I shut down my business, Solver School, last week.

While I have previously detailed the reasoning behind my decision, today I will focus on sharing the lessons I’ve learned and exploring what lies ahead.

Solver School was my first business; I hope it won’t be my last.

Through years of working in consulting, I’ve developed the ability to simplify complex, data-heavy concepts for a non-technical audience. Solver School was my attempt at applying this skill to a creative project. While building the course was challenging, I found deep satisfaction in creating something that allowed me to leverage my strengths to help others.

I made many mistakes, but the wisdom gained from those stumbles will undoubtedly help me in my future endeavors.

The first lesson I learned was to set reasonable expectations and push through my doubts.

I laugh now when I think about how naive I was when I started. I believed I could finish the course in a month. Afterward, sharing it with my email list and announcing it on Twitter would trigger the snowball toward success. I was so confident that I quit my well-paying job before I launched — to be fair, I also quit that job because I was unhappy. But I did believe from the beginning that Solver School would thrive commercially.

I assumed that people organically find good work. After I launched in January 2022, my first customers provided glowing reviews, further fueling my ego-driven beliefs. I believed I was on my way to finding my 1,000 true fans that Kevin Kelly wrote about in his seminal 2008 blog post.

This assumption was foolish, especially for someone who has worked in marketing for as long as I have. As the saying goes, “When you’re too close to something, you lose perspective.”

After a successful launch and first month, my sales began to plateau. I now recognize that my initial customers resulted from converting my (small) email list. That was the good. The bad was that I didn’t have a plan to reach more people and continue to grow my base.

David Ogilvy was a pioneer in advertising. He has a quote that I often think about these days: “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”

For a long time, I was self-conscious about marketing my work. I thought that if I talked too much about Solver School, people might judge me. Now, I recognize the wisdom in that Ogilvy quote. People don’t pay as much attention to us as we think they do. They are generally more focused on the issues in their own lives.

In retrospect, I would have repeated the same set of core messages that best conveyed Solver School’s value across all marketing channels. That’s the way to grow an audience — to reach the portion of the parade that happens to be passing (or scrolling) at that point in time. I waited around for people to find me. Instead, I should have worked harder to reach and engage with them.

The next major lesson I learned was to focus more on the process and less on the outcomes.

Despite not actively marketing my product, I fell victim to the emotional roller coaster that comes from an obsession with sales and web traffic: from the good weeks with multiple product sales to the bad ones when I came up empty, and my traffic was down. I focused on the outcome, and worse, I fretted over it despite not actively doing anything to influence it.

Ryan Holiday, a modern Stoicism author, starts his next book as soon as he finishes his current one. Stephen King, Steven Pressfield, and many other successful authors employ a similar tactic. They continue to do the work, ignoring the highs and the lows. Holiday claims this practice helps writers stay humble and committed to their craft.

This lesson is not limited to writing books; it’s applicable to all projects. Instead of worrying about the outcome, which was mostly out of my control, I would have been better off had I started the next thing.

Internalizing this mindset would have saved me much anxiety. It would have also kept me in the driver’s seat, continuing to focus on building my business instead of helplessly watching it from the passenger seat.

It’s a continued reminder to me to get over my Impostor Syndrome and proudly share my work (see my point above about how people don’t pay as much attention to others as we think they do).

Live and learn.

Finally, I learned to trust my instincts, both the positive and the negative ones.

Solver School was a good idea. I’m convinced of this. Despite not meeting my initial expectations or allowing me to quit my full-time job, the business has been profitable in each of its three years.

More broadly, the solver community has grown considerably since I launched. With GTO Wizard taking over the poker universe, more people are using solvers now than ever. Solver School was a small contribution to the space, but because of it, more people understand how to effectively use solvers and data to analyze the game of poker. I’m proud of that.

When I realized that I no longer had the passion for poker I once did, I (eventually) trusted my gut and decided to shut down. I could have continued to operate the business into the future, but my happiness and ability to explore new projects would have suffered.

I thought I would be sad when I officially closed enrollment last week, especially given the final uptick in sales from my closing discount over the past couple of months. But instead, all I felt was relief, even joy. That feeling lets me know that I made the right decision to move on.

For the first time in several years, I’m facing an open horizon of possibilities, and that’s exhilarating.

This idea reminds me of Tim Urban’s insightful illustration from his blog, Wait But Why:

When reflecting on life, many look back at the paths not traveled. This is pointless. As Marcus Aurelius once said, “Do not waste time on what you cannot control.” The path that we walked is our reality, and nothing we say or do can change it.

However, if we look forward to the future, there is an endless sea of possibilities — all of which could happen. To me, the thought of that is magical. It fills me with hope and delight.

It’s naive to think we know or can perfectly coordinate our path. As much as we like to plan, life happens, and we’re forced to adapt.

Despite my acknowledgment of the role of chance in life, it’s also dishonest to say that I have no idea what direction I want to go. But regardless of the specific projects on my radar, I’m moving forward with a guiding framework instead of a scripted plan.

First and foremost, I am committing to writing more.

For as long as I can remember, I have romanticized the idea of writing a book. But over that time, it was just that…an idea. Despite my proclamation of doing it “someday,” I have yet to make any forward progress. I have since internalized that the best way to achieve that goal is to start…and keep going.

There’s a saying I’m fond of that can be applied to most areas in life. The best time to start [insert any applicable skill or job] was 10 years ago. The second best time is today. It’s true with planting a tree. It’s true with buying Bitcoin (more on that in a future post). And in this case, it’s true with writing.

These days, I often find myself in a teaching role, providing guidance to junior colleagues during the workday and to my two daughters outside of business hours. In both situations, I tell them the same thing: get more reps.

This advice applies to virtually everything in life. Over time, with enough work, you will get better at anything if you keep putting in the work. Malcolm Gladwell once said in Outliers that we need 10,000 hours to become great at a craft. Whether that number is accurate or not, the point remains. The way to get better is to put in the work. So, I’m taking my own advice and applying that to my writing.

I have recently incorporated an hour of uninterrupted writing into my morning routine. While I don’t believe I’m a good writer yet, I’m trying to become one. I’m sitting down every day and doing the work, which is the only way I know of to get there.

Secondly, I’m focusing on reading more effectively to complement my writing.

In 2023, I committed to reading more and finished fifty-three books. I doubled down on this goal in 2024 and will finish the year having read approximately eighty.

That’s great. Reading and writing go hand in hand. In his wonderful book On Writing, Stephen King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

While the writing part is relatively new to me, I have already solidified a consistent reading habit. However, my current approach focuses too much on churning through books and not enough on connecting the concepts I learn from them to refine my life perspectives.

I plan to be more focused as a reader. I won’t set a numeric goal in 2025; instead, I expect my total to be closer to sixty books read than eighty. I’ll also narrow my book topics to align more with my core interests. I hope this helps to better improve my writing over time.

Finally, I will continue to focus on self-improvement, striving to become better in all areas of life.

In 2022, I was depressed and anxious. I was overweight and out of shape. Too much of my time was spent staring at my phone and doomscrolling on social media. I had much room to grow as a father, a husband, and a person.

Finding philosophy and Stoicism transformed my life in a way I can’t begin to underestimate. The words of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus have set me on a path of personal growth.

Seneca once said, “The greatest empire is within us. No one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves.” While I have no desire to “rule” anything, I have taken this wisdom to heart and believe that the true mission in life is to control “the empire between my ears,” as Epictetus would say. Reading philosophy has helped me get my head right.

Since incorporating this practice into my daily life, I began to stay more focused. I stayed committed to bettering my mind through reading. I made more permanent, healthier decisions to improve my body through fitness and nutrition and significantly reducing my alcohol consumption. I gave far less of my time to the invisible rulers who use the algorithms on social media to direct what we consume. I became more present and loving as a father, husband, and friend.

Of course, I’m far from perfect. I still get angry, anxious, and depressed from time to time — more often than I’d like to admit. I’m not always proud of my words or actions. But these moments happen far less frequently than they once did. And when they do, they no longer trigger a negative spiral into a week of binge eating or drinking.

I owe much of that progress to studying the work of the ancients. I find it amazing that these great men faced the same struggles 2,000 years ago that we do today. Their wisdom about tackling these challenges has always been here; I’m just now discovering it and am eager to continue to learn more.

As 2024 winds down, I plan to write two or three more posts here. Since implementing my aforementioned writing habit, I have already written many words — most of which I’ll likely never share. However, I have some ideas for new essays that I plan to publish eventually.

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Life is a wonderful gift. I believe we must make the most of it by becoming the best versions of ourselves, being decent and kind to one another, and positively contributing to the world, our communities, and our families.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your friends and family.

All the best,
Lukich