Heyy Reader, How has your week been? Hope all is well with you. Here are the highlights for this week:

❇️ My addiction & my plan to improve
🦄 Creator of the week - Erika Flores
⏯️ Watch: How to Stop Being Embarrassed to Film in Public
🤖 Weekly Prompt: The Voice Ban List
🧃 Creator Juice Podcast: Behind The Scenes
🖼️ Fun AI-Generated Images of the week: Redraw Me Badly

❇️ It's been 1 day since my last incident.

This is my reflection. ✍️

I'm addicted to learning new things. Sounds like a good problem to have, right? It's not, not entirely.

Here's the pattern: I find a paid course or a YouTube video that promises to teach me something I'm interested in, and I pay for it or I start watching immediately. There's this compulsive need to acquire the information right then. And it doesn't stop there, I have to document everything too: notes, screenshots, whatever it takes to save the knowledge somewhere I can come back to. 🙈

The problem is I end up in this loop of LEARNING and LEARNING and LEARNING, and execution keeps getting pushed back. Sometimes it never happens at all.

I spent $1000 on a course about building a DM automation service for brands and creators. Never touched it as an income stream.

I've watched more "how to vlog your life cinematically" videos than I can count. Vlogs posted: 0.

The upside, if there is one: all that knowledge is still useful. It helps me on my own path, and sometimes it helps someone else who's stuck where I used to be. (Happened multiple times where it seems like Im a genius for knowing all this lol but now you know the true story)

Here's what I'm doing to get a handle on it:

1. No new purchases until I execute on what I already bought. Right now that's learning how to build AI powered ad creative for brands. The goal is 1 paid client within 30 days of finishing the learning. Non negotiable.
   By August 31st, I should have my first paid client.
2. Peer support. I've been slow posting organic content on Instagram, so I asked a friend to hold me accountable and keep me focused on the priority instead of whatever shiny thing shows up next.

Swap my issue of "course" for whatever's eating your evenings after your 9 to 5, and tell me: how do you keep yourself in check?

Reply to this email, I'd love to know. 🙌

🥂 Here's to a new week with new habits!

🦄 Creator of the week - Erika Flores

Erika Flores is a Toronto-based calligrapher and illustrator behind INKSCRPT, blending calligraphy, illustration, and poetry into visual storytelling under the brand message "Tell Your Stories Creatively." She recently hand-painted a set of basketballs for a national Endy x WNBA campaign kicking off the 2026 season, featured in a commercial shoot with Canadian WNBA players Aaliyah Edwards, Kia Nurse, and Laeticia Amihere.

If you're looking for inspiration this week, you can look to Erika. She creates content about turning personal and cultural stories into visual art, and just showed how that same skill translates into a national brand campaign. You can be inspired by her approach and ask yourself "What can I learn here that could be applied to my own content and strategy?"
Check out her profile for details here.

🙊 How to Stop Being Embarrassed to Film in Public

If holding a camera in public makes you want to disappear, I want to change that today. A friend of mine told me he finds it hard to hold his camera up and record in public. I gave him a few mental shifts that actually helped, so I decided to turn them into a video for anyone dealing with the same thing.

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🤖 Prompt: The Voice Ban List

I've been leaning on AI more for first drafts lately, and the thing that gives it away every time isn't the ideas(the ideas are mine), it's the phrasing. This prompt fixes that by building you a personal list of words and patterns to avoid, based on your own writing style.

Prompt: "Based on what you know about my writing and content style from our previous conversation, help me create a personal ban list of words, phrases, and patterns to avoid. Include the obvious AI giveaways, plus the sneaky ones that dilute my voice. Add any transition phrases, weak openers, and overused structures. Format it as a clean list I can paste into every prompt I use from this point."

Source: Jodie Cook, Forbes

🧃Creator Juice BTS

I've been working on re-creating our characters in the artwork. It's been a nightmare to get the details perfectly. So here is an image of various iterations I went through. LOL Time will tell what the final output will look like. Stay tuned for our relaunch updates next week!

Direct Links to: Spotify | Apple Podcasts​

🖼️ Fun weekly AI Generated Images

This week we have: Redraw Me Badly

People are asking ChatGPT to redraw their photos as deliberately terrible, scribbly MS Paint style doodles instead of polished art. Derpy faces, rectangular teeth, chaotic squiggle hair, the works.

My take: I think it's a great reminder to maybe NOT use AI for this and get your pencils out and actually have fun being a kid again lol.

🧞‍♂️Your wish is my command

Thanks for reading! When you signed up for this newsletter, my promise to you was to help you empower your individuality and help you fulfil your true potential. What did you think of today's newsletter? Reply to this email and let me know what you'd like to see more of.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

​​VJ​​

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