Afterword

I told you to put the book down. If you're reading this, you didn't, and that's fine. This is short.

Everything in these pages came from one place: I got tired of paying for things twice. Every deal I lost, every person who left, every mistake I made — I paid once when it happened and then I kept paying, in verdicts, for years. And I watched everybody around me do the same thing, and call it being realistic, or having standards, or learning from their mistakes. None of it was any of those things. It was a court that never adjourned, and I was the judge, the defendant, and the one footing the bill.

When I stopped, the strangest thing was how little I lost. I thought the verdicts were doing something — protecting me, sharpening me, keeping me honest. They weren't. Everything I was afraid I'd lose without them, I still have. My standards. My edge. My ability to tell the truth in a room. What went missing was the weight, and the only thing the weight had ever done was slow me down.

So that's the whole book, one more time, in a sentence: the event is free, and the verdict is the only thing you were ever paying for.

If it worked, you'll know in about a week. Not because you feel different — because you'll notice a should forming, and it'll fall, and you'll have the whole hour it used to cost you. That's the evidence. That's all the proof you'll ever need.

Give the book to someone who's still paying.

— J.P.