, and non-negotiable.
The Outwork Myth (And What It Actually Means)
You do have to outwork everyone.
That part is true.
But not in hours.
In duration.
Most people quit.
That’s the real competition.
Not who grinds harder for six months, but who’s still showing up three years later.
Research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that about 20–23% of businesses fail in the first year.
But by year five, nearly half are gone.
By year ten, 65% have quit.
The people who win aren’t the ones pulling all-nighters and bragging about their 18-hour days.
They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to sustain effort over years without burning out.
They’ve traded the romance of the grind for the reality of compounding small daily habits.
I learned this the hard way.
There was a point where I was working noon to 4am every day, surviving on energy drinks, convincing myself this was what success required.
Then I got a throat infection so bad I couldn’t speak for days.
My body just shut down.
That was a warning sign I’d ignored for too long.
The sustainable version isn’t sexy.
It’s 4-5 focused hours of real work.
It’s knowing exactly what moves the needle and ignoring everything else.
It’s building a life you can actually maintain for a decade, not a sprint you’ll abandon by March.
What to do instead:
Calculate your “sustainable output.”
Not your maximum possible effort, but the level of work you can maintain indefinitely without degrading your health, relationships, or mental state.
For most people, that’s 4-6 hours of deep, focused work per day.
Not 12.
Not 16.
The rest is meetings, admin, and bullshit that feels like work but doesn’t compound.
Protect those 4-6 hours ruthlessly.
That’s where the real output happens.
Everything else is negotiable.
Part Two: The Applied Leverage OS
So what’s the actual system?
I call it the Applied Leverage OS.
It has five levers.
Each one builds on the last.
Skip one and the whole thing breaks.
This is the exact framework that took me from losing a major income stream to building a million-dollar company in two months.
It’s what I teach every student at AIAA.
It’s what separates the people who are stuck at the starting line from the ones who are compounding at 15k, 20k, 30k per month and beyond.
Here’s how each lever works and exactly how to implement it.
Lever One: The Target
What it is: Finding your direction through evidence, not feelings.
Why it matters: Most people are aiming at the wrong thing.
They’ve picked a goal based on what sounds impressive, what someone else achieved, or what they think they should want.
Then they wonder why they can’t stay motivated.
The Target isn’t about finding your passion.
It’s about identifying what you’re actually good at that can generate the outcomes you want.
It’s about looking at evidence, not fantasies.
How to implement it:
Step 1: Audit your wins.
Look at the last 2-3 years.
What have you actually succeeded at?
Not what you tried and failed.
Ask yourself:
What worked?
Where did you make money?
Where did you get results?
Where did people compliment your work without you fishing for it?
Write down at least 5 concrete wins.
Be specific.
“I helped my friend’s business increase their conversion rate by 40%” is useful.
“I’m good at marketing” is not.
Step 2: Identify the patterns.
What do those wins have in common?
Maybe they all involve writing.
Maybe they all involve talking to people.
Maybe they all involve building systems or solving technical problems.
The pattern tells you where your natural leverage is.
The thing you do better than average without having to grind for years to develop.
Step 3: Match patterns to outcomes.
Now look at your desired outcome.
Want to make $20k/month?
Want location freedom?
Want to build a team?
Which of your pattern strengths can be deployed to generate that outcome?
That’s your target.
Not what you wish you were good at.
What you’re already good at, pointed at the outcome you want.
Step 4: Validate with the market.
Before you go all-in, test it.
Can you find people willing to pay for this?
Are there others making money doing similar things?
Is there actual demand?
The Target isn’t just about what you’re good at.
It’s about what you’re good at that the market will reward.
The intersection is where you aim.
The output: A clear, specific direction based on evidence.
Not “I want to be an entrepreneur.”
Something like “I’m going to help e-commerce brands improve their email marketing because I’ve done it successfully three times and there’s clear demand for it.”
Lever Two: The Shot
What it is: Taking action before you’re ready. Boldness beats perfection.
Why it matters: Most people never start.
They research endlessly.
They plan meticulously.
They wait until they feel ready.
And they never feel ready, so they never begin.
The Shot is about breaking that pattern.
It’s about understanding that action produces information that planning never will.
You learn more from one real conversation with a potential client than from a hundred hours of market research.
Playing it safe is bullshit.
Safety is an illusion.
The only real safety comes from building skills and systems that make you valuable regardless of circumstances.
How to implement it:
Step 1: Identify your current “waiting for.”
What are you waiting for before you take action?
More knowledge?
More money?
More time?
The perfect moment?
Write it down.
Be honest.
What’s the thing you’re telling yourself needs to happen before you can start?
Step 2: Ask the kill question.
“If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I do this week?”
Not this year.
This week.
What’s the bold move you’d make if failure wasn’t a factor?
That’s probably the move you should make.
The fear is the signal.
Step 3: Shrink the shot.
If the bold move feels too big, shrink it.
You don’t have to launch the whole business.
You have to send one DM.
You don’t have to sign ten clients.
You have to have one conversation.
What’s the smallest possible version of The Shot that still moves you forward?
Do that.
Today.
Step 4: Set a forcing function.
Tell someone what you’re going to do.
Put money on the line.
Schedule the call before you feel ready.
Create a situation where not taking the shot has immediate consequences.
Motivation is unreliable.
Forcing functions are reliable.
Step 5: Detach from outcomes.
The goal of The Shot isn’t to succeed.
It’s to generate information.
You’re running an experiment.
Did the outreach work?
Did the offer resonate?
Did the client say yes?
If it didn’t work, you learned something.
Adjust and shoot again.
The only failure is not shooting at all.
The output: One concrete action taken this week that moves you toward your target, regardless of whether you felt ready.
Lever Three: The Reps
What it is: Volume builds skill faster than any course, book, or strategy.
Why it matters: Everyone wants the hack.
The shortcut.
The one weird trick that makes everything click.
There is no hack.
There’s only reps.
When I was broke and needed to become a writer, I wrote five articles a day for six months.
Not because I was talented.
Because I understood that repetition beats talent every single time.
You can’t think your way to competence.
You have to rep your way there.
The students at AIAA who are stuck are usually stuck because they’re not doing enough volume.
They sent 10 cold DMs and got no responses, so they concluded that cold outreach doesn’t work.
No.
Ten is not a sample size.
Ten is a warm-up.
How to implement it:
Step 1: Identify your core rep.
Based on your Target, what’s the one activity that, repeated hundreds of times, would guarantee progress?
For a service business, it might be outreach.
For content, it might be publishing.
For sales, it might be calls.
For product, it might be customer conversations.
One activity.
Not five.
The one that matters most.
Step 2: Set a volume target that scares you.
Whatever you think is reasonable, multiply it by 5.
If you were planning to send 10 DMs a week, send 50.
If you were planning to publish once a week, publish daily.
If you were planning to do 2 sales calls a week, do 2 a day.
The volume target should feel unreasonable.
That’s the point.
Unreasonable volume produces unreasonable results.
Step 3: Track publicly.
Create a simple tracker.
How many reps did you do today?
This week?
This month?
Share it somewhere.
With a friend, in a community, on social media.
Public accountability makes it real.
Step 4: Separate reps from results.
This is crucial.
In the beginning, you’re not tracking results.
You’re tracking reps.
Results are lagging indicators.
They show up after the reps compound.
If you track results too early, you’ll get discouraged and quit before the compounding kicks in.
Track the reps.
Trust the reps.
Results follow.
Step 5: Do your reps when you don’t feel like it.
The reps that count the most are the ones you do when motivation is gone.
Anyone can do reps when they’re excited.
The professionals do reps when they’re tired, bored, and wondering if any of this matters.
Those are the reps that separate you from everyone else.
The output: A daily rep target for your core activity, tracked consistently, done regardless of motivation.
Lever Four: The Machine
What it is: Building systems that run without you.
Why it matters: This is where most people fail.
They do the work, but they never systematize the work.
They’re always in the weeds, always firefighting, always one breakdown away from collapse.
The first three levers get you results.
This lever lets you keep them without burning out.
Every time you do something twice, you should be asking:
How do I make sure I never have to think about this again?
How do I turn this into a system, a process, a checklist, an automation?
The Machine is what creates capacity.
When my friend’s project ended and AIAA appeared, I could take that opportunity because I had systems in place.
I wasn’t drowning in operational chaos.
I had bandwidth for what came next.
How to implement it:
Step 1: Document everything you do more than once.
Start a simple SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) library.
Every time you complete a task you’ve done before, spend 5 minutes writing down the steps.
Doesn’t have to be fancy.
A Google Doc with bullet points is fine.
The goal is capturing the process while it’s fresh.
Step 2: Identify your repeated decisions.
What questions do you answer over and over?
What decisions do you make repeatedly?
Turn those into rules.
“If X happens, do Y.”
Remove the decision-making from the process.
Decision fatigue is real.
Automate it away.
Step 3: Build templates for everything.
Email responses you send frequently?
Template.
Client onboarding steps?
Template.
Content formats that work?
Template.
The goal is reducing the creative energy required for routine tasks to zero.
Save your creativity for the work that actually matters.
Step 4: Automate what you can.
Look at your documented processes.
Which steps can be handled by software?
Zapier, Make, n8n, AI tools - there are dozens of options.
Start small.
Automate one thing this week.
Then another.
Then another.
The compound effect of small automations is massive.
Step 5: Delegate what you can’t automate.
Once you have documented processes, you can hand them to someone else.
A VA, a contractor, an employee.
You can’t delegate chaos.
You can only delegate systems.
Build the system first, then hand it off.
Step 6: Schedule system reviews.
Every month, look at your SOPs.
What’s outdated?
What’s missing?
What could be improved?
The Machine isn’t static.
It evolves as you learn.
Build maintenance into the process.
The output: A growing library of documented processes, templates, automations, and delegated tasks that free up your time for high-leverage work.
Lever Five: The Council
What it is: Finding people ahead of you, shutting up, and executing what they tell you.
Why it matters: The problems you’re facing have been solved a thousand times.
Someone has already figured out what you’re struggling with.
They’ve made the mistakes you’re about to make.
They know the shortcuts you haven’t discovered.
Trying to figure everything out yourself isn’t independence.
It’s arrogance.
And it’s slow.
When I joined Client Ascension, I didn’t try to reinvent their system.
I did exactly what they told me to do.
Hit $25k/month in three months.
Then they hired me.
That progression - from student to coach to co-founder - happened because I was willing to execute on what people ahead of me recommended instead of trying to forge my own path through problems they’d already solved.
How to implement it:
Step 1: Identify who’s 2-3 steps ahead.
Not 20 steps.
Not the billionaire you’ll never meet.
The person who’s just slightly ahead of you.
Making what you want to make.
Living how you want to live.
Those people are accessible.
And their advice is relevant because they remember what it was like to be where you are.
Step 2: Get in their orbit.
Join their community.
Buy their course.
Attend their events.
Comment on their content.
Provide value before asking for anything.
Most people ask for mentorship from people they’ve never interacted with.
That doesn’t work.
You need to exist in their world first.
Step 3: Ask specific questions.
“How do I grow my business?” is a terrible question.
It’s too vague to answer.
“I’m at $8k/month selling email marketing services. I’m doing all fulfillment myself and can’t take more clients. Should I raise prices, hire help, or change my offer?” is a question someone can actually answer.
Specific questions get specific answers.
Vague questions get generic advice.
Step 4: Execute before asking again.
This is the part most people skip.
They get advice, nod along, then come back with more questions without implementing anything.
When someone in your Council gives you direction, execute it fully before asking for more input.
Come back with results, not more questions.
“I did what you said. Here’s what happened. What should I do next?”
That’s how you earn continued access to people’s time and attention.
Step 5: Build a personal board of advisors.
Over time, you should have 3-5 people you can go to for different types of problems.
One for marketing.
One for operations.
One for mindset.
One for industry-specific questions.
You don’t need one mentor.
You need a council.
Different experts for different domains.
The output: A small group of people ahead of you whose advice you actively implement, with a track record of executing on their recommendations.
Part Three: The Logs
The five levers are your strategy.
The Logs are your operating layer.
They create clarity on demand and keep you executing instead of wandering.
There are four logs.
Each serves a different purpose.
The Capture Log
What it is: A small notebook that lives in your pocket.
Purpose: Capturing ideas, thoughts, observations, and tasks the moment they occur.
Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.
Every thought you try to remember is taking up mental RAM that could be used for actual work.
When something occurs to you:
An idea
A task
A question
Something you need to remember
Write it in the Capture Log immediately.
Don’t trust yourself to remember it later.
You won’t.
Process the Capture Log daily.
Move items to their appropriate homes (calendar, task manager, other logs).
The Capture Log should be empty by the end of each day.
The Command Log
What it is: A larger notebook for daily execution.
Purpose: Planning and tracking each day’s work.
Every morning, open the Command Log and write out:
What are the 3 most important things I need to accomplish today?
What appointments and commitments do I have?
What’s the one thing that, if I complete it, makes the day a win?
Throughout the day, track your progress.
Check things off.
Note what got done and what didn’t.
At the end of the day, review.
What worked?
What didn’t?
What needs to move to tomorrow?
The Command Log is your daily operating system.
It turns vague intentions into concrete actions.
The Creation Log
What it is: A notebook for content ideas, business ideas, and creative thinking.
Purpose: Developing ideas over time without clogging your daily execution.
When you have an idea for:
A piece of content
A new product
A business improvement
Any creative thought that needs development
It goes in the Creation Log.
Review the Creation Log weekly.
Some ideas will look stupid in retrospect.
Cross them out.
Some will have grown.
Develop them further.
Some will be ready to execute.
Move them to the Command Log.
The Creation Log prevents two failure modes:
Losing good ideas because you didn’t write them down
And cluttering your daily focus with ideas that aren’t ready yet.
The Clarity Log
What it is: A personal journal for brain dumps and reflection.
Purpose: Processing emotions, working through problems, maintaining mental clarity.
This is where you write the stuff that’s swirling in your head.
The anxieties.
The frustrations.
The questions you don’t have answers to.
The things you can’t say to anyone else.
The Clarity Log isn’t for productivity.
It’s for sanity.
When your mind is cluttered, when you can’t focus, when something is bothering you that you can’t name.
Open the Clarity Log and write until you figure out what it is.
The goal isn’t to solve everything.
The goal is to externalize what’s in your head so you can see it clearly.
Often, just writing the problem down reveals the solution.
Using the Logs Together
The four logs work as a system:
Capture Log: Collects everything in the moment
Command Log: Executes daily priorities
Creation Log: Develops ideas over time
Clarity Log: Maintains mental bandwidth
Ideas flow from Capture to either Creation (if they need development) or Command (if they’re actionable now).
Clarity keeps your head clear enough to execute.
Most people try to keep all of this in their head or in one chaotic notes app.
That’s why they feel overwhelmed.
The Logs create structure for different types of thinking.
Part Four: What Actually Changes
At AIAA, I see two types of people.
There are the ones at 15k, 20k, 30k per month who are seeing progress, seeing wins, and know that if they just keep following the plan, keep showing up, it’ll compound.
They’re not romantic about it.
They’re not looking for the montage moment where everything clicks overnight.
They’re just executing daily.
Same inputs, over and over.
Then there are the beginners.
They’re confused.
They don’t know where to start.
Maybe they signed one client, but their fulfillment process was a disaster and they couldn’t replicate it.
They set a vague goal
“I’m going to hit 100k per month by January”
And now it’s January and they’re at 3k and they feel like failures.
They didn’t fail.
They just measured the wrong thing.
The beginners who struggle aren’t stupid or lazy.
They’re struggling because they set a goal without a system.
They aimed at an outcome without building the machine that produces outcomes.
The ones who are winning stopped asking “how do I hit 100k?” and started asking “what do I need to do every day that compounds?”
From Goals to Systems
Goals are romantic.
You imagine yourself at 100k per month.
You feel the dopamine hit of the fantasy.
You can see the life you’d have, the freedom, the validation.
Then reality hits.
You’re at 8k.
You feel like a failure.
But if you’ve been tracking the system.
The daily actions
The weekly outputs
The compounding behaviors
You can see you’re actually ahead of where you were six months ago.
You can see the trajectory.
You can see that you’re better this month than last month.
Research on goal-setting versus systems shows something interesting.
Goals are great for short-term performance boosts.
They direct effort and increase focus.
But systems are better for sustained progress because they don’t create a failure state.
With a goal, you’re failing every day until you hit it.
With a system, you’re winning every day you execute the inputs.
The shift:
From measuring arrival to measuring progress.
From hoping for outcomes to controlling inputs.
Why Boring Is Your Advantage
This isn’t sexy.
The hustle bro playbook is exciting.
Wake up at 4am, cold plunge, grind for 18 hours, post screenshots of big wins, Lamborghinis, Dubai.
The reality of building something sustainable is boring as hell.
It’s showing up.
Same inputs, day after day.
Trusting that these inputs compound over time even when you can’t see immediate results.
Most people cannot handle boring.
They need the dopamine hit of novelty, of trying new strategies, of feeling like they’re onto something big.
They chase the exciting play instead of running the boring one that works.
That’s your advantage.
While everyone else is jumping between tactics, you’re compounding the fundamentals.
While they’re reinventing their entire business model every quarter, you’re running the same proven system and getting incrementally better at it.
Boring wins.
Every single time.
Because boring is what you can sustain for three years while everyone else burns out by March.
Part Five: Your 2026 Operating System
Here’s what happens if you actually implement this.
You stop setting goals and start building systems.
You identify the daily inputs that compound toward your desired outcome and you track those instead of obsessing over the outcome itself.
You stop chasing passion and start leveraging aptitude.
You find what you can be good at, you get good at it through volume, you let the results guide your next move.
You stop measuring arrival and start measuring progress.
You compare yourself to where you were last month, not to some fantasy version of where you think you should be.
You stop grinding hours and start compounding quality.
You recognize that the competition isn’t who works more, it’s who lasts longer.
You build sustainability into your approach from day one.
You stop going it alone and start building your Council.
You identify people who’ve already solved the problems you’re facing and you execute on what they tell you to do.
What Stays the Same
You still have to work.
This isn’t passive income fantasy bullshit.
You still have to show up when you don’t feel like it.
You still have to outlast the people who quit.
But the difference is that now the work has structure.
It has direction.
It compounds.
And when something falls apart.
When a friend changes direction on a project
When a client leaves
When a strategy stops working
You’re not devastated.
You’re not scrambling.
Because you’ve built the foundation.
You’ve stacked the skills.
You’ve created the systems that make you valuable across multiple contexts.
Opportunities find you because you’re ready for them.
Your Implementation Checklist
This week:
Day 1: The Target
Write down 5 concrete wins from the last 2-3 years.
Identify the patterns across those wins.
Match your patterns to your desired outcome.
Day 2: The Shot
Identify what you’re “waiting for.”
Decide on one bold move you’ll make this week.
Set a forcing function (tell someone, schedule it, put money down).
Day 3: The Reps
Identify your core rep (the one activity that matters most).
Set a volume target that scares you.
Create a simple tracker.
Day 4: The Machine
Document one process you do regularly.
Create one template for something you do repeatedly.
Identify one thing to automate this month.
Day 5: The Council
List 3-5 people who are 2-3 steps ahead of you.
Identify how you can get in their orbit.
Prepare one specific question for when you get access.
Day 6-7: The Logs
Get four notebooks (or set up a digital equivalent).
Set up your Capture, Command, Creation, and Clarity logs.
Start using them.
The Close
Two weeks.
That’s how long it took me to go from losing a major income stream to co-founding a company that did over half a million in its first month.
Not because I got lucky.
Not because I manifested it.
Because I’d built a machine that meant I didn’t need to scramble.
This playbook isn’t about working harder.
It’s about building smarter.
Following systems.
Measuring progress.
Lasting longer.
The Applied Leverage OS
Target
Shot
Reps
Machine
Council
plus the four Logs that keep you executing.
That’s the complete system.
It’s not sexy.
It’s not exciting.
It won’t make for good Instagram content.
But it works.
Every single time.
For everyone who actually implements it.
Everyone else will burn out by March.
You’ll still be here.
Compounding.
This is exactly it. Outcomes wobble, systems stay. If the machine is sound, a hit or a loss just changes where the energy flows not whether you survive. :)