December Disaster, January & Prove It To Yourself.
Aim for perfection
A few weeks ago in late November I wrote about how December was going to be the most important business/financial month in a long time, maybe since starting up about a decade ago.
8 days later I had lost £8,000 through betting sports models I’d created, where the “expected” return should have been closer to +£4,000.
Mixed this with November’s very flat results and it was time to confront some realities.
It’s not just variance.
The hockey prediction models sucked.
Something had to change.
Just before this mega-shift, I’d watched a very cinematic, well made video about someone who had business success in the past, but wanted to prove that is wasn’t luck, by not using their previous assets or resources or audience to achieve it again.
I thought this was an incredible idea and something that “proves” resourcefulness, skills and grit rather than just having 1 good idea in a lifetime and living off the proceeds of getting lucky (even though in reality there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just the skill-of-business or skill-of-making-money is something I’m more interested in, rather than the money itself).
Building something that creates value, whether that’s a betting model or a business is an incredible skill.
The amount of money obviously matters but the process of it is something I find more impressive.
If you refurbish furniture and buy something for £20, spend a couple of days and £10 of supplies and sell it for £150 in the same week - that’s an incredible skill of value creation.
The same with a business but on a longer horizon, if you put in 2,000 hyper productive hours (more on that in a sec), £20,000 and 5 years later you are making £10k/month, £50k/month whatever, that’s incredibly impressive to me personally.
So, long story short, this video idea of, what essentially boils down to “prove it to yourself”.
The guy in the video grinded and eventually one of his iterations worked really well, blew up and I think they do a couple mil a month now.
It was extremely impressive and they did it without leveraging those previous audiences, connections etc.
Which was the most impressive thing.
It wasn’t a direct wake up call as I’ve been thinking about this for years at this point, but it was a bit of a spark to come up with a sentence that in the business world is terrible advice but on the sports modelling side is incredible; aim for perfection.
The best (and most profitable) sports betting models I’ve built have been built because they use super granular data, on an individual player and play by play level.
Some of the most insane shit you’ve ever seen.
And it works well, really well in some cases.
Problem is, it’s incredibly difficult to do, takes ages and you don’t know if it’ll even work…
Other stuff I’ve built in a day, without technical knowledge of specialised (sport specific) insights and expected it to work the same.
Obviously it didn’t in most cases.
But I think misunderstanding really how big the upside can get is what stops alot of people from putting in the insane work, the real grind not the BS fake grind.
The upside is enormous.
Literally, once a model is built (the hard part), it becomes not far off; press a few buttons, place a few bets and earn.
There’s no customer service, no operations, no HR, no marketing, no returns… So because of all the insane upsides, the process is hard to do.
As a result, go all-in on it.
I also think it’s essential to go insanely deep on a concept when you have these ideas, building momentum in the process.
I’ve just finished building the best betting model I’ve ever built by a mile, joking that it’s art.
Although it took “years” to make, in reality from the idea to execution it was about 21 hyper productive hours across 3 days (with 2 overnight scrapes).
That’s not crazy, but 21 hyper productive hours is really tough, but the returns that that time should generate would lead to the “hourly rate” being £10,000, maybe £50,000 over the next decade, it’s just tough to get the focus for those 21 hyper productive hours (**cough, link launched now).
But it’s not even this, it’s the framework from that 21 hours that leads to the next model, that should only take 15 hours and have similar ROI and the next, and the next, so you get this leveraged, momentum effect of hyper productivity, if directed in the correct way, towards the correct vehicle.
So instead of having 1 hockey model that earns 10% on a few bets a week, you have 5 hockey models that earn 10% on dozens of bets a week (in-season).
But too many people (me for sure included) put off that 50, 100, 500 hyper productive hours, settling for “good” in a game where good is a really really bad outcome.
In markets - whether that’s sports or financial or business, good doesn’t get “good” returns - it gets below average, because the best models, earn larger amounts and hence shape the market, so the top 0.1% of models earn disproportional amounts to the top 1% and the top 10% probably are down despite being “good”.
That’s the core issue.
Instead it’s better to aim for perfection in one super niche area and become maniacal about that.
So aim for perfection (100%+ ROI) and what will likely happen is you’ll get good (5-10%).
But when you KNOW for a fact that’s real + secure + repeatable, that gives you incredible confidence.
5-10% x 500 bets a month x £2,000 units is £50-100k/month, if it’s real you’ll know very quickly, you just have to ensure you’re not kidding yourself and becoming “excel rich” as I like to call it.
But we live in a world of extremes where the person who’s the best at anything makes exponential returns vs someone who is above average at everything.
This is sped up 100X with AI as well, making your 21 hyper productive hours balloon into the equivalent of 2000 hours just a few years ago.
It’s always the way I seem to get shit done is to have something really shit happen first, the only way to make better betting models was to lose a bunch of money on the shitty ones, and use that “dark” or negative energy to create hyper productivity and progress.
It was the same in business too.
Especially nowadays, with AI leveraging everything so quickly, there’s literally only GRIT as the key skill left to achieving anything.
If you do not know how to do something, go to AI, screenshot the fucker, ask “how do I do this” and it’ll tell you. Learn how to use these tools, the exponential-ness (that’s not a word) of these is incredible.
Sports models I built just 6 months ago, vs new ones created in early 2026 are worlds apart in quality, thanks to improvements in the AI itself, but also improvements in how you/I approach it (aim for perfect), but also just improvements in actually how to use these tools themselves.
Time.
This is quite easy from a modelling perspective as if I’m reaching a point where I need to run a full season scrape on data that will take 2, 4, 6 hours and there’s not much I can proceed on in the mean-time, schedule that for overnight, so you do not waste productive flow-state hours.
It’s tough to draw parallels to this in other businesses or industries but one example would be never leave any messages, questions or requests unanswered overnight, if someone is waiting on you for something (that you actually want to progress quickly) just make sure you are never the bottleneck in your processes and growth.
Another example would be if you are going to utilise AI to its most, any very complex, long prompts will take a while to be processed, especially if you are asking AI to build something, write code etc., so ensure you align that with other specific progress tasks, but stay on track so don’t try to do two separate tasks at once.
Leverage
Building a prediction model that’s 2% better will not only be 2% better ROI, it’s going to be that amount multiplied by time, by capital, by mood, by confidence.
Putting £5,000 on a play is easy if you’ve seen how 100 of those same plays have performed (live) and have earned £50k already off the back of them.
Putting £500 on something new is more difficult.
Prove It To Yourself
This concept is something that’s stuck with me, doing something once could be luck, doing it multiple times proves its skill.
Something interesting to think about.