🌱 Working hard on the wrong thing?

One sentence pitch. One coaching principle. One brutal question.

Mitchell Cohen
April 26, 2026

Here’s your 3 insights in 3 minutes.

Adam Robinson spent a million dollars building a product nobody wanted.

He hired models to walk around a trade show asking guys "how big is your list?"

It worked. Everyone was talking. (clip here.)

Then they found out what he was actually selling.

Eyes glazed over. Business cards handed out just to escape the conversation.

A complete waste of time.

That night he's in an Airbnb, surrounded by chaos, wondering what went wrong.

Spoiler: it wasn't the models.

18 months later, Retention.com hit $22M ARR.

Nothing changed except one thing. The offer.

Same founder. Same work ethic. He just finally found something people actually wanted badly enough to pay for.

Here's the thing nobody talks about:

You can have a great product. Great team. Great trade show stunt. And still have nobody care.

Because if your offer can't "punch someone in the face" the second they hear it, none of the rest matters.

Most founders spend years optimizing everything except that one sentence.

What does your offer actually do for someone, in one sentence?

I've been going deep on John Wooden this week.

Most successful coach of all time, 10 NCAA championships in 12 years. (🐐)

If you played for him, one phrase was tattooed in your brain:

"Be quick, but don't hurry."

At first it sounds like a contradiction. But sit with it.

Quick = decisive. Present. Ready to move.
Hurry = reactive. Scattered. Skipping steps.

One is a skill. The other is anxiety wearing a productivity costume.

Wooden's whole philosophy was simple: winning is just the byproduct of full effort. You don't control the scoreboard. You control how you show up.

I think about this a lot when I'm rushing through slack messages, half-present on zooms, or trying to do five things at once.

That's not quick. That's hurry.

And hurry is expensive.

Peter Drucker wrote this decades ago and it still rings true:

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

Ouch.

Put all three together and you get the paradox:

Do your best.
But, ALSO, what you choose to work on decides everything.

Adam didn’t suddenly work harder.
He pointed the same effort at a better problem.

So here are the 3 questions to ask yourself this week:

Three questions. One theme.

Are you working hard on the right thing?

Salud,
Mitchell