This Book Revealed The Real Secrets To Being A Successful Solopreneur In 2026.
And it’s not 5 am wake-ups or cold plunges.
I used to believe being successful was a stroke of luck.
When I was growing up, I’d see successful people and tell myself they were “lucky”. But since maturing and reading about lots of successful people, I now know success can be engineered.
Here’s how.
Success can’t be replicated, but you can rhyme with it.
I’ve got a multi-millionaire mentor.
He sold his business for hundreds of millions a few decades ago. Since then, he’s used that money and invested in other successful ventures through his Family Office.
He has multiplied his returns many times over.
He is one of the most successful people I know in business and finance.
But he admits that he has average intelligence.
He told me:
“All the friends who did better than I in school are now working for companies that I’ve created.”
Intelligence doesn’t equal success.
In 1993, Karen Arnold tracked the lives of 81 high school valedictorians.
She found that decades later:
Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future visionaries… they typically settle into the system rather than shake it up.
I scored below average for English in high school. I wasn’t the brightest kid at all. My English teacher fell out of her chair laughing when I told her I wanted to be a writer.
Yet, I’ve been able to build a:
Multi-six-figure business powered by writing.
Build a global audience of over 100k+ readers.
Secure a book deal with a traditional publisher (Earnshaw Books).
If intelligence doesn’t equal success, what does?
Well, success leaves clues.
But while someone else’s success can’t be fully repeated, it can rhyme.
Trying to replicate someone else’s success is foolish, you can copy their principles and tactics.
Eric Barker went on a multi-year journey to study the principles of successful people. But this isn’t just him reading winning lottery tickets of statistically irrelevant outliers. No. I’m not a fan of those books either.
Here’s what actually predicts success.
1/ Stories set-up success.
I grew up in an immigrant household.
The stories I was told were:
Work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.
Save all the money you can in your bank.
Put your head down, don’t self-promote. People will find you.
But now, being 30 years old, I’m rewriting many of the stories I was programmed with. I’ve spent years in therapy, meditation, and journaling. This journey is long. When you’ve spent your whole life telling yourself a story, it’s going to take a couple of years to rewrite it.
The hardest part?
A story doesn’t even need to be true to be effective.
We believe fake stories all the time.
All stories are distortions of reality. From benign things like how skilled a driver we are on public roads, or how good a lover we are in bed. We all tell ourselves stories that are radical simplifications of daily life.
This is both good and bad news.
Let’s start positively.
This means that you have the power at any moment, at any age, to decide to tell yourself a new story that’s productive. You don’t need anyone’s permission or the approval from your friends and family. You could choose to tell yourself a new story tomorrow.
But there is a downside.
If you don’t constantly check your story with reality, you can fall into a trap of delusion.
In the book, Eric talks about:
“Meaning, for the human mind, comes in the form of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. This is why so many people believe in fate or say things were meant to be.”
For every area of your life:
Relationships.
Business.
Health
You tell a story to yourself about it.
When it comes to business, solopreneurs tell themselves stories about their clients, customers, products, services, and everything in between.
But rarely are these stories deliberately constructed or consciously thought through.
If you want to change your life, start by telling yourself better stories.
Ask yourself:
What’s a story that served you in childhood, but no longer serves you as an adult?
When was the last time you interrogated the stories that you tell yourself every day?
Whose story have you adopted and kept repeating to yourself even though it’s not true?
The story you tell yourself is the story you become.
2/ Meaning matters most.
His wife and daughter were killed.
He faced daily torture and harassment from guards. He saw people around him kill themselves by running into an electric fence. This was his daily life for years.
In the book, Eric talks about Viktor Frankl.
In 1944, Viktor was a prisoner in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
Despite the daily brutality, he survived.
As a trained psychiatrist, he observed that people died conceptually, before they died physically. If they lost meaning in their minds, they also lost meaning in their physical bodies.
But he made an important decision.
No matter what happens to him, he told himself that no one can take away the freedom in his mind. And it was in this conceptual freedom that he maintained his sanity and positivity.
He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how”.
For Viktor Frankl, his stories were greater than his suffering.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk knows his why.
Everything he goes into, he increases the stakes:
Tesla wasn’t about cars; it was about saving the environment.
SpaceX wasn’t about rockets; it was about making humanity multi-planet.
Twitter wasn’t about social media; it was a fight to preserve the right of free speech.
That’s why he has such a cult-like following.
People are drawn to missionaries, not mercenaries.
Missionaries pursue:
Meaning
Purpose
Impact
Mercenaries chase:
Money
Status
Trends
In the long run, missionaries always beat mercenaries.
I see it all the time with soloprenuers in Bali.
Most are chasing the quickest way to make money as mercenaries.
They will apply their skills to whatever niche or topic is trending and profitable. AI, crypto, day trading. They are in it for the money. Regardless of whether they actually find meaning in it or not.
But while that might last a few years, that extrinsic motivation wears off.
Business is a marathon, not a sprint.
So many of the people who started chasing NFTs, crypto, or blockchain have completely fallen off. I’m even seeing people who were talking about AI now starting to lose steam. Even with writing online, everyone who started in 2019 with me has stopped writing.
When it comes to writing, I’ve got no natural talent at all.
But I saw writing as a mission. Quitting was never an option. Even if you took away my 100k+ audience, reach, and book deal, I’d still sit down and write everyday for 2–3 hours.
Writing means more to me than any external metric.
3/ People, place, and purpose.
18 months ago, I abandoned my life in Melbourne.
But on paper, it looked like I had everything.
$180k salary (plus benefits)
Brand new house built with Henley Homes.
29% equity in a business doing $150k per month in revenue.
But I didn’t believe in the person I was building this business with.
I started to question her judgment. I’d witnessed her making a decision that conflicted with my morality and ethics. The confidence she showed in the business was a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
I felt misled and lied to.
I tried to deny this reality. I’d tell myself: “Just do this for a few more years”. But with each passing month, I couldn’t bargain with myself anymore. I’d walked into a bad business deal. I needed to move on quickly.
As Naval Ravikant said:
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for a decade, don’t work with them for a day.
While this can be hard to implement, it’s a useful mental model.
I couldn’t see myself working with her for another 1–2 years, let alone a decade. I wanted to play long-term games with long-term people. And she wasn’t a long-term player.
So, I left it all behind.
On July 28th 2024, I booked a one-way ticket to Singapore and began a new journey. I set out to find a community of solopreneurs working in the new economy. This was one of the hardest and riskiest things I’ve ever done.
But after 14 months, I’ve never felt more satisfied, aligned, and fulfilled.
I feel like I’ve found in Southeast Asia what I was missing in Melbourne.
In Bali, I’ve got a community of like-minded friends, an environment around that cares about their health and wealth, and a new purpose that aligns with my morals and ethics.
Howard Stevenson and Laura Nash write:
When you align with your values with the employment of your signature skills in a context that reinforces these same strengths, you create a powerful and emotionally engaging force for achievement, significance, happiness, and legacy. When your internal choice of success goals aligns with the group in which you operate, the rewards are even higher.
The intersection of your people, place, and purpose are a predictor of success.
Success isn’t a silver bullet.
But there is one thing that is an accurate predictor of success:
Alignment.
Success is not the result of any one trait, skill, or personality quirk.
Success is about bringing everything together.
Eric Barker sums success nicely:
A story that connects you with the world in a way that keeps you going. A network that helps you, a job that leverages your natural introversion and extroversion.
The recipe for success:
Tell yourself a new story.
Focus on finding meaning, not money.
Control who is around you, where you are, and what you do.
The recipe for success is there.
But how will you cook with it?
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