When you sell your expertise, you freeze a past version of yourself into a product.
Someone emailed me last week to say my course changed their life. I haven't watched it in two years because I'm afraid of what I'll see.
I recorded that thing in a rented apartment in Mexico City during a week when I was sleeping four hours a night and running on mezcal and conviction. I believed every word I said. I was on fire. You can hear it in the audio, that energy, that certainty. That version of me had answers for everything.
I'm not that guy anymore.
The course still sells. Forty, fifty units a month. The emails still go out. The funnel still converts. People quote my own words back to me in DMs, and I say thank you and close my laptop and sit with this quiet hollow feeling of being praised for something I'm not sure I still stand behind.
That's the trap. You build something that captures who you were at a specific moment. It works. It makes money. And then you keep growing, keep changing, keep learning things that contradict what you taught. But the thing stays frozen. Now you're a spokesperson for a version of yourself that doesn't exist anymore, and you can't pull it down because it pays your rent.
Most of the course holds up. I'll say that. But there are three or four sections I'd say completely differently now. One I'd probably cut entirely. The tone is harder than I'd be today. More certain. I was 33 when I made it, and I thought certainty was the same thing as credibility.
It's not. I know that now. But the guy in the course doesn't know that. And he's still talking.
You've felt some version of this. Maybe not with a course. Maybe it's the service you still offer that you outgrew a year ago. The positioning on your website that describes work you don't really do anymore. The thing you're known for that stopped being the thing you care about. But it's working. Revenue is steady. Clients keep coming. And changing it would mean admitting, publicly, that the thing people praised you for isn't quite what you'd say today.
That's harder than it sounds. People don't want you to grow. They want you to be the version of you that helped them. The confident one. The sure one. The one who had the answer and said it without flinching.
When I had my logistics company, this was never a problem. The product was moving shit from one warehouse to another. It didn't contain my opinions. It didn't require me to freeze a version of myself and sell it on repeat. Nobody cared what I believed about anything. They cared if the truck showed up on time.
Digital products are different. You are the product. Your perspective, your voice, your take on the world at one specific point in time. And then time moves. You move. But the product sits there, still saying what you said two years ago to anyone who clicks buy.
I've thought about pulling it down. Rerecording the whole thing from scratch. Starting fresh with what I actually believe now. Every time I open the document to plan it, I look at this month's revenue and close it again. Twenty-something units already and it's only Monday. That's the apartment. That's the freedom. That's the ability to sit here in Lisbon with nothing on my calendar and write this instead of doing something I hate.
So I leave it up.
A buddy of mine wrote a book four years ago. Still sells. He told me over dinner that there's a whole chapter he actively disagrees with now, but you can't unpublish a book. He said reading it is like finding an old journal entry where you're passionately defending a position you quietly abandoned two years ago. Except the journal has 800 reviews on Amazon and people bring it up at parties.
Nobody warns you about this part. When you sell your expertise, you're creating a time capsule. And time capsules are fine as long as they stay buried. They become a problem when they're your primary source of income and people think they represent who you are right now.
I'll rerecord it eventually. When the discomfort gets louder than the convenience. When I can't keep saying thank you to the testimonials without feeling like I'm lying by omission.
For now, I just don't watch it.
There's a version of me inside that course. Confident. Certain. Full of answers I don't fully trust anymore. He's the reason the money comes in every month. He's also the reason I feel like a fraud at least once a week.
The hardest thing about building something that lasts is that you don't.
— Best, Jose
