🦕 What do you know that you've stopped noticing?

Here is what happened this past week.

What I tried: Pitched a YouTube channel and posted to Reddit again.
What came back: One reply, from a bot. No sign-ups.
Pitches: 1 (running: 2 of 12)
Money in: $0 (running: $0)

The full entry is here, including the contact form with three boxes and no labels on any of them.

I started all this because my newsletter turned out to be read mostly by machines. The first thing to answer me back was another one.

This is a report, not an offer. If you're curious, just reply.

I built a free tool for exactly this. It's called What Fits Me. It asks 12 plain questions about what you know, what you enjoy, and how much time and energy you have. Then it suggests two or three ways of earning that might suit you, with a free step-by-step guide for each. Nothing to buy, and your answers stay on your own screen.

Try What Fits Me – it's free

I worked on mainframes my whole career. If you've never seen one, picture a computer the size of a room. They're dinosaurs now.

So when I set out to get paid for a skill I already have, my first thought was, "Who needs a mainframe man in 2026?" The desktop, the internet, and now ChatGPT are a different world from the one I trained in. Some days it's a real challenge.

But here's what I noticed this year, writing these emails three times a week. I always find a solution. It may not be the best one, or the most elegant one. But I find one. The machines changed. That part of me didn't.

That's the skill that travels. Not "mainframes." Finding a way through when the thing in front of me doesn't make sense yet.

Most of us describe ourselves by our old job title. Bookkeeper. Nurse. Machinist. Teacher. Then we look at the title and think nobody's paying for that anymore.

But the title was never the skill. The skill is what you did every day without thinking about it. Calming down an upset customer. Spotting the mistake in a column of numbers. Explaining something twice, a different way, until it landed.

Kiplinger put it well in a piece on earning in retirement: "Forty years of knowing how a distribution center actually runs is worth real money to somebody." Notice it isn't the job title they mean. It's the knowing. Here's the Kiplinger piece.

The hard part is that your own know-how feels ordinary to you. You've done it so long it doesn't feel like knowing anything at all. Other people usually see it first.

Take a sheet of paper and give each one a line or two.

1. What do people ask you to help with? Over the years, not just this month. The neighbor's computer. A form nobody understands. How to fix a leaky tap, plan a trip, or talk to a doctor. Write down three.

2. Which one would you happily explain on a slow afternoon? Circle it. If you'd enjoy explaining it even when nobody's paying, that's a good sign it fits you.

3. Who would want that help? One sentence. "People who just bought their first smartphone." "Folks starting a vegetable garden." The clearer the person, the easier the next step gets.

That's it for this week. No website, no plan, no money spent. Just a short list and one circle.

If you answer the three questions, you'll have something most people never write down: a plain description of what you know and who it might help. That's the starting point for anything worth trying online.

If you don't, nothing changes. What you know stays useful to the people already asking you. You just won't have it in front of you when you're deciding what to try.

I'm still finding out whether anyone will pay for what I know. Two pitches, $0 so far. But I'd rather find out with something I actually know than with something I'd have to learn first.

If you'd like, reply with the one thing you circled. A few words is plenty, and there's no wrong answer.

See You at the Bank 💰
Bob

A short story from my place, about my dog Bradley and the day a new gadget showed up – no sales in it.