She Thought She Was Starting Over. Her Methodology Didn’t Get the Memo.
Last week, I was on a video call with Louise, joining from a small corner of Scotland, thousands of miles away.
She’d been a client months ago. We did the extraction work. Pulled out her invisible patterns and documented the methodology she couldn’t see in herself.
Then life happened. She got scammed out of a significant amount of money. Her dog of many years got sick and big life changes started stacking up. She’s planning a move to a tiny island where crime is so rare that most people don’t even bother locking their doors.
When she came back, she wasn’t sure the work we’d done would matter anymore.
“I need to take some time to get clarity,” she’d written me a few weeks earlier. “There is definitely a change in direction. I want to follow my flow more. I feel like I am bored with business content.”
Louise thought she was starting over. New industry. New audience. New everything. Done with business content entirely.
She has no intention of retiring.
“Why would I?” she says.
Someone Discovered Fire
Then she starts talking about TAO.
Subnets. Emissions. Validators. Bitcast mining.
I don’t know what any of this means.
She keeps going.
Weather forecasting
Computer vision companies
128 businesses on a blockchain
A coding subnet that’s profitable when Anthropic isn’t
A weather prediction subnet beating Google’s forecasts
Code generation “outperforming Claude Code without the billions Anthropic spent”
I’m asking Claude “what is a subnet” in a side window while nodding like I understand.
But here’s the thing…
I’ve never seen her like this.
She’s talking faster. Jumping between ideas. Pulling up dashboards to show me miner rankings. Explaining tokenomics like someone who just discovered fire and needs you to see it.
“It’s the community,” she says. “It’s unreal. Some of the intelligence level of these people. I feel like I’m at home.”
She went from about 100 followers on X in September to over 1,100 by December. She’s ranked 88 on some miner leaderboard I don’t understand. She’s in private invite groups with subnet founders. James Altucher(!) agreed to an interview.
She’s made $375 from two tweets through something called “bitcast mining.” She earned $1283 in two months and “just getting started!”
All of this while processing grief. While planning an international move. While rebuilding from scratch.
“I’ve had a tough two years,” she says. “But this is the most excited I’ve felt about stuff in a long time.”
Familiar Words From an Unfamiliar World
Here’s where it gets fun.
I keep hearing familiar words coming out of her mouth.
“I want to showcase these people and make them look good. That lifts me up.”
“Building patterns across interviews. Cross-sectioning insights. Finding the human side.”
Wait.
That’s the methodology. Pattern extraction. Interview analysis. Making invisible expertise visible. The exact work we did together months ago.
She said she was done with business content. Bored with it. Moving on.
But the methodology underneath? It came with her anyway. She didn’t even notice.
I build her a Claude project while she talks.
Custom instructions
Content multiplication maps
Prompts for pattern extraction
File structures for organizing insights across her interviews.
I don’t understand a single thing about the domain I’m building for.
The Confusion Was the Proof
Here’s what hit me after we hung up.
I didn’t need to understand Bittensor. Didn’t need to know what validators do or how emissions work.
The methodology doesn’t care about the domain.
Louise isn’t doing something different. She’s doing exactly what she did before. Interview interesting people. Extract their patterns. Document what they can’t see.
Build influence by making others look good.
The container changed. The core didn’t.
My confusion was the proof. If I could build her a working system while understanding nothing, the methodology travels.
It goes wherever you go.
Money Was Chasing Her
Look what actually happened.
She’s not competing with the technical people. She’s the only one doing human-interest pattern extraction in a sea of whitepapers and “incentive mechanism” debates.
“A lot of these subnets are on X talking about technicalities,” she told me. “Bores the pants off people. I show a different perspective.”
She wasn’t chasing money. Money was chasing her.
She wasn’t chasing clients. “I’m not going to rule it out,” she says about coaching. “But I’m not chasing it.”
That’s the part people get backwards. They try to force their methodology into new markets. They build expansion roadmaps. They hire consultants to identify adjacent verticals.
Louise just followed her curiosity and the methodology followed her.
We Get to Play
Near the end of the call, she says something that still sticks with me.
“Isn’t it great? We get to play.”
She just went through two of the hardest years of her life. And she sounds like a kid who just discovered a new game.
“What an age we live in,” she says.
I hung up and realized I was smiling. Like, actually smiling. Her energy was contagious. I didn’t understand half of what she told me, but I understood exactly what I was watching…
Someone coming back to life.
After we hung up, she sent me a rabbit hole.
“Start here: theincentivelayer.com. Then watch this. Then this 10-minute explainer. Then this 60-second one.”
Five links in four minutes. Each one deeper than the last.
I still don’t understand half of it. That’s the point.
Then she texted:
“I haven’t been so fired up as I am after our call in a looooonnnnngggg time…”
Some calls you walk away from feeling lucky you got invited along for the ride. This was one of those (man, I love what I do).
Your Methodology Travels Too
What methodology are you running that you assume only works in your field?
The questions you always ask. The patterns you notice. The thing you do so naturally you’ve stopped calling it a skill.
You probably think it only works in your context.
Louise thought she was leaving everything behind when she got bored with business content. Turns out the methodology underneath was never tied to the content at all. It works on subnet founders the same way it worked on coaching clients.
A sommelier’s palate training works for coffee, olive oil, whiskey. The skill is detecting subtle differences. The domain is just where you point it.
Your methodology is probably the same. You’ve been treating it like it belongs to one industry. But the skill is yours. It goes where you go.
What happens if you point it somewhere unexpected?
You might discover what Louise discovered.
The methodology you’ve been treating as industry-specific has been portable the whole time. You just hadn’t followed your curiosity somewhere unexpected yet.
Go get that TAO, Louise. I don’t know exactly what it is.
But I know I’m lucky I got to watch you find it.
-Max
P.S. Want help uncovering yours?
I do this with people one-on-one. You send me transcripts of your client or coaching calls. Your workshops. Your conversations where you’re in your zone of genius.
Then AI and I go to work. I’ve spent the past year building a system and refining it with 50+ experts to surface the patterns you can’t see because you’re inside them.
You get back a document. And somewhere on page 3, you’ll read a sentence describing what you do and think:
“Wait. I DO do that every time. I just never had words for it.”
That’s the moment.
I guarantee this is unlike any coaching or consulting experience you’ve had. It’s a completely customized experience, where I extract your expertise and then build you a system to teach, scale and monetize it.
You already have everything you need inside of you. You just need someone to pull it out of you.
“Max and the Cognitive Fingerprint have been my secret weapon. It’s allowed me to see patterns, blindspots, and frameworks I would have never spotted before. His system has allowed me to add massive value to my businesses and have gotten me into deals that I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to.”
— Mike David, Entrepreneur
Or if you want to explore on your own first, here’s a prompt that will get you started…
The Methodology Transplant Finder
Copy this into Claude. It will extract your methodology and show you where it could travel.
What This Prompt Does
Extracts the invisible methodology you’re running. The approach that stays consistent even when the context changes completely. Then shows you where else it could land.
Fifteen minutes. Five specific outputs:
Your through-line — one sentence describing what you actually do across every client, every context, every weird situation you’ve been thrown into
Your invisible steps — the 3-5 things you do automatically that you’ve stopped recognizing as methodology because they feel like breathing
Your diagnostic pattern — what you’re really sniffing for when you assess a new situation (revealed by the three questions you’d ask any new client)
Three surprising domains — places your methodology could create value that would make your current colleagues say “wait, what?”
One wildcard — the application that feels ridiculous until you realize it might be the biggest opportunity of all
