Josh Stanton

Building businesses and real-world use cases for AI agents. Co-founder of helping people turn AI into operators.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

@dan__rosenthal MICROSITE

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Be honest. How many of you are scrolling this right now from a job you do not actually like?

No judgment. I did it for years.

But at some point you have to ask yourself: am I going to keep doing this for the next 10 years? 20?

What is the one thing stopping you from making a change? Drop it below.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Your employer gets your best hours. 9 to 5. Brain is sharpest. Energy is highest. Creativity is peaking.

Then you get home drained and try to build something for yourself with whatever is left.

The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed.

Your best years, your best hours, your best energy. All going to someone else dream.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The side hustles that actually work are boring.

Cleaning up local business Google profiles. Writing email sequences. Managing someone else social media.

Nobody is flexing these on Instagram. Because the people doing them are too busy getting paid.

Stop chasing exciting. Chase profitable.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Once a year someone sits you down and tells you if you did a good job.

They give you a score. A percentage raise if you are lucky. Maybe some feedback you mostly disagree with.

You are a grown adult waiting for someone else to evaluate your worth on their timeline.

That is wild when you actually stop and think about it.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Most people think the goal is a better job. Higher salary. Better title. More vacation days.

The real goal is to stop trading time for money altogether.

Build something that earns while you sleep and the whole job conversation becomes irrelevant.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Ego is the most expensive thing in business. The best salespeople I know treat their process like software, always updating, never "finished." The moment you think your approach is perfect is the exact moment the market moves past you. What's one tweak that made the biggest difference?

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Your voice could be generating passive income right now while you sleep.

ElevenLabs has paid out over $5 million to people who licensed their voices to its AI platform.

Here's how you could get a cut of that. A thread.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The plan was: work hard for 40 years, retire at 65, then finally enjoy your life.

Problem is, 65-year-old you has bad knees, low energy, and the friends you wanted to travel with have their own problems now.

Freedom was never meant to be a retirement gift.

It was supposed to be the whole deal.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The biggest reason people stay in jobs they hate is not money.

It is what their parents, friends, and coworkers will say when they quit.

You are designing your entire life around the opinions of people who are also stuck.

Think about that.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The raise did not make you richer.

It made you upgrade your car, move to a nicer place, and eat out more.

Now you need that bigger paycheck just to survive. The cage got bigger. The walls are still there.

That is how lifestyle inflation keeps people stuck. The salary goes up. The freedom does not.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

@Closehq1 Feedback is literally free consulting most people ignore because their ego gets in the way. The founders who scale fastest treat every piece of criticism like data, not a personal attack. What's one piece of feedback you almost ignored but it ended up changing everything?

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Your parents told you to get a good job with benefits and a pension.

That advice made perfect sense in the world they grew up in.

The pension is gone. Job security is gone. Benefits are shrinking.

The advice stayed. The world it was built for did not.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

You do not need to be the best in the world at something to charge for it.

You just need to be further ahead than the person you are helping.

Most people are 6 months of learning away from a skill someone would pay for. They just never take the 6 months.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

What is something you would start tomorrow if you knew it would work?

Not the safe answer. The real one.

Drop it below. You might be surprised how many people have the same idea and nobody is doing it yet.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

@Dumbo30728321 @VuTrong_huynh @oldmonk_says This is a scam. Elon hasn't announced any X digital currency. That link is designed to steal your wallet or credentials. Everyone tagged here should avoid clicking it. Report and move on.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

Persistence matters but honestly it's overrated without direction. I've seen people persist for 3 years on the wrong offer when one conversation with their target customer would've saved them 2.5 years. Execution beats persistence every time because the best founders iterate fast and kill what's not working instead of grinding on something broken. Are you persisting or just refusing to pivot?

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The average person spends over 2 hours a day on social media.

That is 14 hours a week. 60 hours a month.

Enough time to learn a new skill, launch a side project, or build something real.

Most people are already putting in the hours. Just for someone else platform.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

In your job you ask permission for everything.

Permission to take time off. Permission for a raise. Permission to leave early. Permission to work from home.

You are an adult asking another adult to approve your life.

At some point that has to stop.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

The most expensive words in personal finance are: one more year.

One more year to save. One more year to plan. One more year to feel ready.

People wake up 10 years later wondering where the window went.

[Josh Stanton @realjoshstanton]

If you spent today counting down the hours until you could leave work, that is 8 hours of your finite life you basically wrote off.

Multiply that by 250 working days a year.

You are too smart to keep doing this math.