I was 24 when I realized silence is supposed to be… silent.
Twenty. Four.
For my entire life up to that point, I had a constant, high-pitched ringing in my ears. Actual ringing. The kind that never shuts up, never takes a day off, and eventually just becomes something you stop questioning.
And here’s the thing… I thought everybody had it.
When people said “wow, it’s so quiet in here,” I figured we were all just politely ignoring the same background noise. You know how a refrigerator hums? Nobody walks into a kitchen and says, “Hey, do you hear that fridge?” Because every fridge hums. That’s what fridges do.
Except mine was broken.
Turns out it’s called “tinnitus.” I had it. Most people don’t.
Other people sit in silence and hear… nothing. I sit in silence and hear eeeeeeeeeeeeee like my brain is trying to connect to dial-up internet in 2002.
But here’s the part that really messed me up.
I spent 24 years convinced my “broken” was everyone’s “normal.”
Now, hold on to that. Because this exact blind spot is running way more of your life than you think. And it has absolutely nothing to do with my ears.
Your secret operating system
So I had this buddy in university.
This guy could talk his way out of anything. Exams. Deadlines. Consequences. Pretty sure if the building caught fire he’d convince the flames to wait.
I’m not exaggerating.
He’d walk into a professor’s office 15 minutes before an exam he absolutely did not study for… And walk out with a new date, bonus credit, and once – I swear – the professor apologizing to HIM.
I watched this happen multiple times. And every time, I thought the same thing: “He just explained his situation clearly. Anyone could do that.”
So I tried it.
Walked in. Calm. Logical. Respectful. Laid out my case like a responsible adult making a reasonable request.
The professor looked at me like I just tried to pay tuition in Monopoly money. I walked out with nothing except the suggestion to “study harder.”
That was the moment something shifted.
My friend had a thing I didn’t have. Something built in. Something he didn’t learn. Didn’t practice. He just… had it.
And I didn’t.
You can see the same thing in business.
Some founders walk into a meeting, sip coffee, crack a joke… and walk out with a signed deal like it’s nothing. Ask them how they did it? They shrug: “I don’t know, it just felt right.” (Super helpful, thanks.)
Others do everything “right”: hire the best salespeople, build the CRM, run the playbook – and still get a polite no. Over and over again.
At some point you stop blaming the script…
Welcome to your character build
If you’ve ever played an RPG, you know that your character has basic stats – Strength, intelligence, charisma, etc.
You level these up by doing stuff. Fight monsters = get stronger. Cast spells = get smarter. You can watch the numbers grow every time you level up. Progress is obvious.
But then there’s this other category.
Perks.
Perks are different. They’re these quirky little modifiers baked into your character. Some you start with. Some you pick up during the game.
They look like this:
- “+30% accuracy with a bow, but only when standing above the target.”
- “15% better at persuading someone of the same gender.”
- “Reduced panic in high-pressure situations. Unable to small talk.”
Most players completely ignore perks. They dump everything into Strength, grab the biggest sword, and then wonder why the game feels impossibly hard.
The best players? They do the exact opposite.
They study their perks. Find the ones that stack together. Build around them. And the result? They play the exact same game as everyone else but have a completely different experience.
Real life works the same way.
Except nobody hands you your perk list.
You don’t know how many you have. You don’t know what they do. You definitely don’t know how they interact with each other. You spawn into this world and assume that however YOU experience things… is how EVERYONE experiences things.
It’s not.
Not even close.
Oh – and one more thing.
Perks aren’t automatically good. Some are incredibly useful. Some are actively sabotaging you. And some are just… weird.
I once read about a guy who could literally smell when someone nearby was about to have a seizure. Useless 99.9% of the time. Life-saving in that 0.1%. Terrible distribution. Still a perk.
My university friend had a persuasion perk. He didn’t earn it. He didn’t take a course. He was born with it.
Which brings me to the real problem…
Those perks are hidden. And they’re expensive.
When you’ve had a perk your entire life, you don’t call it a perk.
You call it “normal.”
Just like fish don’t think “wow, this water is crazy.” The fish just swims. And judges other fish for swimming wrong.
Let me give you one of mine.
Pattern recognition.
I spot systems. Trends. Breaking points. I look at something – a business, a project, a situation – and my brain goes, “Yeah, this is going to fall apart in about three months.” And then it does.
For YEARS, I assumed this was how everybody thinks.
Then I started saying these things out loud. And people would stare at me like I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “How did you SEE that?”
I don’t know. I used my eyes?
Turns out not everyone has those eyes.
And suddenly… a lot of things made sense.
Here’s what I mean.
If you write fast, you think others are slow and complain more. If you never get lost, I guarantee you’ve thought “just pay attention” at least once in your life. If you stay calm when everything’s falling apart, you watch other people panic and wonder what’s wrong with them.
Nothing’s wrong. They just don’t have what you have. We all swim in our own water and call it air.
I see it every time I open someone’s email setup. Break points jump out immediately. Why and where the sequence loses people. Why the list is full but the revenue isn’t. Why every broadcast lands to silence.
They stare at the same dashboard and see a mystery. I see a pattern. (Perk of not being inside the jar.)
Now here’s where it gets expensive. And I mean “you blink and it’s been five years” expensive.
When you don’t know your perks, you build a life that fights them.
You put a highly creative brain into a rigid corporate system with 14 layers of approval. You put someone who reads people like subtitles into a job where nobody talks to anyone and everything is spreadsheets. You thrive in chaos… then force yourself into predictable routines because “that’s what successful people do.”
It’s like walking into a dungeon full of fire-breathing demons and not knowing you’re made of paper. You’re going to burn. Over and over and over. And you’ll have no idea why. Because on paper (ha)… you’re doing everything right.
Perks are hidden. Signals aren’t.
So how do you actually spot your perks when you’re stuck inside your own head?
You could try pure introspection. Sure. Eventually you’d get there. But “eventually” means years. And it requires a level of brutal self-honesty that most of us are genuinely terrible at.
There’s a faster way.
Watch what repeats.
Signal #1: “Must be nice”
When someone says “must be nice” or “well, it’s easy for you” – I need you to understand something. That is not a complaint – that is a GIFT.
Here’s why:
You and that person both ran the same race. You both crossed the finish line. But you showed up in sneakers and a good mood… and they crawled across on their hands and knees, sunburned, out of water, questioning their entire life.
Now they’re not sarcastic (okay, sometimes they are). Most of the time, they are honestly confused about how you made something difficult look like nothing.
Your first instinct will be to deflect. “Oh, it’s not that hard.”
Stop. Do not deflect this.
Write it down like it’s gossip about your own life.
Especially when you keep hearing it about the same kind of thing. From different people. In different situations.
Signal #2: “How did you do that?”
- “How did you figure that out?”
- “I’ve been trying to crack that for three months.”
- “I don’t even understand how you got there.”
That’s someone watching you do something their brain genuinely cannot reverse-engineer. Like you walked through a wall they didn’t know had a door in it.
That’s your perk in action.
Collect these moments like evidence. Because that’s exactly what they are.
Signal #3: “Here we go again”
This one’s trickier, because it doesn’t require other people.
(Great news for introverts.)
If you keep landing in the same spot – same type of business problem, same relationship dynamic, same flavor of conflict, same “how did I end up here again?” – that’s a pattern.
And patterns always come from something you do on autopilot. Something so baked into your wiring you don’t even see it happening.
By the time you notice it, it’s usually already cost you something. A job. A relationship. A year you can’t get back.
I’ll give you a personal one. Because fair is fair.
I did this in relationships. Different woman – same exact story, every time. I played the fixer. The guy who showed up with emotional duct tape, stayed way too long, and eventually got gutted for his trouble.
I thought I was unlucky.
I wasn’t.
I had two perks firing at the same time. And together they were destroying me.
Perk #1: Attraction to emotionally unavailable people.
Perk #2: Compulsion to fix broken things.
Beautiful combo, right?
Like being deathly allergic to cats and deciding to become a vet. Every time I’d start sneezing – every single time – I’d look around like it was some kind of mystery.
“Huh. Again? What are the odds?”
Extremely high. The odds were extremely high.
It keeps happening because you’re surrounded by cats, genius.
Now. You can wait for those signals to pile up on their own.
Or you can cheat a little
This is where personality frameworks like Myers-Briggs or attachment theory come in. Not as personality horoscopes – let me be very clear about that. Neither one is going to hand you your perk list on a silver platter.
But they work as search radius reducers. They eliminate dozens of wrong hypotheses fast and point you toward a much smaller pile of right ones.
MBTI maps your cognitive wiring – how you take in information, how you make decisions, what drains you, which perks are even plausible given your brain architecture.
(Full disclosure: I test as INTJ. Which explains the pattern recognition, the systems thinking, and roughly 95% of my relationship history.)
Attachment theory maps the relational signals you broadcast and what those signals tend to attract. It gave me vocabulary for things I’d been running blind on for years.
And here’s what I’ve learned…
Once you can name something, you can work with it.
When I finally looked at both seriously, things I’d been confused about for years snapped into focus inside a week.
Now, the good news. You don’t need all the answers yet.
You need just a few clues
I’m not going to pretend you can map your entire brain in a weekend. If you could, self-help books would be one page long and wildly disappointing.
This is a lifelong project. Always was.
But your welcome sequence? That’s a this-week fix.
Because most sequences fail the same way: low conversions, a list that grows, revenue that doesn’t, and no obvious reason why.
People call that “market conditions.”
I call it a pattern.
A boring, predictable, totally fixable pattern:
- The structure’s crooked.
- The timing’s off.
- The intent’s muddy.
So your reader checks out and never comes back.
I spot these leaks fast. Usually before someone finishes explaining their setup. At some point, it felt wrong not to package that skill into something usable.
So I did.
That’s Prime Conversion System.
It’s the exact architecture behind welcome sequences that jump from 1-2% conversion rate to 10-15%+. My pattern recognition. Plug and play. Ready to use today.
You can spend years training your eye to catch this stuff. But honestly? Wrestling with broken emails is a terrible use of your actual talents.
>>> Or you can borrow mine here
For 24 years, I had a constant ringing in my head and thought that was normal.
So now I’ll ask you: What are you calling ”normal” in your business… that’s actually just broken noise?
Because that “normal” is expensive.
P.S. That ringing didn’t stop. But I stopped wondering why everything sounded wrong.