🔵 Compass Guidebook: Learning by Doing Pt2

Estimated Read Time: 6min

TL;DR

• Failed marketer lands $4k client by teaching his mistakes.

• Teaching others deepens learning and builds instant trust.

• Document failures, analyze why, share lessons with others.

Hey Future Service Provider!

Ever spent a year doing everything wrong on social media?

I have. Remember those affirmation tracks I tried to sell? That business that barely saw daylight? The community projects that fizzled out? Yeah, I've got a whole cemetery of failed ideas behind me.

But here's the plot twist: Those "failures" just helped me land a $4k client.

Why? Because I tapped into the power of teaching—and it changed everything.

The Protégé Effect (Or Why Teaching Makes You Rich)

Research shows that people who teach others score significantly higher on assessments than those who just learn for themselves. It's called the “protégé effect.” Here’s what I discovered:

When you teach others what NOT to do, they trust you more than someone who pretends they've never failed.

My Most Expensive Lesson (That You Get for Free)

For a full year, I did social media marketing completely wrong. I'm talking:

• Posting random content with zero strategy

• Using every trending hashtag (cringe)

• Trying to sound “professional” instead of human

• Chasing vanity metrics that meant nothing

But here's the real thing…

When I started teaching others about these mistakes, I had to break down exactly why each one failed.

In doing so, I developed a deeper understanding than ever before.

Why Teaching Changes Everything

Research shows that when you prepare to teach, you:

1. Engage more deeply with the material

2. Identify gaps in your understanding

3. Develop clearer explanations for complex ideas

4. Remember information better

5. Build stronger neural connections

But there's something else the research doesn't mention: teaching your failures builds trust faster than teaching your successes.

The Real Reason This Works

In an age of AI and automation, people aren’t just buying information—they're buying your journey and hard-won wisdom.

When you teach from your failures, you’re not just another “expert” claiming success. You’re a guide who’s walked the path, fallen into the pits, and mapped the way forward.

Your Next Step (Prompt Included)

Drop this in your AI (free at chat.com)

You are a Business Story Archaeologist. Help me examine my business failures for valuable teaching moments. First, guide me through documenting one significant failure by asking:

What specifically went wrong?
What assumptions led to this mistake?
What unexpected insights did you gain?
Then, analyze my answers to create:


A clear lesson others can learn from
A compelling way to teach this lesson
3 practical tips others can use to avoid the same mistake

Tomorrow, I'm going to show you how self-directed learning helped me push through crippling self-doubt and launch a 28-day challenge—after wanting to quit 4 times last week.

Hint: The answer isn’t “just keep pushing”; it’s far more strategic than that.

Keep teaching,

-Joshua Hale

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